Monologue: It's The Beginning Of History

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron talks about the end of tech’s hypergrowth era, generative AI’s failure as a business model, and why we need to stop looking to the past to prove that the future will work out. Free newsletter tie-in: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-beginning-of-history/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:39Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:52Ed Zitron?

  Sorry I missed last week's monologue, everyone. I was sick and in truth, I'm still kind of sick. But the work is important. I also want to thank all of you who have sent very kind words via the email inbox and the Reddit. I really do appreciate you so much. And actually, that's a good place to start. Everything's rough, as you know. You've seen everything. The horrors are many. Remember to be there for the people close to you. And as isolated as the world might make you feel right now, there are millions of people feeling exactly like you. Our subreddit, r/betteroffline, is a great place to start. As I assure you that if you feel that isolation, the castigation, the irritation by the push to put AI in everything, you're anything but alone. We are all feeling it.

• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  I'll admit, I've been kind of reeling myself. I've had family stuff to take care of all while being sick for the best part of what is now three weeks, I think. It's tough to take a break when you have so much to do, especially when the stuff you have to do involves keeping up with the current events. And motherfucker, we are in an event-heavy era. I missed the premium newsletter for the first time in months and the monologue for the first time since we started doing them. Felt guilty, which is ridiculous. You all tell me off for saying it. But this show is built on sincerity, so I'm going to say it anyway. So give yourself a little bit of a break. Everything is fucking rough. Not me, though. Not taking one of those. Don't get those. Now, as I wrote in this week's newsletter, which I called "The Beginning of History", things appear to be reaching a breaking point.

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  Let's catch up. A few weeks ago Anthropic and the Department of Defense got in an argument because Anthropic wouldn't allow them to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or to control autonomous weapons, the former of which is a stretch of what LLMs can do and the latter of which is totally out of their capabilities. As a result of this flimsy defiance Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. This immediately led to a depressing amount of people doing bullshit "we stand with Anthropic, je suis Claude" commentary, suggesting that this company was in any way ethically opposed to blowing things up. Let me be blunt about how wrong you are if you think this way. Anthropic's Claude LLM was used in the war in Iran.

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  It isn't clear how, but it's more than likely it was handed a bunch of data, coordinates, images, targets and so on, and asked what to do. This does not mean it is powerful or accurate or really anything other than a means of escaping the responsibility for choosing who to kill. Dario Amadei, really make no mistake about this, loves war, enables war, and is a full supporter of the US military and I quote "using AI to defend democracy", which can mean literally anything that America wants it to, just look at the history of fucking America. Similarly, clammy Sam Altman immediately swept in to take Anthropic's business once the DOD kicked Anthropic out. And I want to go into the nitty gritty because it's weeks old, but from what I can tell,

• 3:46Ed Zitron?

  ChatGPT will support all legal uses. It's, I really just fucking despise everyone involved here, I think they're absolutely disgraceful, I think Sam Altman's mewling bullshit online about claiming he didn't actually agree to all legal uses and would go to jail, you know what Sammy, if you go to jail, I'll come visit you, you little shit. Yet something interesting happened as a result of all of this bullshit. Anthropic, so who were designated a supply chain risk, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense to fight it, and in doing so had to include a sign and a sworn affidavit from its chief financial officer Krishna Rao, which revealed, and this stunned me, that

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  Anthropic has had $5 billion in lifetime revenue to date, with to date referring to March 9th, 2026.

• 4:39Ed Zitron?

