NVIDIA Vs. The Media ft. GamersNexus

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s approach to the media, AI pushing out real tech at Computex, and the weird world of consumer graphics. Follow GamersNexus: https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus https://gamersnexus.net/ https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:18Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:20Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron, and this week, we're joined again by the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus.

• 1:38Ed Zitron?

  How are you doing, Steve?

• 1:39Speaker 05

  Doing well. How about you?

• 1:40Ed Zitron?

  Doing great. So we were just at Computex, right?

• 1:44Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah, we were over there for a couple of weeks.

• 1:46Ed Zitron?

  So for the listeners who don't know, because there's a fair amount who don't know every conference, so what is Computex and what makes it so important?

• 1:54Speaker 05

  Computex is the, I would, I think it's the largest Computer hardware and computer technology trade show. So that's hosted in Taipei every year. And it's like a much better CES. People may know CES.

• 2:10Ed Zitron?

  And is it more focused on enterprise stuff or consumer stuff?

• 2:13Speaker 05

  This year, weirdly, they AI commandeered the entire main hall. So there were actually, there are a lot of pissed off consumer hardware manufacturers who were sort of evicted and driven out of the main hall and put into the lesser one with consumer hardware.

• 2:31Ed Zitron?

  What were they even showing with the AI stuff as well?

• 2:34Speaker 05

  I mean, one company had an AI computer case.

• 2:39Ed Zitron?

  Oh, how did that? What's the AI doing there?

• 2:42Speaker 05

  Absolutely no idea.

• 2:44Ed Zitron?

  Sick. It's so cool that this is absorbed. It's also kind of brutal. That's literally absorbing space.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:53Ed Zitron?

  Did you see anything cool there, though? Anything you're excited about?

• 2:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. The, I mean, there was some immersion cooling, which is always nice to see, like where they actually literally immerse the system, you know, and in fluid for cooling. There was a thermosiphon from Noctua, which is just a really cool use of, it's another cooling technology. Lots of computer case and cooling solution development. And then on the GPU side, I mean, Nvidia sort of buried its 5060 launch and then AMD more formally announced the information for its 9060 XT. And both of those are sort of the slightly more affordable consumer class GPUs.

• 3:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So Nvidia also was doing some funny business with you recently. You did that wonderful video. So walk us through what happened there because they tried to big dog you, so to speak.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I mean, the problem we had with them, we talked about was For several months, there had been this, I felt sort of pressure from Nvidia with where, so Nvidia, for context for people, Nvidia sends out GP review samples. We and other reviewers are not entitled to them. That's fine. We can buy them ourselves as well. But they send out samples for product reviews. And in the past, Nvidia has been in hot water for asking another outlet called Hard Run Box to, I believe the quote was, or the paraphrase was, "Change your editorial direction."

• 4:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so that was several years ago.

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  And what did they, what did they ask them to do back then?

• 4:30Speaker 05

  Back then, it was seeking more coverage of real-time ray tracing in video games, which at the time was more or less only found in any kind of meaningful performance on Nvidia hardware. But also, and the reason,

• 4:47Speaker 05

  at least we weren't ready to fully do testing for real-time ray tracing yet, was because it just, it wasn't ready yet. I mean, there weren't that many games with it.

• 4:56Ed Zitron?

  You couldn't really test it because you couldn't use it.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, they launched, and if I remember correctly, there were actually zero games that supported this technology. And the only thing available were sort of tech demos. And so anyway, that, that was what they wanted then.

• 5:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:10Speaker 05

  They kind of went away, didn't, that's at least as far as we know publicly, didn't try to push reviewers in a particular direction with their narrative or their editorial style.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  And then over the last several months, we were getting this pressure of, of a,

• 5:30Speaker 05

  basically, so we do a bunch of interviews with engineers and technical people at Nvidia. And I felt they were starting to use that as a lever to be like, oh, it sure seems like you like talking to the thermal engineers. It'd be a shame if something happened.

• 5:44Ed Zitron?

  And you did that very long one over with Nvidia, right? You went and kind of looked at how the thermal, thermal stuff worked?

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we did. I mean, they're great educational content. The engineers are awesome. And I've spent years working with mostly people who are in different departments or don't work there anymore to, To get Nvidia on the same page, I'm like, look, we're not looking for a marketing puff piece. We're looking for actual engineers who just want to talk about the stuff they make. And people can learn about it, but it's not like, obviously, yes, it can support the product. By nature of if it's good and the engineers explain it well, then people will like it. But the objective is not just like, come on our show and use us as a platform to sell things. We want engineers, not marketers. Yeah. And so that was great. And um,

• 6:31Speaker 05

  the like I said, lever that it became was they wanted more and video wanted more coverage of this thing called MFG, which is multi-frame generation. Which is something that Jensen Huang, the CEO, talks about on stage as being part of their technology suite that is a big surprise, AI accelerated, that effectively multiplies the frame rate.

