Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City. Ed is joined in-studio by founder and writer Charlie Meyer to talk about the BS of vibe coding, why the valley went so crazy about scaling laws, and the realities of AI coding. https://blog.charliemeyer.co/ https://csmeyer.substack.com/ Code Doesn’t Happen To You - https://csmeyer.substack.com/p/code-doesnt-happen-to-you The Trillion Dollar Chart (scaling laws piece) - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/the-trillion-dollar-chart/ Replit’s Existential Problem - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/replits-existential-problem/ Want to support me? Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg it would mean a lot! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:08Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:12Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:27Ed Zitron?

  And we're here in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course, Charlie Meyer, the esteemed blogger and CEO of Picko. Charlie, thank you for joining me.

• 1:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:38Ed Zitron?

  So, yeah, you've gained some, I would say, notoriety recently by making blogs that go against the oinking of the hogs of the valley. And I think your Scaling Laws piece was the one that really got going.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I, my blog gets some love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel. And so I'm trying to get off of that. We're going to try and build it like a newsletter type thing. But yeah, I'll post on Hacker News, and every once in a while, I'll get something that blows up and I'll get my, get my haters in there, so.

• 2:09Ed Zitron?

  So what is it that's pissing them off?

• 2:11Speaker 05

  So like I had a post a few weeks back that was on, I called it LLMs are the ultimate demo ware.

• 2:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  And so I define demo ware as software that you make the software and it works well in the 30 minutes that you're showing it out to executives or whoever's going to buy it.

• 2:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  And then it doesn't do the thing.

• 2:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  It doesn't do the thing day to day. And so I, I listed some examples and my startup's in edtech, right? So we do, you know, and so like, there's always something that I pick on is, is I really hate AI tutors. And we can get into, to that and how that all works.

• 2:41Ed Zitron?

  Of course.

• 2:41Speaker 05

  But, um, so I said, oh, I listed out a few things that I thought were demo ware. So it's like, oh, vibe coding that makes dashboards.

• 2:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:47Speaker 05

  You know, that's an easy thing to pick on. And then I said, uh, you know, AI tutors. And I said, well, maybe the kid won't want to talk to an AI tutor.

• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  That was the critique I made, right? Is like, maybe they just don't want to talk to him.

• 2:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but won't talk to a person.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  They want to, maybe they want to have like a teacher who is like in the classroom.

• 3:03Ed Zitron?

  Crazy idea.

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 3:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. But did people not like that?

• 3:06Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. So some, some people, uh, you know, I, we can name names if we need to, but I actually don't know how to pronounce them. So, uh, uh, but anyways, so people are in there and they're like, you have no idea. Like if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like you have never even tried. And it's like, it's a classic, like you, you're missing out, like you somehow are completely missing the point.

• 3:29Ed Zitron?

  And you know, something's really good and innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  You, you ape. Well, you have never tried it. And it's like, well, what if I like have, like, what if this is like, actually the thing I spend my time on is thinking about this.

• 3:43Ed Zitron?

  So you're a, you're a non, non-AI IDE, right? So a coding environment.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and that, yeah, we got, yeah, lots of that, lots of that. But like, so the software that I make, bouncing around a little bit here, but Replit was a, is a company. And so Replit was a very loved by teachers IDE online. And their whole thing was like, we teach, like, we help you teach coding online because it's a way for you to run Python and Java and all your code online. And you can do it and you can do it on Chromebooks and you can collaborate. And they had like teacher tools and they sold the software to schools. I was a teacher for a couple of years.

• 4:19Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  It's kind of like my background as an engineer. Teacher and I used Replit and it's awesome.

• 4:23Ed Zitron?

  And this was before, was this before they used AI or?

• 4:25Speaker 05

  This is before they used AI. So I was.

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  And what, so Replit, just for the listeners right now, Replit is an AI powered coding environment that claims to be able to vibe code software, but doesn't really. But what did it used to be?

• 4:36Speaker 05

  So it used to be an excellent tool, just an absolutely fantastic tool. It was, it was just, you go on, you log on like Google Docs for coding.

• 4:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  So like you think, okay, well you, back in the day, you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever, and that sucks. And you know, it's, it's great to bring that online into the cloud. And they did that and they were like very innovative. They were kind of first to market of having like a very fully featured online IDE. And that is useful for exactly one thing, and that is useful for teaching in schools.

