The BS Bubble

In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through why it’s so harmful that the media keeps taking OpenAI at its word - and responds to the most common critiques from AI boosters. 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. You can also order a limited-edition Better Offline hat until 5/22/25! https://cottonbureau.com/p/CAGDW8/hat/better-offline-hat#/28510205/hat-unisex-dad-hat-black-100percent-cotton-adjustable --- 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 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.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Every purchase is a financial decision. So it's worth asking, what am I getting out of this? If you're using the Chase Freedom Flex Card, you can maximize your cash back on things you need. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. Sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 1:14Ed Zitron?

  Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, and you're listening to Better Offline.

• 1:28Ed Zitron?

  As a reminder, you can now buy glorious Better Offline merchandise. There's a link to it in the episode notes. The T-shirts, the tumblers, the tote bags, all that shit. It's lovely. You're gonna love it. Buy it today. But if I'm honest, today, I'm actually a little bit pissed off. And that's why we've got a two-part episode this week about how fucking stupid the AI boom has become. I wrote farcical in the script, and I'm gonna be honest, I need to be a little more pointed. Because I've written tens of thousands of words about this now. I've recorded hours upon hours of podcasts, and still to this day, people are babbling about the AI revolution as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the fucking earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their mores. Things are astronomically fucked outside, yet the tech media continues to tell me to

• 2:11Ed Zitron?

  get my swimming trunks on and take a long, nice dip in the fucking pool. As you can tell, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual. I've just, I'm a little bit frustrated. I don't know why I'm the one saying this, and I frequently feel with the I, a part-time blogger and podcaster, I'm writing the things that I'm writing. Since I put out the newsletter OpenAI as a systemic risk to the tech industry, and actually it was a couple of weeks back, I did the two-parter about it too. I've heard nothing in response, as was the case with how does OpenAI survive and how OpenAI is a bad business.

• 2:43Ed Zitron?

  There just seems to be little concern or belief that there's any kind of risk at the heart of AI, and OpenAI in particular. And there were companies that spent $9 billion in 2024 to lose $5 billion. Well, I'd love to add a because here, if not because it's important to be intellectually honest and represent views that directly contrast my own, even if I do in somewhat sarcastic and sardonic fashion, nobody seems to actually have a cogent response to how they right their ship, other than Hard Fork are casing you and throwing a full-scale psycho tante on a podcast and saying I'm wrong because inference costs are coming down. Inference, by the way, is when an AI takes an input and produces an output. It's the calculations that take place right before Google's generative AI assistant attributes a Voltaire quote to Michael Jackson or

• 3:27Ed Zitron?

  says that black tar heroin, when enjoyed in moderation, can help you lose weight. Newton is a nakedly captured booster that ran an infographic from Anthropic a few weeks ago, the likes of which I haven't seen since 2013. It was telling you all the ways that people use generative AI. It looks like some shit from, I don't know, early day Mashable, no offence Christina. And they essentially treat this company propaganda as gospel. But he's really far from the only one with a flimsy attachment to reality. The Information, a publication that genuinely does some great stuff, which makes it even more heartbreaking to say this, ran a piece in early April that made me even more furious than usual, claiming that OpenAI was forecasting revenue topping $125 billion in 2029

• 4:07Ed Zitron?

  based on selling agents and monetizing free users as a driver to higher revenue. Agents, I should add, are AI systems that can interact with other systems and do stuff. So an AI that can order pizza from from DoorDash for you is, that's an example of an agent. And when I say it can order pizza for you, I am talking entirely theoretically, as they cannot do this right now and may never be able to do so. Indeed, the whole agent thing is just. What we wish AI was, and it actually doesn't work. And the piece, reported based on things, and I quote, "Told to some potential and current investors, takes great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says is perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no goddamn sense."

• 4:50Ed Zitron?

