Ed Zitron
wheresyoured.at · Personal blog · on HN since 2023
Ed Zitron writes critical analysis of the AI industry's finances, focusing on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Big Tech spending and revenue.
What HN saysCommenters recommend him as a market-focused AI skeptic who does the math and has receipts, though one reads his figures as showing OpenAI in better shape.
363HN people shared it
217linked it in comments
239stories submitted
6.7Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
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Most-shared posts
- 1The man who killed Google Search?52 people · 1.9K points · first shared 2024 · 878 comments on HN
- 2Homepage17 people · first shared 2024
- 3Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle14 people · 27 points · first shared 2026 · 2 comments on HN
- 4The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble13 people · 263 points · first shared 2025 · 163 comments on HN
- 5OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B13 people · 22 points · first shared 2026 · 9 comments on HN
- 6Never Forgive Them12 people · 92 points · first shared 2024 · 9 comments on HN
- 7How Much OpenAI Spends on Inference and Its Revenue Share with Microsoft12 people · 68 points · first shared 2025 · 25 comments on HN
- 8OpenAI Is a Bad Business10 people · 110 points · first shared 2024 · 147 comments on HN
- 9The Subprime AI Crisis10 people · 103 points · first shared 2024 · 83 comments on HN
- 10How Does OpenAI Survive?9 people · 165 points · first shared 2024 · 188 comments on HN
- 11OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry9 people · 123 points · first shared 2025 · 124 comments on HN
- 12Requiem for Raghavan9 people · 30 points · first shared 2024 · 6 comments on HN
- 13There Is No AI Revolution by Ed Zitron8 people · 34 points · first shared 2025 · 13 comments on HN
- 14The Shareholder Supremacy7 people · 21 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 15How to Argue with an AI Booster6 people · 45 points · first shared 2025 · 7 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
bandrami · 2026-04-21
Probably the best roundup is Ed Zitron at https://wheresyoured.at
Half the articles are paywalled but the free ones outline the financial situation of the SOTA providers and he has receipts
CodingJeebus · 2025-09-22
Ed Zitron is an AI skeptic from the market perspective, highly recommend his stuff. It’s definitely not comforting to read, but he’s doing the math behind these headlines and it’s not adding up at all[0]
0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
MongooseStudios · 2025-07-30
https://aicodinghorrors.com/ - the database deletion one was how I found out this site exists.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-stud… - somewhat controversial because measuring different tasks. But nobody can measure dev tasks anyway.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-prod… - Saw this very recently, haven't dug in to the sources.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Talks a LOT about the AI hype bubble in general.
The landscape here in the US sucks too. Layoffs and offshoring are still going strong. Everything new is some stupid AI startup. I kinda thought I was done too until I got laid off and started working on my own projects to stay sharp.
Realized I still love making stuff. Just hate the corporate games.
Forgeties79 · 2026-07-11
I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.
Google also did 100% make search worse on purpose as this great piece discusses: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did.
raincole · 2026-06-17
After reading Financial Times and Ed Zitron's articles[0][1], I've reached the opposite conclusion. OpenAI's situation healthier than what the outsiders once believed:
> Revenue: $13.07 billion
> Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion
In other words generating tokens is actually a profitable business even for the frontier models. It's best to IPO when it's the case.
[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb828
[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
evil-olive · 2026-06-09
that's confusing "subscribers" and "paid subscribers".
from Zitron's own website [0]:
> I have 84,000 subscribers and a 55-60% open rate, as well as an 8-11% clickthrough rate.
if the 84k number was all paid subscribers, then the "55-60% open rate" would mean that ~40% of his paying audience doesn't bother to read the thing they're paying for, which does not add up.
also, that's in the "Can I Advertise On Your Newsletter?" section. if there were an even higher number of non-paying subscribers, he'd have an obvious incentive to mention that, because the total number of eyeballs is what a potential advertiser cares about.
0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/
zachthewf · 2026-06-08
Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.
callmeal · 2026-05-22
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
He's been "numbering" for quite a while now.
foxylad · 2026-05-21
Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.
He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.