  Now, this flies in the face of basically every reported revenue, including the information story, and I like the information, I pay for it, but this is important, that Anthropic had made 4.5 billion dollars in 2025, and Anthropic's own statement that it had hit 14 billion dollars in annualized revenue on February 12th, 2026, which works out to about 1.16 billion dollars. Interestingly, Anthropic also revealed it spent 10 billion dollars on model training and inference, which is the process of creating an output, in the same period. Now, the exact phrase was exceeding 5 billion dollars to date, and my god, my god, if your

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  argument there, boosters, is, "Oh, yeah, well, that could mean 6 billion or 7 billion", shut the fuck, I'm sorry, can you please, can you put down the show and Williams you've been eating for a fucking second and think? Anthropic is incentivized in this case to say it's making a lot of money, because all of this is in a filing begging the government to not remove its ability to monetize public sector work, but pretty much war. I really need to be clear, I've been arguing with people about this for days, if you add up all the annualized revenues, you get 6.66 billion dollars, spooky, probably more, if you include missing months and such. It's very obvious that Anthropic is misleading people.

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  Because, I don't know, I trust their CFO in an affidavit far more than the leaks of annualized revenues. I don't see the same alarm in, in the tech journalism world, or the business world. I just don't see it. I don't see anyone giving much of a fuck about this, despite this very likely meaning, everybody has been misled for years. Let's simplify. Anthropic has raised more than 60 billion dollars, with 30 billion dollars of that arriving on or around February 12th. It made 5 billion dollars in revenue, all time, and spent 10 billion dollars in training and inference costs alone. Just think about that for a second. Previously, before that new money, they had thirty billion dollars.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  They spent ten billion on influence and training. And they made five billion dollars of revenue. So just, I guess, like, tens of billions of dollars just fucking annihilated there. This company's a dog. It's very obvious that its leaked revenues have either been inflated or outright lies. And in the end, Anthropic is just kind of a piece of shit. You know what? It's time for a little rant. And while I think you'll all enjoy this, this is really targeted at those B that are yet to be swayed by my arguments. I hear all of this crap about AI changing everything, but where's the proof? Wow, Anthropic managed to turn thirty billion dollars into five billion dollars and start one of the single most annoying debates in history. Where's the money? Who is actually getting a profit out of AI?

• 7:30Ed Zitron?

  Nvidia? The companies that make RAM? Because it doesn't seem to be the companies who are buying the GPUs. It doesn't seem to be the AI companies either. I don't think it's true, but if you believe it, you believe that code is truly being automated away. To what end? What are the actual documented economic effects we can point to? And what are the actual meaningful changes to the world? Also, are you not a little bit concerned about how much code might be written that people do not read, let alone understand? Because I'm learning a little bit about code right now, very slowly learning to code. And the more I learn, the more I realize that it's important to understand what it fucking does. But you know what AI boosters, if you're listening, I don't know how many of you do, but please.

• 8:15Ed Zitron?

  If you talk about the magic of AI and why we should be excited about AI, I need you to start talking today. And use real data, something from today, please. You are legally banned from saying the word soon or in the future.

• 8:33Ed Zitron?

  All of my stuff has to be in the present, so yours should too. Point to one thing from today, from today's models, that even remotely justifies burning in nearly a trillion dollars and filling our internet full of slop and creating the moral distance from an action that might have blown up a fucking school in Iran and empowering the theft of millions of people's work and having to hear every fucking day about Sam Altman and Dario Amade, two terrifyingly boring and annoying oafs with no culture and no whimsy in their wretched little hearts. Oh wow, so you can code a clone of an open source software project, all set up with an LLM that may or may not get the code right? Do you really need this?

• 9:17Ed Zitron?

  Is this really impressing you?

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• 10:32Ed Zitron?

  I want to be clear that my position is sincere. I do not see a path out of this for large language models. I have sat and thought about how I might be wrong far more than I've searched for how I might be right. This industry cannot sustain itself and is not in any way trending towards viability, let alone profitability. This is not a game for me. I am not on a team. I think you are all cresting the wave of the end of the software industry's growth era. I think you think Sam Altman is your friend. I think you think OpenAI is your sports team. I think you think large language models are something you need to align with. I think you think this is fucking fun. It isn't.

• 11:17Ed Zitron?

