The Anti-Consumer Electronics Show with Steve Burke

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about AMD, Lenovo, NVIDIA and Intel’s CES keynotes - and how the tech industry has turned its back on consumers in favor of growth. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! GamersNexus: NVIDIA's AI Bubble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFG3Ah-zf18 AMD Failed Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsCrKGY9F1o Intel Pulls An NVIDIA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wNnLtsxNkY "AMD & NVIDIA Abandoned This Segment" | Intel Arc GPU Factory Tour with Sparkle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwrUxG26ulk Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus https://gamersnexus.net/ https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus CES Videos: Lenovo: https://youtu.be/vAa8ITmv54I?si=vfYqWhkbqGPa1avV&t=288 https://youtu.be/vAa8ITmv54I?si=vfYqWhkbqGPa1avV&t=288 NVIDIA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NBILspM4c4 AMD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvBNWbFK2lY Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/ces.html 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 Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] 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

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• 0:36Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:39Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Better Offline.

• 0:55Ed Zitron?

  We're back in the normal verse after 19 hours of CES coverage as ever. Buy the merchandise in the links in the show notes and subscribe to my freaking premium newsletter. Got a banger of a piece coming out Friday, but today we're talking once again to the incredible Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus. How you doing, Steve?

• 1:11Speaker 04

  I'm doing well. How about you?

• 1:13Ed Zitron?

  Doing all right after post CES and just feeling like I was drowning in nothing is the best way to put it.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it was definitely the keynotes were a lot of air.

• 1:28Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29Ed Zitron?

  I mean, we can start with Nvidia, I think, because I watched that one in person. And the funniest thing was we get there and they're like, there's, you have to do, it's like a massive line rounded around the corner. And then there was a different line where everyone lined up, only to find out that that was actually the line for the viewing party. And then they let us in and it was standing room only. Then someone came around and said, actually, there are seats. And then the actual presentation felt like they just stapled together a few GTC speeches and then gave up?

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06Ed Zitron?

  Like, go on.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Then Nvidia one was like, uh, that one I was watching with someone on the team and um, I want to say the whole thing was maybe like 92 or 93 minutes and then they had the the lead in as well. And it was, you know, the frustrating thing for me was they had actual news. It's on the consumer side. They had some news. There's like DLSS 4.5, some other stuff. Didn't really get a mention at all in the keynote. And then even on the enterprise side, it was like, they bury the Vera Rubin stuff an hour deep. And they had published this huge article that was actually pretty interesting on their website about the architecture and none of it made it in.

• 2:52Ed Zitron?

  What was weird was a lot of the Vera Rubin stuff wasn't new though, like they announced the six so-called new chips that went into it. That was all announced, like every single one. And they didn't even talk about the interesting part, which was they really buried the fact that, yeah, the actual, the the next stage of this, whatever this is to make it faster and whatever, isn't just the power of the GPU, but the surrounding hardware, the networking, the RAM and so on and so forth and storage, which is actually kind of interesting to me. None of that shit. No.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  No. No. Yeah. And Intel did a similar thing where Intel re-announced Panther Lake. They had a little more detail this time, just I guess like Nvidia had a little more detail, you know, on Vera Rubin. But ultimately, it's a thing that was announced months ago. And um, there was just, I don't know, the whole show was kind of weird. I think easily the worst CES that I've ever personally witnessed.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  And uh, yeah, it was, it's just, there's a, the strangest thing to me was when AMD pulled the White House up on stage.

• 4:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, actually, I missed AMD. Tell me what happened in that one. We can go back to Nvidia in a minute. I missed AMD just because the concussion I sustained watching Jensen talk. But what happened with AMD? What did they do?

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think if you watched another keynote after that, he died in the hospital. So, yeah. It was AMD was um,

• 4:23Speaker 04

  They so they they have a new CPU. They have a 9850 XPD, which is a refresh and a little bit faster clocks, like 400 megahertz or something. Did not mention it a single time. They talked about their Helios rack. So they're kind of Vera Rubin, you know, equivalent discussion.

• 4:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So AI GPU racks.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Yep. And then the part that was strange and different from even Nvidia's was when they pulled up, I think his name is Michael Crassios. He's a technology policy like head advisor for the White House. They pulled him up on stage and had this clearly rehearsed scripted conversation. And this is the guy who is leading sort of the the federal government charge on stripping down states' rights for data center and AI regulation. And even on stage, he was talking about how they've been getting rid of these obstructions to AI and

• 5:29Speaker 04

  data center development. And it's just, I don't know, I was like, I don't know what the fuck I'm watching, because it's like, it's CES, which is put on by the Consumer Technology Association. And they have a consumer product. They didn't mention it. And now we're having a White House government policy meeting on AI on stage in front of an audience. It's like, what am I watching?

• 5:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And on top of that, didn't Greg Brockman from OpenAI show up?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  That fucking guy, AI for everyone, everywhere, or everything at once, I guess.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he um, he, he, I don't, I don't know, man. He like told some stories I questioned the veracity of about how AI has saved the lives of people and blah, blah, blah. And then they talked about a child management optimization.

• 6:27Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 6:29Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 6:30Speaker 04

  He had a, he had a line about, um, do everyone, you know, raise your hand if you've had an important moment in your life and something has happened to you, like the birth of a child. And I'm not even, I'm not trying to make it ridiculous. Like that is basically what he said. And the audience is dead silent. Yeah. And then he talks about how, yeah, the, the goal is to like, get there and have AI provide these or help with these important moments and optimize them. And this is after he's talking about managing, you know, children and, and you had, um, of course.

• 7:04Ed Zitron?

  I love managing children.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Well, I had Sam Altman on, uh.

• 7:09Ed Zitron?

  Jimmy Fallon. I love going on TV and just be like, I don't know what to do. Chat GPT. Yeah. It's, it's so weird. It feels like living, it feels like living through a giant gaslighting. Just like everybody pretending. And I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess nobody brought up the data centers they meant to be building for this year either. They just were like, we love, we love number go up, don't we folks?

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, they didn't, there wasn't any detail really. Um, yeah, no specifics.

