Radio Better Offline: Gare Davis, Victoria Song, Allison Morrow

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York city. Ed Zitron is joined in studio by Allison Morrow of CNN, Victoria Song of The Verge and Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here to talk about the fairy tale of AGI, AI boosters’ religious attachment to the industry’s success, and how the tech industry fears admitting they’re out of ideas. Allison Morrow https://www.cnn.com/profiles/allison-morrow https://bsky.app/profile/amorrow.bsky.social AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos Victoria Song https://www.theverge.com/authors/victoria-song https://www.theverge.com/authors/victoria-song https://bsky.app/profile/vicmsong.bsky.social The Unbearable Obviousness of AI Fitness Summaries https://www.theverge.com/fitness-trackers/694140/ai-summaries-fitness-apps-strava-oura-whoop-wearables Gare Davis https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv https://www.instagram.com/hungrybowtie It Could Happen Here https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:49Ed Zitron?

  This is war to extermination. Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth, souls rotten from the orgasm drug, flesh shuddering from the ovens. Prisoners of the earth, come out! Storm the studio! This is better offline, and I'm at Z-Trope.

• 2:12Ed Zitron?

  We have an incredible studio guest assortment today. We have the wonderful Victoria Song from The Verge. How are you doing, Victoria? I'm good. She's great. And we have, of course, Allison Morrow of CNN, CNN Nightcap Newsletter as well? Yes. Wonderful. And of course, Gare Davis, the wonderful Gare Davis, who didn't insult me on Blue Sky for being late because I was on time of Cool Zone Media. Gare, thank you for joining us.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me, again, despite our brief fight on Blue Sky.

• 2:41Ed Zitron?

  Our tiff. It was not even a tiff. It was a friendly thing. Buy some merchandise, though, if you're listening to it. We have new hoodies, we have new t-shirts, we have new hats. We have an upcoming challenge coin that you can spend your money on and it will flow somewhat to me. That's what's great. But today, we're talking about artificial intelligence. There've been a few stories in the media. Alison is fresh back from vacation, so she's about to learn about all the good things that have been happening. But I want to start with one of my favorite stories at the moment. This is the negotiation between Microsoft and OpenAI. Now, the negotiation is, just to run this down, because OpenAI, by the end of the year, needs to become a for-profit entity. It's a little more complex than that. It's the for-profit part of a nonprofit needs to convert. That alone would be difficult, but Microsoft owns 49% of this company's future profits and a bunch of other stuff. They get a revenue

• 3:26Ed Zitron?

  share, they get rights to all of their IP through 2030 and all these other things. And OpenAI has said, okay, what if we give you 33% equity, less revenue share, and you don't get access to all our IP? And understandably, Microsoft has said no. So, we are in the funniest possible scenario here, in that Microsoft could literally just fold their arms and let OpenAI die. And I feel like, at the moment, this is an under-discussed topic, because this is a gun to Sam Altman's head. And everyone's just kind of acting like it's fine. I guess maybe it's just too complex. I don't know. It's confusing to me why more people are a little bit worried.

• 4:09Ed Zitron?

  Anyone?

• 4:09Speaker 05

  Numbers hard.

• 4:10Ed Zitron?

  Numbers hard?

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Math scary.

• 4:12Ed Zitron?

  Math scary?

• 4:13Speaker 05

  That's, yeah.

• 4:14Ed Zitron?

  But I thi- I, I think why I'm going so insane about it is this could kill OpenAI 100%. Like, this is, they don't turn into a for-profit, they're dead, dead. And I'm just wondering why everyone's just kind of chilling, walking around about it. I feel crazy.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  I think it's just the sense that, like, that seems implausible to most people. Like, if you look on it, like, maybe, but, you know, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the sense that Kleenex is synonymous with tissues right now. So, you know, we're at a point in time where, when you see the big, the big one of, of like a tech thing, you kind of feel that they're infallible. It's, it's sort of like saying, well, if Apple doesn't get its ducks in a row with these tariffs, they're fucked. In which case, you're like, eh, are they, are they? It's like a Marvel movie. At the end, are they dead? Are they, are they really dead? Or will they come back in some mutated form in Avengers, like, part seventy-two, the Avenging?

• 5:13Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:14Speaker 06

  And I think everyone's still under the spell of Sam Altman.

• 5:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:18Speaker 06

  There's a sense that he's the visionary who's going to lead us into this AI utopia. And, you know, I and others, and we know, a bunch of us have reported that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, but I think investors and shareholders and people who, like, frankly, the people who work for him desperately want to see him succeed. I think Silicon Valley wants him to succeed. So, maybe it's just a willful blindness.

• 5:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. It's the most strange time in history because, and Victoria, you've written quite a lot about this, when you look at the actual things that this shit does, it don't do that much, right?

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Eh, no.

• 5:57Ed Zitron?

  You've been on the lead AI on, at the verge for a few months now. Have you seen anything exciting at all?

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Ah, define exciting.

• 6:05Ed Zitron?

  Anything that you looked at and you felt delighted by, in any way? Because I'm genuinely curious.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Oh, by delighted. I I think delighted is a strong word.

• 6:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Have I seen things that have been surprising? Yeah, with some of the, I like, I wrote a story not that long ago about the, what I call the hug and kiss generators.

• 6:23Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:24Ed Zitron?

  What's that?

• 6:25Speaker 05

  So there are these uh apps, they're uh called hugging and kiss AI generators. Uh so you take a picture and like they're at, they were advertised in a kind of skeevy way where it's just like, oh, you take a picture of you and your crush and make them kiss. And like, that is the thing that you can do. Um, AI doesn't understand what to do with tongues yet. So, you know, I was generating very cursed content for the verge.com.

• 6:52Ed Zitron?

  That was what those horrible things you're sending me, right?

• 6:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sent you some horrible things that I.

• 6:57Ed Zitron?

  Really awful.

• 6:58Speaker 06

  In fairness to the AI bots, a lot of humans don't know what to do with tongues either.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  No, they, but I really don't know what to do with the tongues. Like, you know, you're supposed to make people kissing. And so like I generated a couple of videos of me and Edward Cullen. Because not because I'm like a Twi hard, but because he was like a preset in in the app.

• 7:15Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  Uh, and you know, you just, you just watch yourself kiss Edward Cullen with full on tongue. And you're just like, huh.

• 7:22Ed Zitron?

  But a little wrong tongue.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  It's wrong tongue because honestly, it's it's like, um, if you told a toddler what kissing looks like, and they just, you know, imagined two faces smooshing together and like, things coming out of the mouths and odd rhythms, that's what it looked like.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  I mean, I I could be wrong here, but I assume most of these products are made by straight men who do not know what to do.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  I it's.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  With the tongue.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  These, these apps are just very like.

• 7:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  Weird, but you know, so I tested them. Uh, I deep faked my parents.

• 7:51Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Parents at my wedding and I was like, oh, this makes me feel weird. Um, I have emotions that do, mom's teeth are not correct in this story. Uh, but you know, so that was just like one of the, I think, one of the things that I've tested most recently and I went, oh.

• 8:09Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  This is something.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  No, I mean, the thing that I've seen this with is like this, this woman who made like a video of of like her mom hugging her as a kid. Based on like an old picture.

• 8:20Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  And it's like this is I've I've never seen a video of my mom before. And it's you start obsessing over this this like artificially generated video. When you're ignoring you, you you actually have a picture of your mom hugging you.

• 8:31Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  You you can look at like that and that actually is her and that is like what she looks like.

• 8:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and what versus watching something imagine not imagine just generate.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Put on like a skin suit of your mom hugging you, which it just isn't like.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  It's weird.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  The video is not real, but the picture is.

• 8:48Ed Zitron?

  I just.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  It's it's a bizarre thing because I felt very judgmental of it before I tried it and then I tried it and I sobbed. I like genuinely sobbed because.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  That's interesting. That reminds me of like um the the VR thing where you're like reconnecting with like dead family members. Um, on like VR headsets, which which yeah, people were very skeptical of. And then I saw. Saw some people try it in Japan and they like like totally broke down.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  It's cause like when I like, I think the the phrasing that I I used was like, I know it's fake. It didn't look anything like my dad. It gave him hair. My dad had never had hair in his life, but like the the shape of it was enough to like. Sketch this like part of me that was very much longing for my father to have been able to go to my wedding. So like doing it, I was like, this is weird. I don't feel this is not comforting. It's not comforting, but it's.

• 9:39Ed Zitron?

  Makes you feel bad.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  That nausea is like like indicative of like the hyperreality problem.

• 9:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Which which mean people like like Altman and the whole the whole industry are.

• 9:47Ed Zitron?

  Can you break down?

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Rapidly pushing us towards.

• 9:49Ed Zitron?

  And the hyperreality problem, can you break that down?

• 9:51Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I guess the term gets used in a few different ways, but it's like the more something so fake that it's more real than real.

