The AI Industry Must Stop Doom Trolling w/ Cal Newport

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it. Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen Cal Newport’s “Dear A. I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs To Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/ Newsletter: https://calnewport.com New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport 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.

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• 2:10Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media.

• 2:13Ed Zitron?

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

• 2:28Ed Zitron?

  That's right, I'm back, all of you. And to be clear, when I said I was having wisdom teeth surgery, I meant I was having more of them added to make me more powerful. The operation was a success. I apologize also for doing this week in reverse with the longer episode on the Friday and the monologue on the, well, I guess Tuesday, I guess. I had to put out OpenAI's financials at the last minute, and well, here we are. Subscribe to the newsletter, ideally the premium to support your local Zitron. And as ever, if you have anyone else's financials, you can catch me on ezitron.76 on Signal. It's gonna be in the episode notes. Anyway, today, now that I'm done drinking milkshakes, I'm joined by the wonderful computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about AI, but specifically

• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  to talk about what he calls doom trolling in one of the best pieces I have read on AI ever. Cal?

• 3:16Speaker 07

  Well, first of all, I'm disappointed. I've sent you my financials multiple times in your Signal chat, and yet you have not written 10,000 words about them yet. So I don't know what you're doing here.

• 3:27Ed Zitron?

  You haven't lost $11 billion or anything. You need to get those numbers down.

• 3:32Speaker 07

  No, I

• 3:33Ed Zitron?

  Only write about bad companies.

• 3:34Speaker 07

  I wrote it off, though, and it's okay.

• 3:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you moved it to an SPV.

• 3:38Speaker 07

  That's right. I may have spent $11 billion, but really I was profitable. It's just a matter

• 3:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:44Speaker 07

  How you look at it.

• 3:45Ed Zitron?

  But let's talk doom trolling, because you had this fantastic piece that talks about the fact that all these companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, even DeepMind to an extent, just keep selling things based on the destruction that AI will allegedly cause, though they appear to be talking about another kind of technology entirely when you think about it.

• 4:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have forgotten or overlooking how strange this is, right? Because what we have here, let's just, let's abstract away from the particular products here and just say, what do we have here more abstractly as a business story? We have consumer product companies.

• 4:20Speaker 07

  Who are on a regular basis through interviews and official white paper releases, trying to terrify their consumers about the harms that their products are going to cause. And if this was any other industry, this would be completely mind boggling. The example I had in the, in the New York Times op ed is like if the, the CEO of Ford, you know, put out a white paper and was like, we're really worried that our F150s are going to start catching on fire and burning people to death. Uh, but you know, automotive technology, we can't impede it. Uh, and we're just going to get back to making them. We're like, what the hell are you talking about?

• 4:54Ed Zitron?

  They're gonna go 2,000 miles an hour at some point in the future. Yeah, we would just ban, we'd ban it.

• 5:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, with consumer safety.

• 5:01Ed Zitron?

  No one would buy. Yeah. Just, it's really, it is something that's gen- I love the term doom trolling as well, because it really frames it well, because it's, it's all part of a larger complex of them never talking about what they're building today. It's always this theoretical scary thingy that might, that it's always two years or two minutes away, depending on who you're talking to.

• 5:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. So what, what I did was, I said, let's actually think this through, because I'm also a digital ethicist. I was like, let's actually think this through with our ethics hat on, right? Like, let's think through what particularly anthropic, I think, is the most systematic in this propaganda campaign, that, uh, I, you know, I analogized it to a, a cat leaving a dead bird on your doorstep and walking away. They just, every two to three weeks, want to drop some sort of doom troll document to get people freaked out, and then they just back away and go back to what they're doing. And I, I kind of got fed up with this. So I said, let's do a moral analysis about this strategy. And I said, look, there's only two options here. Option number one, they really do think the technology they're building has put them on a trajectory to, in the best case, destroying the economy,

• 6:02Speaker 07

  or in the worst case, wiping out humanity, in which case, every ethical system of, you know, any merit would say, you have no other choice but to stop immediately what you're doing and use all of your time, energy and treasure to try to stop other people from doing the same. The second case is you don't fully believe it, which means you are laundering the anxiety of hundreds of millions of people to try to make the bank balances of a vanishingly small number of original stockholders larger, which I think is equally as morally monstrous. There is no moral analysis that says, trying to frequently terrify people about the things you're building while making no adjustments to the things you're building. There's no moral calculus that says that makes sense. But because AI is new, and people don't understand the technology, and it's shiny, and we saw James Cameron's movies.

• 6:48Speaker 07

  We somehow treat this different. And I say, it's not different. This is a product that they are selling. They are not the stewards of an inevitable technology. They are building products according to business plans and trying to sell them. They need to act like consumer product companies. We need to demand that they act like consumer product companies.

• 7:08Ed Zitron?

  Well, another thing that you have in the piece is that it's unclear, like that dichotomy is it isn't clear why they're even doing this other than to make money. And also, they're not acting as if any of this is true. They're not doing anything that suggests that they're actually concerned. You mentioned Dario Amade's thing about how, oh, we might need a pause in AI, or we should have that option. But that isn't actually what he was suggesting. He was suggesting something entirely different.

• 7:35Speaker 07

  Well, what they said was, and they got headlines. I had to look this up for the fact checker. They got every major publication to say anthropic calls for worldwide pause in AI development. You read that section of their white paper, which by the way, reads like sci fi that a ninth grader wrote, right? It's not, it's pseudo-scientific at best. It's not even really scientific. It's, I find their white paper sort of laughable. But they said in it, we should do a worldwide pause because the thing we're building is so dangerous, dot, dot, dot. But we can't do that unless everybody in the world does the same thing, including China essentially. And if that's not the case, we have to just keep going full speed. So what they said was, we should do worldwide pause, but of course, we're not going to. It's really what they were saying there. But the point is, all right. So the report we're talking about here came out a few weeks ago.

• 8:20Speaker 07

  If you haven't read it, this is basically the report where they just out of nowhere, wrote a white paper with a bunch of charts. They always have charts where they were saying.

• 8:28Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. And pretty pictures and everything.

• 8:30Speaker 07

  Pictures and an animation of.

• 8:32Ed Zitron?

  I was just thinking of the little replicating thing. We'll get to self learning AI in a second.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  But their report basically said, huh, Claude Code, which is a harness on top of an LLM for helping to run computer programming.

• 8:45Ed Zitron?

  Just to be clear, a harness is basically a series of scripts that runs on top of the LLM.

• 8:50Speaker 07

  It's a computer program that prompts an LLM and then. parses the response the LLM gives and then actually takes actions on your computer based on what it reads, right? So it's the, yeah. And that's a whole other conversation about the coding world and how much is the harness and how much is the LLM. But they basically said this, this tool, which is a harness, it's an LLM and some other things. This tool that computer, software developers are using is getting really good. And, you know, that could be, we think that it might be, looks like it's getting closer to be able to improve itself. And if it does, recursive self-improvement, which by the way is such as, it's at the core of philosophical superintelligence, right? The sort of Silicon Valley cult-like thinking about computers replacing us. If it does, hey, maybe that'll be good for humanity.