And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.
romaniv · 2026-05-14
Ed Zitron[1] has a lot of articles and podcast episodes on these deals. The nice thing about it is that he occasionally revisits the old announcements to check what happened with them. Apparently a lot of these deals just evaporate after prolonged contact with reality.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/
edzitron · 2026-04-27
borealis-dev · 2026-03-27
Sorry, I realize the headline perhaps implies something with more rigour than it actually delivers. I'm pretty new to writing blog posts! But if you want some actual factual data, you seriously should read Ed Zitron's blog: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
NoGravitas · 2026-02-17
I think it's less mind-reading than looking for a sociological explanation.
That said, I think a big underlying cause is that Business Idiots [1] are, in fact, idiots. Even so, it's worth looking for a sociological explanation of why Being An Idiot doesn't hurt Business Idiots like it would hurt the rest of us.
[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
thenaturalist · 2025-12-28
BetterOffline [0] by Ed Zitron [1] dissecting AI hype and boosters. By a long shot.
The information density and clarity are outstanding.
0: https://www.betteroffline.com/
1: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
qohen · 2025-12-18
If you want more Ed Zitron analysis/commentary on AI, AI companies, etc. you might want to check out his blog: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
jgalt212 · 2025-11-20
True, but they keep using more tokens (Agentic FTW!) and the currently most expensive models.
source: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
gmoore · 2025-10-31
If you want to dig deeper on this - check out https://www.wheresyoured.at/
bdangubic · 2025-10-19
every penny I made in the market over the last 30 years can be in some (or all) way attributed to exactly this. but this has to be backed by fundamentals. and fundamentals are weakening… this is a good read on OpenAI shit happening recently but it is industry-wide related - https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai400bn/
toomuchtodo · 2025-09-28
There’s a quote from Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson) I love on this bubble, which I hope becomes part of the zeitgeist:
> No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-onetrillion/
citizenpaul · 2025-08-28
There a journalist ed zittron
https://www.wheresyoured.at/
That is an openai skeptic. His research if correct says not only is openai unprofitable but it likely never will be. Can't be ,its various finance ratios make early uber, amazon ect look downright fiscally frugal.
He is not a tech person for what that means to you.
JohnKemeny · 2025-08-13
I recommend this Better Offline episode:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
htrp · 2025-08-07
Relevant to this conversation
>So, I ask, why, exactly, is Cognition worth $10 billion? And why did it have to raise $300 million after raising “hundreds of millions” according to Bloomberg in March? Where is the money going? It doesn’t seem to have great revenue, Carl Brown of the Internet of Bugs revealed it faked the demo of “Devin the AI powered software developer” last year, and Devin doesn’t even rank on SWE-benchmark, the industry standard for model efficacy at coding tasks.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/
dotcoma · 2025-07-29
Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.
In the shorter term...
NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.
88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.
And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.
So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.
Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
anonymars · 2025-07-20
I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at some point quality deliberately took a back seat to "growth"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
> The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary.
(Quoting from this follow-up post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
camgunz · 2025-06-17
Yeah maybe I should subscribe. I read Never Forget What They've Done which I don't remember getting linked on HN and is it a little much? Yeah. Do I feel exactly the same? Also yeah. OK I convinced myself to subscribe haha, I did it.
[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/
oblio · 2025-06-09
It's quite hard to say for sure, and I will prefix my comment by saying his blog posts are very long and quite doomerist about LLMs, but he makes a decent case about OpenAI financials:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-indu…
A very solid argument is like that against propaganda: it's not so much about what is being said but what about isn't. OpenAI is basically shouting about every minor achievement from the rooftops so the fact that they are remarkably silent about financial fundamentals says something. At best something mediocre or more likely bad.
hatefulmoron · 2025-06-05
For OpenAI: short answer is no. From what I've seen, their biggest expense is training future models. If they stop that (putting aside the obvious downsides) they'd still be in the hole for a few billion dollars a year.
This is based on what I've read here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-indu… (big AI bear, for what it's worth)
edit: Well, if they shed the other expenses that only really make sense when training future models (research, more data, fewer employees ..) they would be pretty close to break even.
TheMongoose · 2025-05-21
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has a lot to say about the topic.
colonial · 2025-04-16
A few months ago they were AGI vagueposting. Now they're working on SlopBook?
This plus Ed Zitron's excellent investigative writing on their finances [0] makes me think that OpenAI is going to fold within a year, maybe two.
[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-indu… (TL;DR - we have apparently learned nothing from 2008.)