• 9:58Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Um, and we we see this problem with a lot of like the VR stuff, but now now you see this a lot with um with AI. AI generated images, which are like quote unquote photorealistic, but they're like too photorealistic because they're being trained on a on a data set of like highly photoshopped images. So it looks like reality, but it looks more than reality. It's it's it's it's stronger than what reality actually is supposed to be. And that's like completely poisoning the data set and then like this can affect you like emotionally too.

• 10:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and what but the thing is that gets me about this is you look at everything. You look at all the AI stuff. And this is a fairly old example at this point, and I'm not I'm not insulting you with this is nothing bad about your point. It's just. They've not been able to find a doodad or a gizmo that at least. Brings you cheer?

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, you can, if you're twisted, and my mind is twisted, and you can like come up with some prompts that are truly cursed and no editor will let you publish in good faith. Like, yeah, you could have a little fun with it.

• 11:04Ed Zitron?

  I'm talking about a thing that people use to do something normal.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  No, yeah, no.

• 11:08Ed Zitron?

  One.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  It's, it's.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  I mean, it, it, it helped that one kid graduate from UCLA. So there you go.

• 11:14Ed Zitron?

  Which one was that?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Oh, this, this has been a viral video the past like two weeks of this guy like showing the prompts he used to graduate from college, like during his graduation ceremony.

• 11:24Ed Zitron?

  So cool.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, that's the thing I've pointed out a lot is that AI has found a lot of use cases. They're just all kind of bad.

• 11:32Ed Zitron?

  And they don't generate money.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  Right. They don't generate money and they take away, um, and this is, this will be a metaphor that you relate to. I can't remember who said it first. Um, it was a tech columnist. Uh, anyway, it was about letting kids use AI to do their homework is like going to the gym and having a, a machine lift the weights for you.

• 11:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 06

  Like the point is the process and the learning and AI just kind of subverts that, which can be useful if you're coding or doing some high level technical stuff, I suppose.

• 12:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  Not my area, but, um.

• 12:09Ed Zitron?

  But even then it's like with the coding stuff, they massively overstate what coding, like coding is only one part of the software engineering stack. And even then you can't like help, they're like, oh, I could build an entire application. Could it? Has anyone actually, and this is Matt Hughes, my editor brought this up the other day. It's like, all this bullshit, Kevin Rusi and bullshit about, oh, vibe coding is taking over.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 12:29Ed Zitron?

  I've not seen one fucking vibe coded company.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Ban the phrase vibe coding.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  I haven't heard this before.

• 12:35Ed Zitron?

  Vibe coding is when.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  It's horrible. It's, it's, it's, it's horrible. Like at Google I O, they're like vibe coding. And I was like, please kill me. Cause uh, what does it even mean? It's.

• 12:47Ed Zitron?

  So here's, here's what it's meant to mean. It's meant to mean that you as a person do not understand software. A true, true. You are able to use the coding thing to build software. And the idea, which the massive liberty they take from there is that because someone can do a thing like this, whether it works or not, whether it's secure or not, who cares? It means that someone who doesn't understand coding at all could build a huge company that does whatever. It's kind of like if you saw the, you ever see, watch The Simpsons, anyone? Yeah, there's an episode of The Simpsons where they rebuild Ned Flanders' house. And like the rooms get smaller and they're like, this room has no electricity, this room has too much electricity and all the hair stands up. It's like seeing that and being like, holy shit, these people could build a city.

• 13:30Ed Zitron?

  It's fucking insane. And of course, there is a Kevin Roos article in New York Times where he's like, this is, oh my God, I made a recipe application. It's just real like peekaboo moments in AI. And I, I know I've been ranting about AI for what feels like seven years now, but it's only one. But it's just, I don't know why more people, again, I get the Microsoft open AI, I think, I do. But I don't get why more people aren't more alarmed. There's nothing. There's not a thing. There's not a thing that you can point and be like, wow, this is actually kind of fucking cool. It costs too much money, requires stealing, it boils lakes with all these things, but at least we have this. Not really. I genuinely, I'm not even asking the question sarcastically anymore. I'm just like, anything?

• 14:13Ed Zitron?

  Anything, anything. One thing that I don't mean kind of works. I mean, this is a tool that I use every day, like a Dropbox style thing. I don't even mean a file. I just mean a useful piece of software you can point to and go, I use this and it's good.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  I have, I have one, but I don't know how much of it is LLM based. Do you use Otter in your work? Yeah, I do. Yeah, like Otter is a dictation service. Yeah, transcription.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  I was just gonna say.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Transcription.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  I was just gonna say closed captioning. That's like the only thing. Like Dropbox has integrated uh, like auto transcriptions for almost all their uploads. And that makes my job really easy because I have to do a lot of interviews and now I can just refer to that. If I need a more complex transcription, I can send it to one of our services. But, but no, like that's, that's it. But like, that's, LLMs have been doing that for a long time.

• 15:03Ed Zitron?

  It's just transcription. I'm not even being a misanthrope. I'm just. So much money is going into this. So much money is not going into other things. And the only thing we're having popped out is, hey, we've got a Google search that kind of works but doesn't. And we can do transcriptions, which they did almost immediately. I feel I feel like that like Rev had their AI transcriptions almost immediately.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, they've been around for.

• 15:26Ed Zitron?

  Otter, there were various companies. I've worked with an AI transcription company that's dead now. Um, couple of years back with the like twenty twenty three, I think it was. It was like meeting transcription. Zooms had it.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  I was I was using Rev's AI transcriptions back in twenty twenty.

• 15:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just like, it feels, I feels like I'm going insane sometimes. It feels like when I read these stories and they're like, and the revolutionary power of AI. But you look at it, it's like, you don't even have a funny, you have a funny thing, I guess, a Joker level thing.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the problem is, is just like, we are promised one thing, right? You're promised this personalization, this automate, this automation that it's gonna know you and like we've been fed through so many generations of like science fiction, what we think AI is going to be. And this is not that.

• 16:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  This requires so much work from you to train it.

• 16:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  Like you have to understand the language with with to prompt ChatGPT or any of these other AIs in order to get something remotely useful. So you're actually having to learn a new language. And like, if you look at the most successful ChatGPT prompts, they're like four, four paragraphs long.

• 16:34Ed Zitron?

  They're insane.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  You have to like, you have to be preempting what like this thing could be like. I had, I was just like, you know, to to your point about vibe coding. I'm not a, I'm like a spreadsheet girly, but I'm not like an advanced spreadsheet girly. And I was trying to pull some data insights. Um, from this set I was looking at and I was like, okay. I don't know fuck all about spreadsheet formulas besides like the really basic ones. How am I gonna do this conditional logic program? Let me ask ChatGPT. And it took me so long just to figure out the stuff and it was always wrong. And because I I could like, because I understand math, I could parse out how to fix the completely wrong formulas it was giving me.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  But that was such a painful process. And so.

• 17:23Ed Zitron?

  And was the output even that good?

• 17:26Speaker 05

  Oh, no, it was an excellent output. Like, I got a beautiful spreadsheet.

• 17:29Ed Zitron?

  That's cool. And how much time would you say you're invested?

• 17:31Speaker 05

  Uh, two and a half hours.

• 17:33Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Victoria, though, you're a journalist who understands math. Like, you're a rare and special.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  It was, I was just basically like this, the fact that this conditional if and statement is not working, or it's working opposite to what I want for, to find this one particular data set, is driving me cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. It's very simple. I know how to do the math manually. Why can't the computer tell me how to write it to the other frickin' computer? That took me two and a half hours.

• 18:03Ed Zitron?

  I love innovation. And I think, I think that that speaks to the larger problem, which is, generative AI isn't completely useless. If it had been sold as it is, which is kind of niche cloud software, like cloud compute stuff, they wouldn't have been able to fund any of the data centers. If they would have been like, alright, we're gonna be able to in two and a half hours, give you the world's best spreadsheet. They would.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  It was a, it was a good spreadsheet.

• 18:26Ed Zitron?

  Okay, not, not the best, okay.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  It was a decent spreadsheet.

• 18:30Ed Zitron?

  The thing, even the asterisks have asterisks. And it's, it's just, I feel like, and the feedback I get from listeners is very much that everyone is like a lot, like, I don't get any emails from people being like, hey, actually, man, I have the most useful thing. I get the occasional bright sparkers like, I have, over the course of hours, created a very useful thing that I use sometimes. It's like, cool. Okay. It's, fine. Bidet sounds more useful than that. Like, I'm trying to think of like, other innovations that exist that could be, yeah, everything is more useful. Like, Apple Pay is more useful than any of the shit that they've built. But it's this thing where we are being told again and again and again, that it's the future.

• 19:14Ed Zitron?

  And we're being told that it's this ultra-complex thing that we'll never understand, which leads really neatly into my favorite story of the week, which is, all of you, I assume, have heard about this Meta offering $100 million to OpenAI staff? And how there's this big talent war and four people just left OpenAI to go to Meta? Allison, you're on vacation, so you missed some of this, which is probably best for your mental health.