• 7:00Speaker 05

  To be used as a smoothing technology. So it's

• 7:04Ed Zitron?

  Is this different to like DLSS and things like that? Or is that?

• 7:08Speaker 05

  It is part of the DLSS or the deep learn super sampling technology suite. So it's sort of, it's, it's almost like a subset of DLSS.

• 7:17Ed Zitron?

  Right. And so it basically just looks better at higher resolution. It fills in the frames, I'm guessing, just trying to simplify.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So yes, the simplest version of it is MFG sort of interpolates frames. So it's able to add in or insert additional effectively artificial or generated frames, if you're trying to be charitable with it, that are not literally built by the game engine. And so the GPU is working with its own software to construct these frames and construct pixels based on what it thinks is going to happen next. And we've actually tested it and there's situations where it's not bad. There's situations where it's awful, like with any technology. But what it does is it on a chart, if you just look at the number that comes out, the

• 8:08Speaker 05

  so-called frame rate or the amount of frames in a given period of time. That looks higher with this technology.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  But it's not measuring the same thing as something without this technology. So it's effectively, you know, you're comparing apples and oranges. Uh, if you try to put real frames that are rendered in the traditional way up against these generated AI frames that are effectively guessing at what they should look like.

• 8:37Ed Zitron?

  And do they look bad as well? Like?

• 8:40Speaker 05

  They can, they can look really bad. I mean, we've done some testing where uh, in some of the games, it's just like text, for example, will, will get completely garbled. Uh, text on screen, yeah, interface, interface issues will draw the interface in the wrong area. Um, you could have a really bad blur.

• 8:58Ed Zitron?

  It seems insanely bad for like any RPG of any kind or any kind of like Twitch. I don't know that.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:05Ed Zitron?

  It feels like anything you'd be doing ever would be ruined by that.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's scenarios where it works. Okay. But the RPG example you brought up. So Final Fantasy was one of the games we tested where, uh, there's just areas. I mean, it just, I personally would turn it off. It looks worse and I'd, I'd rather have a lower quote unquote, frame rate than have this, um, sort of potential blurry mess every now and then.

• 9:29Ed Zitron?

  So strange. Low quality as well. Just a, a very strange thing to push out the door.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and the, you know, I, I think sort of finish the

• 9:41Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  editorial narrative thing. No, I mean, it's fine, but I'll finish that first and I'll come back to your comment you just made because that's also interesting. But on the editorial side, they wanted more coverage of MFG. And we disagreed from a, an objective standpoint. Uh, you know, I kind of made the case to them several times over several calls over several months of why we think it, it just doesn't belong on the same charts as normal benchmarking, normal objective testing. Uh, and so there was, yeah, there's just a disagreement, which is fine. The problem came in when, uh, I felt repeatedly on various calls with the Nvidia people

• 10:22Speaker 05

  that they were almost sort of holding hostage, the idea of working with, uh, engineers again, where it's, well, the way we're able to make this happen is by you covering things like MFG, you know, sort of that type of conversation.

• 10:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So, and they mentioned something about like budgets as in, in the video, remember?

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, there was like discussion of, um, One of the times specifically, the statement was that this is how we can secure budget for these types of things.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  And, and like to be clear for listeners, we don't take money for interviews.

• 10:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. And in fact, I've paid now over five figures to visit Nvidia on numerous occasions for said interviews. Personally, like I've paid.

• 11:09Ed Zitron?

  And I can say this from the PR side and not working, not work with Nvidia or anyone associated, got firewall that it's like, no one talks about budgets. No one is like, oh, I can't visit a journalist due to budget. And certainly not Nvidia, a company that had $39 billion, I believe in revenue, just in the data center portion last quarter. Kind of farcical.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  Multi-trillion dollar market cap. I think if I try to take devil's advocate, maybe there's some internal budgeting, whatever, like the marketing department needs to budget time from the engineering department or something, but we're talking like a couple hours of time max normally, you know?

• 11:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  Especially when I'm traveling to them. So it just seemed like, I don't know, it, I didn't buy it. And also that was only one of the, the numerous

• 12:05Speaker 05

  calls, you know, like that, the, the defensible reason for them changed, it felt like each time where it's like, oh, let's try this angle. Let's try this angle.

• 12:13Ed Zitron?

