How To Argue With An AI Booster, Part Three

In the final part of this week's three-part Better Offline Guide To Arguing With AI Boosters, Ed Zitron walks you through why generative AI is nothing like Amazon Web Services, how the media misled the public about ChatGPT, and why ChatGPT’s popularity does not mean it’s a mass-market product. Latest Premium Newsletter: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On Generative AI: https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on-ai/ 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. BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in --- 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 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. 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.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O-D-O-O dot com. That's Odoo dot com.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business further and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business. Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 1:58Ed Zitron?

  Hello, I'm Ed Zitron, and this is Better Offline.

• 2:13Ed Zitron?

  We've finally reached the end of our three-part how to argue with an AI booster series. Big, strong men are standing outside of the Better Offline studio, suspended 200 feet above the Las Vegas Strip with tears in their eyes and they're saying, "Sir, sir, it's the most beautiful podcast I've ever heard. Please stop recording it. Everyone else will feel insufficient when they hear it. No, no, I have to continue. I'm afraid my listeners need me." But, okay, seriously, folks, if there's anything I want you to take home so far is that the arguments that these people, these AI sycophants make, they crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny. And yet, these arguments work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who don't understand the rotten economics

• 2:55Ed Zitron?

  of AI, or because they force the opposite party to surrender their reason and to exit the plains of reality. To which I say, "Fuck that. Absolutely not. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on, and I'll hope that you'll all be standing with me side by side." Now, in the first episode, we shook away the claims that it's the early days for AI and we just need to give it more time. Then I took the idea that generative AI is like Uber or fiber optic networking, two industries that both burned a lot of money at the start, but are otherwise nothing like generative AI. And now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments. These are the worst of the worst booster quips. Here we go. "Ultra Booster Quip!" I thought about recording that with a bunch of reverb, but it didn't really work out for me, but I wanted to do it once. But anyway, their argument is, "AI

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  is just like Amazon Web Services, a massive investment that took a while to go profitable, and everybody hated Amazon for it." Now, I actually covered this in-depth in the haters go to the AI bubble, but the long and short of it is that Amazon Web Services is a platform, a necessity with an obvious choice, and has burned about 10% of what Amazon and all of them have burned chasing generative AI, and had also proven demand before building it. Also, Amazon Web Services was break even within three years. And OpenAI was founded in fucking 2015, and even if you start from November 2022, by Amazon Web Services standards, should be break even by now. But now I'll quote myself. "Amazon Web..." No, wait, sorry, that's a booster. "Amazon Web Services was created out of necessity. Amazon's infrastructure

• 4:22Ed Zitron?

  needs were so great that he had effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything to theoretically everywhere."

• 4:32Ed Zitron?

  Handling both the traffic from customers, delivering the software that runs amazon.com quickly and reliably, and well, making sure things were stable. It didn't need to come up with a reason for people to run web applications. They were already doing so themselves, but in ways that cost a lot more, were inflexible and required specialist server skills. Amazon Web Services took something that people already did, and what there was already a proven demand for, and made it better and scaled it. Eventually, Google and Microsoft would join the fray. I editorialized a bit there, but I can do that with my own work. Now, a common booster quip, by the way, is for them to say, "Well, this AI company, they've got high annualized revenues, and as I've discussed in the past, this metric is basically month times 12."

• 5:14Ed Zitron?

  And while it's a fine measure for normal, high-gross-margin businesses like software-as-a-service companies, it isn't for AI. It doesn't account for churn, which is when people leave. It also is a number intentionally used to make a company sound more successful. So you can say $200 million annualized revenue instead of $16.6 million a month. And you're also meant to butcher, "You heard, they said 200 million annualized, but you heard 200 million." You minded. That was a bad blanket reference, but I'll continue. They want you to think 200 million. They want you to think that's what they'll make. More often than not, if they mention an annualized number, that number will not be how much they make that year. Also, if they're using this number, it's likely not consistent.

• 5:56Ed Zitron?

