The Coming Generative AIPocalypse

We're approaching the end of the line for generative AI as big tech realizes that spending $200bn on chips and data centers isn't going to create any good products. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through what might happen - and why we should still have hope. --- 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.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Speaker 03

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• 1:12Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:27Ed Zitron?

  In the last episode, I walked you through how generative AI has hit its ceiling and how big tech has burned billions of dollars chasing a technology that really isn't going to give them the returns they got from the smartphone and cloud computing revolutions. Not that that's going to stop them. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the potentially massive problems they have ahead, the ones they've created by building these massive supercomputers, the ones necessary to capture this imaginary demand of this kind of bullshit AI revolution, and I'm going to try and guess what might happen next. All right, so, the AI boom helped the S and P 500 hit record levels in 2024, largely thanks to chip giant Nvidia, a company that makes both the GPUs necessary to train and run generative AI and the software architecture behind them, as well as some other server

• 2:11Ed Zitron?

  parts too. Part of Nvidia's remarkable growth has been its ability to capitalize on CUDA architecture, the software layer that lets you do complex computing on GPUs rather than simply using them to render video games or complex 3D images. Someone's going to email and say that that's partially wrong, just bear with me. And of course, one of Nvidia's other things they do is continually create new GPUs to sell for tens of thousands of dollars to tech companies that want to burn billions of dollars on generative AI, which has led Nvidia's stock to pop more than 179% over the last year. Back in May, Nvidia CEO and professional carnival barker Jensen Huang said that the company was now, and I quote, "on a one-year rhythm in AI GPU production, with its latest

• 2:52Ed Zitron?

  Blackwell GPUs, specifically the B100, B200, and GBT200, used for generative AI, supposedly due at the end of 2024, except they're now delayed until at least March 2025." Now, before we go any further, it's worth noting that when I say GPU, I don't mean the one you'd find in a gaming PC, but a much, much larger chip put on a specialized server and actually a specialized board as well, with multiple other GPUs, all integrated with special casing, cooling, and networking infrastructure, all of which is sold by Nvidia, by the way. You can use other things, but eh, may as well buy it in one place, right? That's their product strategy. In simple terms, these are the things necessary to make sure all these chips work together efficiently and also stop them from overheating, because they get extremely hot and generative AI makes them run at full speed all the time.

• 3:38Ed Zitron?

  Now, the initial delay of the new Blackwell chips was caused by a now-fixed design flaw in production, but as I've previously suggested, the problem isn't just creating the chips, it's making sure they actually work at scale for the jobs they've been bought for. Now, what if that wasn't possible?

• 3:58Ed Zitron?

  A few weeks ago, The Information reported that Nvidia is currently grappling with the oldest problem in computing: how to cool the fucking things. According to their reporting, Nvidia has been asking suppliers to change the design of its £3,075 GPU server rack several times to overcome these heating problems, which The Information calls "the most complicated design that Nvidia had ever come up with." According to the report, a few months after revealing the racks, engineers found that they didn't work properly, even when they used the smaller 36-chip racks, and they've been kind of scrambling to fix it ever since. While one can dazzle investors with buzzwords, charts, and the term "superintelligence", the laws of physics are a little bit more of a harsh mistress, and if Nvidia is struggling

• 4:41Ed Zitron?

  mere months before the first installations to begin, though I've heard some are going out now, it's kind of unclear how they practically plan to launch this next generation of chips, let alone doing another one in a year. The information reports that these changes have been made late in production, which is scaring customers that desperately need them now so that their models can continue to do something that they will work out later. To quote the information again, two executives at large cloud providers that have ordered the new chips said they are concerned that such last-minute difficulties might push back the timeline for when they can get their GPU clusters up and running next year. The fact that Nvidia is having such significant difficulties with thermal performance is very, very bad. These chips are very expensive, thirty to seventy grand, I hear, and will be running,

• 5:25Ed Zitron?

  as I've mentioned, at full speed, generating an incredible amount of heat that must be dissipated, while sat next to anywhere from thirty-five to seventy-one other chips, which will in turn be densely packed so that you can cram more servers into a data center. New, more powerful chips require entirely new methods to rack-mount them, operate them, and cool them, and all of these parts must operate in sync as overheating GPUs will die. And while these units are big, some of their internal components are nanometers in size, and unless properly cooled, their circuits will start to crumble when roasted by a guy typing Garfield with a gun and a bra into ChatGPT, which I have never done, of course. Remember, Blackwell is supposed to be Nvidia's next big thing. It's meant to represent a major leap forward in performance.