• 7:39Ed Zitron?

  And also to your point, consumer electronic show, consumer for the, for the consumers.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:45Ed Zitron?

  Nothing.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Again, owned by the Consumer Technology Association. So it's like, the, I don't know. The whole thing was just, it's fine. If that's what you want it to be, fine. Right? But like, that's a different show than what we were promised.

• 8:04Ed Zitron?

  And back to Nvidia for a second, I will also say that it was fuck it. I, I give Jensen Huang some real credit here. And that's if you are going to start your, it's your, it's really a make it or make or break year for AI. The first thing I think when I'm thinking AI make or break, I've got to really blow the stocks off is, um, half of the show, like 45 minutes straight about the fucking omniverse.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:31Ed Zitron?

  I sat there and I had David Roth from Defector with me trying to explain what the omniverse was. And just being like, I think it's computer simulations.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's if you're talking about Nvidia's Omni verse.

• 8:48Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's there like you can use it if I remember it correctly, you can use it to make digital twins of things. Yeah, like, or at least that's their buzzword for it. But yeah, they've had some examples in the past of using it for like logistics mapping and for planning around things like typhoons and Taiwan and simulations. Yeah.

• 9:09Ed Zitron?

  Interesting. Yeah. Well, interesting isn't the word. It wasn't interesting. It was so very, it was so very boring.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I've seen I, but I've seen some, it's funny, some of the limited sort of pushback I've seen online against the negativity about what's going on right now has just been, well, why is everyone so negative? Everybody's everyone's very critical. Everything's Dumarism. It's AI Dumarism. It's, you know, it's, it's very negative. And, you know, I read that stuff. I try to factor it in, consider it. And like, we ran a piece that was really positive today as a palate cleanser after CES because CES was actually genuinely awful.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  What do you think about that? Because that's, that's, I'm sure you see that, too.

• 10:04Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, when he says AI Dumarism, is he talking about the people saying that the bubble will burst?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  If we're talking Jensen Huang, then I think, yeah, he just did an interview

• 10:18Speaker 04

  with some podcast, I think it's called No Priors or something. And

• 10:22Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes, it would be no prior.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so in that he said,

• 10:29Speaker 04

  for him, I think Dumarism is, to use his words, like the science fiction version of AI in the future.

• 10:37Ed Zitron?

  Okay, I, if he's saying that's bad, I agree because, but not for the, he probably says it's bad because he doesn't want people to be scared of AI. So they keep buying it. I say it's bad because it's a lie. Because that, because they're lying. They're lying about it. They're just, they're making stuff up. It's just, just lying.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting too, because you could, you could spin that both ways. It's like, it could be the Well, if we're talking about the companies, you know, their version of AI in the future is also a science fiction. It's just the utopia version.

• 11:12Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  And like, there's, yeah, there's, there's ground between Terminator and utopia.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  But it's kind of a hand wavy dismissal, right? To just be like, all this negativity is, is unreasonable. And in that same interview, he was talking about how it's, it's sort of hurtful, I think was the word he used, or harmful.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  And, and, you know, damaging and the, the general vibe I got was like, this negativity is hurtful to society as a whole.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Can't you please buy my product?

• 11:57Ed Zitron?

  Well, that was the weird thing as well. Like, they did the whole Vera Rubin song and dance at that presentation. And they didn't, they're not talking pricing yet. They're not talking about anything. And then they made the comment where it's like, and Vera Rubin is now in manufacturing.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:13Ed Zitron?

  And dead silent, just dead silent, partly because that doesn't mean anything. I assume, I'm gonna be honest, I assumed it was in manufacturing. They're meant to be shipping them soon. Like,

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:26Ed Zitron?

  What was, was people, were people like, oh, they haven't put them together yet. They're just, I don't know. And there was that, I think it was Patrick Moorhead as well during it, who was saying like, yeah, and the crowd went wild, which it didn't. This crowd, the crowd went, to quote someone on Twitter, the crowd, the crowd went mild was the best way of putting it.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could hear like a couple claps, you know?

• 12:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And I could, I've never, and I've watched a lot of press conferences, good and bad. I've never heard a cough.

• 12:53Ed Zitron?

  And it was just like,

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if you dropped your phone after that, you would have heard it on

• 12:59Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  On the crowd mic.

• 13:01Ed Zitron?

  But another great part of that was the the robots and he brought in the robots, which I did not realize were Star Wars robots. He kind of muttered it under his breath. And I thought, oh, he just thinks Star Wars is about robots. I get I just thought it was like almost a boomer-y thing. It was just like, yes, you know, robots. But apparently it's the robots from Jedi Fallen Order.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  It is. Yeah.

• 13:26Ed Zitron?

  That's so weird.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Because he brought them out. The only reason I know that is because they brought them out last time as well. I think Computex or GTC.

• 13:33Ed Zitron?

  That's so sad.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, uh, last time they brought them out, that was when he was,

• 13:41Speaker 04

  I don't know if he was actually frustrated or if he was like joking frustrated, but he, they they weren't responding to the commands properly. And they got kind of stuck. The green one wouldn't move. This time they responded to the commands more, but it was strange because there he was using the second person you

• 14:03Speaker 04

  from that point on. And sometimes it wasn't clear to me if he was talking to the audience or to the customer or to the robots. And he was talking to the robots. He was like, there was one, I didn't talk about this in the video, but there's a clip we've used where he says, he's talking to the robot and he says, and we're actually gonna give, you're gonna be born in these systems.

• 14:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes. That was so weird.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, this like give birth, you know, then he cut himself off. I was like, what the hell?

• 14:33Ed Zitron?

  It was so strange. And he was like, and he talked to them for what felt like an hour.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  It was like 20 or 30 minutes.

• 14:40Ed Zitron?