• 19:37Speaker 06

  Oh, I saw the the the seven-figure bonus story came out right before I went on vacation. So I was.

• 19:44Speaker 05

  Get the bag.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  I can't blame these people.

• 19:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, absolutely.

• 19:47Speaker 06

  Get the bag.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Get away to a 401K that's fat and sizable, like.

• 19:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 19:53Ed Zitron?

  I think it rocks. I think it's great. I think they should demand. There was a part of the Erin Wu from the Information, a great story about this, where she she was talking about how some people like, oh, yeah, I just threatened to quit. And they gave me more money. I would join one of these companies and day two, just be like, fucking quit, Mark. What what are you gonna do about it, Mark? I'm gonna go right back to OpenAI. They're gonna give me this money. And then Mark Zuckerberg will give you whatever. They mean, he's been flying them to his house in Tahoe and they're still saying no. That's the best part. The people are just like, no, I don't wanna, don't wanna, mate. But it might be because they're all in a weird, I'm gonna say clique, but I wanna, I wanna believe Polly situation.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 20:34Ed Zitron?

  So all, okay, I have no, no knowledge that they're fucking. But the recruits on the list, which refers to the meta list for potential people that they could hire, typically typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their twenties and thirties and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power. And their previously obscured talents have never been so highly valued. So these stories have a thread through them I'm really enjoying, which is that the writer and the companies don't know what these people are doing. And I just feel like they are scamming. I think they're scamming them.

• 21:18Ed Zitron?

  Another quote from the Wall Street Journal, Megan Borodsky, I believe, wrote this, "The handful of researchers who were smartest about AI have built up what one described as tribal knowledge that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough." We are very aligned on research directions and interests, one of them wrote. I hope we get to work on more stuff together in the future. They are fucking lying to them. I'm sorry. They are just making shit up. This has to be, I think that this is the funniest thing ever. I think that this is a true revenge of the nerd situation.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Have they, have they reinvented collective bargaining?

• 21:54Ed Zitron?

  They have. They've basically done unionization. It's amazing.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Good for them.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  I know, I love.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Higher education is really expensive. They have a lot of debt.

• 22:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I love this. I think that they should ask for more money. I think they should all get together and just refuse to take less than 50 million a day.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  Eight figure, eight figure.

• 22:13Ed Zitron?

  Nine figure. Like, sky's the limit. Sam, Sam won't want to burn anything, but back to Erin Wu here. Um, this is another quote about this, which is from inside the great AI talent auction, the deals, the free agents and the egos.

• 22:27Ed Zitron?

  But a senior leader at another of the major AI labs said it was hard to know what research specialties actually mattered for improving AI models. AI is a field where researchers are designing such complicated systems that it is difficult to break up one aspect of the work from another, the leader said. Ultimately, they said, recruiting often comes down to word of mouth, the game of knowing a person or having worked with them before. It's a scam.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  Isn't that just like normal?

• 22:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  Job stuff, like word of mouth, knowing, having worked with someone before and going like, yeah.

• 22:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  It feels like hyper focused Silicon Valley stuff.

• 22:59Ed Zitron?

  Generally, you know what they did at the job. Generally, you do. And Mark Zuckerberg is.

• 23:03Speaker 06

  AI.

• 23:04Ed Zitron?

  They, we did AI.

• 23:14Speaker 01

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• 24:17Ed Zitron?

  There is a WhatsApp group. I think it's called Recruitment and it's the party emoji. And that's where Mark Zuckerberg invites people. He like has his little weird little WhatsApp like hole. He invites people. He's like, hey, I'm Mark Zuckerberg. Do you want all the money in the world? What do you do? I don't care. How many? And apparently one of the metrics they measure them on is like citations in papers. I genuinely think this is a scam. It's genuinely a scam. I think it's the coolest scam of all time. We find it's nerds versus management consultants.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  So nerds versus different types of nerds.

• 24:51Ed Zitron?

  Management consultants are not nerds. Actually, I want to say it. Management consultants are not nerds. They're jocks.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  I would agree with that. I would agree with that because they are professional deck makers about. And they go, in slide one, we can see that number go up.

• 25:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  And slide two, we can see number flat. Here's a pie chart. Bada bing bada boom.

• 25:12Ed Zitron?

  And someone else made this.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  Buzzword.

• 25:14Ed Zitron?

  Yes. That's it.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  I can see it.

• 25:16Ed Zitron?

  It's jock shit.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:17Ed Zitron?

  I went to a drama private school. I know everyone's surprised.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  This is not shocking.

• 25:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I thank you. All boys as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was like the dumbest kid in that school, which is really, and I was the fattest as well. So school was great for me. But you run into a lot of people who can memorize a lot of things, but don't know how to put them together. There's no real like synthetic thought. It's all just like, I don't know, like having a big pile of information that they arbitrarily draw from. And they, they don't really know what any of it means.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Sounds familiar to all the AI fitness summaries that I've been suffering through. I just wrote a thing about it. That's on my mind.

• 25:53Ed Zitron?

  Actually, tell us about that. What, what's, what's the AI fitness shit been doing? This is.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, so I ate it during a run last week.

• 26:00Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, no, it was too hot outside. Uh, and I was, you know, I, I was on the Vox Union bargaining committee. So I've been like sleep deprived for two months.

• 26:09Ed Zitron?

  Well, so congratulations.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  Salute.

• 26:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:12Ed Zitron?

  Congratulations.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  It was, it was, it came down to the wire, but we averted a strike. It was real great stuff. Uh, and I was, I basically was like, oh, now it's time to look into my fitness and wearable data from this time period and, and kind of gain insights. And it was just like, not that, it was beyond. I called my article, "The Unbearable Obviousness of AI Fitness"

• 26:32Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  Summaries, because it was just not great, but to my point, I ate it on, on this run. Uh, you can kind of see my hands fucked up.

• 26:41Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I ate shit playing basketball the other day as well.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  My knees are fucked up. Uh, so like I, I was basically like, all right, let me see what all of these things said about my data. And could I find, could I get these AIs to say like, hey, you've been like really strung out over the last two months. Your sleep schedule has been supremely disrupted. Um, your metrics are completely off. These are all things I know from looking at my baselines and knowing what they are. Um, but could I get it to, to say you showed ha, like you've shown signs of elevated, um, risk of injury? Not a single one of them could do it. And Stravos was like the most egregious because it's like, you had an intense run. And I had uploaded pictures of my injury. I had like uploaded a note saying that I had like injured myself pretty badly.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  There was no like context of like what I should do with that. It was just, it is literally stuff like, you ran 3.1 miles. It was 88 degrees Fahrenheit. This was slightly higher effort than other efforts that you've made in the last 30 days. Have a nice day. And I was like, that's not useful when you put it right next to a chart that says the same thing. Your elevation was 88, uh, you had an 88 feet of elevation gain and it was up and down during your, your run. And literally it's next to a thing that says elevation gain 88 feet and a graph that shows up and down. Like it's, it's that, I do that degree.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  There's no intelligence. Like AI, there's no intelligence.

• 28:09Ed Zitron?

  This feels like the thing it should be able to do already.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  This is what people wanted to do because at least in my field where, um, you, you generate a massive mountain of like quantified self data that you're looking at and you want insights from. I wanted, I wanted Aura to tell me like, uh, what my average weekly number, like how many hours per week do I sleep on average on a 12 month basis? And then how much, uh, of a sleep debt did I incur in this specific week? And it's like, ooh. We can't do that. We can only do it the most recent week and the most recent month for trends. And I was like, that's fucking useless. I have six years worth of Aura data that I should be able to mine for that kind of insight. And I can't do that. So that's not at all useful for what I for like the purposes of what I was trying to prove.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  And so I ended up arguing with this thing for like an hour.

• 28:59Ed Zitron?

  I feel like you did prove something, though.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did. I did. But it was at the same time, just like, it's sort of like a Wikipedia. It's like a book report written by a fourth grader who decided to read the entry of the book on Wikipedia instead of actually reading the book for insights. So it's like, here you go. Here you go.

• 29:19Ed Zitron?

  It feels like the most elementary thing it should be able to do. I have over a decade of fitness data.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:25Ed Zitron?

  And I still don't have shit. I don't. It told my Aura ring the other day. I got Aura. I got Somni. I got the thing that electrocutes your head. Yeah, that's why I'm so smart. It's like, I just watched the X-Files episode with the computer bit. That's what's happening to me. I'm getting electrocuted every day. I got Aura. I got the eight sleep in Vegas. I got all sorts of gumph. And I don't know a single goddamn thing. It told me two days ago, I am like, something is wrong. I yeah, I'd slept three hours two days straight. It was just a bad combination of red eyes. And it's like, yeah, you should do something about that. Thanks. I'm glad I pay you $10 a month for, but this this just feels like the obvious. And how does it not know how? And maybe it is just the ultimate limitation that we've been complaining about.