• 6:09Ed Zitron?

  If Nvidia doesn't solve its cooling problem and solve it well, its customers will undoubtedly encounter thermal throttling, where the chip reduces its speed in order to avoid causing any permanent damage. It could eliminate some or all of the performance gains obtained from the new architecture and new manufacturing process, despite costing much, much more, both for the chips itself and the housing for them. Nvidia's problem isn't just bringing these thermal performance issues under control, but both keeping them under control and being able to educate their customers on how to do so. Nvidia has, according to the information, repeatedly tried to influence its customers' server integrations to follow its designs, because it thinks it will lead to better performance, but in this case, one has to worry if Nvidia's Blackwell chips can be reliably cooled. Maybe they can.

• 6:54Ed Zitron?

  Nvidia's worked out crazy things in the past. And while Nvidia might be able to fix this problem in isolation within its racks, it remains to be seen how this works at scale as they ship and integrate hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs, starting in the front half of 2025. Things also get a little worse when you realise how these chips are being installed. In these giant supercomputer data centres where tens of thousands, or as many as 100,000 of them in the case of Elon Musk's Colossus data centre, which is just very funny that that's what it's for. It's for Grok on a dying social network. But yeah, these GPUs, they're running concert to power generative AI models. That's all they're really for. And the Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that building these vast data centres creates entirely new engineering challenges, with one expert saying that big tech companies

• 7:39Ed Zitron?

  could be spending as much of half of their capital expenditures on replacing parts that are broken down, in large part because these clusters are running on GPUs that are running at full speed, that need to all be cooled and need to be cooled well. Remember, the capital expenditures on generative AI and its associated infrastructure have gone over $200 billion in the last year. If half of that's dedicated to replacing broken shit, what happens when there's no path to profitability? In any case, Nvidia's fine. They'll work it out well enough to keep flogging these things. They've already made billions of dollars selling Blackwells. They're sold out for a year, in fact, and they'll continue to do so for now, but any manufacturing or cooling issues are going to be very costly. And even then, at some point, somebody has to ask the question, why do we need all these

• 8:23Ed Zitron?

  GPUs if we've reached PKI? Despite the remarkable power of these chips, Nvidia's entire enterprise GPU business model centres around the idea that throwing more power at these problems will finally create some solutions. What if that isn't the case, though? So, as ever, I'm kind of pissed off. I'm pissed off reading this stuff, and it's not just because I was saying this months ago. It's because all of this money could have gone literally anywhere else. They could have done something else. They could have, I don't know, I'm not running a big tech company, but I would have put it into climate stuff or new battery technology. Everyone's saying, "Oh, we'll make our own chips now." Yeah, see you in a few years, dickhead. Well, you go to TSMC and ask if they've got any spare slots. I'm sure they've got plenty.

• 9:07Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure that you can just go and build a chip tomorrow. Sam Altman talking about building his own goddamn chips. What an absolute farce this is. This fucking farce. All of this money burned in search of a technology that only kind of works on some things sometimes. It's it's just kind of a joke. The tech industry is over leveraged, they've doubled, they've tripled, they've quadrupled down on generative AI now. And this technology does not do much more than it did a few months ago. And I don't think it's going to do very much more in a few months. Every single big tech company has piled tens of billions of dollars into building out these massive superclusters with the intent of capturing AI demand. Yet they never seem to think whether they were actually building things that people wanted or would pay for.

• 9:50Ed Zitron?