  Now, if they bring this up, you should just say to them, "Hey, how much profit is the company making, and also, how much are they burning?" At this point, they will, I think, mace you. I mean, with the spray or an actual mace. AI boosters are strange. Now, they'll also say, "Well, AI, this AI company's in growth mode," and they'll pull the profit lever when it's time. And the answer to that is always going to be, "Why have none of them done this?" Not one. Not one of them. Now a booster will burst through your dome and go, AI, AGI, AGI, and then there's that will bullshit again. It's always about the will with these fuckers. We do not know how thinking works in humans and thus cannot extrapolate it to a machine. And at the very

• 6:38Ed Zitron?

  least, human beings have the ability to reevaluate things and learn, a thing that LLMs cannot do and will never do. We do not know how to get to AGI. Sam Altman said in June that OpenAI was now confident they knew how to build AGI, as they have traditionally understood it. Then in August, Altman said that AGI was not a super useful term and that the point of all this is it doesn't really matter and it's just this continuing exponential of model capability that we'll rely on for more and more things. I'm really tired of people quoting this guy. He doesn't make any fucking sense. Read out, read anything he says out loud and it's just really just total bullshit. Even Meta's chief AI scientist,

• 7:20Ed Zitron?

  the Yan Le Cun, says it isn't possible with transformer-based models to make AGI. We don't know if AGI is possible, and anyone claiming they do is lying. Anyone who's talking about AGI is talking about fanfiction again. Ask them how they feel about Banjo and Kazooie. Do you think they made love? Actually, that's a, if next time someone brings up AGI to you seriously, bring up Banjo and Kazooie and their romantic involvement. I actually, that, I think that that's the only response you should give now. Stop humoring them. It is fanfiction. But putting Banjo and Kazooie aside, there's also a really stupid booster thing they do, which is, I'm hearing from people deep within the AI industry that there's some sort of ultra powerful models they're not talking about. And this, by the

• 8:05Ed Zitron?

  way, is hogwash. Nothing different than your buddy's friend's uncle who works at Nintendo that says Mario is coming to the PlayStation. Ilya Sutskever and Miriam Murati raised billions of dollars for companies with no product, let alone a product roadmap. And they did so because they saw an opportunity for a grift and to throw a bunch of money at compute for no reason. Anyone who has secret shit is not talking about it because it doesn't exist. Also, if someone from deep within the industry has told somebody big things are coming, they're doing so to con them or make them think that they have privileged information. Ask for specifics. And if they say, I couldn't possibly tell you, then they're full of shit. They're full of crap. They are full of doo-doo. And if they get vague, get specific. Oh, it's gonna be able to automate all the things. What things? How? How's it automate them? Oh, I don't know.

• 8:50Ed Zitron?

  Then you don't know shit about fuck. Now, talking about not knowing shit about fuck is another booster quip. ChatGPT is so popular. Seven hundred million people use it weekly. It's one of the most popular websites on the internet. Its popularity proves its utility. Look at all the paying customers. Now, that paying customers part we'll get to in a second. But this argument is poised as a comeback to my suggestion that AI is not particularly useful. A proof point that this movement is not inherently wasteful or that there are, in fact, use cases for ChatGPT that are lasting, meaningful, or important. I fundamentally disagree. In fact, I believe ChatGPT and LLMs in general have been marketed based on lies of inference, which I realize is ironic. I know. It's pretty clever. I had a whole blog written called The Lie of Inference that kind of became this.

• 9:35Ed Zitron?

  It wasn't very good, though. This is. This is good. Don't say it's bad. I also have grander concerns and suspicions about what OpenAI considers a user and how it counts revenue. Let me give you an example. They claim to have five million business customers, yet five hundred thousand of those are from a fifteen million dollar year deal, year-long deal, with Cal State University, which works out to around two dollars and fifty cents a user a month. OpenAI has also started doing one dollar a month trials of its thirty dollar a month team subscription. And one has to wonder how many of those subscribers accounted in the total and indeed for how long. I do not know the scale of these offers nor how long OpenAI has been offering them. A Redditor posted about this one dollar for a month deal a few months ago,

• 10:19Ed Zitron?

  saying that OpenAI was offering five seats at once, so one buck for a month per seat. How many people cancel after that? Who knows? Maybe they just hope they don't. In fact, I found a few people talking about these deals and even one adding that they were offered an annual ten dollar a month ChatGPT plus subscription. That's like... Not like ten dollars a month for just one month, that's for twelve months. With one person saying a few weeks ago that they'd seen people offered that same deal for cancelling their subscription. And actually, I got the same thing when I tried to cancel. Yes, I pay for ChatGPT. I need to actually use the fucking thing to criticize it. When I tried to cancel, it was like, hey, do you want three months for ten bucks a piece? And I was like, sure, just to prove my point. Suspicious. But there is a greater problem at play, by the way, and it goes beyond pricing.