  And he was like, you're good. This is how we build you. And he turned and he looked at the picture of the robots behind him that was from GTC. Like, we've seen that picture before. He's like, this is where we train. These are your, they're like you. These are your friends. And it's just like, mate, you are wearing a, I assume, $25,000 leather jacket. Your company is the largest on the stock market. Why are you talking to them to quote David Roth from Defector like you're offering them Skittles? Like, it was so bizarre. It I think that we're going to look back on that press conferences like the top because I went and I rewatched GTC 2025. I watched some of his other, like even these analyst things. He used to have this like

• 15:25Ed Zitron?

  braggadocious swagger. He would trot around. He had a big smart, even last CES, he had, he did the Avengers she like the Avengers shield. They're going to email me about the Avengers shield, the Captain America shield thing. And like he, he felt kind of like up and at them. This time he was like, ah, you know, got some shit. I guess you wanna look, we're gonna maybe do a, I didn't even catch that they're planning to do a robot taxi service.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:52Ed Zitron?

  I didn't, I was watching and listening, but it was not super obvious.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know some people who were, who tried it and were like actually impressed by it.

• 16:01Ed Zitron?

  I mean, it's a robot taxi. We've the cool, but like, but just also like you're Nvidia. What are you doing?

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, we went back on the team here and we were looking at some of their older keynotes. Cause I was basically like, has it always been like, I'm just not remembering it right. And no, I mean, they were a lot tighter in the past. Like if you go back to 900 series, 10 series era keynotes.

• 16:28Ed Zitron?

  And how long ago was that?

• 16:30Speaker 04

  That'd be 2015, 2016.

• 16:32Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Maybe 2014. Yeah. And um, yeah. So you go back to that range of two to three years. And generally they were tighter together. Um, it's interesting how much, I mean, we all change. Certainly I've, my hosting style has changed on camera. You know, if you run 10 years apart, then yeah, it's like totally different person. But um, it is interesting though, to see his change in particular where the, the, the gaffes and the sort of silliness back then, they were more of like your, your uncle is telling old tired jokes that

• 17:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Heard a million times, but you know, but it was like, it was a likeable style.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  And now it's just like, instead the

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Jokes are things that, I don't know, you're just kind of like, shut the fuck up.

• 17:25Ed Zitron?

  Can you tell me about, do you have a graphics card you could show me? Can I see a graphics card? What are you talking about?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:32Ed Zitron?

  What do you, and he also seemed, I'm just psychoanalyzing Jensen Huang here, but he seemed unconfident. Like even when he was being a huge asshole last year, when he was like saying, you broke the audio thing to the guy he named.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:46Ed Zitron?

  Uh, even then he seemed confident. He seemed excited. He was kind of like, yeah, let's go. This year he was like, and we've got, we've got some, um, you want to see the, the omniverse? I guess. Look, Vera Rubin, it's so powerful. There were less slides.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:02Ed Zitron?

  I actually, I, I wouldn't.

• 18:05Ed Zitron?

  I mean, he just kind of seemed like he didn't have anything new, probably because he didn't.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  It's so weird though, cause like, at least with, and not to make it all about gaming, but you know, it's, it's kind of like, if you're going to make space for robot taxis and for robots and AI and omniverse and, okay, so there's a little carve out for everybody. Everybody's got their 10 or 20 minutes. And it's, the gaming stuff, it's like, there was actually new stuff there, uh, and it could have replaced any number of other things, but I all, I was almost just uncertain if, do they feel like the gaming topics

• 18:49Speaker 04

  sort of devalue what they do in, in the business enterprise world? Like if they, if they talk about gaming for, you know, five minutes in the keynote, are they worried their stock price is going to go down? You know, like, I, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't get a presence.

• 19:05Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I think, I think they're just scrambling. I don't think they know what to do anymore. There's a lot of the kind of key jingling going on. I think they're just like, ah, fuck. But even then, that was what, that's actually, I, I don't know if I actually agree with that thinking about it, because why did you talk about the omniverse? Why talk about that at all when you don't appear to be able to explain what it is? But I think, I talked to a few analysts afterwards as well, like good ones that actually know what they're talking about. So not the ones on Twitter.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:37Ed Zitron?

  And all of them pretty much came to the same conclusion, which was, this was a half-hearted attempt to claim the GPUs can do something else.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, trying to start creating a carve out for um if if interest wanes or whatever and the other, you know, an AI or other applications.

• 19:56Ed Zitron?

  Didn't really work because it was impossible to it was impossible to actually divine what it was they were selling. Also, it didn't help that that morning, the information put out story saying the Omniverse sucked, that like, nobody would buy it. It did so, but that was crazy, though. That was one part of that story that I I'm unsurprised that they didn't talk about on there. But apparently Nvidia has been paying the cloud, they've been paying various cloud providers money to rent capacity so that people can do Omniverse stuff.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Oh, for Omniverse specifically?

• 20:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, okay, but it, I mean, it it sucks. Like, it just doesn't work so good because also, I digital twin stuff has been around for a while. And I also think must be small.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, it is interesting. Like, I mean, that is one of the ones where the first time I saw one of their digital twin demos was before they were throwing around AI as much as there now is a buzzword. And um, I mean, I do remember, I was like, okay, I, yeah, no, this, I kind of get this, this, and because the example they were giving at the time, when I first really saw it was, they had a weather simulation, but they also had a warehouse simulation. And they were using it to show, you know, at the time, instead of AI, was more commonly referred to as like machine learning.

• 21:15Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  And using it to show how you might digitally replicate a warehouse and all the stocking and then map out how people and robots move and interact with the warehouse.

• 21:31Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Like, okay, this I get. I mean, this is like.

• 21:34Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it makes sense. It isn't a complete vaporware product.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  But but they're not really like, that's already been done. You know, that's been, they showed that a long time ago. So.

• 21:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's also just not a sexy story, even though it's very likely useful to someone.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Definitely not an interesting story at the Consumer Technology Association's CES.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  It's like, oh, oh, great. Cool. I'll, yeah, I'll.

• 22:05Ed Zitron?

  I can't wait to. So I, as a consumer technology person, will look forward to doing some. And it was also not obvious what it was meant to be like. He didn't do like a traditional product rundown. And while one could argue the people that want this don't need that, it was still a keynote. It's still keynote. You're meant to be showing things at the keynote.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I mean, I think also he did mention Palantir like three.