  Or that would make the money, or that would help humanity in any way, or really anything to do with an outcome other than line go up. While some have claimed that agents are the next frontier, AI agents, frontier, Jesus, nope, keep it. The reality is that agents may be the last generative AI product. Multiple large language models and integrations bouncing off of each other in an attempt to simulate what a human might do at a cost that won't be sustainable for the majority of businesses. While Anthropic's demo of its alleged model that can control a few browser windows with a prompt might have seemed impressive to credulous people, specifically mean Casey Newton here. These were controlled demos which Anthropic added was slow and make lots of mistakes.

• 10:31Ed Zitron?

  Hey, almost like it's hallucinating, I sure hope they fixed that unfixable problem I've been talking about for months, Jesus Christ. Even if it does. Anthropic has now successfully replaced an entry level data worker position at an indeterminate cost and likely an unprofitable one too. And in many organizations, those jobs have already been outsourced or automated or staffed with cheap contractors. So the people who are going to lose out here are people who are already getting shat on by life. It really sucks. And the obscenity of this mass delusion, it's just nauseating. It's a monolith to bad decision making and the herd mentality of tech's most powerful people. As well as an outright attempt to manipulate the media into believing something was possible that never was. And the media bought it, hook, line and sinker. You all bought it.

• 11:16Ed Zitron?

  Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted building giant data centers to crunch numbers for software that has no real product-market fit, or while trying to hammer it into various shapes to make it pretend that it's alive, conscious, or even fucking useful. There is no path, from what I can see, to turning generative AI from what it is today into anything resembling a sustainable business. And the only path that big tech appeared to have seen or thought about was to throw as much money, power, and data at the problem, an avenue that appeared to be, and definitely appears to be now, a complete dead end. And worse still, nothing's really come out of this movement. I've used a handful of AI products that I found useful, an AI-powered journal, for example.

• 11:58Ed Zitron?

  But these are not products that one associates with revolutions. They're useful tools that would have been a welcome surprise if it didn't require burning billions of dollars, blowing past emissions targets, and stealing the creative works of millions of people to train them. It's just sickening. It's sickening because this did not have to happen. Had Sundar Pichai seen what Microsoft did with OpenAI and said, "Not for me, mate." That's definitely not how he talks, but nevertheless, none of this would have continued. You think Microsoft was gonna hold this shit up on their own? God, no. They have no juice. Satya Nadella, he's just a, he's a cult leader. Something I'm gonna get into in a later episode. And it's just, it's all very sad. But if you wanna cheer yourself up, maybe you could listen to one of the following advertisements.

• 12:43Ed Zitron?

  And this is a short episode, so if they don't put one after this, you might just have a short gap between me talking. That's up to Matt. Matt's a genius. That's my producer, by the way, Matt Asowski. Anyway, ads.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, wanna treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 13:35Speaker 05

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• 14:04Speaker 06

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription-maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection, common cold, sinus infection,

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• 15:07Ed Zitron?

  And we're back. Look, I truly don't know what happens next, but I'm going to walk you through what I'm thinking. If we're truly at the diminishing return stage of transformer-based models, it's going to be extremely difficult to justify buying further iterations of Nvidia GPUs past Blackwell. And also, I have doubts they're going to be able to make a new one every year. The entire generative AI movement lives and dies by the idea that more compute power and more training data makes these things better. And if that's no longer the case, there's not really a reason to keep buying bigger and better. What's the point? Even now, what exactly happens when Microsoft or Google has racks worth of Blackwell GPUs? Models aren't getting better. Faster, I guess? What does faster even mean?

• 15:51Ed Zitron?