  So, according to the information's reporting, OpenAI expects agents and new products, and both of those are quotes, "to contribute tens of billions of dollars of revenue, both in the near term, somehow contributing $3 billion in revenue this year, which I will get to in a little bit, and in the long term, with an egregious $25 billion in revenue in 2029 even, projected to come from just new products." If you're wondering what those new products might be, I am too, because the information doesn't seem to know. And instead of saying, "OpenAI has no idea what the fuck they're talking about and is just saying stuff," the outlet continues to publish things with the kind of empty optimism that's indistinguishable from GPT-generated LinkedIn posts. Must be

• 5:33Ed Zitron?

  clear, the information isn't generating their articles, they're writing them fresh.

• 5:38Ed Zitron?

  I want to be really, really clear about something. We are in, nearly in May 2025, and indeed, one of these will come out, actually, in May, the second part. I see no evidence that OpenAI even has a marketable agent product they can sell, let alone one it will make $3 billion goddamn dollars off of.

• 5:57Ed Zitron?

  And they definitely are not going to do so in the next six or seven months. Oh my, for context, that's triple the revenue of OpenAI that they made reportedly, at least from selling access to their models via its APIs, essentially allowing third-party companies to use GPT in their apps, in the entirety of 2024. And those APIs and models actually exist, in a meaningful sense, as opposed to whatever the fuck OpenAI's half-baked ass agent stuff is. In fact, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to be mean. I'm not. Be calm, be normal. I'm going to explain exactly what the information is reporting in an objective way, because writing it out really shows how silly it all sounds. I'm going to write "they believe a lot" because I must be clear how stupid this is. Now, according to the information's reporting, they believe that OpenAI will make $3 billion

• 6:42Ed Zitron?

  in 2025 from selling access to its agents. This appears to come from SoftBank, which has said it will buy $3 billion worth of OpenAI products annually. Earlier this year, we got a bit of extra information about how SoftBank will use these products. It plans to create a system called Cristal Intelligence, that's C R I S T A L. And it's one of the most generic names I've ever seen. And it will be a kind of general purpose AI agent platform for big enterprises. The exact specifics of that will shock you and that there are none, but SoftBank intends to use the technology internally across its various portfolio companies as well as market it to other large enterprise companies in Japan. I still do not know what the fuck this is, Cristal Intelligence, billions of dollars, billions of dollars.

• 7:25Ed Zitron?

  And they just don't, they can't even describe what it is, just saying, yeah, it'll be an agent platform that does stuff with your business like, does that sound good? Can I have three billion, I need forty billion dollars, I need forty billion dollars, give me, okay. I also want to add that the information can't seem to keep its story straight on this issue. Back in February, they reported that OpenAI would make three billion dollars in revenue only from agents. With a big, beautiful chart that said three billion dollars would come from it, only to add that it would be SoftBank using OpenAI's products across its companies. Based on these numbers, it seems like SoftBank will be the only customer for OpenAI's agents. While this most likely won't be the case, and it isn't because it excludes anyone willing to pay a few bucks to test it out.

• 8:10Ed Zitron?

  It nonetheless doesn't signal good things for agents as a mass market product. Not that there were any good signals beforehand, though. Agents do not exist as a product that can be sold at scale. Yes, OpenAI teased Operator, its first agent at the start of the year, but it doesn't seem to be able to do anything. The information's own reporting from mid-April highlighted how OpenAI's Operator Agent struggled with comparison shopping on financial products, and that's a quote. And how Operator and other agents are, and I quote again, tripped by pop-ups or logins as well as prompts asking for email addresses and phone numbers for marketing purposes, which I I think accurately describes most websites. And just to summarize from everything I've said, the information is saying that the above product will make OpenAI

• 8:53Ed Zitron?

  three billion dollars by the end of 2025. Sounds very real to me, sounds extremely real. I love that the business media just prints this. I love this, I love this so much, I'm having so much fun. Jesus Christ. According to the information's reporting, they believe that OpenAI will basically double revenue every single year for the next four years and make thirteen billion dollars in revenue in twenty twenty five, more than doubling that to twenty nine billion dollars in twenty twenty six, nearly doubling that to fifty four billion dollars in twenty twenty seven, and nearly doubling that again to eighty six billion dollars in twenty twenty eight, and eventually leveling out a ridiculous one hundred and twenty five billion dollars of revenue in twenty twenty nine.