• 9:33Speaker 07

  It'll cure all diseases, but also we could lose control of it. Thank you. Have a nice day. And they walked away. They just put out that report. That's the report.

• 9:42Ed Zitron?

  And the thing that I like about it as well is I think that we're in, the next big thing is going to be RSI. Because, so just to be clear for the listeners, recursive self-improvement is just AI that builds itself. It is a theoretical concept. It has not happened yet, but mysteriously, within the same six, seven day period, this came out and Sam Altman said to his staff in a, in a Slack message he knew would leak, oh yeah, we might delay our IPO if we have signs of RSI, if we have signs of AI that can build itself. Meta a year ago said in personal superintelligence, we're seeing the early signs. And they're doing this because, in my opinion, maybe disagree, Cal, they've run out of ideas

• 10:25Ed Zitron?

  to the point that they're literally going back to what Sam Altman said in 2019. Yeah, we'll just ask the AI what to do. Yeah. Ask the AI how to build it. These guys have so few ideas, they're just like, Christ, can't we just make the AI do it?

• 10:37Speaker 07

  RSI is a get out of jail free car from a technical expertise standpoint. So, you know, we, we saw a lot of this a year or two ago when we had like Project 2027. We had these sort of post-GPT for warnings of, you know, existential crises. It's a get out of jail free card because if you ask like the authors of 2027, Well, explain to me what a system that is smarter than humans and can fire the missiles and over, what does it look like? How you architect it? Like, what allows it to do it? And their answer is, we don't have to figure that out. The AI will, right?

• 11:14Ed Zitron?

  Perfect.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Not the history.

• 11:17Ed Zitron?

  No problem.

• 11:17Speaker 07

  We could history lesson this. This although this goes all the way back to the 1960s. So there's a, there's a statistician, applied mathematician named IJ Good. And he wrote a paper, it was really like an information theory paper, but he wrote a paper where he said, um, we, uh, if we think about, he called it ultra intelligence. Really, all you have to do is build a machine smart enough to improve itself. And then that machine will improve itself, that machine will improve itself, and then we'll get to ultra intelligence. So we don't have to figure out how to do it. The danger lies in just making the machine fast enough. So it was like a, a bit of a semi thought experiment. That became the ur document of what I call like the philosophical superintelligence cultist. So this sort of, uh, where the philosophers took this idea

• 12:01Speaker 07

  away from the technologist and began turning it into a sort of digital era scholasticism, where they sort of abstracted away all technical details and just started building list of list of list of lists of all the different things that could happen. They just did a bunch of thought experiments about superintelligence and recursive self-improvement. They then merged with the, the utopian singularity people that were coming out of sort of Kurzweil's orbit. And you kind of created this group that was non-technical. This is not engineers. This is philosophers, ethicists and sort of gadflies and, you know, you know, speculative fiction writers and fanfiction writers like Yekowsky. And they kind of created this sort of doomerous utopian cult. And then what happened is that group was like, we should

• 12:43Speaker 07

  create a nonprofit to look at these ideas and we'll take Sam Altman and put him in charge. We'll call this OpenAI. And then suddenly they were like, oh my God, this Gen AI thing is working better than we thought. And we have now a, one of the, you know, someone coming out of this general kind of cultish, let's eschatological, you know, in times you could come through computers, was suddenly and accidentally in charge of the most important company in AI. And one of his, you know, lieutenants left to start his own company and his name was Dario Amade. So these, the two major players we have in AI right now come out of philosophical superintelligence, which uses this idea of RSI and it's like a, it's like a parable. It's like an abstraction.

• 13:28Speaker 07

  This is not like a serious, it wasn't like a technical concern. It was a, like a thought experiment. And they are completely influencing the, like the daily lives and psychological wellbeing of hundreds of millions and like the economic health of the entire world. So it's, it's a really an interesting world we've ended up in now. And all of which is to say, I don't think we're talking enough about how weird these people are. I think we keep steering the conversation back to the technology itself. We keep steering the conversation back to like, well, could it take over or not? And we need to spend some more time saying, wait, who are these people and what are they doing? They're doom trolling? This makes no sense. No company ever in the history of companies was ever trying to troll their own customers to be afraid of their products.

• 14:11Speaker 07

  They're, they're treating their technology like a religious object. Like we, we are underestimating the weirdness of these people. And when we put that into focus, it completely changes, I think, our own psychological relationship with what's going on right now.

• 14:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And I fully agree that it is almost, I think it's a distraction as well from the actual reality of what these things are. And I think it's a deliberate one. I naturally fall on the side of just thinking these people are deeply cynical. I've met people who think that Dario Amade believes this stuff. I actually don't, I don't think they believe a fucking thing. I think that however you feel is however you feel, but I think that they correctly realize that they could very easily make people talk about something that doesn't exist just by mentioning it. How, I saw a bunch of headlines that were like, wow, Anthropic sees the path to self-building AI. No, they don't. Other than the fact they had a single sentence saying, I see the path to this.

• 15:10Ed Zitron?

  They don't have any proof. They don't have anything. And yeah, you're right. These people are weird. I have seen people on, on X, the everything app, Twitter. Actually posting that we are in AI 2027, that everything matches up with AI 2027. I want to be clear, the, and the reason I brought, mentioned this, I just brought this up, is that in early 2026, in AI 2027, they say that Agent One has already started doing its own research. That's not happening. None of that's happening. In fact, none of this is happening. These people are just weird fantasists. I think while there's the poison of the philosophers in them, I just think that Wario Amadei and Sam Altman both, I think that they both realize

• 15:55Ed Zitron?

  that journalists are easily conned, that investors are easily conned, that you can just say shit and anyone will print it and believe you because you're a CEO.

• 16:05Speaker 07

  I don't know how to answer that question because the more I look into how quasi-religious and cultish this sort of philosophical superintelligence community is, the more I get confused about what these people actually believe. So go spend time in Silicon Valley, go spend-

• 16:24Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I mean, to be clear, when I say they, I'm referring specifically to Amadei and Altman.

• 16:30Speaker 07

  Well, so-

• 16:30Ed Zitron?

  I could, I fully believe that there are tons of people in the valley that 100% believe this, that they believe that this is the path to that.

• 16:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:37Ed Zitron?

  I think, just to be abundantly clear, I don't think everyone is cynical. I think they've been easily conned, but I don't think that they're cynical.

• 16:45Speaker 07

  No, I could, I could believe that as, and I could believe that as they, their companies got larger and their leadership roles got larger, that they have stepped away like, oh, this is, this was a little naive. That's possible. But also, I saw a news report today that Dario, I don't know if this is true, so I'm just, there's a headline I haven't read yet, that he has like one direct report?

• 17:07Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  So I don't think, you know, he's, he's necessarily in the war room with a thousand engineers and like doing a lot of business strategy here too. So it's possible that they, these guys are more isolated than- Then we think, I don't know.