  What does better even mean? Better has yet to mean a new product. Better has not seemed to be measurable by humans just by bullshit benchmarks. This also makes the lives of OpenAI and Anthropic a little more difficult. Sam Altman has grown rich and powerful lying about how GPT will somehow lead to AGI, some conscious computer. But at this, at this point, what exactly is OpenAI meant to do? What are they doing? The only way it's this company has ever been able to develop new models is by throwing masses of compute and training data at them. And their only other choice is to start stapling its their reasoning model onto the side of their large language model, at which point,

• 16:32Ed Zitron?

  something happens. Something, everyone, it's happening. Something that is so good that literally nobody working for OpenAI or in the media appears to be able to tell you what it is. Yeah. Putting that aside, OpenAI is also a terrible business that has to burn $5 billion to make $3.7 billion. And there's no proof that they're able to bring down their costs. The constant thing I hear from VCs and AI fantasists is that the chips will bring down the cost of inference. Yet I don't see that happening. I've yet to see that happening. There's cerebrus, dinner plate sized chips, but you know what? I just don't think that shit's going to scale. And at that point, you have to wonder, do they have, like, where is this going?

• 17:15Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I know you're listening to an episode where I tell you, but still, even reading this stuff all day, you just look at it too hard and you start feeling a little crazy. I've read pretty much every article on OpenAI at this point. I've read Microsoft's earnings, multiple quarters straight, same with the rest of them. I've read all their blog posts, I've read all their shit. They don't have any idea. I'm confident that they don't have any idea. It's terrifying. And this is just this dismal situation where the only other, there's really only a few options, if I'm honest. You stop now. That is the biggest one. You just stop. Someone has to admit, Microsoft, Google, they'll never do this. They need to go, this is not going to scale. We need to pare this back or we need to stop

• 18:00Ed Zitron?

  it. And it will hurt their stock. It will hurt their media. But it's the right thing to do for the environment alone, but as a sustainable business. But assuming they don't do that, we have another problem, which is the only other option they can have is to keep flooring the gas. It cost $100 million to train GPT-4O. Anthropic CEO Dario Amade estimated a few months ago that training future models would cost $1 billion, if not $10 billion, with one researcher claiming that training OpenAI's next model, GPT-5, will cost around $1 billion. Outside of a miracle, we're about to enter an era of desperation in generative AI. We're two years in, and we have no killer apps,

• 18:42Ed Zitron?

  no industry-defining products, other than ChatGPT, a product that burns billions of dollars and nobody can really describe. Every episode, I'm like, "Email me, tell me what ChatGPT is," and I'll get some smart ass who sends me three paragraphs, "No, no, no, no, no. That's not a description, that's an essay, mate. You actually need to tell me what the hell this is. And if you can't, you've proven my point in my extremely thin and rigged game." Anyway, neither Microsoft nor Meta nor Google nor Amazon seem to be able to come up with any profitable use cases, let alone one their users actually like, nor have any of the people that have raised billions of dollars in venture capital for anything with AI take to the side. An investor interest in AI is already cooling, according to the information.

• 19:24Ed Zitron?

  It's kind of unclear how far this fast goes from here, if only because it isn't obvious what it is that anybody gets by investing in future rounds of OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of these other generative AI companies. At some point, they must make money, and the entire dream has been built around the idea that all of these GPUs and all of this money would eventually spit out something, something revolutionary, something world-changing. Yet what we have is this clunky, ugly, messy, larcenous, environmentally destructive and mediocre piece of shit. Generative AI was a reckless pursuit, one that shows a total lack of creativity and sense in the minds of big tech and venture capital, one where there was never anything really impressive, other than the amount of money it could burn and the amount of time Sam Altman could say something stupid and get quoted for it.

• 20:08Ed Zitron?

  I'll be honest with you, I don't really know what happens here. The future was always one that demanded big tech spend more to make even bigger models that would at some point become useful, and it isn't happening. In pursuit of doing so, big tech invested hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure specifically to follow one goal and put AI front and center of their businesses, claiming it was the future without ever checking if it was, if it actually did anything useful.

• 20:35Ed Zitron?