  So did they end up blocking you? Are they just, how did that situation resolve itself?

• 12:18Speaker 05

  I have not spoken with anyone there since we posted our video talking about it. And part of the challenge with posting that video is, um, you know, it's like the, the first couple of times this came up, I assumed that it was just sort of. Okay, maybe the guy phrased it wrong. You know, I've worked with these people for a while and maybe it just came out wrong. After a couple of times, I did call one of my reps after the meeting where they kind of pushed this. You know, you testing this technology that you think is is not appropriate to share on charts with competitors. That's how we get you these interviews. I called a rep and said, um, you know, hey,

• 13:01Speaker 05

  this, if you guys say this to people, this is going to be taken the wrong way. And like, I'm still assuming it's not meant this way.

• 13:08Ed Zitron?

  Right. Really trying your hardest there.

• 13:12Speaker 05

  But if I hear this again, right? Like it's, I'm gonna have to start assuming it's, it's the way it sounds. And it did come up again. And part of the challenge with making the video we made was, you know, we want to blow the whistle on it in case other people are facing that pressure. And also in case consumers are watching or reading content, which may be influenced without their knowledge. The problem is, I think Nvidia may now be in a situation where, let's just assume, uh, everybody makes up and it's fine at some point. I don't know that they will ever be able to put an engineer on camera anytime in the near future with anybody, without the audience questioning it and for good reason.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Because that was what we felt was being used as the lever against us. And so it's just kind of, I don't know, we, we tried to, you know, I explained to them several times why this is a problem. And why the phrasing is a problem. And the more you hear it, the more it's like, okay, I mean, at some point, like, I think you're saying what it sounds like you're saying, and I'm gonna stop.

• 14:17Ed Zitron?

  It's good that you did it though, because it's, well, GN's got well, over a million subscribers. So who knows what they're doing to much smaller outlets as well?

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, and that's what I'm really concerned about is I've had conversations with. Nvidia in the past that we'll probably get into in a future video, but about their strategy for newer creators. And I don't like what I've heard. I mean, it sounds very much like we're gonna sort of try and shape these newer creators. And, you know, I think the problem is as especially old guard media, as in people like OGs before us retire or move to other industries, the there's openings to change how media interfaces with these companies in general, because you've got newer people who don't have the historical background with these companies to know what to expect.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  And so it's easier to kind of slowly creep that goalpost where it's it's less independence and it's more marketing arm of the companies. And that's what I'm really worried about is if they get in any of these companies with newer creators early and are able to change the expectancy of the relationship. So change it from independent reviewer analyzing large companies device into more of a, hey, we're all friends, we're all working together to try and benefit the consumer. When if you're talking about a multi trillion dollar company, that their motives are far different from like the guy in his bedroom who's trying to do hardware reviews.

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• 16:57Ed Zitron?

  It's just so weird as well because they're already so successful. Is this history? It sounds like historically Nvidia has been a bit draconian like this, though not necessarily pressuring in this way.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  I mean, I certainly think Nvidia is one of the most vindictive companies in the space. They, the stories we've heard and told in some instances of their partners, not reviewers, but actual business partners like board vendors, people who make the video cards that Nvidia GPUs go on. Those stories would seem to indicate a sort of vindictiveness.

• 17:34Ed Zitron?

  Can you give an example?

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, allocation. So GPU allocation is the concept of how many of a high demand GPU can you as a partner get to then attach to a product to then sell to a consumer? And there's a limited amount of these because they're going to sell 100% of them. And allocation is typically measured by percent. So company A might get 25%. Company B might get 5% of the GPU supply, whatever that is. And that allocation, we've been told in the past, has been used also as sort of a lever. And so an example would be back in the EVGA days, which EVGA sort of famously was-

• 18:20Ed Zitron?

  And that was a graphics card company.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  Correct, yeah. They, they were Nvidia's number one partner. And they, they were so Nvidia favored that they only made Nvidia video cards. They did not work with any competitors.

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  And they famously cut that relationship publicly. And we ran a story about that. But one of the things that they were unhappy about was Nvidia slowly tightening the screws, which is a direct quote from an Nvidia PM I spoke to once.

• 18:50Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  Slowly tightening the screws is the quote, but on what the partners were allowed to do with their products. And slowly over time, they're losing some of this creative freedom.

• 19:07Ed Zitron?

  When you say they lose creative freedom, like what are they being constrained to do?

