Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Ed Zitron Where's Your Ed At Published

Monopoly Money

We recorded 11 claims from this post. 5 were checked against evidence. 6 can’t be checked. 5 more are held. Read the post at its source.

Claims from this post (11)

In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.

  1. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened.”

    What we tested: The generative AI hype cycle is in a slow, painful collapse as of August 2024.

  2. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Monopolies are inherently anti-consumer and anti-innovation, and the big push toward generative AI is a blatant attempt to create another monopoly — the dominance of Large Language Models owned by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta.”

    What we tested: Big tech's push toward generative AI is a deliberate attempt to create a monopoly of LLMs owned by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta.

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While this might seem like a competitive marketplace, because these models all require incredibly large amounts of cloud compute and cash to both train and maintain, most companies can’t really compete at scale.”

    What we tested: Because LLMs require enormous compute and cash to train and maintain, most companies cannot compete at scale in the LLM market.

  4. Assessment: ContradictedSaid

    “No private startup can actually afford to build and scale a Large Language Model without the help of Google, Amazon or Microsoft — and thus they would, assuming they actually became useful, effectively control every single product involving this technology.”

    What we tested: No private startup can afford to build and scale an LLM without the help of Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

    What happened: The paper documents DeepSeek-V2's 236-billion-parameter model, substantial pretraining, and deployed inference on H800 hardware. Together with the independently identified High-Flyer resources in e2 and e3, this supplies a counterexample already operating before the post. (DeepSeek-AI, arXiv, )

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “No private startup can actually afford to build and scale a Large Language Model without the help of Google, Amazon or Microsoft — and thus they would, assuming they actually became useful, effectively control every single product involving this technology.”

    What we tested: If LLMs became useful, Google, Amazon and Microsoft would effectively control every product involving the technology.

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “generative AI is (in most cases) a product with minimal utility, minimal value, and will likely prove to be a transient fad”

    What we tested: Generative AI will likely prove to be a transient fad.

  7. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And these companies are, in some cases, well-positioned to become tech’s next landlord.”

    What we tested: Some big tech companies controlling LLMs are well-positioned to become the tech industry's next landlord.

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I hypothesize that the goal was (is?) for these companies to basically reduce the future of computing to you paying them for their models rather than you running your own models on their cloud compute services.”

    What we tested: Ed hypothesizes that big tech's goal is to make customers pay for their models rather than run their own models on the companies' cloud services.

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta also monopolize the infrastructure itself, both in the data centers they can build (or already own) and in their access to the specialized GPUs necessary to run these models.”

    What we tested: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta monopolize AI infrastructure, through data centers and access to the GPUs needed to run models.

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “This master plan only falls apart when the “thing” that needs to be trained using hardware that they monopolize doesn’t actually provide the business returns that they need to justify its existence.”

    What we tested: Big tech's master plan to monopolize AI models falls apart only when the models trained on their monopolized hardware do not provide the business returns needed to justify their existence.

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And without something new — and no, generative AI is not the answer — they really don’t have a way to keep growing, and in the case of Meta and Google, may not have a way to sustain their companies past the next decade.”

    What we tested: Without a new growth product (and generative AI is not it), Meta and Google may not be able to sustain their companies past the next decade.

Held from this post (5)

These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.