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

Unresolved claims, page 5 of 20

Claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron. Deadlines are judged as of 2026-10-29.

Unresolved claims (1958)

The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it. Forecasts whose deadline has not arrived are listed apart, as not yet due.

Page 5 of 20: claims 401 to 500 of 1958, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While I acknowledge that Anthropic has grown significantly, that level of stratospheric growth does stretch the limits of credibility. Moreover, the fact that previous ARR figures are inconsistent with the leaked charts from Anthropic further raises questions about the credibility of any numbers from the company.”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Costs increase linearly with revenue, and will continue to do so in perpetuity.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In July, Anthropic will start paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, - or $15 billion a year, - on top of all of its other compute deals with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Every time I think about the numbers and lack of RoI for most pilot studies and the reliability problems I think so.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Yet even a Business Idiot eventually realizes that too much money is being spent, and the first one of these dimwits to cut their token budget will send the rest of them running for the doors.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Every time you defend generative AI you defend a machine of capital that has burned $1 trillion and created one of the most-wasteful products in history.”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “None of them will talk about their actual AI revenues.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Every organization I’ve talked to has exceeded or is nearing the edge of their annual token budget barely five months into the year, which means that everybody has suddenly given themselves an extra few million dollars’ worth of operating expenses for reasons that escape effectively everybody I’ve talked to.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This week, I’ll publish the second part to my ongoing series (“What If…We’re In An AI Bubble?”) about the factors and events that will cause the AI bubble to finally pop.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Sidenote: In all honesty, I have no idea how Meta makes this make sense, as it plans to invest at least $125 billion in capex in 2026 and has, to this point, not shown any actual, real growth in its revenue from AI, and no, those increases in conversion don’t mean actual revenue.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The problem is simple: nobody actually knows how much AI is going to cost them in any given quarter. This means that the current token spend you’re seeing is entirely experimental, which is why organizations keep burning through their tokens so fast.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Earlier in the week, carnival barker and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his company would spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, and as I discussed in my premium from Friday, unrestrained AI spending is inflating the revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI in a way that isn’t sustainable for anybody involved:”

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Okay, fine. Microsoft also has 20 million Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers for an absolute maximum revenue of $7.2 billion…if every single one were paying $30 a month, which they are most assuredly not as Microsoft has been offering discounts on it for years.”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Based on my reporting from last year, Microsoft made around $7.5 billion from OpenAI’s inference spend and $761 million from its revenue share in Fiscal Year 2025, a year when it invested (either spent or allocated) around $88.2 billion in capital expenditures.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I’d estimate it needs $5 billion a year for its compute deal xAI (so $20 billion over the total period) and an estimated $30 billion to cover its deal with CoreWeave. That brings us to a total of $380 billion.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This means that around 30% of Microsoft’s capex ($87 billion) went to building OpenAI’s infrastructure.”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In some cases, the pressure to use AI for everything is turning companies’ software stacks into slop.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Based on Microsoft’s own disclosures, without Anthropic and OpenAI’s additions, RPO would have been effectively flat, as evidenced by the fact that in Q3FY26, remaining performance obligations sat at $627 billion.”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “You can argue that “actually GPUs are profitable to run” (I disagree!), but for any of this to make sense, four things have to happen:”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “You are not recovering these investments without either a massive new product line that doesn’t exist today or three or four Anthropic or OpenAI-sized compute contracts.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I’ve spent hours and hours looking, and I’ve come up with a few hundred megawatts delivered in the past two years.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This starts with a very simple statement: nobody has actually built a 1GW data center (to be clear, it’s usually a campus of multiple buildings networked together) yet.”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While the Anthropic-Musk compute deal is an obvious sign about xAI’s lack of demand for compute, it’s also, as I mentioned earlier, a clear sign that AI data centers are mostly not getting finished, and those that do get finished are taking two or three years even for smaller builds.”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In simpler terms, there’s at most around 117MW of capacity running at Fairwater Wisconsin.”