• 17:20Ed Zitron?

  I mean, if he has one direct report, he's not doing anything. He's just what he's going to meetings. Sorry, what were you saying?

• 17:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, but, but, but coming back to it, like, what, what are the, whether they, how much they believe or not? And I hope they don't because again, I think it would be morally monstrous if you really believe this, that you're like, yeah, but, but I want to win an IPO, like I want to make more money.

• 17:39Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 07

  I think that would be morally monstrous, right? But like, if you think about what the benefits would, would be, they've, this has led to a sort of discourse environment. Essentially where you have a normal technology that's, that's advancing along a jagged frontier, which is what happens with like new technologies. There's like certain applications where they feel like they're making progress and a lot of other applications where they're stuck. And so like they've been making progress with these, these coding systems that that's kind of a, a scenario in which there's a lot of room for play with these type of systems. A lot of other things like non-coding agents, et cetera, is not going so well. In math, they're making progress, but that's such a narrow field and it's not like, it's not economically relevant to them. So you could see this as just like a normal technology.

• 18:25Speaker 07

  And in chat, chat search, which is basically, you know, running Google search results through a language model, the natural language search, basically. So really places they're making progress, other places they're stuck. That's like an interesting, normal technology story. But if you layer on this other sort of eschatological story about we are on our way to utopia or dystopia, and we keep trying to keep you like upset about that. Think about the way now, when you're online, how people think and talk about AI. It's all about if something made, if there's some new feature that works, if there's some new chart that goes better, that's evidence for the prophecy is true. And, and then, so then that, that puts so much more power.

• 19:05Speaker 07

  Like if you otherwise just came to me and said like, hey, we have this like advance in our coding harnesses. I'd be like, I don't care. I'm not a software developer. But if you say, oh, that means that the prophecy of the RSI gods is true now. Suddenly that is really eventful and I'm really excited or scared, but I'm giving a lot of import to your company. So I do think. generates way more sense of of import on these otherwise like I think very my often very minor and jagged improvements. I mean, I think with other companies, if you kept putting out graphs that you created on measures you created, I was like, I don't know what that means. Tell me when like my business is going to be doing better. Right? So it there is a huge advantage regardless of intention. There is a huge advantage to have the doom troll because

• 19:50Speaker 07

  as long as people are terrified or extremely excited about this future. And then there's a secondary advance. This is cynical, but I just want to throw it out here, Ed, because I'm sensing this more. I think there's a whole other substrata of sort of like tech adjacent people who are who are, you know, online or not, who got caught up a little bit in that type of hype type vision. And now their pride is engaged. And so now they will they will interpret, I encounter this all the time, not even skepticism, just literally saying, oh, I don't think that tool, people are struggling to use that tool well, or this might, this is not a very profitable model here. They'll have to find another model. They interpret it as like, well, this is embarrassing, because I was

• 20:32Speaker 07

  just telling my my siblings and everyone at dinner last night about because I use Claude code and I I think it's how 9000 and I was just so excited about it. It's cognitive dissonance and I'm embarrassed. And so now I am a warrior for the prophecy. So I think you also have that substrate who are like, yeah, but what about and then, you know, some metric that went up or something like that. And that's way in their benefit as well. You have a soldiers of marketers that are trying to basically protect their pride.

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• 23:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you've absolutely nailed it. It's the pride thing. Again, hadn't thought of that, but you're right. The way that they react when you give, I mean, I just published OpenAI's financials and the pretzels they're contorting themselves into, the ways in which it's Silicon Valley has always been this proudly atheistic, meritocratic, rugged pragmatism world, or at least this is how they sold themselves. It's not about your feelings. It's about can you ship co? Is your software good? Does it make money? But something about this is really entered into the realm of religiosity, not even faith, because faith is like faith is a much stronger and more

• 23:56Ed Zitron?

  fundamentally sound thing. This is religious cultism, but the god is capital. Like you can say it's AI, but the god is capitalism. It is this idea that the the big money people who are constantly threatening you, like they just they're like, yeah, it's gonna kill you. It's gonna take everything. I guess it's Pascal's wager as well. It's well, if I don't know if this is the case, but if they're all saying it, and if I'm wrong, Rocco's basilisk will drop an anvil on me, I guess. It's it's frustrating, but also I don't know what these people will do if the bubble, when the bubble bursts. I don't know why I'm saying if, when it bursts. I don't know what these people will do, because their worldview is built around existing outside of reality,

• 24:40Ed Zitron?

  almost like that just this chatbot will become god, will become autonomous. And because I was there saying it will become autonomous, I will be given something. It's unclear what the reward is other than simpering. And there's something in it for them. That's the that's the thing. It's like, I guess maybe it's community they're finding. It's replace AI with God, just like with church, and they would mock whoever was talking about it. They would mock anyone who took a sign of Well, this is proof that God exists, but they would look at a meter study and they go, well, that's proof that AGI is coming.

• 25:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:18Ed Zitron?

  And it's so strange.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like, hey, look at how complicated the structure of the leaf is. It's palely intelligent design, like God exists because of the algorithm design. Like they would mock that, right?

• 25:29Ed Zitron?

  Yes, exactly. In two seconds.

• 25:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, but like, hey, we, we could draw a unicorn and ticks using like a GPT four prompt. Yeah, the, the AI God is coming.

• 25:39Ed Zitron?

  But it's, it's so strange as well. I've been writing about Silicon Valley bubble recently, this idea that basically the valley itself is, is a bubble inflating that will burst going back 10, 15 years because they ran out of new ideas that they've not had anything good, not had a new smartphone or a new app store or a new cloud computing in a while. And I think that that's what's fed into this as well, because you've got that kind of desperation that we've run out of big ideas and then added this layer of fear mongering plus childish philosophy.

• 26:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  Very like, very much like this shit must have hit so, this would hit so hard if I was 12.

• 26:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:17Ed Zitron?

  I go as 12, I'll be like, holy shit, yeah. Oh, I'm using this computer today and tomorrow it will be ultra intelligent. I'm so smart for finding this first. It's deeply sad. I didn't think I could be more embarrassed by Silicon Valley, but the fact that these people are being this weird is that I like, we need to call them weird. It's actually kind of unsettling as well. It's unsettling the, also that you are one of the few people just saying it, but everyone else is acting like this is normal or rational or

• 26:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:47Ed Zitron?

  in any way logical.

• 26:49Speaker 07

  Well, I'm trying to activate a bigger crowd here, right?

• 26:52Ed Zitron?

  And, and Good.

• 26:52Speaker 07

  here's what I think we need. I think your, your use of the word embarrassing is key because I, the trend I'm seeing, which I don't like, is this idea of the, the people who instinctually do not like what's going on with these AI companies. Are trying to match the intensity and hype of what they're saying, but going the other direction, right? And so they're like, they're destroying everything, right? Like the, the, the environment will all be destroyed by the data centers and all education's going to end. And the idea being is like, I need to be as like, as intense about all of the terribleness that your technology will cause as you are about like the good it will cause.