• 30:09Ed Zitron?

  It's just it's kind of insulting. I don't know.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, not to be like, I don't want to be the hippie here because I use Strava and I like track my workouts and things. But it's like, I know when I'm tired and I know when I'm hungry and when I've eaten too much or eaten too little. Like, you know, why do we need the computer to do that for us is a real question. And it's part of this like consumer trend of just trying to get AI into every single app on my phone. And it's like, I don't need Strava. Like, Strava is doing great for me for what I need it for. I like it to show me how many miles I ran that week and like. What my bike ride to work looked like?

• 30:47Speaker 05

  I wanted it, I like, I would have loved it to be like, okay, so when you go run after a prolonged break, particularly in hot weather, you have self-reported an increased number of injuries. That's the type of shit that I want. And so it's like, so seeing that it was really hot after a prolonged injury, you have a real bad habit of getting injured after that. So like, you dumb dumb.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe drink some more water.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Drink some more water, do the thing. So like, that is the type of insight I would have liked after this most recent run where I ate it.

• 31:16Ed Zitron?

  Well, the last three months, I've increased my cardio a shit ton playing basketball. I would love to see, and it has all the stuff, and this doesn't feel that difficult, if it could say, yeah, your cardiovascular has improved. Aura likes to occasionally be like, yeah, you're four years or two years younger than your age cardio wise. And it's like, the fuck does that mean?

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Don't get me started on those like longevity metrics. I, I.

• 31:38Ed Zitron?

  But just, there's nothing useful to it, other than I'm a data pervert and I like looking at the numbers going, hmm, number up, number down, why? And, but even then, the simplest things are kind of hard to get. But Strava, you have to go through like three menus to just see how much you've worked out. There's like eight different options. None of them, you, you can't turn any of them off. There's one about biking, because I used to bike. I don't bike anymore. I don't need that. But now you need to share the biking, mate. Got to make sure it's zero miles, you fucking idiot. You loser. It's just, it, it is the wider thing of tech just not being for us anymore. Almost. It's like, hey, got some data, I guess. Pay me now. Pay me. And I, even then with Aura and A, I've been using

• 32:20Ed Zitron?

  them for five years, six years. You know what? I've never got a single bit of advice about my sleep. I've never had it say, oi, what if you did this? Nope. It'll be.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  Have you tried using the chatbot that's in Aura?

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  No, I thought about it yesterday and I was like, I'm gonna get angry at this.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  It's actually one of the better implementations.

• 32:40Ed Zitron?

  Does it work?

• 32:41Speaker 05

  It's one of the better implementations if you like.

• 32:45Ed Zitron?

  If I

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Know how to talk to it.

• 32:47Ed Zitron?

  Okay, how do I talk to it?

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Well, you have to be very specific about the information that you're wanting. So you're like, tell me about my sleep trend and I've noticed that I have this problem. What are some ways that I could uh get around that?

• 33:00Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Or it's just like, do I show signs in the past month of sleep irregularities? If so, like, what are some? The thing is, like, the things it's going to tell you to do that are actionable are going to be like, well, duh.

• 33:12Ed Zitron?

  Um, really only helpful if this is your first foray into fixing your health, into fixing your health.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  If you've literally Googled anything before, have any base knowledge of like, you should have consistent sleep schedules. Um, you maybe just don't eat ice cream before bed, like common sense things like that.

• 33:30Ed Zitron?

  Maybe I'll just die.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  Not gonna necessarily help you, but you know, other things I were, because I'm also, I've got a CGM at the moment. And so it's just like.

• 33:38Ed Zitron?

  Is that a constant glucose?

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, continuous glucose monitor. And I was like, I've had a lot of stress. Does stress in- impact glucose levels? And I was like, yes, it does. And I was like, okay, cool. That's nice. Nice to know that it's high because of that. And then it'll remember that when you ask it questions in the future. So you just have to be like.

• 33:55Ed Zitron?

  Kind of useful.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  You just have to talk to it so much and like, kind of train it. It's like, literally like training a toddler. So the amount of effort that you're putting in versus what they're telling you, like all the insights, they'll be so personal, personalized and so automated. It's like, yeah.

• 34:12Ed Zitron?

  You just have to do all the work to make it useful, which appears to be the AI theme.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have to do an immense amount of legwork and like, training and thinking like an AI in order for it to spit out something that might make you go, huh?

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  Wow. The future's so cool. I love living in this wonderful period. I saw Wired mention this thing called Limitless earlier. Have you heard about?

• 34:38Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. It's the, it's the class of, it's like B. The thing that I talked to you last time.

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  The, the AI device that constantly listens to you. What is Limitless, though?

• 34:47Speaker 05

  It's similar. It, it constantly listens to you and generates insights based on listening to you constantly.

• 34:53Ed Zitron?

  Steven, Steven Levy, the Larry Bird of. Big wet kisses in tech journalism, write about it like it's the future. And it's just like, I, I just wish some writers would experience humanity just once, because the idea of someone constantly listening is not fun or good, nor has it ever really worked.

• 35:15Speaker 06

  I don't want to age anyone here, but I feel like we're roughly the same age and we experienced kind of the revolution of social media as this kind of like, oh, look in, look at how cool it can be if we're able to connect

• 35:30Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  in mass, all the time, anywhere. And that was cool. That was revolutionary in its time. And now we're at kind of like the denouement of that. And it's turned us all inward. We're all like tracking our personal data and like, you know, we're more isolated than we've ever been. Not entirely social media's fault, but doesn't help. We're like talking to our AI therapists and our AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

• 36:00Ed Zitron?

  I don't know how many people are actually doing that, though. I know a lot, a lot of them are, but.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  I think that like the narrative, like the step back narrative right now is just like, well, there should be a next thing. It shouldn't just be social media was cool and the internet was cool for a while. And things are getting kind of stale. And it's like, well, what's the next thing? And I think, I think tech journalists can be guilty of this sometimes of feeling like, well, 2012 was really exciting. 2022 has got to be just as exciting in 2025. Boy, can't wait.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  Maybe the technology is just not there yet and it's going to take a lot longer than anyone expects.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  Or maybe this is just not the right approach because the way LLMs work is that it's a mirror. And like, we have tech journalists left and right failing the mirror test and like not understanding that when you talk to chat GPT or you talk to these AI girlfriends and boyfriends in a different avatar, you are just talking to yourself in the mirror. It is a digital version of talking to yourself in the mirror, which can be useful. It can be useful to talk to yourself in the mirror. There's a reason why people go like, you're great. Yes, awesome. Sometimes you need to like hear yourself think out loud and that can be useful and helpful. But. That's what you're doing. Like, you have to understand that you are talking to yourself. You are just having a conversation with yourself.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  And I think a lot of people don't get that. They don't, they think they're talking to a higher intelligence. Literally, no, you are just talking to yourself. If yourself could Google a little faster than you currently could.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that was, that was the gist of, uh, Kashmir Hills. Uh, amazing New York Times piece about the people who really fell into a rabbit hole around these chatbots, like ChatGPT convinced them that they were in a matrix, like, you know, alternate universe and like, one guy committed suicide.

• 37:55Ed Zitron?

  Didn't he pull a knife on a cop or something?

• 37:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, he like told the bot that he was gonna kill himself, do suicide by cop. And then his dad was like worried about his mental health, did call the cops and he was like, listen, I think my son's gonna try to kill himself by attacking you. And guess what? He did because the chatbot was like.

• 38:15Ed Zitron?

  And guess what? The cops just came right over with, yeah, like it's like, yeah, you know, someone's mental health. What, what do they need? Oh, they definitely want to die by a cop. Well, let's pull our guns.

• 38:25Speaker 06

  I'm saying is our society's not in a good spot right now.

• 38:28Ed Zitron?

  No, our society is not prepared. Uh, policing is prepared to arrest rather than help or service. So.

• 38:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:36Ed Zitron?

  The, it's the natural, I think it's the, all of this is the natural comeuppance of a society built with very little intention. And so because, because that's the thing, it is vibes. And large language models are the ultimate like vibe slop. It's something built with no real, and people love to say, well, Sam Altman's plan, Sam Altman. No one has a single goddamn plan at all. That's why there are no use cases, because if anyone sat there and went, what can we do with this? They'd go. Fuck, I don't, I don't know. I don't. Is there anyone that we can pay a hundred million dollars to?

• 39:10Speaker 05

  Well, they can do anything that you can imagine. That's why Andy Jassy is saying the future is up to you, guys. Imagine how you're going to use it.

• 39:18Ed Zitron?

  I can imagine a lot. And it's, but that's the thing, like, Alison, you had an excellent piece on this. It's like the whole job loss story is just them being like, please, please up the shares, up shares, go number go up, please.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like, I have to say this because everyone's paying attention to me. And it's like, I'm sure shareholders and investors on Wall Street are saying, what is your AI strategy? And how are you planning to massively lay off your staff so that you can cut corners and replace people with AI? And so you have someone like Andy Jassy come out and say, you guys are all doing great work. We've built incredible products. Alexa, everyone loves it. Spoiler alert, no one loves Alexa. It's stupid.