• 22:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes, he did.

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

• 25:19Speaker 06

  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.

• 25:41Ed Zitron?

  Just reading a quote from the information, the problem might be that, and I quote, "Developers who have used Omniverse tools for building and simulating scenes and objects often say the software was hard to use, that it easily broke, and that its features fell incomplete." So who knows what could have happened there? I, I don't know. I think, but Nvidia actually announced stuff, though. They just chose not to announce it at their announcement?

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:06Ed Zitron?

  Great. What did they announce? Because I truly missed it. I truly, it was that.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, it wasn't huge, but also they had, um...

• 26:18Speaker 04

  They've had announcements in the past that weren't huge. So like back in the day when they were pushing, I'm trying to remember the name of it. It was like game something. Anyway, they had a, they had a program where, uh, game works. That's what it was. It had some controversy over the years, like all their products, but even when it was just game works where they were, hey, here's some developer tools to make graphics look better, easier was kind of the pitch. And um, even when that was it for their announcement, they didn't have new GPUs. They would still find spots to talk about it on stage at keynotes at these very shows. And uh, yeah, this time, I mean, they had DLSS 4.5.

• 26:57Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing that you can upscale, right?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:00Ed Zitron?

  Unless I'm misunderstanding.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of like more, uh, they've rolled in a bunch of things to it now. So it's, it's a general,

• 27:09Speaker 04

  blanket name to describe the upscaling solution and also frame generation and things like that. And so, um, so yeah, now they have an update to their model. They rolled out a transform model last year, uh, as opposed to the, um, neural net, the CNN model previously. And we tested that last year. It was improved. And then their new one that they have this year, the half step iteration, actually directly fixes and resolves most of the issues we found with the previous one.

• 27:42Ed Zitron?

  That's cool.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, they're doing stuff. They, you know, they took the feedback. They fixed it. And then they don't really show it anywhere. Um, which is kind of disappointing, but.

• 27:54Ed Zitron?

  And so, so that allows you to run games at a higher resolution or is the frame rate higher just for the?

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So it sort of fakes it. It basically, you can run the game. As far as your computer is concerned, it's being run at a lower resolution. So there's a lot fewer pixels, um, which reduces the, the load on the GPU especially. So if you're on an older GPU, you can more easily, run the software at a higher performing frame rate to get a better experience. And it then up scales that lower resolution native render and um, stitches it back together by uh, by using machine learned upscaling. And it's one of the use cases where it's like, not just bullshit, two letters, AI, you know, like it actually does something.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, you get there's, there's actually instances now, and this didn't used to be true, but there's instances now rarely where an upscaled output can at times be better than a low resolution native output. A lot of that has to do with replacing what the game is doing. So if the game is doing like a temporal anti alias and then you replace it with DLSS, it's going to look better. And so like it's an, I don't know, it's, that's one of those where it's like the fake frames thing, not the biggest fan of, but generally DLSS and the upscaling, I think it works fairly well and they've actually improved on it and they've actually addressed the criticisms and it was nowhere to be found in the keynote.

• 29:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's I get, well, I guess the argument being the, um, okay, they're not going to talk about why you don't need a new GPU.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Fair, yeah. But they can say AI.

• 29:41Ed Zitron?

  They can say AI. So it's really, really difficult one for old Jensen. But you know, moving off of Nvidia, I didn't catch it. What did Intel do at CES this year? What are they up to?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Intel does have actual products that are potentially promising. I mean, they've got 18 Anks from rolling their new process.

• 30:03Ed Zitron?

  And what is that?

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Uh, that is their new process node where Intel for a while now has had to rely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, TSMC, to make their parts. You know, Intel historically has fabbed all of its own silicon. And then as its process technology fell behind, uh, and started losing the race to TSMC, they had to take their own in-house products and get them made by their fab competitor. Um, and now they've gotten some of their fabs operational, like one of their new ones in the US, at least one, it might be two, um, to where they're producing their

• 30:41Speaker 04

  modern, more competitive process technology, 18 Anks, 18A it's called. Uh, and they've rolled out things like backside power delivery, which is a more efficient way to deliver. Power into the CPU. It has some benefits where the frequency can be uplifted a little bit, couple of percentage points, single digit percentage points. And so there's, there's actual technology improvements there. Like Nvidia, the actual technology and improvements and the engineering got almost no airtime at the show.

• 31:14Ed Zitron?

  What did?

• 31:16Speaker 04

  AI.

• 31:17Ed Zitron?

  Oh, what?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:19Ed Zitron?

  Sorry.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  I was so, I was so disappointed because it's just like, man, the, so you re-announced Panther Lake, which they announced in October, I think it was.

• 31:30Ed Zitron?

  Empath Lake is the new, new CPU.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you. Yes. The new SOC solution CPU and yeah, for, um, mostly for mobile products, handhelds, laptops.

• 31:41Ed Zitron?

  Cool.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  And.

• 31:42Ed Zitron?

  Re-announced though.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and it's kind of like the backside power delivery is not a new technology, but it's kind of new for being deployed in actual things that you can buy. And, um, if you're going to re-announce the existence of the product, I feel like you might as well take the time to just go into detail on the cool engineering that makes it actually interesting and potentially competitive. Um, but instead, yeah, they reserve all that time for, you know, the, the usual revolving door of executives in suits to come talk about AI.

• 32:17Ed Zitron?

  But what are they even doing with AI?

• 32:19Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 32:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh. Oh, okay.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 32:24Ed Zitron?

  That rocks. Like you've been in this, you've been in, in hardware for decades now. You just, who the fuck know?

• 32:31Speaker 04

  I don't know, man. I was like, Intel, it was, it's weird. So I would say if I had to rank the keynotes, uh, least, least worst to best worst.

• 32:46Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  It would be, I think Intel was the least worst. They were not as bad as the others. I watched them among the first. Uh, little did I know at that point, it would get worse from there. So I, I'd put Intel at the not as bad scale. Uh, Nvidia's in the middle. AMD's honestly. For me, theirs was the worst.