• 27:34Speaker 07

  Where I don't think that's playing into their hands. I think the right reaction is ridicule and embarrassment. This is where things need to be. If you read anthropic white paper, you read these things. It's, we're now going to go through, we envisioned four possible futures for where this technology could come. And then they just make up like four 12-year-old sci-fi, maybe the technology will take over, but it will be in more of a sort of a Churchillian mold and will wear top hats and that we could imagine a council of, of humans, but it would probably be like one-third humans and two-thirds robots. And, you know, like, just like work, it's just, it's just nonsense, right? Like this

• 28:11Ed Zitron?

  It's goofy.

• 28:12Speaker 07

  It's not, it's not philosophy. It's not, it's not technology. It's not political science. It's just goofy, right? And I think that, and I said this in the op-ed, I said the zeitgeist on this should, could change really quickly, right? Where it's like, all right, Dario, is the AGI in the room with you right now? Can you see the AGI in the room with you right? Cause it's, that's like, that's the reaction I think we need. Plus, forget that. Justify why I'm spending a thousand dollars a month on tokens. Like, I don't want to hear your report about, you know, hey Ford, I don't need your report about the future in which we'll have transformers that will like help us police our streets. I am spending this much money on gas for my F-150. Like, tell me like why that's worth it, right? Like

• 28:56Speaker 07

  just continually bring it back to, you have really three products you're selling right now. Great. Sell a product. It's interesting. This is interesting technology. You're making a good product out of it. Sell me. What are the benefits? Why is it worth the money? And I will take for granted, you better say it's not going to harm anyone because otherwise fix it so it doesn't. Like that should just be a

• 29:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's your job to fix.

• 29:16Speaker 07

  That's your job to fix. And you don't, and just to throw in another moral argument I put in the New York Times op-ed. It is not actually a moral argument to say, there's this thing we want to do that's going to cause potentially a lot of harm and destruction, but that guy's going to do it. And as long as he's doing it, I get to do it too. That is what my eight-year-old says, right? He's like, I know, but like, he stole the cookies. Why can't I steal it too? So I do not understand this argument. It was in the latest Anthropic paper. We're building this technology. It might come alive and we might lose control of it. But how can we stop? Because China is also building the technology. And what if they build it and it comes alive and comes control? Why don't we get to do it too? What's the moral

• 29:57Speaker 07

  argument there? This is not like a nuclear deterrence argument that if you somehow destroy humanity first, like, what's the advantage there, right? Like, what game have you won? So I don't understand that. But my bigger point here is like, yeah, I think we need to activate. I'm working on a big article now for a trade magazine for engineers, actually, where I'm making this case, it's a cry to cure. You need to stand up and say, that's nonsense. Let's talk about your real technology. I know about this because I think there's a lot of people like me who are on the wrong coast. We're not on the West Coast. We don't, we haven't gone to those cult meetings, who are like, there's interesting technology here, and I want to hear about the products. And this is actually where you and I maybe even differ a little bit. I end that piece by saying, I'm pissed off because this should

• 30:40Speaker 07

  have been for a nerd like me, an exciting time. This is a cool technology. It's hard to make products out of it, but we should have been like, kind of excited about, oh, I never thought about doing that with this. Oh, isn't that cool? What's going on? Instead, everyone is terrified. Like, you ruin this moment because of God knows why. We don't even have to get into it. So I think the right response from like, actual engineers who are not part of that cult, and, you know, you gotta swallow your pride. I get it. You were really excited to your cousin after you used Claude Code. Like, that's okay. Swallow your pride a little bit, and say, this is doom trolling, and it's embarrassing. Can we talk about the real technology like a normal product? There's cool things you can build. Some stuff isn't working. I want to know if my stock market portfolio is going

• 31:21Speaker 07

  to crash. Like, let's just be normal. Stop the weird stuff. Just stop it. Like, you're a real company trying to sell real things. Let's talk about products. Like, why, I want to spark a revolution to bring things back to normal.

• 31:36Ed Zitron?

  I fully agree. And I even said I was on Chris Hayes' show a couple weeks ago. And I said, I think we should legally ban boosters from using the future tense. I don't think they should be allowed to say if either. I don't think they should be able to say will. I think they should only be allowed to talk about what's coming out today. You can go two weeks in the future, Max.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:58Ed Zitron?

  I think that, because when you read any story about AI that's positive, it always speaks in the future tense. It does not speak about what's happening now. And when they do speak about what's happening now, it's the vaguest stuff in the world. It's like, it can write or it can autonomously write software. Is the software good? No. Is it stable? No. Can you rely, can you even actually do anything with it if you don't know what you're doing? No. Is the code overly verbose? Yes. Like, it's like there are tons of problems with it, but one sentence allows the generalities to grow. And also, the, I think there's a very obvious reason they don't talk about the present. Because it's kind of boring.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  It is.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's just, in comparison to a big sexy autonomous robot, it's incredibly boring to say, but also, the business doesn't work. The business, like, the business doesn't function. If they have to talk about why it costs a thousand dollars of API tokens to do something, they have to talk about their business and they have to talk about what it does today. And the problem is with that is, so my position on this is, I don't mind on device models. I actually think that's all that's going to remain of LLMs. I think maybe we'll get some rag search stuff here and there, but I don't have an animus with the non-data center ones. But I do agree that there needs to be, that people do need to stop

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  fighting fire with fire as far as being like, if they're going to do more, we're going to say that all data centers are the worst, which they are. The water story is murky, but the environmental story is very real, especially with the behind the meter gas turbines, but...

• 33:29Speaker 07

  And the economic story, which you've been good on too, is like, there's so much more money coming into building these centers and their centers being built. And that's going to be its own.

• 33:38Ed Zitron?

  But also, just fundamentally, these weirdos are trying to make you scared of cloud software. Like, that's my thing that I keep. It's like, if Satya Nadella, every two weeks, is like, "You'll never fucking believe what Microsoft Word's gonna do next, mate. You're never gonna believe what Power BI is gonna do with the dashboard. I saw a dashboard on Power BI, and I'm pretty sure next week it's gonna, it's gonna try and kill someone." You'd be like, "You sound like a lunatic, man. You sound like a crazy person. This is an insane... Sundar Pichai, yeah, Google search is gonna... Oh, any week now, you just laugh at it. You would laugh at him."

• 34:15Speaker 07

  And the two, and the Microsoft guys are, are...

• 34:19Ed Zitron?

  No, Mustafa Suleiman.

• 34:21Speaker 07

  He's trying to, because he's not, he's trying to use the Dario Sam playbook, but he's not good at it. And so it's kind of, he's like, "I think, you know, AI is going to, it's not only gonna take over all jobs, it's going to create new jobs just to automate them." And it's gonna do it...

• 34:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's 12 to 18...

• 34:42Speaker 07

  Thursday. It'll do it Thursday. How about that? Is that, guys? Is that, is that? I mean, it's like...

• 34:46Ed Zitron?