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Uh, one that's public is we did an interview with a famous overclocker who used to work for EVGA, uh, Kingpin is his username and his name is on video cards that are world famous. We did a video with him and he talked about how he wanted to add two power connectors to a card to basically make it more fun to overclock with for consumers. And so it'd be, they'd be able to pull more power and it would also be able to do so safer because the current power connector has this issue of, uh, burning and catching on fire sometimes.

• 19:46Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  And so, and so he wanted the two of them to kind of resolve some of that. And in the public discussion we had with Kingpin in the video, he said, um,

• 19:59Speaker 05

  paraphrasing, but the conversation was, he said, they wouldn't allow it or they restricted it or something like that. And I said, who is they? And he said, they, you know, like we, we, there was only one they, there could be.

• 20:11Ed Zitron?

  Who could it be?

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, but there's plenty of examples like that where the, another one would be,

• 20:20Speaker 05

  a couple of generations ago, the cheaper cards, like the $200, $300 models, they were, those models were difficult for the partners to actually make and still make any money. And so there were times where we were told about how this MSRP level video card, meaning the number that Nvidia says is the MSRP, that would only exist for a fixed period of time, uh, because it was simply impossible to afford to make it. But Nvidia really wanted them to exist at this certain MSRP. It allows them to advertise a lower price. And so they're pushed to make these cards that allows them to potentially get things like more access to allocation or, you know, whatever privilege they may get.

• 21:06Ed Zitron?

  So on a much larger level, what do you think is going on with Nvidia as a company right now? I'm not asking for stock analysis, like that totally not that, but just as a company that both makes consumer graphics cards and underpins whatever the AI thing is. How like, what do you think is going on there right now?

• 21:25Speaker 05

  I I think there's definitely a focus on AI to try and get money. I mean, there's a Jensen Huang was in an interview, I don't know, last year sometime, I think, or early this year, and made a comment about how they use AI to write their own driver software now, or their own software, or something like that. And you know, this is, it's their number one focus. It's what they're making the most, I guess, investor money on. So they're focused on it. The concern I have is it's one thing to sort of let the consumer hardware side

• 22:11Speaker 05

  dwindle or get less competitive effort. It's another thing to, in my opinion, sort of drag the entire industry down with it as they shift focus to the higher revenue AI side.

• 22:25Ed Zitron?

  Right. When you say drag them down, how do you mean?

• 22:28Speaker 05

  I mean, things like trying to, in my opinion, control the media narrative and shape it. Like that, that to me goes beyond, okay, we don't care much about consumer. We're going to focus on making money with AI. That gets into, we are going to actively damage the credibility of independent media and also potentially harm consumers who are influenced by that media, which has been shaped with a certain, you know, corporate narrative to push. And that's my concern. So that's, that's, that's where I draw the distinction between, you know, as we said in our video, it's if you want to just focus on AI and if they want to just sell all the GPUs to big enterprise companies, go for it.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  But you don't screw all the rest of us over at the same time.

• 23:17Ed Zitron?

  And do you think that they're abandoning consumer? Or is it just they are, they are focusing on the shiny object of the day?

• 23:25Speaker 05

  I I don't know Jensen Huang personally. My read on him, though, I feel like it's unlikely he would want to abandon something he already has.

• 23:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Even if it's only out of maybe sort of pride. And so I don't think they'll abandon it. I do think they're focusing on AI. It's just that, uh, I mean, they have like 92% market share in consumer GPUs now, according to John Putty Research. So I, it's just like, they can, it's a monopoly. I mean, that's just like, this is what monopolies look like.

• 24:06Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's it. I would say there was an opportunity for someone to come in, but based on everything you've shown with like AMD recently, even on the low end, it just, it doesn't feel, it almost feels like consumer graphics are being not treated with the respect they deserve, despite PC gaming being a huge industry and so on and so forth.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a massive industry and prosumer too. I mean, even just non-AI use cases include people who edit videos or make movies or do 3D animations. Um, yeah, I think Intel's a good barometer here because Intel decided to get into consumer GPU and they're new to it. And they've had a hell of a time. They're doing much better now with this current generation. But, uh, one of the quotes from an Intel person I spoke with previously to us was for their last generation was we should be wrapping these with money when we sell them because they were just, they were basically subsidizing, you know, the build out of this new division, this GPU division by undercutting prices from competitors to just try and get

• 25:10Speaker 05

  their foot in the door, uh, with what at the time was a lesser product. And so, yeah, I think they're a good barometer because. If you want to be, first of all, to have a fab, a fabrication facility costs these days, potentially tens of billions of dollars and years to build. So a new vendor would have to be fabulous, like Nvidia and like AMD, unlike Intel. And to be fabulous and make a

• 25:40Ed Zitron?