• 9:34Ed Zitron?

  Said revenue estimates as of twenty twenty six includes billions of dollars of new products that include free monetization, free user monetization even. And if you're wondering what that means, I also am. The information does not explain. Jessica Lessin must have been busy being horrible to people that work for her. They do, however, say that OpenAI will start, and I'm quoting this, won't start generating much revenue from free users and other products until next year, that's twenty twenty six. In twenty twenty nine, and I'm still quoting, however, it projects revenue from free users and other products will reach twenty five billion dollars, a one-fifth of all revenue, and then adds that shopping is another potential avenue.

• 10:14Ed Zitron?

  You still probably don't know what they're doing, and neither do I, and I have driven myself insane reading about this. I really cannot express my disgust about how willing publications are to blindly publish projections like these, especially when they're all so stupid. Let me just read this to you, all right?

• 10:32Ed Zitron?

  And I quote, "OpenAI has already begun experimenting with launching software features for shopping. Starting in January, some users can access web browsing agent Operator as part of their Pro ChatGPT subscription tier to order groceries from Instacart and make restaurant reservations on OpenTable." Just want to be clear, this is a few episodes ago, I mentioned Casey Newton not even being able to like say this worked.

• 10:56Ed Zitron?

  I just want to be really clear as well what the information is saying. So they're saying that this experimental software launched to an indeterminate amount of people that barely works is going to make OpenAI three billion dollars in twenty twenty five, and then somehow this is going to lead to OpenAI making twenty nine billion dollars in twenty twenty six, and then they're going to eventually be up to one hundred and twenty five billion dol- what the fuck? How? How? What fucking universe are we all living in? There's no proof that OpenAI can do this, other than the fact it has a lot of users and a lot of venture capital.

• 11:32Speaker 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.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. 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.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the Food Allergy Podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 12:49Ed Zitron?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 13:04Speaker 06

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the Food Allergy Podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

• 13:33Ed Zitron?

  In fact, I think we have real reason to worry about whether OpenAI even makes its current projections. In my last multi-part episode, and in the newsletter OpenAI is a systemic risk, for those of you who like to read while listening to my fucking podcast, I wrote that Bloomberg had estimated that OpenAI would triple revenue to $12.7 billion in 2025, and based on its current subscriber base, OpenAI would effectively have to double its current subscription revenue and massively increase its API revenue to hit these targets. These projections rely on one entity, SoftBank, spending $3 billion specifically on OpenAI's services. Really shouldn't have said specifically because they keep changing what it means, meaning that they'd have to make enough on API calls, so people plug in the models into their products,

• 14:15Ed Zitron?

  to generate more revenue than OpenAI made in subscriptions in the entirety of 2024. And something else that I can only describe as an act of God. And that, I admit, assumes that SoftBank's spending commitment is based on usage and not like a flat fee, where SoftBank just hands them $3 billion and gets infinite levels of access. Assuming it's the former, I'd be stunned if SoftBank's consumption hits $3 billion in 2025, even with the massive cost of the reasoning models that Crystal Intelligence will maybe be based off of. Again, we don't know. And SoftBank announced this deal with OpenAI in February. Crystal Intelligence, if it works, and that is possibly the most load-bearing if of all time, will be a massive, complicated, and ambitious product.

• 14:57Ed Zitron?

  Details are vague, but from what I understand, SoftBank wants to create an AI that handles a bunch of varied tasks that knowledge workers do. I mean, it's just the same marketing bullshit. It's the same thing. It's the thing they've been lying about before. And to be clear, OpenAI's agents cannot consistently do well anything right now. What I believe is happening is that reporters are taking OpenAI's rapid growth in revenue from 2023 to 2024, when they went from like tens of millions of dollars a month in the beginning of the 2023 to 300 million in August 2024. Genuinely, a big leap. They're taking this to mean that the company will always effectively double or triple revenue every single year forever, with their evidence being, OpenAI has said that this will happen in projections. It's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's bullshit. It's bullshit.