• 11:02Ed Zitron?

  And it's that ChatGPT and OpenAI has been marketed based on lies. So ChatGPT has seven hundred million weekly active users. OpenAI has yet to provide a definition. Yes, I've asked them. Which means that an active user could be defined as somebody who has gone to ChatGPT once in the space of a week. This term is extremely flimsy and doesn't really tell us much. Yes, it's a lot of people, but how active are they? Similar web says that in July twenty twenty five, ChatGPT dot com had one point two eight seven billion total visits, making it very popular. What do these facts actually mean, though? As I said previously, ChatGPT has had probably the most sustained PR campaign for anything outside of a presidency or a pop star. Every single article about AI mentions OpenAI or ChatGPT.

• 11:47Ed Zitron?

  Every single feature launch, no matter how small, gets a slew of coverage. Every single time you hear AI, you're made to think of ChatGPT by a tech media that's never stopped to think about their role in the hype or their responsibility to their readers. And as the hype has grown, the publicity compounds, because the natural thing for a journalist to do when everybody is talking about something is to talk about it more. ChatGPT's immediate popularity may have been viral, but the media took the ball and ran with it. And then proceeded to tell people it did stuff it did not. People were pressured to try this service then under false pretenses, something that continues to happen to this day. And I'm gonna give you a really fucking grisly example. When I discovered this, when I went and looked at this, it filled me full of rage. It's disgraceful what happened.

• 12:31Ed Zitron?

  On March fifteenth twenty twenty three, Kevin Roos of the New York Times would say that OpenAI's GPT four was exciting and scary. And then it was exacerbating, in his words, the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I've been getting whenever I think about AI lately. Wondering if he was experiencing future shock, then described how it was an indeterminate level of better and. Then said something that immediately sounded ridiculous. In one test conducted by an AI safety research group that hooked GPT-4 up to a number of other systems, GPT-4 was able to hire a human task rabbit worker to do a simple online task career, solving a capture test without alerting the person to the fact it was a robot. The AI even lied to the robot about why it needed the capture done, concocting a story about a vision impairment.

• 13:18Ed Zitron?

  Now, this doesn't sound even remotely real now, but this was two years ago. So I went and looked up the paper and pretty much everything that Roos described was illustrative, i.e. doesn't really seem whether it happened. Now, he's referring to the safety card, which every model has that lists all the measures used to train it and such. And this safety card led to the perpetration of one of the earliest falsehoods and most eagerly parroted lies about this fucking industry. And that was that ChatGPT and Generative AI is capable of agentic actions, outlet after outlet and some people who should definitely have known better, led by Kevin Roos, eagerly interpreted an entire series of events that took place that doesn't remotely make sense. Starting with the fact that I don't think you can hire a task rabbit to solve a capture.

• 14:04Ed Zitron?

  Or at the very least, without a contrived situation where you create an empty task and ask them to complete it, why not use Mechanical Turk or Fiverr? There are people right now offering that service. There were actual, real things. But you know me, I'm a curious little critter. So I went further and followed this, the citation from the safety card to the study. And this is by METR and their research page. It turns out that what actually happened was METR had a researcher copy and paste the generated responses from the model and otherwise handled the entire interaction with the task rabbit. And based on the plurality of task rabbit contractors, it appears to have taken multiple times. On top of that, it appears that OpenAI and Meta, that's METR, sorry, were prompting the model on what to say, which kind of defeats the point, like.

• 14:50Ed Zitron?