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The current “AI compute demand is insatiable” narrative is utterly false, and a direct result of a lack of capacity coming online.”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This company claims it’s built four fucking gigawatts of capacity, but when I go and look to see what it’s actually built I’ve failed to find a single announced data center from the last three years that got turned on outside of its Fairwater Atlanta and Wisconsin sites.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is bad, and indicative of a larger problem in the industry — that it’s really difficult to build data centers, and for the most part, they’re not being fully built!”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Oracle lacks Microsoft or Google’s existing profitable businesses to fall back on if these data centers are delayed, with its existing business lines plateauing and its only real growth coming from theoretical deals with OpenAI and GPU compute with negative 100% margins.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There are campuses — such as Stargate Abilene — which promise to reach 1.2GW, but nearly two years in sit at two buildings at around 103MW of critical IT load each with, based on discussions with sources with direct knowledge of Abilene’s infrastructure, a third building sitting fully-constructed but with barely any gear inside it.”

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Babies don’t keep doubling forever, and nor will AI progress.”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “We can be absolutely sure that the task length “time horizon” for AI is not going to keep doubling until “time horizons will be 580 times the age of the universe” as Lisan al-Ghaib joked.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Every single one of these companies is talking about AI non-stop, and not one of them can show a profit.”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I also want to be clear about something else: I know, from documents viewed by this publication, that Microsoft has these line items fully itemized, and could share them if it wanted to, but intentionally chooses not to.”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic and OpenAI make up the vast majority of all AI revenues and compute capacity. I estimate 70% of all revenues and capacity demand, if not higher.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s barely any actual demand for AI services or AI compute at the scale necessary to substantiate a trillion or more in capital expenditures.”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Today I can report, based on discussions with sources with direct knowledge of Azure revenue, that in Q2 FY2025, Microsoft brought in around $325.2 million in revenue via renting out GPUs and other AI infrastructure, and around $367 million in revenue from Microsoft 365 Copilot, or less than half of the $1.467 billion that OpenAI spent on inference.”

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “At the current rate of sales, it’s taking six months to install a quarter’s GPUs. At this point it’s obvious that there are warehouses of these things.”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI and Anthropic both lose tens of billions of dollars a year (yes, Anthropic said it’ll lose $11 billion in a projection, and I believe they are being coy with their actual losses), which means that the majority of AI revenue and compute demand is dependent on whether Anthropic and OpenAI can continue to raise money.”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While I only had half the fourth quarter’s numbers, I estimate that OpenAI’s annualized spend hit over $18.5 billion — or around $4.6 billion a quarter — by the end of the year, and that’s not accounting for things like Sora 2 or the launch of its Codex coding platform.”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Most of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s capex is being driven into capacity mostly used by OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of whom have the money to pay without continual infusions of more capital.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These fucknuts have spent over a trillion dollars on AI and all they have to show for it is either nothing, vague statements about “everything lifting because of AI,” or pathetic revenues that only get worse the more you think about them.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Outside of those two, the only other competitive AI businesses are those of Amazon, Microsoft and Google — two of which now have annualized AI revenues of around 6% of their capital expenditures so far.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I’ve also confirmed that Microsoft’s “Fairwater” data centers — which constitute (when finished) “hundreds of thousands of GPUs” — are entirely reserved for OpenAI.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Microsoft desperately wants you to think that this is a diverse, booming revenue stream, when in fact it’s spent around $293 billion in four years to make — when you remove OpenAI — less than $3 billion a quarter in revenue, not profit.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “To be clear, I don’t think any of these companies die as a result of the bubble bursting”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I’m gonna be honest, I think Anthropic is outright misleading its investors if it’s saying that it will only burn $11 billion in 2026 and 2027, per The Information”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Based on my own reporting from direct Azure revenue numbers, this would make OpenAI’s $2.947 billion in inference spend in that quarter around 71% ($11.7bn) of Microsoft’s Q3 FY2025 AI revenue run rate.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In fact, I’d argue that Anthropic is having to raise this money to pay up front for capacity that’s yet to be built.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Practically every day I see new signs that the backlash against AI is growing.”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation).”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If the trial is cast as a referendum on Musk, rather than on OpenAI’s founders, he will lose.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As of April 27 2026, only two buildings are operational and generating revenue, and the third barely has any IT gear in it. I estimate the total cost of Stargate Abilene to be around $52.8 billion.”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is the kind of thing that happens before a company starts dying. OpenAI’s growth is slowing at precisely the time it needs to accelerate. It needs to effectively 10x its current business by 2030 to make its obligations.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I really need to be clear that Oracle has no other path to making this revenue without OpenAI, and these projects are entirely financed and paid for using the projected cashflow of the data centers themselves.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This means that a large part — if not the majority of — AI compute revenue is dependent on a continual flow of venture capital and debt, both of which are only made possible by investors that still believe that generative AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing in the world.”