  And really, they, as I've said in the Rockcom bubble a few months ago, they don't have anything else. They don't have another growth market. And maybe that's why they're shoving all the cash into this, because they don't have it anywhere else to put it. They don't want to admit they've got nothing else. They don't want to admit that their businesses are crumbling under scrutiny from antitrust. They don't want to admit their services are kind of deteriorating, especially in the case of Meta. They don't have anything else. The revenue isn't coming. The products aren't coming. Orion, OpenAI's next model, it will underwhelm, as will its competitors' model. And at some point, somebody is going to blink in one of the hyperscalers and the AI era will end. Almost every single generative AI company that you've heard of is deeply unprofitable.

• 21:16Ed Zitron?

  And there are very few innovations coming to save them from the atrophy of the foundation model system, which, by the way, is the main large language models that they're training in all of these cases. Now, I've tried to keep my emotions in check, but you might, you might be able to tell that this pisses me off a little. I just feel sad and exhausted about it all. I feel drained as I look at how many times I've tried to warn people. I'm pissed off at the many members of the media that failed to push back against the over promises and outright lies of people like Sam Altman and Dario Amade. Wario Amade is what I'm calling him now. It's not particularly funny or accurate, but it's funny to say for me. And I'm just full of dread as I consider the economic ramifications of this industry collapsing, as well as the damage it's already done to our fucking environment.

• 22:01Ed Zitron?

  Once the AI bubble pops, there are no hyper-growth markets left, which will in turn lead to a bloodbath in big tech stocks as they realise that they're out of big ideas to convince the street that they're going to grow forever. There are some that will boast about being right here, and yes, there is some satisfaction in being so. Of course, of course, you take the moment, you do the victory lap, whatever, I said a thing and I was right.

• 22:24Ed Zitron?

  I don't know if I'm, I'm really doing the Joker kick down the stairs here. I don't know if I'm really happy about being right here. I think generative AI is a huge waste of money. I think the damage it's doing to the environment is disgusting. I think the stealing required to make the training data side is disgusting. I think all of that ending is good. And I think it needs to, just to be clear where I sit. But you know what? The other problem is that when this all falls apart, it's going to be rough. It's going to be rough for people in the tech industry, and it's going to be rough for the economy.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com, not an Empower client, paid or sponsored.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  The world is transforming faster than ever, and standing still isn't an option. At Oppenheimer, we're working at the forefront of the innovation economy to invest where progress begins, finding opportunities that build and protect wealth for individuals and institutions that want a seat at the edge of tomorrow.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

• 24:07Speaker 06

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  Common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, blue or fluke-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extenture. Learn more at extenture.com or call 1-833-393-3678.

• 25:13Ed Zitron?

  So I'm gonna start wrapping up here. I'm gonna read you a quote from Bubble Trouble, a piece I wrote in April. Ahem. How do you solve all of these incredibly difficult problems? What does OpenAI or Anthropic do when they run out of data and its synthetic data doesn't fill the gap, or worse massively degrades the quality of their outputs? What does Sam Altman do if GPT-5, like GPT-4, doesn't significantly improve its performance and he can't find enough compute to make the next step? What do OpenAI and Anthropic do when they realise they'll likely never turn a profit? What does Microsoft or Amazon or Google do if demand never really takes off and they're left with billions of dollars of underutilised data centres? What does Nvidia do if the demand for its chips drops off a cliff as a result? I don't know why more people aren't screaming from the rooftops about how unsustainable

• 25:58Ed Zitron?

  the AI boom is and how impossible some of the challenges are that it faces. There is no way to create enough training data for these models and little that we've seen so far suggests that generative AI will make anybody but Nvidia money. We're reaching the point where physics, things like heat and electricity, are getting in the way of progressing much further and it's hard to stomach investing more considering where we're at right now, once you cut through the noise. It just seems kind of barely goddamn mediocre. There's no iPhone moment coming, I'm afraid. So all right, not gonna be too smug, but reading that back, pretty accurate, pretty good for April. I was right then and I'm right now. Generative AI isn't a revolution, it's an evolution of a tech industry overtaken by

• 26:42Ed Zitron?

