Dan Luu — the systems engineer behind some of the most-cited teardowns on the internet — decided to check the record of Ed Zitron, the AI skeptic tech media quote most often. So he went through Zitron’s predictions one by one and graded them.
The verdict: wrong on roughly everything, and wrong on the reasoning, not just the outcome.
- “Peak AI” called repeatedly from Feb 2024 through 2025 — models kept improving each time
- Meta, Google, and Microsoft called “dying” in late 2024 — all grew revenue and profit at double-digit rates through 2025 and the first half of 2026
- OpenAI’s growth “stalling” — it exceeded its own revenue forecasts
- Gemini hitting 500M users “so unrealistic that someone should be fired” — it passed 750M
- Cursor “going to die” — acquired for $60B; CoreWeave “can’t survive six months” — more than doubled its IPO price
Luu’s point isn’t that the numbers are merely wrong. It’s that they’re deployed as rhetorical cover: a spreadsheet that double-counts a month, third-party traffic data that contradicts the company’s own reports, and a style that floods you with so much confident nonsense that refuting it costs more than producing it — a tactic known as a gish gallop.
The deeper observation is about how AI-skeptic authority circulates. People cite Zitron as “someone who looked at the numbers” without the numbers holding up, and his defenders respond with mood affiliation rather than facts. Luu compares him to Paul Ehrlich, who kept predicting imminent catastrophe for fifty years, moving the date forward each time it failed to arrive.
Luu is careful to state his own bias: he’s not an AI booster, has no stake in AI companies, and has long argued people underestimate AI’s ability to displace jobs. His position is deliberately boring — if something is currently happening, the people insisting it can never happen are probably wrong. That’s the calibration this essay offers: skepticism is healthy, but the version that says “it’s all fake and it has already peaked” now has a track record. It’s a bad one.