  Do you like, he's turning a big dial. It says AI on it. It's just like, "Do you like this?" I love it as well, because he'll, he'll even talk and be like, "Yeah, 12 to 18 months away, we're going to have superintelligence, but also Anthropic's too expensive, we can't pay them anymore. But also, this is normal, and it's not gonna take jobs, but it's gonna take all the jobs in two years, but not today, but not next week, but maybe in six months." And it's just, yeah, they're using the Dario playbook with everything, because they're just making the same things, and they don't work particularly well. It's just so, these people are so weird. Now you've said it, now it's all I can think about.

• 35:25Speaker 07

  So here's the, here's the logic I also want people to avoid, because it came up in what you were saying there. And I feel like maybe Chris did this a little bit in your interview. I have to go back and listen to it. But this, this logic, and I, and I get it, and I'll give an explanation for it from a psychological perspective in a second. But there's this logic of... If there's something I can point to where AI did something that I thought was like impressive or interesting or better than I thought, every prophecy is true.

• 35:51Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  And I think, I think it's, I don't know, psychological self-preservation, or I don't know what it is, but I don't under, this, this is again, from like a logic point of view, I teach logic to undergraduates, like propositional logic. I don't understand, this is a, it's, it's an argument that's missing premises, right? So they're, they're going from the premise of, hey, it's, and it's almost always the same thing. It's almost always a non-engineer using Claude code.

• 36:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 07

  Because it's really fun. It's like a slot machine. It, especially, you know, it just like creates code that works for simple things. And you're like, this, it's really fun. Like I've talked, I know people who are like, they're, they're just like, this is my new hobby. Like it's, it's really fun if you're into that type of thing, right? We talked about this earlier. It's like model trains for engineers. You do that, you're like, that was really cool. And then you translate that experience of like, I really enjoyed that to, um, you know, I wonder what salt mine the AI overlords are going to assign me to. And it's a weird, that, that leap of logic, how, can we just keep it as like, okay, this was really cool that you built this dashboard. We don't have to leap from

• 37:03Speaker 07

  that to therefore, everything Dario Amadei said must be true. It's not this binary balancing on a fulcrum where we're just looking for like one, one little piece of evidence will tip it one way or the other. So I, I think we need to be careful about these elaborations. It's a jagged technology. Some things make more progress than others. Some things are cool. Some things are more narrow than you would think, but like, you know, let's see, oh, I, I built a really cool web-based game in Fable 5, which actually is probably just copying the source code of a similar game.

• 37:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 07

  Does that mean like recursive self-improvement is coming? So what I'm hoping we can do is stop making these leaps of logic. Where if you if you encounter any sort of feature or have any sort of positive experience with an AI product that you then leap immediately to the conclusion that everything involved in the prophecy about the future of AI must be true. Or to put, you know, someone like you and me now, it has to be put on the defensive of, I did something positive with AI. All right, Ed, doesn't that now mean everything anyone's ever said about AI is true? Convince me I'm wrong. I think that logic is backwards, that these grand proclamations of we're going to have self-improving AI, we're going to automate all jobs.

• 38:17Speaker 07

  Used a Carl Sagan quote, "Those remarkable claims require a remarkable amount of evidence." Why is everyone so quick of like, this product which you're working on and putting billions of dollars on, of course, you're going to keep adding new features or finding things to improve. That is a given, of course. What technology in the history of world would you have no improvements on if you're spending, you know, 10 to 20 billion dollars a year in R and D? Of course, it's going to have improvements. Why are we leaping from that, that like, that means that anything you say, any speculative future you give about, you know, some sci-fi future is now the default unless we can prove otherwise. So we got to stop that logic too. We should be able to discuss, enjoy, or get around the implications of particular AI

• 38:58Speaker 07

  features without having to have that shift to a conversation about RSI or widespread job automation.

• 39:04Ed Zitron?

  I think what it is, it comes back to the pride thing. I think the, there's also something about LLMs and the way they make people feel. I like, I'm on the spectrum, autistic. People have probably worked that out from the third 10,000-word article, but I don't feel anything when they're nice to me. I feel absolutely nothing. When the chatbot is like, wow, that was a great idea. I don't have, I don't respect it. I don't care what it thinks because it doesn't think. I don't see anything about what it said. If it tells me I have a good idea, I'm like, I don't care. I feel nothing. I think that a lot of people do feel something. I think when they see these things, compliment them and do an impression of brainstorming

• 39:47Ed Zitron?

  with them, which is really just talking to yourself in the mirror, which is, can help, that can help. I've done it. Um, I think that it makes them feel good. And also, your Claude Code example, I think that people feel very good about that and they feel very proficient and it makes them feel capable at something perhaps they were incapable of before. And thus, if you say to them, well, okay, that's just, that's fine. They go, no, no, I'm a big boy. I think there's something kind of almost childish about it. Like, no, I'm special. I'm special. Why aren't you impressed with? And it's something the models are built to do. The ingratiation, I think, is important, but also

• 40:31Ed Zitron?

  I think that the tech industry has done a really good job over the years of convincing us that everything gets better and better and better, even though it doesn't. Even though a lot of Google search has got worse, Facebook's got worse, Twitter's got worse. Honestly, I argue many parts of Blue Sky have got worse. It's less reliable at least. The experience of using the computer has got worse. We've hit a wall with innovation in general. But this thing, because it can kind of resemble anything if you want it to, I think touches something dark in some people. Not evil, but just like something very vulnerable and kind of weak and kind of gullible where they say, well, if I'm getting this out of this, then I'm part of the future. And I need someone to be impressed by this. This is now a part of my identity.

• 41:16Ed Zitron?

  And that's, I think that that might also be the differentiator here as well. I don't remember tech. Sure, you had forum wars about gaming consoles. I'm sure you had, you have Android versus iOS, whatever. Not like this. Yeah. Nothing like this. And I think that it touches something in people.

• 41:33Speaker 07

  Well, I, so I, I think there's a whole class of people where that's what's going on, especially the sort of bro adjacent, tech bro adjacent people on, you know, X who are, who are always yelling, well, but what about this? What about this? Right? It, and then I think the, the other thing that happens for a lot of people, especially who are a little bit more tech distance, is it's a way of dealing with anxiety. Right?

• 41:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  And if you think about this and like, we've talked about COVID before, you and I, but I think it, it offers some good, you know, analogies here is like, one of the ways when, you know, the virus was spreading, but hadn't quite got to the US or was just coming, or the hospitals were overloaded in Italy or whatever, is like, one of the ways to deal with it psychologically was to get out in front of it and be like, this is going to be really bad. Like I, I, you know, On it and you know, you feel more prepared like I'm not, I'm not going to be caught off guard. I'll be the one telling people how bad this is and like somehow that does help you a little bit. Deal with like the anxiety of like impending dread. And I think there's a lot of that going on with this as well is like, I'm anxious about this doom troll. And I've been doom trolled so many times, I'm going to kind of get out in front of it now.

