The AI Hater's Manifesto

Summary

Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At, 115,000 subscribers) synthesizes three years of AI criticism into a single manifesto: he believes LLMs are genuinely interesting technology that could fix broken enterprise software, but argues the AI industry as currently structured is a hype cycle built on circular financing, inflated revenue, and narratives that outrun actual product utility. The circular financing problem he identifies runs through deals like Microsoft investing in OpenAI, which then buys Azure compute, whose revenue flows back to Microsoft; similar loops exist with SoftBank and Databricks. Zitron’s core indictment is that AI company revenue depends more on how much compute can be sold than on what the models actually produce — and that claimed productivity gains at companies using AI are not showing up in GDP data.

Connections

• Artificial Intelligence — the underlying technology Zitron distinguishes from the industry built around it
• OpenAI — the primary subject of the circular financing and hype critique
• Anthropic — cited as more careful than OpenAI but facing the same monetization pressures
• NVIDIA — Zitron argues the AI industry is increasingly a scheme to funnel money to NVIDIA and Broadcom
• Microsoft — central to the circular financing loop with OpenAI via Azure compute
• AI Bubble — the broader thesis Zitron has been building for three years
• Ed Zitron — the author; his ongoing AI skepticism coverage is the context for the manifesto