  Sorry about this. This is just for the listeners. What is a fab in this case?

• 25:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a fab, a fabrication plant is basically a factory for silicon. It's a highly controlled clean room environment. And that means that there's basically absolutely no dust ingress. The small pieces of skin or whatever, you know, just working in an environment, that's all either captured or controlled. And that's because a single particle of dust on a wafer can can destroy at least part of that silicon supply.

• 26:14Ed Zitron?

  Cool. Sorry.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so a new vendor would have to be probably fabulous unless they're already huge like Intel. And that means they need to go get supply from most likely TSMC, possibly from Intel. Maybe, I mean, the past Samsung has been used. There's really not a lot of options here. And everybody wants their silicon. So to even get allocation of these silicon wafers would be difficult. It's just all of the chips are stacked against someone who wants to do this. And they would, I think the only way you get in is if you're an existing multi billion dollar company or have obscene amounts of investment.

• 26:57Ed Zitron?

  Well, that fucking sucks. It's actually, that's a good question, though. So this is for the old timers listening. I remember having a 3DEX, it was a Voodoo 5500, picture of a halo on the on the box, actually. Don't know what happened there. What happened to all the smaller manufacturers? Did they just get kind of absorbed? Or did they just fall apart?

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, they they got bought or, yeah, I think 3DEX, if I remember correctly, was bought by Nvidia. And I just checked that, but.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  Some of the others, I mean, there's like VIA, Syrix and some of these CPU companies. Yeah, 3D FX bought by Nvidia. SGI was another, so they, they.

• 27:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, I forgot about SGI.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so SGI is interesting because they sort of pursued heavily. I guess the, at the time, what enterprise would have been, or at least workstation hardware. And they're really invested in workstation. The story I got from someone, I wasn't covering things back then, but was that um. SGI was less interested in consumer and didn't really think consumers could afford video cards, which at the time was sort of true. And that's when Nvidia came in and, and, uh, you know, started really kicking ass in the early days. But a lot of them just, they either got bought or they sort of exited that space.

• 28:23Ed Zitron?

  So, changing tack slightly, how do you feel about AI in general? I know that I'm not expecting like an industry in that, I'm just, from your perspective, at least from what you've told me in watching your videos, it feels like AI is something now being stapled onto the side of literally everything.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:39Ed Zitron?

  Within your world. Do you think there's like, do you use it? Do you have any thoughts on it?

• 28:44Speaker 05

  There's uses, um.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  I, I mean, one thing I am, I'm actually worried about long-term with AI use cases. And the, the biggest thing I'm worried about is on the media side, we obviously get a lot of comments. I probably read or at least skim, you know, tens of thousands of comments a year. And, uh, I'm seeing more and more AI comments and not just the really obvious YouTube spam bots. But somewhere you kind of, you read it and you're like, ah, that, hmm, that could be real, you know? And I don't want to like, yeah, I, I don't want to like remove it if it's a valid, real comment, but then. A few comments down the thread, there'll be this discussion amongst what are obvious

• 29:32Speaker 05

  sort of bots about, say, some new crypto BS or whatever.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  And so I'm, I'm actually worried about sort of like that internet theory, I guess, the, the concept of you're the only human in the room and you might not even know it. That's concerning to me. There's a loneliness factor there I'm worried about.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  But the big one is just how easily people are manipulated by comments that sort of appear to have the prevailing opinion, just in general, even from real comments. You then take that and you apply it to potential AI that becomes very convincing in the future. And you then think one step further of who owns these LLMs and, and the companies that sell so-called AI products. And all of them are these multi-billion dollar companies that if they want to, could tune it to filter the responses in ways that are beneficial

• 30:37Speaker 05

  to them. And that to me is sort of the dystopian old man yells at clouds, you know, like concern I have.

• 30:56Speaker 01

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• 31:27Speaker 06

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• 32:00Ed Zitron?

  But it feels like a more practical one because everyone freaks out about AGI, which is fictional and all of these other things. But yeah, the idea that comments would be filled with people who were just subtly being nudged in different directions. And when you talk about corporate narratives as well, who knows that? And I don't usually with with LLMs in particular, I try not to lean into anything too conspiratorial. But like, this is a simple one that you're kind of seeing signs of even on Blue Sky. I will occasionally get a comment from someone. It'll take me half a second, second to go like, what's wrong with you? This doesn't feel like a human being saying this. No one speaks like this, but you sound human adjacent.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 32:38Ed Zitron?