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There has never been — and never will be — an economically-feasible way to offer services powered by LLMs without charging the actual token burn of each user, and in the process of deceiving said users, these companies have created products with illusory benefits and questionable return on investment.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I think it’s inevitable that the majority of AI subscriptions move to token-based billing, especially as both Anthropic and OpenAI have now done so with their enterprise customers.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It’s also unclear whether the customer base for AI compute exists outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, whose demand accounts for 50% of AI data centers under construction, creating a massive systemic weakness if either of them lacks the money to pay.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I should also be clear that Oracle is mortgaging its entire fucking future on projects like Stargate Abilene, incurring billions of dollars of costs up front for a business that will take years to turn a profit even if OpenAI makes every single payment in a timely manner.”

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The people that have so aggressively worked together to hold up this industry have only delayed its inevitable fall.”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It is unclear if that’s 200MW of critical IT capacity or the total available power at the Abilene campus, and in any case, this is only enough power for two buildings, which means that Oracle is most decidedly not “on schedule.””

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I truly believe that LLM-based subscriptions are going to go away entirely, at least at the scale of any product that generates code, and in doing so, Amodei and Altman will wrap up their con, or at least believe that they have.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Of the 114GW of data centers supposedly being built by the end of 2028, only 15.2GW is under construction in any way, shape, or form.”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Either way, Oracle is insufficiently-capitalized to finish Stargate Abilene. It will need at least another $150 billion to get this done, and that’s assuming that other partners pick up about $30 billion in costs.”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And that day has finally arrived, because every single AI service you use subsidized compute, and every single service is losing money as a result:”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And if OpenAI can’t pay for that compute, Oracle dies, because it’s taken on around $115 billion in debt just to build Stargate’s data centers, and needs another $150 billion to finish them:”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As of April 27 2026, only two buildings are operational and generating revenue, and the third barely has any IT gear in it. I estimate the total cost of Stargate Abilene to be around $52.8 billion.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “On the back end, AI startups are annihilating cash, with up until recently Anthropic allowing you to burn upwards of $8 in compute for every dollar of your subscription.”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I really need to be clear that Oracle has no other path to making this revenue without OpenAI, and these projects are entirely financed and paid for using the projected cashflow of the data centers themselves.”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This means that a large part — if not the majority of — AI compute revenue is dependent on a continual flow of venture capital and debt, both of which are only made possible by investors that still believe that generative AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing in the world.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is a deeply sad era. The people that have so aggressively worked together to hold up this industry have only delayed its inevitable fall.”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There has never been — and never will be — an economically-feasible way to offer services powered by LLMs without charging the actual token burn of each user, and in the process of deceiving said users, these companies have created products with illusory benefits and questionable return on investment.”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I think it’s inevitable that the majority of AI subscriptions move to token-based billing, especially as both Anthropic and OpenAI have now done so with their enterprise customers.”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “At some point investors — even the braindead fuckwits who have been inflating the AI bubble — will begin to question mounting R&D costs (which is where AI token burn is usually hidden) when the company’s revenue growth fails to follow.”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It is an incredibly unprofitable business, and even if it wasn’t, it would have to make so much more money than it currently does to pay Oracle on an ongoing basis.