  growth-hungry management consultant freaks that neither know the problems that real people face nor how to fix them. It's a waste, it's a sickening waste, a monument to the corrupting force of growth and a sign that people empowering tech no longer work for you, the customer, but for venture capitalists and for the markets. I also wanna be clear that none of these companies seem to have ever had a plan. They believed that if they threw enough GPUs together, they would turn generative AI, with a probabilistic model for generating stuff, either into a sentient computer in OpenAI's case or into some sort of useful product in Microsoft's case. Neither of them are right. And I get it. I get some of you that you're like, "Well, this is all the big plans so they can proliferate data centres, this is all the big plans so they can steal everything and ship it back

• 27:27Ed Zitron?

  to us, they can do this to us." It's much easier and more comfortable to look at the world as a series of conspiracies, these grand strategies, and that all of these people are powerful, which they are, but powerful in a way that is kind of the dread hand, controlling your everything. But honestly, it's far scarier to see reality for what it is. Extremely rich and powerful people that are willing to bet insanely large amounts of money on what amounts to a few PDFs in their fucking gut. These people have no plan. This is not big tech's big plan to, or their excuse to build more data centers. It's the death throes of 20 years of growth at all costs thinking, because throwing a bunch of money at more servers and more engineers always seemed to create more growth in the past.

• 28:10Ed Zitron?

  In practice, this means that the people in charge and the strategies they employ are born not of an interest in improving the lives of you, their customer, but in increasing revenue growth, which means products they create aren't really about solving any problem other than what will make somebody give me more money, which doesn't necessarily mean provide them with a service. Generative AI is the perfect monster of the rot economy. It's a technology that lacks any real purpose, sold as if it could do literally anything, one without a real business model or a killer app. Proliferated because big tech no longer innovates. They clone and they monopolize. Yes, this much money can be this stupid, and yes, they will burn billions more in pursuit of a non-specific dream that involves charging you more money and trapping you in their ecosystem. But they're out of ideas.

• 28:56Ed Zitron?

  This was their big thing. If they had anything else, they wouldn't have done this. They don't. They're kind of screwed. I don't know how long it will take for you to see how much they're screwed. Could be a year, could be two quarters. I honestly don't know. But it cannot go on like this. It cannot, because at some point, burning billions of dollars every month is not going to work. At some point, the markets will react, or at some point, I don't know, CFO of Microsoft, Amy Hood might say, "Hey, we're burning billions of dollars to lose billions of dollars. We don't have the customers. These products aren't useful enough." Or maybe she keeps driving to hell. I don't know. But the longer it takes, the worse it's going to be for the industry and for the markets.

• 29:39Ed Zitron?

  I'm not trying to be a doomsayer, just like I wasn't trying to be one in March. I believe all of this is going nowhere, and that at some point, Google, Microsoft Meta, they're gonna, one of them's gonna blink, and they're gonna pull back on their capex. And before then, you're gonna see a lot of desperate stories about how AI gains can be found outside of training new models to try and keep the party going despite reality flicking the lights on and off and threatening to call the police on them. Really, though, you're gonna see so much of that. You're gonna see people in the media who should know better, still pumping, still pumping that bag. Because it gets back to the conspiracy theory I was talking about before. It gets back there because it's so much easier to think, ah, they'll work it out,

• 30:20Ed Zitron?

  they're smart, I trust them, I trust these people, they're gonna work out and make generative AI, make so much money, it's gonna be so profitable, always gonna be so good. Because when you don't accept that premise, everything you write about feels like writing about a dying person. Oh, Anthropic claims it can write in your writing style now, great. Where's Anthropic gonna be in two years? The toilet, probably. Gonna need a pretty big toilet for all those GPUs. Oh, OpenAI, they have this idea. Yeah, their ideas have fucking sucked so far. And the irony is, large language models as an idea aren't a bad one. The concept is interesting. A word calculator, sexy autocorrect, whatever you call it, there are meaningful things you could build

• 31:02Ed Zitron?

  with that, but not at this cost. Not like this. Not this much money. Not stealing from artists, not stealing from writers. I don't know if mine have been used, but if they have, I got the legal resources to fight, and I fucking will. I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of what I see in being done to contractors. I'm sick of what I see happening to art directors who lose their jobs to some shithead using DALL-E 3 Mini. It's grotesque. It's enough to turn your stomach. And as we come towards the end of the year, you may have at the beginning of the show been like, why Ed is so, why is he so annoyed? I think I've done a good job explaining it.