• 40:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  Uh, and as a result of that, sometime in the near future, I won't say when, but sometime soon, a lot of you are going to be laid off or have your jobs changed by AI. And, and I'm shocked every time one of these CEOs does this, we report it out as if it's like, oh,

• 40:24Ed Zitron?

  It's true.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  God in heaven just, just said, like, this is what's going to happen. And, and that is what's going to happen. Like, we had, you know, banner headlines saying like, Amazon CEO says AI is going to take your jobs. And it's like, well, he didn't really say how or when or by what mechanism. And there's no evidence of it happening yet. So what are we talking about?

• 40:47Ed Zitron?

  Well, it's, I think that there is an alarming amount of journalism that's excited for it, or there's just a doomerism behind it.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  I think you can replace the word AI in a lot of these articles with just God. And like, this is something that like, we talked about the first time we met in Vegas, right? Is how all of these, like, the people who are into AI talk about it as if it's just a cult. And you could, like, like, like, there's this divine aspect that has like ordained, like, you have to lose your job because AI is taking, God, God has mandated this. And like even even like with the, you know, talking to an AI like it's a person, they often gain this like divine aspect when when people are treating these chatbots like they are like sentient beings. It's like the same way that we like project divinity onto aspects of nature. And I think that is like a big, a big part of it because now you have God telling you that you're actually in the matrix and you and you and you need to do this thing.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  And for some reason, there's not safeguards put on this God program to protect you, God's creation.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  They're all programmed to be super friendly and to tell you that you're great. And it's like if you if you're actually like trying to use this thing and you're viewing it as you talking to you, like I have to tell chat GPT all the time. You're putting too much flattery in, you have to cap all of your flattery at 1% because I can't, I can't handle you. And I need you to like explain why everything you said has no bias or as little bias as possible or to explain all of your bias in it. So that I can read and evaluate and just go like, no, that's not it. And I've been told I'm insane for for like programming all the AI I talk to that way.

• 42:15Ed Zitron?

  It's input output shit. It's making it's adjusting a program to do a thing for you.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  It is because like if you just leave it at the default.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  It's trying to warp your brain.

• 42:23Speaker 05

  Like if you leave it at the default, it's just like, you've done nothing wrong. You are absolutely correct and everything you said, what a brilliant thing that you've said. And if you like, listen to that enough times, it's the bleh.

• 42:35Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, I think it's warping your brain because there is no intention behind this. They're they train it whatever, but they could relatively easily put a thing saying, just to be clear, you are talking to you. This is they don't want to do that. And I think it might have been Altman, one of the goombas from OpenAI.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  It breaks the illusion, right? Like it's it's like the Wizard of Oz thing.

• 42:55Ed Zitron?

  Yes, but they should break the illusion.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  No, they had they have to, but it.

• 42:58Ed Zitron?

  They don't want to.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  They don't want to because it would mean they will get less.

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Tension economy, the less, it breaks the engagement. You're not going to engage with it if you're like, this is obviously a robot.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  That's that's the part where I get actually emotional and angry about AI is when the CEOs of these companies talk about it. They talk about it as if it's inevitable and we have no agency. That's where the God thing comes in where it's like, yes, this is happening whether we keep doing it or not.

• 43:25Ed Zitron?

  And we are the ones who will fix it, of course.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, I mean, Sam Altman, I was just rereading like a.

• 43:32Ed Zitron?

  The gentle singularity, that fucking blog.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  Oh, I hadn't read that one. No, I was talking about he created WorldCoin.

• 43:40Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Christ almighty.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Because he's so convinced that.

• 43:46Ed Zitron?

  No, let me stop you there.

• 43:47Speaker 06

  Okay. I'll stop.

• 43:49Ed Zitron?

  No, I just want to stop you because you said he's so convinced. Your only source of information for that claim is Sam Altman. Sam Altman did WorldCoin so he could sell a cryptocurrency. That's the only reason.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 43:58Ed Zitron?

  So he could collect a bunch of debt. No, he's so convinced. He's convinced of nothing, I believe. Okay, this is literally me.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Sure. The pitch, the pitch of WorldCoin. I, I, like, I interviewed their CEO last year.

• 44:08Ed Zitron?

  He's a real bozo. He's a real dumb.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  I had a lovely conversation with him.

• 44:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sorry. Sorry.

• 44:15Speaker 06

  But, you know, the pitch is AI is going to become so ubiquitous and it's going to destroy all the jobs and, and flatten the economy and we're going to have to have this UBI that's distributed by, by this blockchain mechanism. And I'm sitting here and I'm going, yes, but we don't have, we are actually full agents in this world. Like, we all need to step back and realize that we have sovereignty over what we do and the technology we make and how we regulate it. And it's a real, just like, kind of, uh, uh, abdication of responsibility for society where I'm just like,

• 44:58Speaker 06

  what, what do we want to make for future generations? And that's all the like pablum that comes out of Silicon Valley is like, building a better future. And it's like, you, you can't have both things be true.

• 45:10Ed Zitron?

  What are you building?

• 45:11Speaker 05

  It's, it's because like what they really are building is money machine go up.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  And like, that's the main thing. It's like, they say all this lip service about making everything better. Well, you could cure cancer. That would like legitimately make everything better.

• 45:23Ed Zitron?

  They will.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  Sure. You could do, do that, but it's like their first and foremost.

• 45:30Ed Zitron?

  I believe Joe Biden will cure cancer before Sam Altman. Both have claimed they will. I believe Joe Biden would. No, I mean neither of them will do it, which is my larger point. But I mean, you're both wrong because to quote Sam Altman, "As data center production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity." People are often curious about how much energy chat GPT queries use. The average query is 0.34 watt hours, about what an oven would use in little over a second. Now, someone has almost immediately thrown water on this entire thing, but this blog, A Gentle Singularity by Sam Altman, was quoted "like scripture by everyone." And that, I think, I'd love that you brought up divinity gag,

• 46:14Ed Zitron?

  because it really is just like the pseudo-religious, it's religion capitalism. It's all, it's just, we found a way to love a company like a god and also kind of abdicate any responsibility or thinking about it? Because when you look at the people who love AI and the way they talk about it, it's not about what's happening today. It's nowhere near the like in the future when this happens.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  No, it's always, it's always this future prophecy. And if, if we believe in this god enough and if we build up this religion enough, it can deliver us an infinite automated money machine.

• 46:44Ed Zitron?

  But what's crazy is the money machine is bad. It doesn't make any, it loses so much. They spent $327 billion in capital expenditures this year, or projected to, and the revenue of this industry is like $40 billion.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  That's because money is fake until you have none. That's the only time it's real.

• 47:01Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, money will run out. Money, money go down. Money go down, not work good. And the story that's really been twisting me up this week, I was telling you about earlier, and I swear it won't be this boring, is OpenAI is Microsoft's biggest customer. $10 billion in projected revenue this year through Azure. And Azure revenue has been kind of like not growing so good. So we just have one of the largest tech companies in the world. That is just handing itself cash and as part of the deal when they funded them in 2023, they funded them principally in cloud compute credits. So $10 billion of Microsoft's revenue is going to be partially in air miles. And everyone's just sitting around being like, this is great. On top of that, $10 billion

• 47:45Ed Zitron?

  of revenue from OpenAI, so 13 billion total from Microsoft, then OpenAI projected to make $12.7 billion. Half of the revenue in this fucking industry is OpenAI or the slop, the cost slop of OpenAI.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  It's okay, Ed. We can just, we can just keep blowing up the balloon. It's never gonna pop. We can keep blowing it up.

• 48:05Ed Zitron?

  It's just crazy.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  We, we found the infinite balloon. It's this crazy material that's indestructible. You can keep blowing more in and it's gonna be fine.

• 48:15Ed Zitron?

  It's just, it's so funny as well.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  The economy's gonna be fine.

• 48:18Ed Zitron?

  It's so good. I just feel like AI is just like the imbecile magnet. It's just this idea that people who don't really know stuff but have got to positions of power can go, yes, finally, a thing that will make up the reason I have to buy it for me.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  I, I see this in journalism all the time. I'm getting like conversations about, well, AI could replace entry level journalism jobs. I think that's like a real concern. If you're like just a, I started as a copy editor with zero responsibilities other than like finding typos and misspellings and occasionally getting to write a headline and being like, oh, thank you for letting me write a headline. Uh, and I could see a large language model filling that in, in which case I don't get a jumping off point to do what I want to do.

• 49:05Ed Zitron?

  And I mean, they've been offshoring those jobs as well. It's just another offshoring.

• 49:08Speaker 06

  My point is, I've been in this for like 20 years and it was happening then. It might happen at a more accelerated timeframe with AI.