  And I'm and at your scale, I imagine that becomes a lot harder to moderate slash process.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it really is just, I mean, I'm highly, my job is to be skeptical and you try to do that in a healthy way. You know, it's easy to go way overboard. But this is something where I I just, I think there's so much opportunity to be abused. And I was actually looking at, there's that meta story about meta and Facebook pirating all of these, you know, books or taking books from pirated materials and integrating them. And there's a lawsuit over it. One of the things I was thinking of, though, and actually speaking to a copyright attorney about was it

• 33:23Speaker 05

  really feels like right now, the companies that are willing to break the most laws, especially intellectual property laws, and steal the most stuff, will make so much money that it's like, you know what, let's just, we'll just deal with the consequences in five years when it gets through the court. And we'll be so far out ahead of anyone who didn't lie, cheat and steal, you know, to get here.

• 33:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  That it won't matter, which is just how the big corporations broadly behave. But applying that to a new area like AI, I don't know, it's, I'm really concerned about it. I think there's absolutely good use cases. And I mean, as an example, internally, we've used it to concept things. So like I I'll have an idea in my head for art, like for a product, and I can see it, but I'm a terrible artist. And so there's a use case there where I'll sit down with my artist and try to explain it as best I can. And he'll take a go at it. And if I'm like, nah, it doesn't really like look how it looks in my head. That's when I might try to pull some mid journey thing like, okay, here's

• 34:36Speaker 05

  like broadly, like the style artistically I'm trying to get, you know, and then he can take that and actually make something.

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  So but just to be clear, you would never use any of that stuff in the real it is literally just a concept tool. Correct. The just making sure the listeners have a good view on this.

• 34:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, correct. The the artist, so Andrew, he's been working with me forever. He makes it all from scratch, like in Blender normally, and actually flattens it into a 2D image for the shirts and things. Cool. So yeah, it is purely used if if in the first conversation, he can't like quite figure out what I'm trying to explain as a non artist, you know, it's like, okay, let me go, let me try and figure out like, I don't, I don't know art words, you know, I don't know. No, no, I know. I know what you mean. Yeah.

• 35:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. How do you deal with the ethical side of that? Because it's just, it is still working on copyright material. But I guess if you're not putting it out there, it's just like, this, this shit sucks. Even like, looking at it feels bad.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's hard because it's the first step for us. So it's always like a Google search to see what's out there already. And so we'll do a Google search if I'm trying to explain something I want. And normally, that's pretty successful. But like now, it's the same. It's like you're getting all this AI art surfacing. And so at some point, it's sort of like the downloading and uploading and downloading, uploading a PNG multiple times. It feels like it's just getting like, the the quality is getting lost somewhere in that chain.

• 36:05Ed Zitron?

  It is. It is funny. We're also like three years into it. And the best we've got as far as like, from you, arguably, one of the most like, I don't mean this, I mean, this actually is in a good way, like, you would be excited about something cool in tech coming out. Like, if something cool happened, and the coolest we've got is, yeah, sometimes I can't work out what I'm thinking. So I just make one image, and hopefully, my artist gets in. Yeah, it's just like that with three years in. And that's the best we've got.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I I think. We, early, early on with GPT, when we ran one of the first news stories that we ran about it and I was trying to understand like, what is this thing? I remember feeding it a spreadsheet I had made with our own data and asking it to analyze the results and it was just like,

• 36:56Speaker 05

  and keep in mind, this was early, but it had hallucinated so much

• 37:02Speaker 05

  that I was just, I was disillusioned. It was like, okay, this is just, it literally just made everything up.

• 37:08Ed Zitron?

  And that was kind of how I was at the beginning as well, because I love my doodads, my gizmos. I was kind of like, okay, everyone's talking about this. And so I tried to do all of the things they talk, oh, it could automate your work. I'm a spreadsheet-heavy guy and this crap can't even do that. The funniest one for me was that you have a Manus, Manus? You heard of this one?

• 37:27Speaker 05

  No.

• 37:28Ed Zitron?

  They claim to be an AI agent company.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 37:30Ed Zitron?

  And I asked it, can you go and find all of the links that mentioned me for the last two years? Probably over a hundred of them. And it takes 11 minutes or so and it's writing Python for every single step. And it comes back with 11 links. Or like nine links. I go, hey, you missed some and it comes back with nine more after like another 10 minutes. And this is, this was about a month ago. It's just what, it feels like they're pushing them up a hill.

• 37:58Ed Zitron?

  It's, but back to Nvidia for a second, because this will be the last Nvidia one, I think. You have done a really good job of kind of tracking Nvidia as they've jumped towards these movements. But they've done this, but they did, how big was their move towards crypto? That's actually something I've had trouble encapsulating before. Did they really shift the company that aggressively in that direction?