• 42:36Speaker 07

  If I'm the one saying, well, wait a second, I get so many, I am for a lot of people now. They're like stress pacifier of like, well, what about this? Go, right? Like I saw this thing that upset me like, doesn't that mean? That means I think that means it is going to take it over. And then they're kind of hoping that me or someone else will come in and be like, you don't really, it's okay. Like that's not as big of a deal as it seems, right? So I think both are going on. It's either like this gives me meaning, like I'm a part of the future. If you're like using Claude code and if you're just using like chat GPT for national language search, you might just be really anxious because you, you know, you hear these earnest podcasts where people are interviewing people about, you know, we'll have to eat our dogs when the jobs are gone.

• 43:17Speaker 07

  And you're like, well, if I, if I get out in front of it, at least I feel like I have some autonomy in this dark thing that's happening. And so it's like common psychology, both of the psychologies equal dollar and cents for a, again, I keep coming back to remember is a vanishingly small number of early investors who have large equity positions in these companies. That is who benefits from all of that. They will benefit immensely because no matter what that psychology is, this company is at the fulcrum of the future and that's worthy of investing in, even if their revenue story is murky, even if their product story is, um, there's no moat. And it is, I mean, I don't want to get into the economic weeds, but this is like a Clayton Christensen fever dream. What is happening with these companies and their products?

• 44:03Speaker 07

  What does that mean? So he had this idea of, um, you know, talking about disruption from below, that the problem is, is you're working on a high end version of a product and you don't want to undermine your market. So you try to keep it expensive and high end. And then someone comes in from below with a different way of doing it this much cheaper. And you're screwed because you, you ignored that market. All of these use, the use cases that are useful now that people are spending money on like software development tools and natural language search. Here's the problem. You don't need a 10 trillion parameter language model to do this. And this is why they're so, these companies are so screwed and I think are trying to IPO as fast as they can is that like someone's going to come along and say, we're using a 20 billion parameter open source model with a really smart coding harness that we just coded ourselves on top of it and tweaked for the last two years. And you know what?

• 44:48Speaker 07

  People like it better than Claude Code and it's a hundredth of the price. Right? Or natural language search, you don't need Claude Fable five to summarize Google search results. Right? And the economics make no sense, but a small model could, a non-chip model could. That is why they're in trouble economically.

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• 47:23Ed Zitron?

  I also think that there is, and I do think there is a deeply cynical thing here. Well, let me reframe that. I think that people have to find ways to rationalize capitalism. I think that the only way that they could, the amount of times I hear a week of, it's just like Amazon Web Services, just like Uber's, just like this. I have restated that point 100 times, people sometimes listen, people sometimes don't. But people need to find a way, I think, to rationalize the massive expenditures and the current products do not provide that rationalization. Nothing about ChatGPT or Claude or Claude Code or Fable or whatever actually rationalizes this, doesn't make sense.

• 48:07Ed Zitron?

  A trillion dollars is too much money for anything outside of like universal healthcare and housing. In fact, probably could have taken care of that really easily. But nevertheless, people see that and they don't want to deal with the natural kind of dissonance they get, which is, wow, are all the companies run by people who don't know what's going on? And the answer is yes. Like, I don't think that there's actually a grand conspiracy. Oh my God, the emails I get every week, people being like, it's surveillance, it's a secret surveillance state, it's secret, it's, yeah, it's so secret, it's on CNBC every day. Oh, they're all, they're doing secret data centers. Yeah, it's called Oracle. It's being, it's called Oracle. That's what Oracle does. Oracle has a huge, like, that's very well known. What do you, like?

• 48:51Ed Zitron?

  I think people need there to be a conspiracy because otherwise the answer is, which is what I believe, which is none of these companies had a plan. I think Sam Altman and Dari Amadi thought we're going to throw a bunch of money at this and then God will come out.

• 49:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:04Ed Zitron?

  Money, money, so much money, and then they will have ASI, AGI, whatever they call it. And then it happened. And then that didn't. They hit the diminishing returns at the end 2024. And since then, they've been kind of harnessing non-LLM stuff on top of LLMs in an attempt to make them do stuff.

• 49:21Speaker 07

  But that's been so successful, by the way. Think about the doom trolling. This is another advantage of it. They've completely obfuscated exactly that point that you just made, which is that pre-training scaling, again, had, we've talked about this on the show, but it's had diminishing returns, you know, starting after 2024. And so all of the improvements that have come since then has been post-training, pre-trained models and building hand-coding harnesses with more and more special cases plugged into it to find more places for them to be useful, which is a completely different trajectory than 2023, where they were like, no, we'll just keep pre-trained scaling these things till we have AGI. And they've created a sense of like, well, AI has been drastically improving, hasn't it? And you say, well, wait a second.

• 50:03Speaker 07

  Like, if you told me in 2022, you know, when you're like, we're going to scale our way to AGI, and our vision of AGI is software development tools.

• 50:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like it's just dreadfully boring in comparison.

• 50:14Speaker 07

  That's boring. Or natural language, Google. But you're like, but isn't that just like a feature that like, Google would just kind of, otherwise would have just kept adding and tweaking in a very like economically reasonable way?

• 50:24Ed Zitron?

  Saying forever, it's like, yeah. I thought like, the reason that people like LLM search is pretty simple, that it responds to search, how people have always used search, which is questions. You're like, hey, what about this and this? I've used AI mode with Google maybe three times, and I always use it as like a trawling expedition to say like, has anyone ever said anything like this? And then it would give me a bunch of fake citations, like just that happens every time. But then I'll find one weird PDF and it'll be like, oh, cool. But isn't that? If you didn't, if LLMs didn't exist, I would expect Google Search to do that by now. Like, that would, that feels like a natural progression. But it's just normal, kind of boring.

• 51:07Ed Zitron?

  I always say it's like, oh, if they called it library models, it wouldn't be that big a deal. But it would be a more accurate, like, you just choose a regular name. This, people weren't freaking out about platform as a service tools. Then they hear all this bullshit about Kubernetes, which is way more fun to say than large language models. People have taken this. And the thing is, I don't think that the strategy was always, we're going to doom troll. Like, I don't think they sat and thought about it very much. I think they just kind of Oafmaxed their way. They just bumbled into it and they're like, it's scary. And then they saw how well it worked. I think, I genuinely think, on an ethical level, it's one of the most disgraceful things anyone's ever done.

• 51:46Ed Zitron?

  Technologically, I think it's just, on top of the obfuscation of what these things actually do, it's horrible. It's a cruel thing to do. I hear from people all the time just being like, am I going to lose my job to this? Am I, why is my boss telling me I'm going to lose my job to this? Why, what is this? Why is it different? Why, and I think when they hear all the doomerism and they use the product and they use Claude Code and they go, oh, it baffled out an open source CRM. They're like, oh, God, they're right. Imagine what someone who kind of knew what they were doing could do. Oh, I'm scared. I don't think that, I think that that, I, they shouldn't be able to sleep at night. I think it's an evil way to market.

