The Generative AI Con

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2025-02-17 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/

Summary

Ed’s comprehensive case that generative AI is a speculative bubble sustained by deliberate executive dishonesty and credulous media. Both major frontier labs burn billions annually with no path to profitability; ChatGPT’s reported user growth appears inconsistent with actual traffic data; Deep Research produces poorly-sourced reports; Operator barely functions; no killer app has emerged after two years and hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are named as executives perpetuating false capability narratives to sustain investor enthusiasm.

Implications

This is one of Ed’s definitive AI financial sustainability pieces — a full-spectrum prosecution of the bubble thesis. The traffic-vs-reported-users discrepancy is the specific data point worth tracking: if ChatGPT’s user numbers are inflated, the addressable market projections for AI consumer products collapse. The “no killer app after two years” observation is the key falsifiability marker: if genuine enterprise productivity gains existed at scale, they would be visible in economic data by now. Ed’s naming of Amodei alongside Altman signals he’s not letting safety-focused positioning exempt labs from financial accountability scrutiny.