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It’s also unclear whether the customer base for AI compute exists outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, whose demand accounts for 50% of AI data centers under construction, creating a massive systemic weakness if either of them lacks the money to pay.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I should also be clear that Oracle is mortgaging its entire fucking future on projects like Stargate Abilene, incurring billions of dollars of costs up front for a business that will take years to turn a profit even if OpenAI makes every single payment in a timely manner.”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I truly believe that LLM-based subscriptions are going to go away entirely, at least at the scale of any product that generates code, and in doing so, Amodei and Altman will wrap up their con, or at least believe that they have.”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And that day has finally arrived, because every single AI service you use subsidized compute, and every single service is losing money as a result:”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And if OpenAI can’t pay for that compute, Oracle dies, because it’s taken on around $115 billion in debt just to build Stargate’s data centers, and needs another $150 billion to finish them:”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These are astonishing numbers, made more so by the fact that there is no way you’re only spending $30 a day if you use any of Anthropic’s more-recent models.”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “If we assume that the 15.2GW of data center capacity under construction (due by the end of 2028) has a PUE of around 1.35, that leaves us with roughly 11.2GW of critical IT. At $14 million per megawatt, that works out to around $156.8 billion in annual revenue in GPU rental revenue required to actually make these data centers worth it.”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “while prices for some models might have come down, newer “reasoning” models burn way more tokens, which means the cost of inference has, somehow, gotten higher over time.”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic and OpenAI both intend to burn tens of billions of dollars in the next few years, and neither of them have a path to profitability.”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Even Cursor, a company that briefly (before its pseudo-acquisition by Musk’s SpaceX) claimed it had positive gross margins, actually had negative 23% gross margins as of January, or negative 31% if you include the cost of non-paying users, which you fucking should if you actually care about your accounting.”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Both assumptions were wrong, because the monthly subscription model does not make sense for any service connected to a Large Language Model.”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While Copilot might not be “...the same product it was a year ago,” very little has changed about the underlying economic mismatch: that Microsoft was allowing users to burn more than their subscription costs in tokens every single month for three years.”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is a blinking red fucking light, and in a sane market would send Oracle’s stock into a tailspin, because OpenAI’s ascent to over $280 billion in annual revenue is critical to Oracle’s ability to not run out of money.”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic and OpenAI both intend to burn tens of billions of dollars in the next few years, and neither of them have a path to profitability.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “On the back end, AI startups are annihilating cash, with up until recently Anthropic allowing you to burn upwards of $8 in compute for every dollar of your subscription. OpenAI allows you to do the same, though it’s hard to gauge by how much.”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Both assumptions were wrong, because the monthly subscription model does not make sense for any service connected to a Large Language Model.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Eager math-knowers in the audience will also realize that, if we assume a $5-a-month subscription cost, even if OpenAI succeeds in what would be the single-largest user acquisition campaign in history, it would still be $155 million short.”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I also just did a piece about how OpenAI will kill Oracle.”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And I am sure we will see many more catastrophic failures soon enough, involving things like privacy, security and data loss. Already there have been many.”

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Here is a further example of my last point that ChatGPT’s exciting new image system has trouble with functional understanding, sent to me by a reader:”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But if you look closely, there are several errors, and those errors are revealing.”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But anybody knowledgeable about bikes (racers, mechanics, designers etc) would immediately see numerous problems.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While the documents refer to moving “all” GitHub Copilot users to token-based billing, it’s unclear at this time how Microsoft will be handling individual Pro or Pro+ subscribers.”