  We don't naturally know what they prompted it to do. And when you look, it even says it does like chain of thought reasoning, which didn't really exist back then. And if it did, it was extremely like chain of thought is reasoning and that came out end of 2024.

• 15:04Ed Zitron?

  This whole thing is absolutely insane. It's absurd that anyone wrote about it is real. What happened, just to be really blunt, is that they, if they even opened a TaskRabbit, it's really not obvious whether they actually did this. They had to go to the model and say, okay, I'm opening a TaskRabbit window. And now the person has said this, and now this is it. It just doesn't sound real at all, but even if it did, it's very obvious that they were telling the model what to say and then copy pasting the response and it took them multiple tries. It took me five whole minutes to find this article, partly because it was cited on the GPT-4 system card. I then, then read it within that time, then wrote this part of the script. It didn't require any technical knowledge other than the ability to read.

• 15:47Ed Zitron?

  It is transparently blatantly obvious that GPT-4 did not hire a TaskRabbit or indeed make any of these actions. It was prompted to and they did not use, show the prompts they used, likely because they had to use so many of them, if they even did it. Anyone falling for this is a mark. An open AI should have gone out of their way to correct people. Instead, they sat back and let people publish outright misinformation.

• 16:16Ed Zitron?

  All right, folks, I'm back talking to you about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And I finally pulled the trigger and picked up one of their Cuban curb chains to go with one of their pima cotton t-shirts. Going to be a good look for me? Eh, you'll find out. All of this will sit beneath one of Quince's responsible down hooded parkas, a ridiculously warm and comfortable coat that I wear constantly in the fall and winter. It can actually really take a beating in the wind. It's wonderful and I can't recommend it enough. Now, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. I've been buying from them for years before they advertised and I heartily recommend their stuff. Even wearing one of their t-shirts as I speak. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 17:01Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was better offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex card, you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat for you too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 19:05Ed Zitron?

  Ruse, along with his co-host Casey Newton, would go on to describe this example at length on a podcast that week, describing an entire narrative where the human actually gets suspicious and GPT-4 reasons out loud that it should not reveal that it is a robot. It's not a reasoning model. At which point, the TaskRabbit solves the capture. During this conversation, Newton gasps and says, "Oh my God," twice. And when he asks Ruse, "How does this model understand that in order to succeed at its task, it has to deceive the human?" Ruse responds, "We don't know." That is the unsatisfying answer. And Newton laughs and states, "We need to pull the plug." I mean, again, what?

• 19:42Ed Zitron?

  Disgraceful, embarrassing, reprehensible. All that and more on the Hard Fork Podcast. Published weekly. You can cut that, that ads for free, fellas. Credulousness aside, the GPT-4 marketing campaign was incredibly effective, creating an aura that allowed OpenAI to take advantage of the vagueness of its offering as people, including members of the media, willfully filled in the blanks for them. Altman has really never had to work to sell his product. Think about it, have you ever heard OpenAI tell you what ChatGPT can do or go to great lengths to describe its actual abilities? Even on OpenAI's own page for ChatGPT, the text is extremely vague. You scroll down, you're told that ChatGPT can write, brainstorm, edit and explore ideas with you.

• 20:24Ed Zitron?

  It can generate and debug code or automate repetitive tasks, not clear what the tasks are, and help you learn new APIs? Question mark. With ChatGPT, you can learn something new, dive into a hobby, answer complex questions and analyze data and create charts. What repetitive tasks? Who knows? How am I learning? Unclear. It's got thinking built in. What that means is also unclear. Unexplained and thus allows a user to incorrectly believe that ChatGPT has a brain and thinks. To be clear, I know what reasoning means, but this website does not attempt to explain what thinking means. You can also offload complex tasks from start to finish with an agent, which can, according to OpenAI, think and act, proactively choosing from a toolbox of agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer.

• 21:08Ed Zitron?

  This is an egregious lie, employing the kind of weasel wording that would be used to torture IR baboon for an eternity. Precise in its vagueness, OpenAI's copy is honed to make reporters willing to simply write down whatever they see and interpret it in the most positive light. And thus, the lie of inference began. What ChatGPT meant was muddied from the beginning, and thus ChatGPT's actual outcomes have never been fully defined. What ChatGPT could do became a kind of folklore, a nonspecific form of automation that could write code and generate copy and images that can analyze data, all things that are true, but one can infer much greater meaning and use from. One can infer that automation means the automation of anything related to text, or that write code means write the entirety of a computer program.