• 52:27Speaker 07

  I, I would say, the way I would think of it, I put on my, my, like, my Bentham hat here, right? Let's use like a utilitarian calculus. The net harm that doom trolling as a communication strategy has caused in terms of mental health, right? Just like people feeling bad. The net harm caused by doom trolling far, far, far, far, far exceeds any, the grand total of benefits that this AI technology has produced so far. Like, I don't see any other way for that calculus to work out. I would, you know, I was just reading one of the many papers that are actually now, you know, surveying and studying AI in the workforce. And they, they, they looked at this paper and they asked people that these software developers, like, estimate. How much time you've saved or whatever and it was, um, you know, 11 hours a week we're saving.

• 53:12Speaker 07

  And then they asked them, um, is your company performing better at all? Like, has this made any impact on your bottom line? And it was like a vanishingly small percent that was like, yeah, there's anything different on the performance. Was that worth or making like software developers, maybe by some measures, 1.2 times more efficient? Yeah. Worth causing, I think the negative toll of this psychologically is like getting close to like COVID territory. It's like population wide, you are stressing out everybody day after day. They've made the last two years for anyone who's following the news psychologically miserable. That is a real harm. That is a real measurable harm.

• 53:55Speaker 07

  Like, I really hate that I have to deal with this, like time and again. Uh, it reminds me of having to deal with the pandemic, which was like a, a, like a psychologically fraught time. Because every day you were being bombarded. But at this time, you know, A, there's not a virus that's infecting a lot of people. And B, the people who are like warning about all the doom in this analogy. It would be as if like they were the ones in the lab doing the research that was producing the virus. Like, that's the craziest thing about it, right? I mean, imagine if in like 2019, someone was like, these viruses, coronavirus is doing gain of function research. Could really, really like infect the whole world. Like, of course they're going to get out. We can't contain them. Oh, by the way. But we gotta make them.

• 54:37Speaker 07

  Curiously doing this gain of function research on these viruses. And we're not going to stop because, you know, the Chinese, well, in this case, but whatever. Yeah. Someone else might do it. Someone else might do it. So like, what can we do? You'd be like, stop building the viruses then. Uh, anyway, so, so I think we have to account for the net psychological harm. And I think, I mean, I don't think our current government can do this, but I think that that's something where the government should in an abstract world. Be involved like, oh, there's a small number of people who are causing a huge amount of distress and anxiety around our entire country. Of course, we're going to get in the game and we're going to pause all of your model deployments until like you either convince us that that's not the case and you admit like, yeah, we were kind of making that up. Or if you don't want to say that, then

• 55:21Speaker 07

  like, no, you don't get a release this product. You're causing mass, mass unhappiness and damage, right? To our entire country, you have to account for that. You don't get to just do that. So it is, I think the harms so far have exponentially outweighed the tangible benefits.

• 55:40Ed Zitron?

  I'm just also going to be honest. Yeah, the model AI companies are terrible. I also think the media has categorically failed here and should feel fucking ashamed of themselves. I think the media is as much to blame.

• 55:50Speaker 07

  I think I'm going to put it, I'm going to put a fundamental blame on venture capital. I'll give you my quick pitch on that.

• 55:55Ed Zitron?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 55:56Speaker 07

  I mean, you have to understand the economics of especially high tech venture capital coming out of Silicon Valley, the, the, the whole model. And again, this is all just because you have like some institutional investors and rich people that you want to make richer. That's it. Like, that's the whole underlying goal, right? And their whole model is we have to find new, new areas where there's something to be monetized in which there's possibilities for unicorns. So we have to find new territories where you have the possibility of getting in early and having an investment turn out to be a multi-billion dollar company, right? The, the, the web, that's what started in the 90s with the web and most of those bets failed because of the first dot com crash. A couple paid off like Amazon. Then you had web two. It turned out attention was a resource

• 56:40Speaker 07

  you could monetize. So it's like discovering a new mineral or oil. There was a huge fortune to be had. The venture capitalists could get in there early. They had massive returns betting on Meta, betting on, you know, the social media companies, right? Then they're like, we need another because you have to keep finding every time you raise a new fund, you need a giant new resource that you can monetize and get to early. So the next thing they tried was crypto. Crypto was just, you know, Andreessen Horowitz saying there's no more unicorns left in social. We're going to try to create a new field in which we can create unicorns. And they really flogged crypto. This is the future. This is the future.

• 57:15Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  And it wasn't, especially for software. And I got yelled at for saying this, but I'm, I'm literally an expert on this. I, my doctorate's in the theory of distributed systems. It's a stupid way to build a distributed system and, and I was right. And then no one built the systems that way. So that kind of failed. This was the next territory. And it doesn't say this technology is not interesting or potentially useful, but as you said, it's not trillion dollar useful, not yet. So why did all that money come in? Is because we're talking about one street in one city. We're talking like San Hill Road in Palo Alto, like the people on that one street are like, we need to find a new territory that can produce, you know, a hundred billion dollar companies so that we can get the returns that we expect to keep our lifestyle up. And that's it.

• 57:55Ed Zitron?

  This is what I've been, I've been saying this for years. It's the rock con bubble. It's they're out of big ideas and AI was the panacea. It was the, it was the API would be the way to build new startups. It'd be the way for enterprise companies to sell more software with new add-ons. It would be the way for business software to take off, consumer software. It was meant to be the solution because they're doing exactly the same thing as the AI companies are doing, saying, yeah, the AI will just fix this. What are we going to build with this? Or the AI will work it out. What's the product? AI will work it out. It's honestly a kind of a pathetic culture.

• 58:29Speaker 07

  I don't think they even care about that. I think they're like, okay, if we put the money in this now, what's the strike price going to be at the IPO? That's what they care about.

• 58:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's what I'm, I'm getting at that.

• 58:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, they don't care if it works in the end or not. They're, they're like, we, we want a SpaceX. Look at that.

• 58:43Ed Zitron?

  But the theoretical that I'm saying is that the idea of large language models as an API or a consumer product was what they were excited about because you can just extrapolate the various things. But I must, I must get back to it. I think the media is responsible. I 100% believe the media is responsible. They are the ones that, at the Times, Ezra Klein, how much AGI bullshit has that guy shoveled? How many Bernie Sanders going out there and talking to Claude? I realize that's politics, but they put it on YouTube for a reason. How many different outlets have talked about the jobpocalypse that does not exist? Or the SaaSpocalypse, claiming that software companies are being sold off because of AI disruption that doesn't exist?

• 59:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:24Ed Zitron?

  The media bought and sold this. In 2023, there was a Guardian headline that said Sam Altman was a little bit scared. It's just without that, none of this was possible. And perhaps they were just being a megaphone for real anxieties from these companies. Or perhaps they were just looking for a narrative that would get clicks.

• 59:45Speaker 07

  I think, I don't think it's clicks. I think they underestimated the weirdness of these people. And they took them at face, this is my, you know, having many feet within the world of media. What I really think happened is it didn't cross their minds that these people are super strange cultist weirdos. They don't know about Yukowski, they don't know about the rationalist, they don't know about the X risk community. That came out of the rationalist and then merged with the technological singularities and that they also think they're going to live forever by harvesting the blood of children and all they don't, they were just like, these are engineers. I don't know about technology, they do, they're telling me this, why would they lie?