• 15:41Ed Zitron?

  As I wrote before in a newsletter, it's called There's No AI Revolution and the accompanying episodes at the time, OpenAI effectively is the generative AI industry and nothing about the rest of the generative AI industry suggests that the revenue exists to sustain these ridiculous obscens and frankly fucking stupid valuations and projections. What do I mean by that, by the way? Okay, let me get into it. ChatGPT is the only real generative AI product with any significant usage, or rather, their nearest rivals are a fraction of said user base. Or maybe I need to be a little bit blunter. If anyone held a Google Gemini user conference, all the attendees could probably share a cab. Believing the OpenAI growth myth, and yes, reporting it objectively as both endorsing

• 16:23Ed Zitron?

  and believing these numbers, is engaging in childlike logic where you take one event, which is OpenAI's revenue grew 1700% from 2023 to 2024. Wow! To mean another will take place, which is that OpenAI will continue to double revenue literally every other year, another insane thing to believe, and you're consciously ignoring difficult questions such as, how will they do this? And what's the total addressable market of large language models and their associated subscriptions exactly? And how does this company even survive when it expects the costs of inference to triple this year to $6 billion alone? Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. I really need to be clear with that last one because it's a direct quote from the information. Hmm. The company also expects growth in inference costs, the costs of running AI products such

• 17:08Ed Zitron?

  as ChatGPT and their underlying models, to moderate over the next half decade. These costs will triple this year, referring to 2025 to $6 billion, and rise to nearly $47 billion in 2030. Still, the annual growth rate will fall to about 30% then. Okay, thanks. Also, are you fucking kidding me? $6 billion fucking dollars for fucking inference? Hey, Casey Newton, I thought those costs were coming down. Casey? Case? Casey?

• 17:37Ed Zitron?

  He's not here. He's not here. Anyway, that's not really great at all. That's actually really bad. The information reports that OpenAI will make about $8 billion in subscriptions to ChatGPT in 2025, meaning that 75% of OpenAI's largest revenue source is eaten up by the price of providing it. This is meant to be the cheap part. This is the one fucking thing people say to me is meant to come down in price. I've had assholes saying to me for the last year, "Cost of inference is coming down." Is it? Are we living in different dimensions? Are there large parts of the tech media that have fucking gas leaks? What am I missing? Tell me what I am missing. Now, Ed, you haven't talked to people to build these things. You don't know what they're... Shut the fuck up. If you were one of these people who says, "I need to..." Casey, you're included, man. Fuck. Like, I'm so sick of this.

• 18:22Ed Zitron?

  "Oh, you don't talk to people running these things." I am sick of people, like Casey U and others too, saying, "Oh, you don't talk to enough AI people. You haven't listened to them." You mean I haven't listened to the pablum of the people that make money off of lying about this dogshit? Are you really think... You think that's what's missing from my analysis? Interviewing people who work at these companies and understanding how the technologies work? I know how the technologies work. I don't need to talk to these fucking people. There are people out there like Simon Wilson and Max Wolf, who know how these things work, that I talk to fairly regularly, and both of them push back on me because they know how large language models work. Those people matter. What doesn't matter to me, what will never matter to me, is what Dario Amade, Jack Clark, and all the other fucking people at Anthropic think.

• 19:06Ed Zitron?

  And I think it's detestable and actively, honestly, malpractice in journalism to pretend that there's something ethical about speaking to these people and listening and taking in their marketing spiel. It's actually a little bit disgusting that this is even a critique leveled at anyone.

• 19:28Ed Zitron?

  But you're gonna have to forgive me, I'm gonna be a little rude, and I know that seemed like it, but I'm not even getting started. In fact, you know what?

• 19:35Ed Zitron?

  I think it's time, okay, everyone? I think it's time that I go through the most common critiques in AI. It's time for me to really sit down, and I'm gonna do my Kevin Roos voice, and I know a lot of you like my Kevin Roos voice, and some of you, not a lot of you, are gonna say I'm being rude to these people, and it weakens my analysis, to which I say, kiss my ass. I will just, I will turn you, I will cube you like a car in a garbage dump.