• 38:21Speaker 05

  That's a good question. So from Nvidia's relationship with crypto is weird. I remember at one point, there was some kind of earnings call or something where it was during one of the GPU mining sort of apocalypses where consumers couldn't get cards because they're all being bought by crypto mining. And

• 38:42Speaker 05

  I remember doing a report on in hardware news on the earnings where it seemed like the amount of revenue for mining was sort of obfuscated and it was a challenge where the devices are shared with gaming and so, okay, I could see how it would be difficult to decouple these in a revenue chart if you sell gaming devices and they're used for multiple things.

• 39:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  So, you know, it's like, I kind of get it, but at the same time, they weren't like hiding from making sales to crypto mining. And then later on, Nvidia released these LHR low hash rate cards. I think it was the 30 series. And that was done to try and get more card, well, they say to try and get more cards to gamers. Now, there were bypasses for that, which is a separate story, but it was done at a time when the 30 series, it was really unfortunate covering it because like the hardware was pretty good. The prices at the beginning were good, but there's no supply to meet the demand, which was partly because of COVID shutdowns where people were

• 39:52Speaker 05

  building new computers for home and also partly because of mining. And so they tried a few things like these low hash rate cards to reduce the viability for mining operations. But, but yeah, I mean, it's it definitely they've kind of that pendulum has swung back and forth. I think at Nvidia, it's like, okay, we sell a lot of these and make a lot of money to people are really pissed off, you know, and we can't get them to consumer users who might actually be repeat customers in the future. And so let's try and restrict it. So it's definitely, I don't know. I mean, it's not unexpected behavior, I guess, for a big corporation where it's just, where's the money? And if the pendulum swings back the other way, you know, we need to try and

• 40:32Speaker 05

  Minimize how much both of these potential client groups hate us for catering to the other one, so.

• 40:42Ed Zitron?

  So, final GPU related question, actually. And forgive me if you don't know the answer for this exactly, but assuming the AI bubble burst and you don't have to commit to whether you think that will happen or not, what else can these big enterprise level GPUs actually be used for?

• 40:59Speaker 05

  They can be used for a lot. I mean, like, some of the, we're talking to a professor at a university for an upcoming piece, and they have some very serious, like, machine learning research use cases. And I've looked into some of the other ones. And as you might expect, there's really promising use cases in medical and pattern recognition and like so-called AI being able to do early identification of potentially cancerous masses and people that, you know, it's one of those, like, if you treat it like a tool rather than like

• 41:39Speaker 05

  the answer, then I suppose in this example, as someone who knows nothing about, you know, the medical world, but I suppose a skilled doctor might be able to use it to help the process. I think the concern I would have as a skeptic would be, okay, but can we keep that doctor in the mindset of I'm using this to help catch my mistakes or help see things I can't, rather than, you know, I'm overworked and I need to lean on this to do my job?

• 42:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  That would be the concern.

• 42:17Ed Zitron?

  I'm just, and my whole thing is just if they, and I believe they have, this is my personal opinion, I think they've massively overbuilt and oversold these cards. And I, it's, sorry, cards is inappropriate to refer to like the enterprise ones, racks, I suppose. But it's what do they do next is going to be the question eventually. And I mean, there's just very clearly not going to be enough use cases for them. But I think that's going to be really interesting. And now I've got two fun questions for you. First of all, did you hear about this $3,600 keyboard?

• 42:48Speaker 05

  I did not.

• 42:49Ed Zitron?

  The Norbauer Seneca. Okay, so I'm gonna send you this later. So Nathan Edwards over at The Verge reviewed this one, this $3,600 keyboard, which I need to send you because I, I assume you would.

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Norbauer Seneca, I see the review. Luxury keyboard.

• 43:04Ed Zitron?

  It's insane. Listeners, I will drop with everything we've been talking about, I'll have links in there, but this thing, it's like precision honed, and if he gets it wrong, he has to start again with, it takes him like a full day to do like the things that absorb impact. So cool.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  This is, this reminds me of, uh, the, I don't know, probably almost 20 years ago now, there was the super expensive, I think it was like an Optimus keyboard or something.

• 43:32Ed Zitron?

  Oh, was it like the, the Opt or the Dusk keyboard where it had the little screens on each key?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was screens for every key. And back then, you know, that was, that was before we were putting screens on everything.