• 33:07Ed Zitron?

  I really wish I'd have watched it now.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Oh, it's it's on. You're welcome. It's still out there. You got now to spend.

• 33:14Ed Zitron?

  I could hit myself in the nuts with a baseball bat and that's just really, that's, that's, that sounds more fun. It is, it is really depressing though with Lisa Su because even a year ago, I would have been like, okay, Lisa is the smart one.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:31Ed Zitron?

  She's not gonna do the key jingling. But, but I guess not. I guess it's all keys. From here on out. Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:40Ed Zitron?

  That's so, it's so weird. And I mean, I mentioned it earlier and I've, I need to put this in an episode versus just newsletter. But they announced this deal with OpenAI back in September or October last year that they were going to build, they were going to have the first gigawatt of MI450 instinct whatevers in a data center this year. And I feel like I'm going insane because nothing has happened. They haven't raised their guidance. They haven't changed anything. They're not, they're not acting as if they're going to build it. They're just like, look, it's Greg Brockman. You love him, right?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:16Ed Zitron?

  And he just turned like the least charismatic man.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Stellar story Jensen Huang, his leather jacket.

• 34:22Ed Zitron?

  Just like, hey, guys, yeah, you know, imagine if your children could be raised with an AI, wouldn't that be good? Well, it can't do that now. In fact, it can't do very much, but what if it could? Yeah. Welcome to AMD. This is the Consumer Electronics Show. We have no products. Goodbye.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's AMD's in particular is just like,

• 34:45Speaker 04

  your count on Lisa is interesting because, you know, Jensen absolutely is, is intelligent in multiple different ways.

• 34:55Ed Zitron?

  And right.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so is Lisa. They both have originally at least an engineering background. Not sure that they do much of that now. It's not a slight against them, but like Lisa, I would say has had a fairly clean reputation of kind of a no bullshit, straight shooter.

• 35:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Welcome to our show. Here's our stuff. See you later. And. And she's still, I would say, is still more of a straight shooter than Jensen. But it's just like, I don't know, I watched the Andy keynote, it's like, oh, okay, you're all doing sort of the same type of thing right now with the companies because it's the same government policy discussions on stage, it's the same AI B2B enterprise obsession, data centers. And you just kind of go, all right, I thought maybe you were different, but yeah.

• 35:50Ed Zitron?

  You are not only the same, you're really the same. Like you were just, it's also very strange, based on the history, the modern history of like AMD versus Nvidia and Intel and such, watching AMD being an also ran.

• 36:07Ed Zitron?

  Like I, I don't know, I'm not anywhere near as bad than this as you, but like I had reached a point where it's like, wow, AMD isn't a company that jumps on shiny objects that, or if they do, they do so with consideration and the thought on how it might. Now it's just like, yeah, we're going to do AI GPUs. You know, the ones that are so expensive that the only way you can buy them is using debt. That one, that's what we're gonna, everything is on this now.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's, the thing I find,

• 36:38Speaker 04

  if I try to take a devil's advocate position, I think, I think the thing I would say would be, well, but if they don't try at all, then they get completely left behind and there's zero competition for Nvidia.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  I don't know the best responses to that, like other than, well, you could do it in more moderation or do we really have to try though? But yeah, I think that's probably the response is like, well, what do you want them to do? And that's what I see a lot of that when I, when I, I read a lot of the initial comments on content from a place of like actually trying to gather sort of feedback. I would say the general, the general sentiment definitely, at least on our channel, is aligned with kind of how you and I are both talking right now. If you look at the people who are more cynical of the negativity.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  In good faith, I think they, I, I do think a lot of times it comes down to, well, what would you have them do? Almost as if to say, not pursuing, you know, infinite money glitches is impossible. Like you have, you literally have to pursue an infant money glitch in this market. I think that's probably the argument.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Or maybe that it's idealistic to assume that they wouldn't, right?

• 38:06Ed Zitron?

  I think the, no, I think you're right. It's just the level of, maybe they're making the money now, but I don't even know if AMD, AMD's data center revenue, like it's a hit 4.3 billion in Q3 2025. I mean, it's like, okay, you can get that money, the stock, it's good for the stock and all that. But at the same time, how do you walk this back if you fail? How do you walk this back? Because that's the thing that I keep saying, because putting aside how anyone feels about AI in any particular moment, it is proof that this is not coming out of cash flows, that this has to come out of debt. And AMD, I don't know, AMD staking

• 38:50Ed Zitron?

  their entire future on this. It just feels, it feels chaotic. It doesn't feel like a strategic, there is no strategic moat. They're not trying to be, I'm sure that they'll claim there is something, but they're trying, like, there's no real difference, other than they're not as powerful and they don't have CUDA. They're trying with HIPDF, I guess, which is their version of CUDA, kind of.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Do you think if this all implodes, um, do you think, I saw a comment that was interesting to me where, uh, no particular evidence or anything, but the guy just said, if it all collapses, uh, he thought AMD would get screwed the most because he said, they just don't have the cash reserves to, to deal with a collapse like Nvidia does. I mean, What's your take on that?

• 39:40Ed Zitron?

  I mean, let's see their free cash flow. 2.4 billion. I mean, it really comes down to the cash in hand, which I'm gonna look, I'm gonna look at live on air. So they got about 5 billion. Uh, let's see, 7 billion on hand. I mean, when a crash happens, I don't think it's something where Nvidia dies or AMD dies. I think Oracle could. I think Oracle, Oracle has negative 13 billion dollars of cash flow. They're fucked. But with AMD, it's like, I am not super familiar with their finances well enough to say, oh, this will mess them up. That being said, they have a much, much, much smaller cushion.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:18Ed Zitron?

  Like their cushion is like Nvidia has like tens of billions of dollars in cash. I think AMD, AMD as well. Their business, they've, they've really had to yank their business. Yeah, they have about 7 billion dollars in inventory as well. They've really had to yank their business towards AI rather, and they've had to rush to catch up. Which is not great if this explodes and then the longer it takes for this to explode, the better it will be for AMD. Just because they will be able to make some sales and actually get some instincts out the, out the door. If it breaks in the next year, they're in real trouble. And also, I personally am looking forward to watching all these companies have to explain what they were doing. Like, hey, did like-

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Ideally in front of a congressional committee.