• 20:02Ed Zitron?

  But let's start, shall we? The cost of inference is coming down. That's one argument, okay? Source? Source? Where is your source? If you are someone saying to me that the costs of inference are coming down, I want your source. I want you to show me the costs. I want you to show me the costs at scale, because it sure seems like they're increasing for OpenAI, and they're effectively the entire user base of the entire generative AI industry. But Ed, what about Deep? You sweet idiot child, DeepSeek is not OpenAI, and OpenAI's latest models only seem to be getting more expensive as time drags on. GPT-4.5 costs $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens. And at the risk of repeating myself, OpenAI is effectively the entire generative AI industry, at least for the world outside of China. On

• 20:45Ed Zitron?

  top of that, we actually don't know whether DeepSeek is even profitable to run at scale. It is definitely cheaper to run,

• 20:55Ed Zitron?

  but we don't know if it's actually profitable. Indeed, I don't know even how you'd calculate this, because running a DeepSeek modeled as just one person is one thing. The question is whether you could scale it up like OpenAI. We don't know. But let's get back to the other critiques. This is a company at its growth stage. They can just hit the button, it'll all be profitable. You have the mind of a child. If this was the case, why would both Anthropic and OpenAI be losing so much money? Why are none of the hyperscalers making profit on AI? Why does nobody want to talk about the underlying economics if they're at the growth stage? And also, little side point as well, why have we been at the growth stage for years, and why are hyperscalers at the growth stage? They're not startups. Anyway, on to another one, though. These are the early days of AI. It's just like the early days.

• 21:39Ed Zitron?

  Wrong, wrong. We have all the king's horses and all the king's men, the entire tech industry and more money that has ever been invested into anything piled into generative AI. And the result has been utterly mediocre. Nobody's making on it money on AI other than Nvidia and maybe Turing a consultancy. But Ed, they're already showing signs that the AI is going to be powerful. No, it's not. No, it's not like I'm if anyone brings these critiques, do you just say, no, no, they're not? Show me, show me, show me. Why is it the only people I'm giving Simon Wilson credit here? He's one of the only people who will show you anything cool and it's cloud compute stuff. It's like relatively boring enterprise stuff. It's exciting for the niche cases like software generally is, but

• 22:23Ed Zitron?

  it's really not showing any power. We talk about this powerful AI thing. Is it in the room? Like, where is this? Where is this powerful AI? But then I have actually had a few emails saying, Ed, Ed, look at OpenAI's O3 model. And I just want to be clear that this new and extremely expensive reasoning model also hallucinates more. Is that AGI, by the way? Is this AGI? Is the AGI in the room with us? Did the AGI tell you it loved you? Did it tell you to leave your wife? Did it? Did it offer you sex? I hope you're OK.

• 23:08Speaker 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.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000. Hundred thousand dollars right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. 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.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 24:24Ed Zitron?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 24:40Speaker 06

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 25:11Ed Zitron?

  But Ed, Ed, Ed, it really is the early days, though. It's just like this, the early days of the internet. No, it was not. And you're a buffoon for suggesting otherwise. Jim Cavieco of Goldman Sachs wrote in a note from last year in the episode Pop Culture. You can listen to it, which he... The early days of the internet were nothing like this. Nothing at all, nothing. There were the $62,000, $64,000, some microsystems servers, yes, but there were so, so many few of them. But Ed, smartphones, I've got you. I finally have me in my sights. People doubted those too. They didn't. I will drown you in an icy lake if another person comes to me and says, "Hey, Ed, smartphones, people doubted smartphones." Nobody doubted smartphones. Why do people care? I've read this point so many times,

• 25:56Ed Zitron?

  but no one seems to have a fucking hyperlink because they're lying. They're goddamn lying. Cavello of Goldman Sachs also noted and included an entire thing about how smartphones were fully telegraphed to analysts in advance with hundreds of presentations that accurately fit how smartphones rolled out and that said that no roadmap exists for AI. It's just, we're years into this and I'm still repeating the same points and I still don't have much in return other than the cost of inference that are going down. But here's another point of people like, they go, Ed, you're so boned. Check out this article and some of you love to email me this fucking thing. Not many of you, I must be clear, the listeners, you're wonderful. I love you so much, but there's one or two of you out there really, you're very attached to your generative AIs and I'm never gonna like it. But some of