• 43:41Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh. I, I want, that's the thing. I love that this exists because if you look at The Verge story, which I'll link, it's just a guy who literally sits in this garage and just builds these things like an Artesian. I wish we had more weird shit like this. This is what I miss about the tech industry.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, the weird stuff and the cool stuff and things where, that's what I like seeing at Computex, where it's, okay, I could, this isn't a product yet, but I could see it becoming a product, or there's pieces of this that could become a, you know, an affordable product. That's the stuff I like.

• 44:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Did you see anything really bizarre like that there?

• 44:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, well, actually, most recently, this wasn't Computex, but the most sort of bizarre cool thing I saw and worked with that I was really happy about was the, um, pre-built PC made by a small company called Cherry Tree, and they make modded computer cases. And, um, it's just a computer inside of the husk of a video card.

• 44:42Ed Zitron?

  Okay, that's cool. Yeah, I love that. That's, that reminds me of the Corsair 1000D case, which I actually have at home where they have, you can fit, uh, my, these are Micro ATX and a regular sized motherboard in there. I love that stuff. Like it's, that's why I, I, that's the thing I love about tech, the really, really dumb kind of niche stuff. And actually with that in mind, what are you actually excited for as we wrap up? Like, what are the things coming out soon that you're kind of pumped up to see?

• 45:10Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, the cases and cooling are really interesting to me. I, I just think in the,

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Computer, actually CPUs have gotten interesting too. So on the silicon side, AMD has done really well to actually get into gear competitively over the last several years. And the, these, they call them X3D CPUs, which have a bunch of extra cache on them. They've been really good for gaming and that's it. I mean,

• 45:41Ed Zitron?

  What does the extra cache allow?

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so because you can fit more stuff local to the CPU, like, like you can store more of what the CPU needs to process within the CPU silicon itself. It doesn't have to go out to system memory. So the way it normally works is like if you're playing a game and you need some kind of file for drawing something in the game or whatever, I mean, it'll go into memory of some kind. So it might be GPU memory, it might be system memory. But if we take the system memory example, something goes into system memory. You need that file. There'll be a transaction where you can imagine these bits going down a bus to the memory and coming all the way back to the CPU. And that's a long highway to go down.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  Whereas with extra cache, you can store more local to the CPU. It can transact via basically like a shortcut. And that allows in the real world significantly a higher performance in gaming or in cash heavy applications.

• 46:44Ed Zitron?

  And so the new AMD ones are, they,

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the new, like the 9800 X3D, for example. So those, I'm really excited about that, how that's gone because that actually, you may like this, but that was actually a sort of a Skunk Works project where this team of engineers in AMD, and we ran a story on this too, but they decided, let's just try this idea. And they experimented with it. They got it working and they brought it through management and said, hey, this looks viable. And, you know, and then they were able to actually make a product that it came from. An abnormal path of an underground sort of, you know, Skunk Works effort at the, in the

• 47:30Speaker 05

  engineering department to actually being the leading gaming product for CPUs on the market.

• 47:35Ed Zitron?

  That's it. I, I, we will have that link in the episode notes as well. And we can wrap on the product, the AMD Skunk Works product you mentioned in a recent video that I'd not, AMD made a mountain bike at one point? Just wanna what?

• 47:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, yeah, that was not a good moment for AMD. Fortunately, fortunately, it didn't particularly damage their CPU or GPU credibility because it was so

• 48:03Ed Zitron?

  I can't imagine so. But why? Why? Why did they do what?

• 48:06Speaker 05

  They, it was during the COVID bike shortages. I don't know if you remember, but like all kinds of bicycles, yeah, were difficult to get. And, uh, yeah, so they made these $300 so-called mountain bikes. Uh, I think they're like Kent Walmart bike rebrands, basically.

• 48:24Ed Zitron?

  Nice. So they went real cheap.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it was advertised, you know, for mountain biking and off-road trails and whatever. And so we took it down a trail and I actually had trouble getting out of the parking lot. Uh, that's how messed up the bike was. We had to take it to a shop before I rode it for a safety check because the, the, it used V brakes and they were going through the spokes. So, uh, they definitely would have stopped me, but.

• 48:50Ed Zitron?

  Jensen Huang sitting there being like, we could have had a fucking mountain bike, man.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. How do we get, yeah. If we make a bike, we can get rid of them.

• 48:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they're just like two, $20 billion shoved into mountain bike research. That would be so good. Steve, it's always such a pleasure having you on here. Where can people find you?

• 49:09Speaker 05

  And Gamer's Nexus on YouTube.

• 49:12Ed Zitron?

  Thank you so much for being here. I'm of course Ed Zitron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Have a great week, everyone. Steve, thanks for coming on.

• 49:18Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 49:27Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com, not an Empower client, paid, or sponsored.

• 51:02Speaker 07

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.