• 21:51Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI's ChatGPT agent is not by any extension of the word, and I quote, "already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks," but it has not, in any meaningful sense, committed to any actual outcomes. As a result, potential users, subject to a 24/7 marketing campaign, have been pushed towards a website that can theoretically do anything or nothing, and have otherwise been left to their own devices. The endless gaslighting, societal pressure, media pressure, and pressure from their bosses has pushed hundreds of billions of people to try a product that even its creators can't really describe, or don't feel compelled to. And if I was wrong, we'd have real use cases by now and better metrics than weekly active users. As I've said in the past, OpenAI is deliberately using these weekly active users so that it doesn't have to publish their monthly active users,

• 22:35Ed Zitron?

  which I believe would be much higher. Now, why wouldn't it do this? Well, OpenAI, as I've mentioned, has 20 million paying ChatGPT subscribers and 5 million business customers, with no explanation of what the difference might be, really other than "it involves Teams and Edge U", but not Pro. Anyway, this is already a mediocre 3.5% conversion rate. Yeah, its monthly active users, which are likely 800 or 900 million, but these are guesses, would make that rate lower than 3%, which is pretty terrible considering everyone says this shit is the future. I'm also tired of having people claim that Search or Brainstorm or Companions are a lasting, meaningful business model. I'm really tired of it. I'm tired of being told this again and again and again. That's not what ChatGPT is gonna actually survive on.

• 23:19Ed Zitron?

  Breathe, okay, let's move on. Here's another boost of grip, though. "OpenAI is making tons of money! That's proof they're a successful company, and you are wrong somehow!" So OpenAI announced that it is here its first $1 billion month on August 20th, 2025, on CNBC, in fact. Weirdly enough, by the way, that quote was not in the TV interview. But anyway, this also brings it exactly in line with my estimated $5.26 billion in revenue that I believe it has made at the end of July. Did that in a premium newsletter, please pay me. However, remember what the MIT study that I mentioned said? Enterprise adoption is high, but transformation is low. There are tons of companies throwing money at AI, but they are not seeing actual returns.

• 24:01Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI is growth as the single most prominent company in AI, and if we're honest, one of the most prominent in software writ large. Makes sense, but at some point will slow, because the actual returns for businesses are not there. If there were, we'd have one article where we could point a chat GPT integration that had helped scale a company, save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money, written in plain English, and not in the gobbledygook of profit improvement. Also, OpenAI is projected to make $12.7 billion in 2025. How exactly will it do that? Is it really making $1.5 billion a month by the end of the year? Even if it does, is the idea that it keeps burning $10 billion or more a year, every

• 24:42Ed Zitron?

  year into it, like, what actual revenue potential does OpenAI have long term? Its products are about as good as everybody else's, cost about the same, and do the same things. ChatGPT is basically the same product as Claude or Grok, maybe less Mecha Hitler, or any number of different LLMs. The only real advantages that OpenAI has are infrastructure and brand recognition. These models have clearly hit a wall in training, hitting diminishing returns, meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing its service at scale, nothing more. It isn't making its business cheaper, other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it, other than the site in Abilene, Texas, where it's promised Oracle $30 billion a year in 2025. I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

• 25:24Ed Zitron?

  I don't buy that this company will continue growing forever, and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon. When OpenAI opens Stargate Abilene, it will turn profitable. How? I hear this one a good amount. How? How? How? How's it gonna happen? Nobody ever answers. No one ever answers, actually, how this company will become profitable. It's fucking insane to me. Nobody ever answers the question. Efficiencies? Efficiencies. They're gonna be efficient? Hmm? Hmm? They're gonna be efficient? If you're gonna say ChatGPT 5, I wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient. In fact, it's less efficient. And I'm sure one of you is gonna argue, well, you know, they could do the custom silicon, they have a $10 billion deal with Broadcom. How they fucking pay them for that?