• 26:41Ed Zitron?

  you like to send me this article from Newsweek in 1995 from a guy who said that the web would not be a big business. Clifford Stoll, he said, why the web won't be Nirvana. And this piece, by the way, is quite detailed. You should read it. I'm gonna have have it in the episode notes. But they think that sending me this, that one guy, one guy was wrong once. One guy, he said that the internet wouldn't be big. And this proves that I, Ed Zitron, what's that, 99, it's like 20 years later, because one guy said that the internet wouldn't be big, that I am wrong somehow, motherfucker. Have you read the piece? That's actually the thing. All of these are things that you can box up and use in people who

• 27:25Ed Zitron?

  use this half-assed bullshit. Clifford Stoll basically says that the internet at the time was pretty limited. And yes, he conflated that with the idea that it wouldn't be big in the future. However, Stoll's piece also, as Michael Hiltzik wrote for the LA Times, was alarmingly accurate about misinformation and sleazy companies selling computerized replacements for education. In any case, one guy saying that the internet won't be big doesn't make a fucking thing about generative AI and you're a simpleton if you think it does. One guy being wrong in some way is not a response to a criticism. I will crush you like a bug if this is your logic. I will eat you. I will put you in my mouth like Kirby and I'll shit you out and I will have the powers of a dunce. Stoll's analysis also isn't based on hundreds of hours of research and endless reporting. Mine is, I will grab

• 28:08Ed Zitron?

  you from the ceiling like the Wall Master from Zelda and you will never be heard from again.

• 28:14Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, another argument, another argument that people are to give me is that OpenAI and anthropic a research entity is not business and that they are not focused on profit. Okay, so just so we're clear that if that's the case, they're just gonna burn money forever? Is that the case? Or are they gonna hit like the be profitable button sometime? Also, if OpenAI was a research entity, why does it need forty billion dollars from SoftBank? Or to change its weird corporate structure to become a full for profit? Actually, wait, wait a second, a second, something just occurred to me. OpenAI has as many as eight hundred million weekly active users. That's proof of adoption, right? That's gonna be an argument that people have. There's some bloke on Blue Sky who's just been responding to me every few days with this kind of argument saying, look, look at all the users.

• 28:59Ed Zitron?

  And look, I get the, you might be a bit horny about this number, but something don't make no sense about this number. On March thirty first, twenty twenty five, OpenAI said that it had five hundred million people who use ChatGPT every week. Two weeks later, Sam Altman claimed that something like ten percent of the world uses their systems a lot. They're referring to ChatGPTs. And the media took this to mean that ChatGPT has eight hundred million weekly active users. I just wanna be clear about something as well. Sam Altman didn't say that. He said the weird vague thing about something like ten percent of the world. Like, that's what he said. And everyone just went, oh shit, we gotta help, help Sam Altman out. Gotta push this bad boy over the edge. And there are three ways to interpret what he said, and you tell me which one sounds real.

• 29:41Ed Zitron?

  Number one, OpenAI's user base increased by three hundred million weekly active users in two weeks. Number two, OpenAI understated its user base in the announcement of their funding announcement on openai.com by three hundred million users. Or three, number three, how about this? Sam Altman fucking lied. I get that some members of the media have a weird attachment to this damp little man, but have any of you ever considered that he's just fucking saying things, knowing that you will print them with the kindest possible interpretation? Sam Altman is a liar. He's lied before and he'll lie again. I wrote an entire newsletter called Sam Altman is full of shit. You should read it. I'm gonna link to it. But wait, Ed, Google says it has three hundred and fifty million monthly active users on Gemini. Eat shit, Zitron. No, you eat shit.