• 49:19Speaker 06

  But I'm skeptical you're still gonna need, as we saw with that Chicago

• 49:24Ed Zitron?

  Chicago sometimes.

• 49:25Speaker 06

  Summer book list, you know, like in case anyone missed it, you know, you got the authors, right? And then just made up complete horseshit for the books that they didn't write and were about whatever AI made hallucinated they were about. You know, an entry level copy editor would have caught that. But we've already fired those people. We've already laid off the entry level copy editors. So, you know, all of these things, these ways that like technology is going to create job losses. That's, that's standard in our age. AI is going to create some job losses. Yes. Is it going to be the, what was it? White color bloodbath? I don't think so.

• 50:05Ed Zitron?

  10 to 20% unemployment, according to Wario Amade. And it's, that's a CEO of Anthropic, and his name is Wario. Everyone makes the typo and touched Dario. I'm not sure why it's in books, literature, but let's start correcting the record.

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• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  It fucking pisses me off as well, because I mentioned it earlier. There's almost like a excitement in journalism for job loss and AI. Maybe it's doomerism, maybe they're just like, "Oh, I'll get ahead of this." But it feels almost like they want it to happen, and they want it so that it proves AI is the big point. It is religious to get fucking Christ on.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  It always comes back to that. We've been talking about this for two years, like this cultish nexus around AI. I mean, this goes in like the early superintelligence hype of the 20 teens, right? It's all built on this idea.

• 52:13Ed Zitron?

  Wait, there was a hype cycle on that? How did I fucking forget that one? There was in...

• 52:17Speaker 04

  It was a long time ago. Like the Rock was Basilisk thing, right?

• 52:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  It's the very, like, the early stages of this. Yeah, like viewing AI like this inevitable god.

• 52:26Ed Zitron?

  Have you heard of Eliza Yudowski?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Sounds familiar.

• 52:30Ed Zitron?

  I keep having this person brought up to me by serious people. He is a person that writes about AGI and writes scary. He wrote like a fanfic, Harry Potter fanfiction thing with AGI.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:41Ed Zitron?

  I just want to be clear. If anyone else brings him up to me, I'm gonna email you back just some sort of obscenity. Because you should not take this man seriously. He writes Harry Potter fanfiction. He has just ingratiated himself with other cultists from Les Wrong. And I see real journalists mentioning them. And it's almost like people just want to find any possible proof they're right so that they can ignore the signs that everyone's wrong. And I also think that regular people see the problems of AI way more than the journalists do. And it's strange. It's bizarre. It's like, um, another thing, I forget who said this. If you're the person that said this to me, I'm very sorry for forgetting. But it's like everyone feels bad that they missed out on social media. I'm calling social media as the biggest movement.

• 53:25Ed Zitron?

  Or they feel bad on missing out on GPUs and not saying GPUs have pushed the next thing. And by the way, there are people who tried in like 2017 to say GPUs would be the next computing thing. And they were ignored. Uh, it was crazy how early they were. But it's.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  And journalists in particular were late to the internet.

• 53:43Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 53:44Speaker 06

  So we're, there's probably a, an institutional bias toward taking tech seriously because we are paying for brushing off the internet in, you know, 2000.

• 53:56Ed Zitron?

  I think I'm gonna start an award show called the Felferit Awards.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  That's a good idea.

• 54:00Ed Zitron?

  And I'm gonna, when, because it's like, you say that, and they were late, they weren't late to the metaverse. How'd that go? They, they were late to crypto.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  NFTs.

• 54:09Ed Zitron?

  NFTs.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  That's because crypto sucks and it's hard to talk, like, it's hard to explain. Skill issue. Yeah, having to explain blockchain.

• 54:18Ed Zitron?

  No, it's, it, the problem with crypto is it's complex, but you can explain it quite simply as a decentralized database. But when you explain it like that, it sounds fucking boring because it is.

• 54:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 54:28Ed Zitron?

  It's connected to money sometimes. It's, I wrote about crypto for years and every time I think about writing it again, I feel sad.

• 54:36Speaker 06

  Come do my job. I'll switch with you.

• 54:38Ed Zitron?

  Sure. I, absolutely. Give me a CNN column. Michael Balaban will kick my ass. But it's, he's, he's a wonderful man.

• 54:47Speaker 06

  He's great.

• 54:48Ed Zitron?

  It's just so frustrating as well because as ever, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the big show, it's like, the people who get fucked here are regular people. AI bubble bursts. It's not like Sam, Sam Altman will be humiliated. I will make sure of it. But it's not like Wario or Sammy, Clammy Sammy. Clammy Sammy. I, is gonna get done in at the end of this. It's gonna be, the stocks are going to crash to fuck. People's pensions will be fucked. I mean, 35% of the American stock market is magnificent seven, 19% of that is Nvidia. I think 42% of Nvidia's revenue is magnificent seven stocks. I will have a citation in this notes, Laura Bratton at Yahoo Finance, the goat. But it's going to hit everyone, but it's not gonna, I don't think it'll be great financial crisis level, but it's gonna be really bad and.

• 55:33Ed Zitron?

  We're, I don't think these AI companies are going to be offering the free spigot anymore. It costs them so much money. So we're gonna see all of this get like, it will still be there, but like this festering hole at the side of, in, in the side of the tech industry as everyone goes, what the fuck's next?

• 55:48Speaker 04

  You have such a beautiful way with words.

• 55:50Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 55:51Speaker 06

  Kind of the way the metaverse still exists within Facebook, but like, it's not the star child.

• 55:58Ed Zitron?

  Okay. I was talking, talking to my lady, lady last night about this and it was driving me insane. Isn't it fucking insane Meta, a multi-trillion market cap company just went, don't worry, legs are coming in the metaverse? And then just went, actually they're not.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  Actually, we're pivoting to AI glasses now.

• 56:17Ed Zitron?

  A huge company just lied. They lied constantly for like over a year. You had people being like, absolutely believe you 100%. And then everyone just went, oh, isn't that fucking straight? What the fuck is going, it's, it's weirder than the AI thing. Though the AI thing is pretty weird. It's like we live, tech journalism sometimes lives in an alternate reality.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:40Ed Zitron?

  It's so, I don't know, I, I don't know what's going on with a lot of things, but in particular, it just feels like it would be more fun if we were honest. It'd be so much more fun. I wrote a thing today, coming out in a few days. So the thing I wrote on Monday is just make fun of them because they're not charming, they're not interesting, they're not hot. None of them, none of them tasty looking.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  I think Seth Altman has had some work done recently.

• 57:07Ed Zitron?

  Do you think he has? What's he have done?

• 57:09Speaker 04

  His lips are looking a little fuller than usual.

• 57:11Ed Zitron?

  Juicy Sammy.

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Just saying.

• 57:13Ed Zitron?

  Juicy Sam Altman, alright, that's a, that's a new, that's a new, that's a new phrase we did to text eight people. But it's, it's like they're not charming, they're not interesting. Steve Jobs, complete monster, but at least interesting to listen to. They're boring, they're all management consultants, they don't. I went and reread the iPhone announcement today. And the beginning is him just being like, yeah, we did this, we did this. And then we came up with a thing that did all of this and I'm about to show you. Yeah, I, I get why people cheered that, but now it's like.

• 57:43Speaker 04

  I tried watching the liquid glass presentation. I fell asleep in like five to seven minutes.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  I was there.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  Damn. And like, I think there's parts of Liquid Glass that seem compelling. I, I, hopefully it'll get worked out, uh, before it really has the full launch. But like, it's presented in the most non-compelling way possible.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  It's glass, based on Vision OS from the most successful.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  The most successful Apple product of all time.

• 58:09Ed Zitron?

  You remember the Vision Pro? No?

• 58:14Ed Zitron?

  Me neither. Like, uh, but that's the thing as well, like, they're trying to get us excited for, for Liquid ass, and it's very confusing as well because you could just describe it in a boring way and say, yeah, like, and just be very matter of fact about it, but I guess it's for shareholders, but is it even? No, even the most slimy Apple people were kind of like, eh, you know.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  They needed a literal shiny thing to distract from the AI.

• 58:41Ed Zitron?

  How about they fix cropping in screenshots? Fifty percent of my screenshots do not crop properly. If you work for Apple and you know why, email me. Uh, but it's, oh, I don't know. Make odd devices work good. They are, they're, they're all a mess. Everything's.

• 58:56Speaker 05

  It's like, if you think about the iPhone, it's seventeen years old. It's ready to go to college.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  That's scary.

• 59:03Speaker 05

  People who are twenty-one, who can vote and go to war and do all those things, most likely have no memory of a life before the smartphone.