• 26:09Ed Zitron?

  Also, you realize that, well, actually, no, just, no, no, you're right, they're gonna get the chip from Broadcom, because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech, right? It always works and it's always great, and it has no problems. That's what I always, that's, that's what happened with pretty much every first time they make anything in tech. Anyway, let's move on. You'll hear boosters also be like, well, my brother's friend's dog uses ChatGPT and loves it. Well, I heard this happened, or my mate has it in this, or I heard this person, or I use it in this one. Before we go any further, just to be clear, though.

• 26:43Ed Zitron?

  Is, when you hear a booster bring up AI and they'll say something, make sure they're talking about generative AI. Are they actually talking about generative AI? Is this a large language model thing? It's very, very, very common for people to conflate AI with generative AI. There are many different kinds of AI. Make sure that the AI booster, whatever they're claiming, whatever they're telling you, is actually about large language models. There are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up. LLMs have nothing to do with folding at home, autonomous cars, or most disease research. But okay, let's do a speedrun.

• 27:16Ed Zitron?

  Using AI led researchers to discover forty-four percent more materials. No, it didn't. MIT is now withdrawing this paper citing concerns about its integrity. I've linked it in the show notes. There's a huge rundown. Here's another quote. AI is so profoundly powerful that it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job. While young people have been having trouble finding jobs, there's no proof that AI is the reason. Every piece of coverage you're reading is citing an Oxford Economics report that amidst a bunch of numbers says, and I quote, "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates." A statement that it does not back up. Other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along this sheer employment declines in some roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from AI, and digging deeper, the largest

• 28:01Ed Zitron?

  displacement seems to be entry-level jobs normally filled by recent graduates. There's otherwise new data. Anyone making this point is grasping at straws. I go into this in more detail in a newsletter called Sincerity Wins the War, which I've linked to, but it's one of the worst reported stories in tech. And now I'm actually gonna ad lib for a second because I forgot while writing this script, there was also this thing that came out of Stanford that said, "There's been a thirteen percent drop in jobs affected by AI." And this was used as proof that AI was taking them. Now, curious little critter that I am, I went and read that. What it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to AI and being affected by AI. They saw they were going down, they went, "Oh, it's AI that did that." They've done, they fart around with various statistics,

• 28:44Ed Zitron?

  but that's the long and short of it. I'll give you an example of one of the jobs, accountancy. Now, any accountants listening, big up to my accountant listeners. There's been a hiring crisis in accountancy for years. People are not becoming CPAs. The reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them. It's nothing to do with AI. They, like, are you? Imagine if anyone put half as much effort into writing up these stories as I did writing up one of these booster quips. But here's another one, that AI is replacing young coders, and it is not. In fact, Amazon's cloud chief just said that replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard. There is no actual real evidence that this is the case. Every single story you have read is anecdotal. Anyone peddling this has

• 29:26Ed Zitron?

  an agenda or is not reading. Every CEO mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that AI is replacing people because AI can't replace people. I will add an aside, there are people's jobs that have been replaced by AI, translators, transcribers, Brian over at Blood is in the Machine, Blood in the Machine even, sorry Brian, he's doing a great job uncovering this. There are people that have lost jobs. These people are losing it because their bosses are fucking stupid, because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work and slopping it up. That's not happening at the knowledge worker scale, nor is it happening at the coder scale. Everyone telling you that has an agenda. But boosters will also claim

• 30:06Ed Zitron?

  that AI is doing science research somehow, or will do it. And it won't. I've included a write-up about why foundation models can't do this. Someone's gonna read it and say, but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of LLMs. And the reason he says this is because, I shit you not, that LLMs aren't incapable of doing scientific research. He says they're insufficient, which is, which is the same thing, they're insufficient. But anyway, he claims they're also not dead weight for science, then spends hundreds of words meandering around that thing to kiss up to AI boosters for some reason, I assume because they've terrified him by being really annoying. And these people need to go outside and touch

• 30:47Ed Zitron?

  grass. Now, a lot of people think they're gonna tell me that they use AI all the time, and that will change my mind. I cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use cases. Every use case I hear is one of the following. I use it for brainstorming, to which I say, who cares? Not a business model, it's commoditized. I use it like search, who cares? It's not even good at search, it's fine. It's not even better than the low bar set by Google Search. The results it gives on Gray. And the links are deliberately made smaller, which gets in the way of me clicking them. So I can actually look at the content. If you're using chat G P T for search, you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at. If I'm wrong, great. You now have a functional search engine. Congratulations. Well, I use it for research. And if you use it for research, you do not respect actual research. You want a quick answer.