• 41:03Ed Zitron?

  Yes, exactly. Or like over a shark tank or something like that. Like, because it's just throughout CES, oh, actually, I'll give you a great example. The worst presentation I watched was actually yesterday.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:17Ed Zitron?

  I watched it on the fly and it was only five minutes and it pissed me off. So Lenovo.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 41:22Ed Zitron?

  You remember Lenovo? They make laptops and such.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  I remember that.

• 41:25Ed Zitron?

  Famous, famous laptop company, Lenovo. So they rented out the Las Vegas Sphere.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:32Ed Zitron?

  And they get up, I'm wondering if I can actually get this, get the quote of what the CEO said. Because the CEO got on stage, don't remember his name, not gonna lie. Uh, let's see. Here we go. Here we go. Um, and I quote- Nowadays, AI is no longer just generating answers, writing code, creating images and producing videos. I mean, citation needed. AI is quickly evolving and gaining new capabilities, sensing our three-dimensional world, understanding how things move and connect, learning our logic and complexity, and interacting with reality in ways never seen before. AI is everywhere. So, based on that, you would think that they would have something new.

• 42:11Ed Zitron?

  What they actually had was an AI called Kira, Q-I-R-A, that was, they called a super agent, and you'll be shocked to hear it can summarize things, it can tell you what's on your calendar, it can look things up. The worst part was because the CEO came on, did his kind of like word vomit, and they just walked off. And this spokesperson, this woman comes on, she's like, "Kira, what do you see around you?" And he goes, "I see we're in, there is a big screen, and this, that, and the other." And they say the size of the screen, of the sphere, and it's wrong. It's just immediately. But it's like, wow, that's so new, except multimodal AI has been around for years. So, and then she says,

• 42:52Ed Zitron?

  "Well, Kira, when I have some time later, what should I get for my kids?" So it's just like, "Oh, great." Yeah, you fucking, "Kira, I don't give a fuck about my family. What can I do?" I'm an awful parent, what should I do? Yeah. "I'm too busy rebranding a chatbot as a new thing." And I shit you not, it goes, "Las Vegas's fashion mall has some Labubus that kids will go crazy for." And I was just, I was on a plane, so I couldn't make the noise I wanted to make, which was just a guttural roar, just complete disgust.

• 44:05Ed Zitron?

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• 44:48Ed Zitron?

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• 45:05Speaker 05

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• 45:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 45:52Speaker 07

  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.

• 46:03Speaker 06

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

• 46:08Speaker 08

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

• 46:14Speaker 06

  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.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  I have their press release here and it says it is AI. But did you know their definition of AI?

• 46:46Ed Zitron?

  No, tell me.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  It's not the same as everyone else's.

• 46:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  There's Lenovo Kira called a personal ambient intelligence system. That's ambient intelligence AI. It says, well, we'll begin rolling out on select Lenovo and Motorola products. And it's, yeah, so it's going to help people move more easily between PCs, tablets and phones by keeping tasks connected. Again, see Google Calendar or any calendar app.

• 47:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It was, and like the sphere is, that probably cost them north of $10 million

• 47:23Ed Zitron?

  to rent that. And then probably that spokesperson was def, I don't know if she worked for Lenovo. She was very clearly like a seasoned actor.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:32Ed Zitron?

  In the sense that she was lying, but it was just, it was remarkable because it's, it was just, I've watched a lot of CES keynotes. I've gone to a lot of CESs and I've heard a lot of bullshit. This feels like, this feels like just the year when everybody just gave up on trying. They were just like, it's a large lang, it's AI is large language model. Good. You like this? And they were claiming it's their own ambient intelligence. You'll be shocked to hear it's just connected to Microsoft Azure.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Oh, great. Yeah.

• 48:06Ed Zitron?

  And then right at the end, she's like, and here I have a proof of con, and to be clear, this was like minutes of her just doing the classic LLM bullshit. And then right at the end, she said, she says, I have here a proof of concept. And what it is, is it records what you're saying, but only when you give it permission.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 48:23Ed Zitron?

  And it transcribes everything. But it's also just, yes, I also don't trust that. But on top of it, it's like, wow, a device that records you and transcribes everything.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Oh, you don't even need AI for that, right?

• 48:35Ed Zitron?

  Like the Otter.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:38Ed Zitron?

  Or literally any LLM will do this. I mean. It it's almost as if nobody has anything. I mean, Lenovo did have this really cool unrolling screen situation. That was pretty cool. I like that. They didn't show that. They can't show that. You can't can't be showing interesting stuff. You have to show.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  Well, you can't show the screen products inside of the giant Las Vegas.

• 49:02Ed Zitron?

  How would people possibly see it? It's so weird. It's.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  But I don't. So is is um, I don't know. I kind of I almost I want to come back to this. Negativity topic a little bit because it is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Which is like, it's, you know, we're trying to balance as best we can palate cleansers of there's a lot of bad things. Uh, let's make sure we're still trying to get some coverage of good things, interesting, fun, educational, whatever, but not to the point of it just being

• 49:39Speaker 04

  for purposes of you. You don't want to hide from reality, right?

• 49:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  So there's got to be a balance. Uh, but I just it for me, the negative things that are going on right now in the tech industry have become so intertwined with global economics and politics, uh, that it's a lot worse, I think, than just this series of GPUs is bad. And and you're not going to like the frame rate with them, you know?

• 50:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  It's a lot more wide reaching and I have a hard time like the negativity for me or the criticism, the cynicism doesn't it's not an act. It's I I actually am very concerned about the direction of where things are headed right now. Uh, and so I don't know what you you know, it's like, I don't know what to say to someone who's like, everything's so negative. Um, because we put a couple of pieces out that are more positive, but you really, you're you're just kind of hiding from reality at some point. So.