• 59:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Like, we're at a point where people want what's next. And so I think you just have, like, tech journalism, we have to chase clicks and SEO farm bait. We have to chase all of the, to stay alive. And so it's very much like, this is the next thing. Get hype. Because if you all care, it's like, we're looking for the next Game of Thrones, but for tech. Because Game of Thrones was such a huge traffic magnet that literally anything that happened, like, ah, we're all drinking at the tit of, like, SEO traffic and ad monies are coming in. So I just think there is like an incentive and like, you know, journalists always get pushed in any, doesn't matter who you write for. You always get pushed to like, do the next big thing, find the next big trend and, oh, did, did, did, do, do, do.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you're a Beltway journalist, you have to think about what's the next election? Who's gonna be the next thing? You know, it's like all the horse race.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  What's the, what's the take?

• 1:00:02Ed Zitron?

  And I think that the reason no one wants to write that. Is that there's nothing left. I don't mean this.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  That's the scary thought, right? It's like, what if this is it like? Like, we're trying to come up with what's the thing that'll be the new thing after the smartphone and like? It's like, like AR contacts, like, come on.

• 1:00:20Ed Zitron?

  It's been a minute.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Like, it's until we start getting the chips implanted, like, and.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  I thought Joni I was hired to fix this, to figure out what the what's the phone that's not a phone.

• 1:00:31Ed Zitron?

  We've come up with a new kind of phone.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  It's.

• 1:00:34Ed Zitron?

  There's no screen on it.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I just think we're at a point where like the tech is stalled out, right? Because if you have like the law of diminishing returns and just.

• 1:00:41Ed Zitron?

  Rockcom bubble, our episode last year. But it is, though. It's we're at the, are we at the, I'm not gonna say end of history because people misquote Fukuyama, but it's, we're at the end. Actually, anyway, I'll get back to that later. It's, we're at the end of innovation. For a minute, because if you look at how they're trying to innovate right now, first of all, I know I've been making fun of the overpaying people, but the overpaying thing they're doing is only something you do if you have no fucking clue.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  They don't know what to do.

• 1:01:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they're just throwing around money. They're investing $327 billion this year into something. They don't, they built massive data centers. I don't think that any of, I think they all kind of have realized there might not be a next thing. And I think that their obsession has become something different, which is line go up, money go up, but how can I charge you $10 a month? How can I charge you and a thousand people in your organization $30 a month? To the point that they don't know how to do math anymore. And they're like, well, I got you to pay $30. It cost me 75 to get that money from you. But I don't know how to fix that. But what if I spent more money?

• 1:01:50Ed Zitron?

  To find out, maybe, I don't know. And they don't know how, and they will say this. If you ask questions, which people tend not to with these people. And it's just, even you've got analysts doing, there was an analyst earlier who's like, oh, yeah, Google's, uh, they're making $3.1 billion in Google One subscriptions because of AI. And it's not, they're just like, Google One subscriptions have gone up and they're like. Fuck, I think it's AI.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  I mean, this is, this is why everyone's focused on AI is because it's like, it's like the final boss of our like collective tech on like unconsciousness, right? It's this thing, Victoria, you were talking about earlier, it's like, like in like, you know, like 80s sci fi. This is always like the final thing. Yeah. After we've gotten like, you know, augmented reality, you got the contacts, got the glasses, like AIs, that's like the last thing. That's the last like ghost of our, of our past that we're still trying to chase. That's this thing that's still trying to like, control us like time traveling like backwards in time. This idea that eventually we will, we will have this AI thing. And like, it is, yeah, it is, it is like the final boss and we're always trying to chase it. And we're coming up with like the, the, the barrier of like, maybe this thing isn't actually ever gonna be real.

• 1:02:56Ed Zitron?

  And I think they think it's the magical thing because it will tell them how to run their business.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Because it'll, well, it'll tell them what's next. The only, this is as far as we can get. And then we have to create something smarter than us so it can tell us what will the next thing will be. Because this is the final thing we can imagine. And this is like, this is like it.

• 1:03:12Ed Zitron?

  But even when you listen to Clammy Sammy talking about it and he'll say, he will be like.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Juicy Sammy.

• 1:03:18Ed Zitron?

  Juicy Sammy, juicy Sam Oldman.

• 1:03:23Ed Zitron?

  Clammy Sammy's thing he always says is, I can't wait to see what you'll build with this. And it's like, motherfucker, that is your job. I, and that's actually the thing with AI as well. I'm always being to, but the few haters who dare enter my dojo is they say, oh, well, you don't know how to use it, right? You're not doing it correctly. I think even Alison, you might have mentioned this, like the holding it wrong thing. But it's like, no, I am the customer. I am, I am paying you for work. I shouldn't have to write a 950 word prompt that tells you to imagine you're a spaceman or whatever, like whatever makes it work. Fuck you, fuck you, man. I, I, me pay you money, you give me thing.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  900 word prompt to generate a 900 word story?

• 1:04:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. That sucks. They're like straight upset, they're just like bereft of, and it's also, we've handed over society to people that don't create things. We've had people who were just like, showing different faces to enough people that they get where they need to go. The business idiot writ large. And it's just, it's so funny as well because.

• 1:04:28Ed Zitron?

  It's going to fall apart and when it does, everyone, I genuinely, I mean, I look forward to it because of the obvious yucks and chuckles I will get out of it. But there's going to be a really interesting period of journalism having to sit and go, why did we fall for this? And if there isn't, I will make this happen with all of my energy. I will hold everyone, because it's, I think, and I'm not insulting, you're out there.

• 1:04:55Ed Zitron?

  But Victoria.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  I'm not insulting you.

• 1:04:56Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, this is not an insult, I promise. Read the comments on AI stories on The Verge.

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  I do read the comments on AI.

• 1:05:03Ed Zitron?

  Because you see, regular people are so skeptical of this shit.

• 1:05:07Speaker 05

  I know, I read, I read all the comments on all the stories that I write, which are just like, thank you for calling out how stupid it is.

• 1:05:14Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing, though. Regular people seem to get it.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  There's gonna be, well, it depends. Like, I think there's a sector of, of counterculture that's developing like a neo-Luddite perspective. Like beyond just like, you know, like, like, anti-tech, like, green anarchists, which have carried the Luddite torch for the past like thirty years. We're starting to see like, like, quote-unquote, the cool kids adopting this like neo-Luddite tendency. Mostly in response to like, you know, like, like alienation and like automation.

• 1:05:42Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  And I think that trend is gonna like continue. Like, that's gonna, it's gonna be like, almost like a social status, like, status, like a signifier. Is, is the fact that you're not reliant on, on these things. Because there will be a version of AI that does keep getting like, normified, I think. It's gonna, it's.

• 1:06:00Ed Zitron?

  How do you mean?

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  There's gonna be, like, even if you look at the way higher education is working right now, the level of people who are graduating just on the basis of like AI helping them with large parts of their assignments. Like, I have, I have a few friends who are professors. And the majority of assignments that are turned in are majority written by AI. And we get to this point, we're gonna have like, we're gonna have a new generation of the workforce that doesn't really know how to do anything. Because AI's been doing everything for them, but they got their degree, you know, like, I am employable certificate. But now, now they don't really know what to do. So.

• 1:06:32Ed Zitron?

  And that's the ramifications of this shit.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  But there's gonna be a counterculture.

• 1:06:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  That is like, that like refuses to use that, right? That's like, I will not be using AI. That's gonna be the thing you have to like prove and like talk about. And it's, it's gonna be a version of a social, like, status card.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  Have you heard of Cluley?

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  I oh, I've seen Cluey.

• 1:06:50Ed Zitron?

  Tell us about Cluey.

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Oh, I love Cluey.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the cheat on everything app. And so it was invented by this Columbia kid drop who I interviewed him for.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Oh, I heard about this guy. Okay.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  So it's the cheat on everything app. I tested it. It helped me cheat on nothing. It was terrible.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  I cannot wait to have all my dates go flawless.

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  It can't even do that.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  Now that I read from a teleprompter.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  It can't even do that. Like in its current state, it's like you use it. It's like a prompt machine for when you are on a video call and it very slowly can answer prompts based on a transcript of your video. It's not that usable. It messed up the mics on my computer from testing it to this point where like I deleted it from my computer and video software programs like Google Meet and Zoom will pick a non-existent Cluey mic. And I'm just like, oh, I don't love that for my computer.

• 1:07:47Ed Zitron?

  It's so cool.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you know, like as soon as I wrote that story up, someone, another company messaged me and was like, we're using AI to catch the AI cheaters. And I was like, oh, okay.

• 1:07:58Ed Zitron?

  Finally, we have bare force from The Simpsons.

• 1:08:00Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  Solving this problem we created. That's the perfect use case for AI, though. Using AI to fix all the problems caused by AI. That's the real.

• 1:08:10Ed Zitron?

  I think it's beautiful.

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  That's the actual singularity.

• 1:08:13Ed Zitron?

  We've created problems to create solutions for. Neither of them work. But Cluey, the, one of the people from Andreessen went on a podcast and was like, yeah, you know, it's when marketing and virality overtake making a perfect artesian product. It's like, what you mean is when something goes viral for fucking lying. Lying, like it was a lie. Like when you say something that is not true intentionally, that's called lying.