• 31:43Ed Zitron?

  But I want to end on a good note. And look, I fear for the future for many reasons, but I always have hope because I believe that there are still good people in the tech industry and I love technology. I'm gonna say it every episode that I can, because I really do. I love my computer. I love the people I find through it. I love the friends and the families and loved ones I've found through it. And I know a lot of you do too. And I want to make that clear because none of this is a problem with tech as a whole. The people who have taken over tech are the problem. The management consultant elite, the business people who just want to see growth at all costs. But I do have hope. I do have hope because of Blue Sky, which is a social network that I've posted on for over a year that's finally taking root. And this isn't an ad. This is just somewhere I spend 11 hours a day posting.

• 32:28Ed Zitron?

  But it feels different. It's growing rapidly. It's competing with threads and with Twitter. And they're doing so on an honest product and an open protocol. I'm not saying it's the solution for everything. I'm just saying solutions are possible. People are building them. People are trying. It doesn't have to be like this. The rot economy does not have to control the destiny of tech. And I think better things can happen. It's gonna take a while. Things are gonna blow up. I'm scared for this industry for what happens after generative AI collapses and not just for the initial problem, but when they don't have anything else the next quarter. But there are other ideas out there.

• 33:10Ed Zitron?

  There are other ideas for the future that aren't just born out of this shitty scuzzy billionaire mindset from shitheels like Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman and Prabha Gargavan. And they can and they will grow out of the ruins that these people create. I want you to have hope. Hope isn't just about blindly being optimistic. You can feel hopeful while still being pissed off at everything. Hope is about getting up every day and being willing to say what you think better looks like. What you think a better world could be. You don't have to do it at scale. You don't have to be an influence. You don't have to write. You don't have to have a tech podcast. You just have to talk to your friends. You have to talk to the people you know.

• 33:53Ed Zitron?

  You have to fight within the institutions you are in to find the joy and to push out things like generative AI. We can have better and you are the beginning of fixing these problems. And I actually believe that with enough pushback, these big tech companies can change too. I'm not relying on them. I hate that I have to use their products. But you don't. Perhaps you can find alternatives. I always say it's a great day to join Blue Sky or use Signal. Proton Mail is apparently great. I'm very much stuck in the Gmail ecosystem, which sucks. A few decades in there, it's tough. Is it decades now? Either way, it's hard to escape the rot economy hole, but there are bits of yourself you can remove from it. Please do not give up hope.

• 34:38Ed Zitron?

  Please stay angry. If you are angry, I'm not telling you to be angry. Your indignation is necessary. Your righteous indignation is necessary to tell these people to go fucking pound sand. Your little changes, those discussions you have with colleagues and friends and loved ones about these problems. That knowledge is powerful and I encourage you to talk about these things. The tech industry has grown big and strong, telling you you're too stupid to understand what they're doing. And unless I'm very much mistaken, based on the readers I and listeners I talk to, you all get this. I just explained GPUs and server architecture and shit. I think you mostly got it, right? I'm assuming you did. You keep listening.

• 35:21Ed Zitron?

  And that's because this stuff isn't that complex. They want you to believe it is so that they can stay powerful. But you're a lot goddamn smarter than you give yourself credit for. You're a lot goddamn stronger than you are too. Don't let these people make you feel oppressed. Don't let them make you feel weak. You are not. You are so much more valuable to them than they'll ever be to you. You have been conned. You are the victim and you will succeed long term. Spread the good ideas. Talk about what a good world looks like and thank you for listening.

• 36:02Ed 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.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  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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