  It's a waste. OpenAI and Anthropic are not selling great software. And even if you somehow think that they are, their software business sucks absolute ass. Anthropic spent $2 for every dollar it made just on training and inference. And that's before sales and marketing, that's before real estate, and that's before the actual people. That's not just crap, it's shit. How much of what you love about AI is actually rooted in the present? Are you having fun? I'm having fun because I enjoy writing and reading my podcast. If I worked in the technology industry full time right now, I'd want to cry my fucking eyes out. It's a depressing, ugly time where bosses talk endlessly about stuff that doesn't work

• 12:00Ed Zitron?

  and force their workers to push it on their customers, all while losing money. It's a fucking cult built on debt and theft. And I'm sick of hearing about it, and even more sick of hearing that I should be scared of it. I'm not scared of AI. I'm scared of the financial apocalypse that come. I recently read a terrifying stat the other day from Apollo's asset manager, sorry, Apollo Asset Management's John Zito, who said that between 2018 and 2022, software accounted for 30 to 40% of private equity leveraged buyouts. The specific era in which venture capital stopped providing reliable returns and private equity's own growth started to slow.

• 12:41Ed Zitron?

  Worse still, the largest software leveraged buyouts of 2021 to 2024 were financed with anywhere from 50% to 90% debt.

• 12:51Ed Zitron?

  In very simple terms, PE firms bought into software companies and bought software companies they believed would grow forever, pumping them full of debt, taking on debt to buy them, and did so based on the growth trajectory of software companies from 2005 to 2018. A completely different era, when there were tonnes more lands to conquer and tonnes of growth ideas still left to build. We're, I, I, that was a weird noise, but I'm gonna keep it. We're past that. I think we're running out, if we haven't run out already. As I said a few years ago in the Rodcom bubble, I believe we're at the end of software's hypergrowth era and the comeuppance has begun, with $46.9 billion of software debt now

• 13:33Ed Zitron?

  marked as distressed, which means likely to be, unlikely to be paid even. All of this has also been happening as software growth has slowed across the board, because there are only so many things you could sell and only so many people to sell them to. Generative AI was meant to be the solution here. It was meant to be the panacea that would restart growth in the software sector, allowing software-as-a-service companies to upsell their clients, create new SaaS companies that venture capital and private equity could invest in, and usher in that new era of hypergrowth. Instead, large language models are unprofitable, lack significant or innovative features that make selling new software possible, and outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, do not appear to have much revenue potential at all.

• 14:18Ed Zitron?

  Most businesses don't even break out their specific AI revenue. IBM literally just stopped doing so, and 80% of their generative AI revenue was consultancy services hocking it to people that didn't really need AI, but they needed to start doing AI because their shareholders would kill them. But here's a good example: Salesforce, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year, well, they revealed that they had $800 million of annualized revenue for their agent-force chatbot. That works out to about $60-something million a month. That's poopy. That's dogshit. And if you disagree, you don't know fucking finance and you're living in a dream. But who is the dreamer?

• 15:00Ed Zitron?

  We are both at an end and a beginning. A reckoning for decades of hubris and a punishment for those who believe that all software would grow in perpetuity. I don't know what happens next, but I do know that we're at the beginning of history and that looking at the past as a way of confirming your biases about everything is a mistake. You need to start looking at the fundamentals. If you don't, if you're a booster, if you're an AI fan listening to this, if you're someone that writes about tech and you're still in the AI camp, you need to start proving your arguments. Because when this collapses, and I'm confident it will, you're going to look like a fucking

• 15:44Ed Zitron?

  idiot. Now, some of you might be not so bad. There are many of you that won't. Many of you have taken a kind of middle ground, a centrist position. We all know how those work out. It's time to start looking at the fundamentals and it's time to stop looking at the dot com bubble or looking at Uber, looking at whatever little myth you have to pretend that all of this is going to work out. If you can prove me wrong, I look forward to reading it or hearing it, but it's been years and nobody appears to have tried. I really don't know what will happen next, but I'll be here to explain what I know every single week. Thank you for listening.

• 16:32Speaker 01

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• 18:38Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.