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  It's called IRL hallucination.

• 1:08:45Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  It's weird because the way that app was born initially, it was like some other app that was used to kind of make a point about how stupid technical interviews are for devs.

• 1:08:54Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  And I was like, that's actually kind of radical and like it is proving a point and you have lost the point and now you have $5 million and some, somebody gave you $5 million into $100,000 commercials.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  A nice apartment.

• 1:09:09Ed Zitron?

  Did you hear about Mira Marati though, the former CTO of OpenAI and her new startup, Intelligent Machines? No one, so they raised, I think like a billion dollars, I want to say, and they did not share anything about the financials. They also did not share anything about the product. So anyone investing just went into a room, Mira Marati went, yes, so uh, I need money, me money now. And they went, fuck yeah, absolutely. There were reports where people, the VCs were just like, can you share anything? She said, no. On top of this, and by the way, I admire the scam at this point. I just get it. She has her voting rights supersede everyone. Get it? No, I'm, I fuck these pigs who cannot even bother

• 1:09:52Ed Zitron?

  to even think about what they're building or what it is they do. They just like, I will take an, I will give you an unlimited amount of money because of the vibes I have. Because of the.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  When's it my turn? I would love that.

• 1:10:04Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I definitely had a moment where I'm like, could I?

• 1:10:09Speaker 05

  I have great vibes. Give me money.

• 1:10:11Ed Zitron?

  Give me a hundred million dollars.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  Give me money and I will vaguely, vaguely promise to write you something in the future at a time unspecified from now.

• 1:10:19Ed Zitron?

  I will never do anything. I will guarantee you that. I mean, Ilya Sutskever, the other OpenAI guy, misreported by Pivot to AI that generally does good work, but needs to work on their fucking headlines, suggesting that they guaranteed they would not do anything until superintelligence, when the actual headline was that they said they have nothing and they want to build superintelligence, which is way funnier. I honestly, at this point, like it's evil to lie and extract capital, but the people you're extracting it from, you're wallet inspecting them. But also you could fix almost, you could fix like hun- world hunger, I think for six billion dollars, they worked it out.

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Ed Zitron?

  You could.

• 1:10:58Speaker 06

  And challenged Elon Musk and he said, if you figure out the number, I'll give it to you. And then they figured out the number.

• 1:11:03Ed Zitron?

  The number's not based. Uh, it's very upsetting. I saw an outlet as well say today that Grok only makes a hundred million dollars in revenue. It's so fucking cool as well. They all burn money. I.

• 1:11:16Speaker 05

  I mean, just give it to me.

• 1:11:18Ed Zitron?

  Give it to me also.

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  To me, sponsor a journalist. You too can sponsor a journalist to live a life.

• 1:11:26Ed Zitron?

  And the funny thing is, is like, I actually think you could make a shit ton of profitable journalism just by like talking about this bluntly. I'm doing it all the time, but it's, it's weird. And I actually, it's kind of wrap us up as well. I, I have to wonder if at the end of this farce, whether there will be a rise of critical tech journalism. I'm not holding my hopes out, but I think that there is a slogan like, you two actually, Victoria, Allison, you've both inspired me a bit that it's possible.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  I just write what's true. I try it and I tell you what happened when I tried it. That's it. It's literally my job.

• 1:12:01Ed Zitron?

  Imagine that. Imagine if that happened on Hard Fork. Sorry. Uh, but it's.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  I'm saying nothing.

• 1:12:08Ed Zitron?

  No, I know, I know, I know. I'm not going to let, and these are my opinions, just mine. I think about them all the time. It's, I'm hoping this happens because I think you've got Brian Merchant, you've got Edwin Gray Jr., Molly White, of course, one of the fucking best in the business.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  Molly's great.

• 1:12:22Ed Zitron?

  Molly is, you've got really good criticism and I think people are hungry for it. The reason I brought up the Verge's comments is this isn't like a, any kind of fun making. It's, you see people saying it now, just being like, hey, why the fuck am I having to pretend here? And I just, I think it's the business idiot idea I had a few months ago where it's like. Hey, maybe we've handed over our economy, our finances, the editorial structure of some publications and the people with the biggest microphones to people that don't understand a single goddamn thing. And it's kind of, that scares me more than anything because we talk about the harms of generative AI. And it's, yeah, there is no intention. No intention is far scarier than people being like, they want all of your data and all this.

• 1:13:06Ed Zitron?

  When they have no idea. I was actually kind of disappointed. Meredith Whitaker of Signal, she's really good, admire her dearly. She said a thing on stage about, yeah, AI agents, which is the marketing term, but they're going to do this and they're going to do this. Whenever anyone speaks about AI agents, just imagine like clown noises. Circus music if it helps because AI agents do not exist. They do not work. There are people who are getting close to a thing that might work one time. They had a big study out of Salesforce, said like, with multi-step processes, you know, things that require you to do more than one thing.

• 1:13:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Ed Zitron?

  It failed like less, more than, I think it's more than thirty-two percent of the time. It's like, sorry, it only succeeded thirty-two percent of the time, which is very bad and not getting better. And it's like, this is what, and everyone's talking about AI agents despite them not working. I realize this sentence started in one point and it's gonna end with, I feel like I'm going fucking insane. Every time I read the news and I see a new thing that does not exist and everyone says it exists. Am I crazy? Am I having a problem? Like, is, I mean, yes, but is it, is that why I'm reading the stuff that doesn't exist? It's just driving me insane. But now you've said the divinity thing. I'm just like, this isn't actually about building stuff. This is a belief system and plate spinning.

• 1:14:25Ed Zitron?

  This is just an intention to build a vibes-based economy, except it can't last long term. Oh, God.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  Or until the next, the next revolution that replaces the AI god, you know, if like industrial revolution and modernity killed god, quack god.

• 1:14:44Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:14:45Speaker 06

  Then maybe AI is the, is the. Demigod that we that we replace God with and then something else will happen.

• 1:14:54Ed Zitron?

  Sam Altman is the Antichrist.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  Many, many, many people are saying this.

• 1:14:59Ed Zitron?

  Many people.

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  Many people are saying this. Many people in a New York City podcasting studio are saying.

• 1:15:05Ed Zitron?

  Did I do that? Um, it's, sorry, uh, it's, but even then, the reason I say he's the Antichrist is not any recent interviews on the New York Times podcast. It's specifically about the fact that he is able to charm every business idiot. He's so good at it. He's good at saying nothing in a way that makes people give him a billion dollars. And he is wrapped, I think he's wrapped everyone up in this insanity and no one really knows why they're doing it. You've got journalists, you've got investors, you've got consumers even who are like chasing this dream. And I genuinely think he may lead the tech industry to a kind of ruin. I don't think all the companies are going to shut down, but this is the ultimate hubris of basing everything in tech on venture capital. Invested by people that don't really understand and public companies run by people with MBAs.

• 1:15:49Ed Zitron?

  Every single, uh, Mark Zuckerberg's a rarity. He doesn't have an MBA, but all the rest of them do. Even the guy who replaced Andy Jassy, uh, AWS, the cloud part of Amazon has an MBA. MBAs are everywhere. I think we should bar them from running companies.

• 1:16:04Ed Zitron?

  And also being allowed to.

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  Just don't give people MBAs.

• 1:16:09Ed Zitron?

  Or healthcare, no, I'm sorry, I'll stop that one there. Uh, but it's, it's just, I don't know, we're, we're all going to suffer for this. I will, I'll blog about it, I guess, and we'll all blog, we'll do podcasts, Gare. But you know what? I'm going to wrap it on that happy note there. Gare, where can people find you?

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  Well, I help run a daily Yikes, uh, new show, uh, for Coles and Media called It Could Happen Here. That's where you can find most of my work. Right now I'm finishing my final piece on the Stop Cup City movement in Atlanta, as well as an upcoming piece on liberal accelerationism. So.

• 1:16:43Ed Zitron?

  What is that?

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  You know, that's what the piece is about.

• 1:16:46Ed Zitron?

  Well, we'll have to find out and listen to it. Allison, where can people find you?

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  Uh, I write a business newsletter for CNN called Nightcap. You can just Google CNN Business Nightcap. And I'm on Blue Sky.

• 1:16:57Ed Zitron?

  And, uh, Victoria.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  You can find me at The Verge and, uh, all my handles on everything, Blue Sky, Twitter, Instagram, all the things is at Vik M Song.

• 1:17:06Ed Zitron?

  You can find me inside your computer. That's where I live. I'm Ed Zitron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you, of course, to our wonderful producer, Daniel Goodman. You've been hearing us recorded out of the beautiful New York City, Nevada. And yeah, you keep listening to my goddamn show. We'll have a monologue this week as well. Peace out.

• 1:17:31Ed 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 app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:18:03Speaker 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.

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