• 50:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's it's weird as well because I mean, we did 19 hours at CES and I asked everyone, did you see stuff you liked? And I shit you not, the most consistent thing I got was, yeah, I saw a battery I liked. And every like Cory Doctorow found a plug that he really liked.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Okay, like that goes into a wall?

• 51:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like a British plug that has a satisfying metallic click.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  That's nice.

• 51:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's the thing. I'm not even trying.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Why can't you be happy, Ed?

• 51:21Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. Look, look, plug, plug, click, plug, plug, click. It's the thing is, I love my doodads, my gizmos. I love seeing like the big TVs were nice. Those big old TVs. We like it. We like a big television.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  There are some computer cases that looked interesting, but even those are. Well, so even those, the, the public doesn't know some of those yet. They will soon, but uh, the, the preview is that even the cases that are nice are nested in bad things that are about to happen. And uh, it's because the companies like the computer case and the cooler companies cannot survive. Uh, when people can't afford to buy a stick of RAM. And, and there's like, as of the last week, two major companies in the computer case and cooling side

• 52:17Speaker 04

  uh, have terminated basically their like entire staff for one of them and then a significant amount of the staff for the other. And so it's, and these companies are companies that just showed actually pretty cool cases at CES. You know, but then it's, it's sort of the last hurrah of what they can get across the line and then they're just out of money.

• 52:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I, I, I don't know. I have also had the opposite, like a few weeks, like maybe a month ago I had, I was like, I like the iPhone air. And I got so many comments, people, you fucking chill. You fucking chill. Apple's, it's true. Apple has tons of shitty things. Like they, their app store is a horrifying mob like thing. They won't take, they won't take X's child porn generator down, but they will take down like the ICE app. Like it's, it's very, yeah, it's very, like there were tons of bad things. But at the same time, to your point, yeah, being negative is kind of just telling people what's happening. Like, the RAM crisis in and of itself was a big conversation during the show.

• 53:26Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, yeah, everything is going to get more expensive because of this. And I think the, I think it's hard to not be negative. Even when, like, trying to be positive right now makes you sound like an insane person on XT everything app being like, this is the year that agents take over consumer. It just, you just have to just start lying. Like, you just have to just start lying about-

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, or hide from it, where it's like, yeah, I can, I can find a computer case to be happy about. And, and we will, you know, we'll publish reviews of products that are good.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  But, yeah, you just, you can't strip out the general undertone. Cause I don't know, I've, I've even seen some comments about that where there was one that I agreed with. I didn't disagree with at all, but where the guy referenced an ad we had for a Thermaltake case in a video. And, um, and I almost wanted to heart it too. And he said, oh, this case looks awesome. It'll be great to put the nothing inside of it that I can afford.

• 54:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  You know, and I don't blame him. I completely agree. So, yeah, it's just, I don't know. I've never seen it this bad. And it's not just technology. It's just like,

• 54:41Speaker 04

  or I should say, it's not just consumer gaming. It's technology sort of broadly has this, this problem. And it's AI and the, the need to keep this bubble inflated has crept into everything, including just if you want to go buy groceries or whatever, you know, where they're manipulating pricing in some stores, so.

• 55:02Ed Zitron?

  Well, I think what, my whole thing is my rot economy, all the growth at all cost thing. Like, like, of course that is my bit, but it is kind of that. It's, they've chased out all the people that run these companies that make actual technology and those that have, those that have remained, those, those that are actually run by technology people, technologists like Elisa Seer or Jensen Huang are just like, fuck it. Number co-op, we must buy as much as possible. We must sell as much as possible. Everything, we must have every RAM stick. I just, I think the-

• 55:38Ed Zitron?

  A reckoning is coming for everything related to technology and I think it is going to be bloody. Not literally, but I think it's got like most of CES was LLM rappers.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Right. Like, uh, what was it called? Something with a Q for Lenovo.

• 55:54Ed Zitron?

  Uh, Kira.

• 55:55Speaker 04

  Kira, yeah.

• 55:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just like everything had an L M and they were, I think consumers are also aware they're being lied to in a way that they're not usually.

• 56:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:07Ed Zitron?

  And

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Not usually lied to or not usually aware?

• 56:10Ed Zitron?

  They're usually not aware of it, or at least the

• 56:13Speaker 04

  I agree with that.

• 56:14Ed Zitron?

  The wank is not as wank. The wank has never been this wanky. It's never been so bad that

• 56:20Speaker 04

  It's the wankiest right now.

• 56:21Ed Zitron?

  It's the way it's we're the peak wank. Um, that's, that's good. I'm going to write that down, but it's, I think it's also that it's never hurt this much. Like it's never been a case where it's like, hey, you, everything's getting more expensive because we must buy all the RAM for this thing you don't like. Also this thing you don't like, we're going to tell you it does things that it doesn't, but you're going to need to adopt it now or you'll be left behind. By the way, you should be scared for your job because you're going to be overtaken by the software that doesn't work. That's making everything more expensive. I just think it's pushing people to a limit. And I even said this on the show, I'm not buying new electronics for a while. I'm for the first time in like 17 generations, I'm not going to buy the next iPhone.

• 57:02Ed Zitron?

  I'm going to buy used for as long as humanely possible. My MacBook here is like three years old. I don't know why I don't update that. Because I think that that's the only thing that will possibly shift and also new electronics are not as like, there's not really anything new either.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way with, um, uh, I don't know. I, I went through and canceled some subscriptions to software companies, which is just my favorite thing to subscribe to.

• 57:32Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  Um, and you know, part of the reason I was canceling them, I was like, I don't know, maybe we have a use for this couple of times a year. We probably get the, we probably get the value out of it, but I just, it's, it's the smallest form of protest, I guess. And it, for me, it felt like Putting your money where your mouth is a little bit, you know, if I'm gonna complain about all this shit, I should at least stop feeding into some of it.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  And I don't know, my like, so I've got three computers I use regularly, two at the office, one home and two of them have 1080 Ti's from, what is it, 2016, I think in them, or 2017? And if I play games, it's like, you know, independent developer indie games and they tend to not need ray tracing and they play just fine on it and

• 58:20Speaker 04

  and at the office, I've, you know, I have newer stuff for video editing, but yeah, I, I don't know, I think the, the only concern I have with the, well, do you just boycott broadly? Do you try and organize or whatever boycott or? I think the only concern I have is it seems that these companies can, if you don't want it, fine, they want it. You know, and you can rent it back from them later.