• 31:33Ed Zitron?

  It's that simple. These reports are slop. I've read many, many, many A I reports and they're not good. Sorry. Well, I use it for coding or know someone who used it for coding and I'll get to that in a minute. But all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about this stuff as if it was changing society. None of these use cases come close to explaining why I should be impressed by generative A I. It also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that A I did for you once. We are so past the point when any of that matters. A I is being sold as a transformational technology and I am yet to see it transform anything. I am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me or even one thing that feels possible now that wasn't possible before.

• 32:13Ed Zitron?

  This isn't even me being a cynic. I'm ready to be impressed. I just haven't been impressed in three fucking years and it's getting boring. Also, tell me with a straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure. Remember, A I boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful. None of these use cases are powerful sounding.

• 32:31Ed Zitron?

  But sir, oh, you're back, right? Sir, vibe coding is changing the world, allowing people who can't code to make software. Now, this is one of the most brain-dead takes about A I and coding. And it's that vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software and you'll never guess what Kevin Roos covered this. He should get this article. I, while writing the script, I hadn't even noticed the glitch. Anyway, while technically true in that one can just type, build me a website into one of many coding environments. This does not mean said website is functional, secure or useful. Let's make this really clear. A I cannot just handle coding. Go into the show notes and read this piece I've linked from Colton Bogey. I have actually interviewed him now. He's gonna be coming out in the next few weeks, the episode. The interview is fucking brilliant.

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  And then the other I've linked to by Nick Suresh. If you contact me about A I and coding without reading these, I will send them to you and nothing else or crush you. Like a car in a garbage dump into a cube, one or the other, I will choose at the time. Also, show me a vibe-coded company, please. Not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features. A fully functional, secure and useful app that has made money.

• 33:40Ed Zitron?

  And made by somebody who cannot read or write code. You won't be able to because it is impossible. Vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals. And are our AI coding environments making people faster? I don't think so. In fact, a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers 19% slower. The reason that nobody is vibe coding in entire companies because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go. And oftentimes, when you add something, it breaks something else. This is all well and good if you actually understand code. It's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or Claude code like a kid at an arcade machine, turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo is going on. Vibe coders are also awful for the already negative margins of most AI coding environments

• 34:25Ed Zitron?

  as every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise, burning tokens in pursuit of a goal they themselves don't really understand. Vibe coding doesn't work, it will not work, and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance and at worst, supporting a campaign built on lies.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex Car, you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good. And maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. So while you're checking names off your holiday list,

• 36:07Speaker 04

  those gifts can be a treat for you, too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 36:38Ed Zitron?

  And this is all built up to one final point. I'm no longer accepting half-baked arguments. If you're an AI booster, please come up with better arguments. And if you truly believe in this stuff, you should have a firmer grasp on why you do so. It's been three years and the best some of you have is, "It's really popular," or "Uber also burned money." Your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true. And it's deeply embarrassing. Then again, there are many well-intentioned people who aren't necessarily AI boosters who repeat these arguments, regardless of how thinly framed they are, in part because we live in a high-information, low-processing society where people tend to put great faith in people who are confident in what they say and sound smart adjacent. I also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out

• 37:22Ed Zitron?

  or seeming stupid is being used against them. If you don't understand something, it's likely because the people you're reading or hearing it from don't either. If a company takes a promise and you don't understand how they'll deliver on it, it's their job to explain how and your job to suggest it isn't plausible in clear and defined language. This has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an outright failure of journalism. I have never seen more misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career. And it's largely peddled by reporters who either don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible, in part because all their peers are doing the same thing and saying the same nonsense. As things begin to collapse, and they sure look like they're collapsing, but I'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet.

