Ed Zitron

https://aicodinghorrors.com/ - the database deletion one was how I found out this site exists.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ - somewhat controversial because measuring different tasks. But nobody can measure dev tasks anyway.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code/ - Saw this very recently, haven't dug in to the sources.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Talks a LOT about the AI hype bubble in general.

The landscape here in the US sucks too. Layoffs and offshoring are still going strong. Everything new is some stupid AI startup. I kinda thought I was done too until I got laid off and started working on my own projects to stay sharp.

Realized I still love making stuff. Just hate the corporate games.

Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.

In the shorter term...

NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.

88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.

By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.

And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.

So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.

Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.

He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.

And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.

that's confusing "subscribers" and "paid subscribers".

from Zitron's own website [0]:

> I have 84,000 subscribers and a 55-60% open rate, as well as an 8-11% clickthrough rate.

if the 84k number was all paid subscribers, then the "55-60% open rate" would mean that ~40% of his paying audience doesn't bother to read the thing they're paying for, which does not add up.

also, that's in the "Can I Advertise On Your Newsletter?" section. if there were an even higher number of non-paying subscribers, he'd have an obvious incentive to mention that, because the total number of eyeballs is what a potential advertiser cares about.

0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/

It's quite hard to say for sure, and I will prefix my comment by saying his blog posts are very long and quite doomerist about LLMs, but he makes a decent case about OpenAI financials:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/

A very solid argument is like that against propaganda: it's not so much about what is being said but what about isn't. OpenAI is basically shouting about every minor achievement from the rooftops so the fact that they are remarkably silent about financial fundamentals says something. At best something mediocre or more likely bad.

I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth"

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary.

(Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)