• 1:00:26Speaker 07

  I heard, I've heard that word for word from multiple, early on, multiple journalists. And I think it was all being seen through the frame of COVID. Where that was in the recent history. If the virus, I don't know anything about viruses, but the virologists were like, trust me, like this is something I can't directly observe. Right? Because there's not very many people sick, but like, trust us. This is going to spread and this is a really big deal and like all trucks, the virologists know what they talk about, why would they lie? And I don't want to miss that story. I think there was a lot of that going on of these are the people building the tech, because I heard this phrase from so many people. These are the people building the technology. They know about it best. I'm not a computer scientist. I mean, I am, but like if I'm being the journalist, and this is why like the people who were not

• 1:01:11Speaker 07

  like where is the resistance is coming from is computer scientists like me who don't live near Silicon Valley. And like, well, I do understand this technology and what the hell are you talking about? But I think for the journalist, it was, and now they're just, and this is why I'm wrote that op ed. I'm trying to spread the word more. These guys are weird. They're weird. And by the way, they're mainly guys too, because I don't think women are going to put up with this weird, you know, I'm going to go in my room and play with my Star Wars toys nonsense, right? I don't want to, who knows what that tells us about our, our gender, Ed, but it's not great. That it's all men doing this craziness.

• 1:01:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like Tim, Tim Reed Gab, Gabber isn't particularly sold on this, for example, like I don't think.

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  Emily Bender, like a lot of the hardcore skeptics are like, you boys with your Star Wars toys.

• 1:01:56Ed Zitron?

  What are you up to, lads?

• 1:01:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Ed Zitron?

  What do you mean? You don't have friends, do you?

• 1:02:01Speaker 07

  Is this, is this related to fantasy football? What, guys, what is this, right? Which, which?

• 1:02:05Ed Zitron?

  The funny thing is though, there is something to that where it's, it is a very male technology. And I do wonder, like, it's not, not something I think two white guys can necessarily get into in any, any depth without a worn present. So that we could actually have a rounded conversation, but it is interesting that pretty much everyone running this stuff is a guy.

• 1:02:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Ed Zitron?

  And the majority of them are white fellas and they're all claiming that everything they build is amazing. I don't know. Perhaps there's something going on there too. It's just.

• 1:02:36Speaker 07

  Is there something, yeah, white guys are good at is thinking everything we do is amazing. We are pretty well trained. We are pretty well trained at that. Uh, but this is why I do think it's important. It's why I wrote that op ed is like, I want to name what they're doing. This is doom trolling. I think you need to understand these people are weird. Um, and we can't take what they're saying at face value. We just can't because they're too weird. They've, they've proven time and again. Uh, and, but the key message I would also want, like, if you're listening to this pod, if you're listening to this podcast now. Do not, do not interpret this conversation as, oh, I'm going to categorize this in a claim that AI doesn't work. And therefore, if I see something cool that AI does, uh, this conversation isn't relevant. You know, Cal was wrong.

• 1:03:18Speaker 07

  This is, it's really not about that is what I'm talking about right now. I am talking about the way that we actually talk about AI. How we treat it as a business, what is morally appropriate and what is morally not. And I, these are normal products. And I don't, I don't, to me, this isn't, it's not vaporware. I mean, I think the ability to parse natural language like a language model can do is like, it's fascinating. And I'm also surprised by how hard it's been to come up with a lot of good, useful, economically viable products off of that ability. Like, we, we're still with software development tools and, and, you know, rewriting Google search results. I actually thought we would have a lot more interesting tools that we were using in our

• 1:04:01Speaker 07

  everyday life right now. And because there's been some problems that we didn't think about. So this whole conversation is about stop treating this like a demon that's been summoned. Make fun of doom trolling, because it's kind of embarrassing. This is the, you know, this is the, the magic to gathering club at the high school table. And just treat this like a normal product. And like, I don't want to hear, let's just, what are the products you're selling? What are the benefits? How much do they cost? Is it worth the money? And what other products are you working on? Like, let's just have normal conversations. And so do not, as a listener, categorize this in this, in this, in this sort of light first dark is like, okay, this means AI doesn't work. And this team says it does work. And if, and then I'm going to try to assess in my mind, is AI useful or not? And if it is,

• 1:04:46Speaker 07

  then I have to be ready to mate with machines. And if it doesn't, then, you know, stop all that sort of extreme thinking. I just want us to talk about this like a normal, interesting, but normal technology. And normal people should look at the way that these companies are doom trolling us and say, that's strange. Please stop. And in the meantime, I'm gonna have to really make fun of you. Like, I think that's where we need to be.

• 1:05:09Ed Zitron?

  I fully agree. And I think all of this, large language models in a vacuum, in very interesting technology. The problem is, they tried to scale them like a giant multi-trillion dollar industry, which I don't think they fit into. The, the future of L L Ms, in whatever form they have, is on device. They never should have been scaled at this scale. Like, it never made sense, never once. And in the end, it is normal technology. And that is the thing to always take away from this, which is,

• 1:05:38Ed Zitron?

  You wouldn't freak out about Kubernetes. You wouldn't Microsoft Word doing autocomplete shouldn't scare you. Grammarly shouldn't scare you. This is be the actual technology itself is not scaring you. It's the people around it and the people's extrapolations. And also, like you said, the willingness we have to believe people who are working on something, who have supposed expertise, as if expertise guarantees that you're correct or indeed guarantees that you know what you're talking about, or indeed that you can see the future.

• 1:06:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there we go. I mean, I think that's it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Who knows?

• 1:06:17Ed Zitron?

  No, no.

• 1:06:18Speaker 07

  I'm already seeing like the comments on my New York Times pieces just falling into the like, oh, you, you, you said somewhere in there, there could be a benefit of AI. You are a host. AI is terrible. Or like the other side is, is like, well, well, how do you explain the fact you're I'm, oh, my God, is this written by AI? These comments, I get this sent this all the time. These, these comments that are like, I work for a such and such company. And what used to take me three weeks, I now do in like six seconds. And, you know, it's just like falling, people are just falling into their camps about like, either you're one of the, the priests of the, the new religion, or, you know, you're the, you're the, the, the Canaanites who were, who were kicked out of the land or something, right? Like, it's like, you gotta be in like one of these two, like extremes. And don't do that.

• 1:07:02Speaker 07

  Just say like, treat it like a normal technology. Stop doom trolling is, is stupid. Stop it like, treat it like a normal technology. Either stop if you really think you're destroying the world, or start talking about it like pickup trucks, right? We, we don't need this in between. So hopefully, hopefully we can convince a few more people about that.

• 1:07:19Ed Zitron?

  I hope so. Cal, thank you so much for joining me.

• 1:07:22Speaker 07

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:07:32Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

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