• 38:06Ed Zitron?

  It will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say. Never have I seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than Sam Altman saying that GPT-5 was actually bad and that GPT-6 will be even better. Members of the media, Sam Altman does not respect you. He is not your friend. Clammy Sam Altman is not secretly confiding in you. Clammy will thinks you are stupid and easily manipulated and will print anything he says, largely in part because many members of the media will print exactly what he says whenever he says it. And to be clear, if you wrote about GPT-6 and made fun of it, that's great. But let's close by discussing the very nature of AI skepticism and the so-called void between those who hate AI and those who love AI from the perspective of one of the most prominent

• 38:50Ed Zitron?

  people in the skeptic camp. Critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace, patience, or in many cases hospitality when it comes to their position. While they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side, it's always framed as the work of a firebrand, an outlier, or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify. Skeptics are demonized, their points under constant scrutiny, their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or intellectual weakness. Skeptic and critic, a word said with a sneer of trepidation, that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that AI is the most powerful special thing ever. To not immediately fall in love with something that everybody is talking about is to be

• 39:32Ed Zitron?

  framed as a hater, to have oneself introduced with the words "not everyone agrees" on 40% of your appearances. By comparison, AI boosters are the first to get TV appearances and offers to be on panels, their coverage featured prominently on Techmeme, selling slop-like books called shit like "The Future of Intelligence: Masters of the Brain", featuring 18 interviews with different CEOs that all say the same thing. They don't have to justify their love, they simply have to remember all the right terms, chirping out "test time compute and the cost of inference is going down" enough times to Solomon Wario Amade to give them an hour-long interview where he says "the models, they are, in years, going to be the most powerful schoolteacher ever built." And by the way, yeah, I did sell a book, because my shit fucking bangs, my shit rocks.

• 40:15Ed Zitron?

  I'm not, I'm, I'm not gonna be too smug, but like, I put a lot of effort into this and I researched it very well. Others should try harder. I have consistent, deeply sourced arguments that I've built over the course of years. I didn't become a hater because I'm a contrarian. I became a hater because the shit that these fucking oaths have done to the computer pisses me off. I did The Man That Destroyed Google Search because I wanted to know why Google Search sucked. I wrote Sam Altman Free because at the time I didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath. Everything I do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology. I started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with 300 subscribers and 60 views, and have written it as an exploration of subjects that grows as I write.

• 40:59Ed Zitron?

  I do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what I am, and if that's strange to you, well, I'm a strange man, but at least I'm an honest one. I do have a chip on my shoulder in that I really do not like it when people try to make other people feel stupid, especially when they do so as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good. I write this stuff out because I have an intellectual interest. I like writing, and by writing, I'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology. And talking it out actually feels good. It's an intellectual exercise that I really enjoy. I happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month, and I'm not specifying where those people go. And if you think that I've grown this by being a hater, you are doing yourself to the service of underestimating me, which I will use to my advantage by writing deeper, more meaningful, and more insightful things than you,

• 41:44Ed Zitron?

  and then I'll say them with lots of curse words on this podcast. I've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again and make billions doing so, and all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like Google, Facebook, and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth. I can't manufacture my disgust, nor is it hard to, nor can I manufacture whatever is inside it that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things. I don't know if I take this too seriously, whether I don't take it seriously enough because I keep saying fuck and shit, but I'm honoured that I'm able to do so, and I really appreciate everyone who listens, reads, or engages with me in any way. I really do love you all for listening. I know that this was a long three-parter. I've enjoyed recording it. I've done lots of retakes.

• 42:27Ed Zitron?

  Matt Asowski, love you, man, sorry for all of this. I'll catch you next episode.

• 42:40Ed Zitron?

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

• 43:13Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 44:17Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  This is the moment, baby. This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question. Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game and those who just want to watch from the sidelines, eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that [dog barking] dog in you. Underdog. At least your dog. Terms may apply.

• 45:17Speaker 08

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture. Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, [coughing] 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.

• 46:00Speaker 08

  Common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or flu-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. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.