• 58:46Ed Zitron?

  But right up until they can't, because the thing I keep coming back to is all of this is based on that Nvidia. The, it is the ultimate in growth economics. Has Nvidia reached a point where they're like, we can just set the price to whatever we want to? Eight, like eight B200 GPUs in a pod is what $500,000? I reckon Vera Rubin could be like $700,000. They just set the price. And what's funny is people will buy it right up until they don't. And when I say people, I mean enterprises.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:16Ed Zitron?

  And it's very clear that everyone is just in a fuck you customer mode. And it's hard to be positive because I, I can't find anything to like my fa- my favorite game of the last year was Dead Zone Rogue, which can run on most PCs and is on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, great name. And I don't know, like, I reckon it would probably run on old PCs too.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, my favorite game right now is Nova Roma, which is a city builder and

• 59:48Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  It can run on probably any computer I've owned since like 2010, you know?

• 59:55Ed Zitron?

  And it's just, and I think that that like, the best thing about the internet is being able to connect to people. Technology has stopped being built for people. So I feel like people are just understandably frustrated and tired of it. And this CES really did kind of show that the companies are in that fuck you consumer mode. So. If there is, I'm, I'm always open, easyitbetteroffline.com. I'll take email, email recommendations for things to be excited about in tech, but walking around that convention center, bringing people in specifically to do that, to be like, go and find cool stuff. I couldn't. I talked to like 11 journalists on air that week.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  I really want that plug though.

• 1:00:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the, the click it. Well, it's only for England though. So unless you go to England, it's not really that exciting. I know.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  You guys get the best things.

• 1:00:44Ed Zitron?

  Well, thankfully I'm in New York though, because otherwise I'd have to live in England. And that's the thing, like, I couldn't even find an anchor booth. I couldn't even find like a delightful charger booth. Just if it was just like, oh, we've got a cable that we're, my, one of my favorite tech innovations this year is an anchor, uh, surge protector that has USB C cables built into it. Yes. Perfect. But it's, it's like, uh, maybe we're at the end of this era. I think like you talk about what AMD will do if things go wrong. The answer is suffer in a way that they should for not building a sustainable company. Suffer in a way. Every, anyone, any company that is put in distress as a result of chasing the AI bubble at this point, I'm kind of like, fuck them.

• 1:01:29Ed Zitron?

  I hope they burn.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Ed Zitron?

  I, I feel bad for the people that work there and get laid off. I really do. The people that should suffer are the CEOs.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Well, and, and feel bad for the people who are in the just wider economy, right? Who are going to get screwed too, but.

• 1:01:42Ed Zitron?

  I mean, they're the, they're already the victims of all of this.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  But I agree with you. And I also, I do. I know effectively nothing about like macroeconomics or whatever. My gut feeling hot take or not is, um, the sooner it pops, the, not necessarily better, but the less damaging it'll be to normal people.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Uh, but then at the same time, the longer it goes on, probably the you get maximum damage for some of these companies, uh, where some, you know, more of them are more likely to go out of business, which is maybe a good thing. I guess it depends, you know, who it is, but.

• 1:02:20Ed Zitron?

  Well, and as we wrap up today, literally is recording this, a story just came through that the Chinese government has told tech companies that would only approve purchases of Nvidia's H200 AI chips under special circumstances. I, you know what? To wrap it up, it is funny watching China just kind of talk, like I've got cats. This is how cats play with dying mice. It's like, we're gonna, we're gonna do this.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Wait to see where it was going.

• 1:02:46Ed Zitron?

  Let, let you run away. We're gonna smack you again. Oh, I'm gonna get you. Now you're gonna run away. Cause it's just like, yeah, they were, I think I've read three different stories saying, hey, wow, China is gonna buy $50 billion worth of H200s. And now it's, China isn't gonna do shit. China's just playing with you. And it's like.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and it also CXMT is at like 5% or whatever of the memory supply market right now. Uh, John's seen memory technologies. They're a, um, uh, Chinese fab, silicon fab for memory for like DRAM. And, um, and they've just taken like 5% out of the chunk that was part of the big three Samsung, SK, Hi-Nex, Micron. And, uh, the consumer sentiment has, I've never seen more people be positive about like, uh, Chinese products where, you know, I, I started at the time where it was like, if you bought something from AliExpress, you

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  were happy if it got there and people were surprised if it worked. And, and that's just, it's the sentiment. It's not necessarily that the quality has changed. Cause like the quality manufacturing has been pretty good for a long time in China. Uh, because we, you know, it's, that's where everything's been made forever. And the thing that I've seen shift though, is the sentiment where now there's almost this like. Literally any other silicon manufacturer on earth, please save us from these companies. And it looks like it's gonna be up to right now, Chinese silicon companies, because they're the only ones who kind of have products that are, they're, you know, starting to make, so.

• 1:04:29Ed Zitron?

  Well, on that happy note, Steve, you got anything coming up you want to plug?

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  We have, um, yeah, we do have our data center series we're working on. So we're going to be visiting a bunch of different data centers around the US and covering the story about, uh, people, you know, getting screwed by them and hopefully connect with a bunch of viewers around the US and get their story on, uh, how the data centers are coming in and bulldozing, uh, literally and metaphorically, everything in their past. Yeah.

• 1:05:03Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's fun.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Is that happy?

• 1:05:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's, that's the kind of chipper thing. No, it's always good to have you, Steve. Thank you for having us. It was having you, well, us for having you. Nah, it's a podcast. Thank you, everyone, for listening. I've been Ed Zitron, of course. We will be back with a monologue this Friday. And thank you, of course, for sticking with us during CES. Goodbye.

• 1:05:31Ed 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 better offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  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.

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