• 30:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes, Google Gemini has 350 million monthly active users and that's because they started replacing Google Assistant with Google Gemini in early March. You are being had, you are being swindled. If Google replaced Google Search with Google Gemini, it would have billions of monthly active users. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ on a goddamn cracker. Even reading this script out, I get like, some of you have suggested that this is at all manufactured. No, reading this stuff makes me very angry because I didn't grow up popular or intelligent in any way. I've had to pick this shit up as I go. And I don't think what I'm saying is crazy, but I am sometimes treated that way. And this episode, I realize I'm doing

• 31:08Ed Zitron?

  myself no favors. But anyway, back to the critiques really quickly. OpenAI having hundreds of millions of free users, each losing its money, is proof that the free version of ChatGPT is popular, largely because the entirety of the media has written about AI nonstop for two straight years and mentioned ChatGPT every single fucking time. Yes, yes, there is a degree here of marketing, of partnerships, of word of mouth, of some degree of utility. But when you remove the nonstop free media campaign, ChatGPT would have petered out by now, along with this stupid fucking bubble. But edits, proof somebody's doing something. Yeah, it's proof that something is broken in society. Generative AI has never ever had the kind of meaningful business returns or utility that actually underpins

• 31:49Ed Zitron?

  something meaningful. But it has had enough to make people give it a try. Do you not, actually, no, I know you listening, you're gonna get this. In some ways, this episode has been, I mean, in all ways, it's been pretty ranty, and the second one gonna be even more so. What I'm trying to do here is show you how farcical all this crap is, how ridiculous it is, how silly these posits are, these projections are, the suggestion that what we have today will become something else, when all we've had is proof that it won't. Do you see the obvious cracks in the wall here? No matter how strenuously people like professional credulous dipshits at the other big publications tried to pave over them, does any of this make sense to you?

• 32:32Ed Zitron?

  Because I, even when I try and steel man my own arguments, can't wrap my head around how any of this survives, let alone becomes an industry where the biggest player has annual revenues greater than some major industrialized countries. And I know some of you, the emotions a lot, and I know the aggression's a lot. I'm frustrated because I truly believe this stuff's falling apart. I truly believe that this was never really anything. While I'm saying this, Kevin Roos is in the New York Times going, "I believe that AGI is my friend. I believe AGI will rise out of the ground and hug me in the way that no one ever has." I think that's disgusting on multiple levels, but I also think it's genuinely irresponsible. I think all of this is.

• 33:13Ed Zitron?

  I think when this collapses, we're going to have to look back and take inventory of how we got here.

• 33:21Ed Zitron?

  And I need you to, in the next episode, listen to it through the kind of, listen to it through the lens, that's how lenses work. I need you to just stick with it and realize that all of it, what this is, is trying to show you, and hopefully other people that you talk to, how silly this is, how ridiculous this is, and that we have a major problem in tech and business media. We have a problem where people can come out and just say whatever. The Charlie Brown had hose of the tech media. And it's disgusting to me because there are startups that could use this money. There are better things to be done with this money. Perhaps they're not hypergrowth markets, but there are things that actually exist that could be piled into. Instead, we've done this to make companies look like they can grow, to make Sam Altman

• 34:06Ed Zitron?

  able to buy another $5 million Kona Sig car. Is that the one he has? Either way, I'm not going to lower the temperature on the next episode. I'm going to be honest, it's going to be just as spicy. But I want you to know, all of this frustration comes from a place of knowing that we can do better, of knowing that the tech industry could do better. Perhaps it won't be as big as it is today in the future. I don't know. But for it to get better, this shit needs to end. Stick around for the next part, where I'll talk about how we actually got here, how this bubble got inflated, and how nasty the result could be at the end.

• 34:47Ed 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.

• 35:19Speaker 07

  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.

• 35:49Speaker 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.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. Is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis,

• 37:05Speaker 04

  while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 37:20Speaker 07

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll! Try rips on Underdog! Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real, physical card! Football, basketball, even Pokemon! Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door, or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get 5 free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top Grails are extremely rare. Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. That's why Chase for Business helps small business owners like you by offering personalized

• 38:02Speaker 07

  guidance and digital tools that can help your business grow. With our guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business: Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.