• 5:06Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Because like you have kids and they have $200 Chromebooks that the school bought them. And so you get Replit and like boom, I have a great way to teach computer science now. That is fantastic.

• 5:16Ed Zitron?

  And that's what it used to be before the AI.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  And now it's just.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  And now it's, yeah.

• 5:21Ed Zitron?

  It's so listeners, you've probably heard me mention Replit in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most favorite companies. If you go on the Replit Reddit, it's just the wallet inspector.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  And so now that's kind of like, I, I, I've gotten rid of most of my like doom scrolling places, but like this is not, I, I don't know what type of scrolling it is, but like I go on our Replit.

• 5:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  And it's just so funny.

• 5:43Ed Zitron?

  It's just guy being, guy being like, yeah, spend $1,500. It doesn't really work.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:49Ed Zitron?

  But I think if I spend $5,000 more dollars, it might.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Well, that, I mean, people are like, okay, well, should I spend $5,000? I mean, we can, we can be reasonable, Ed. We can bring the numbers down to reality. It's, it's, I spent $50, which for a person who has got a bad software idea.

• 6:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  That's a, that's a big waste of money. And they're like, okay, well, it seems like I might need to spend $250 more or should I go on Fiverr?

• 6:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  And then it's just people and Reddit. I mean, it's Reddit. So they're just like skill issue.

• 6:16Ed Zitron?

  It, well, that and also the people who are like, I too am running into this problem.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of that. Yeah. Where it's like, and, but Replit, just, just for, for anyone on there, on, on Replit right now.

• 6:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Like what do they do to teachers? So teachers, they had a product for teachers that worked. That was great. That was well loved.

• 6:34Ed Zitron?

  Teachers.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  And on this November something, 2023, this is a big day for my business, because this is the only reason I have my business is to replace Replit.

• 6:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Because they turned on AI autocomplete for kids.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  No way to shut it off.

• 6:49Ed Zitron?

  Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning?

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I had a, I have a small YouTube channel with not, you know, a million subscribers. But, you know, I talked to teachers on there and, you know, we had a customer of mine on there and they were like, yeah, you know, that year it just seemed like the guy, he just like, he missed the fact that the AI got turned on. No one sent him an announcement or an email or a warning.

• 7:09Ed Zitron?

  So all of his students were just amazing.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  They were just, he was like, yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody got an A that semester. Like, I wonder, you know.

• 7:16Ed Zitron?

  Did that actually, so did students actually end up getting great scores because no one noticed the AI going?

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it took, depending on who you, if you're wandering around the classroom looking at students and you see them all tab completing, like, because AI.

• 7:29Ed Zitron?

  And just for, just for the listeners as well, Scott Spelout, so with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like autocorrect, like coding.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so, so like AI, for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced podcast here. But AI can really well, it can solve intro to computer science for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy.

• 7:52Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's Carl Brown from the internet at Bugsy said it makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Yes. And so, yeah, so if you need to, if you're in ninth grade and you're writing your first program, yeah, you can, you can tab complete the whole thing in one go. It'll one-shot it, Ed. That's incredible. It'll one-shot your ninth grade program.

• 8:09Ed Zitron?

  It's this term, that, that term, just listeners is like, it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly?

• 8:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's like count to 10 and the AI can count to 10, which is incredible. That's revolutionary.

• 8:22Ed Zitron?

  But fun, fun fact, if you try and make ChatGPT count to a million, it freaks out. If you do the voice mode, Adam Conover told me this one, if you go like count to a million, it stops around nine or 10 and then says, should I continue? And it just won't do it. It's very funny. I love living in the future.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  But, yeah, so, so they, they though, they turn on the AI and then they were like, we're not doing education. And companies have deprecated things.

• 8:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, it happens.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  They do deprecate things.

• 8:48Ed Zitron?

  Not their main product.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, whatever. So that, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm a indie developer, whatever, like. My software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online. ID to schools.

• 8:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 05

  There's money, but it's not a it's not a billion dollar business. It's fine. I don't.

• 9:02Ed Zitron?

  Neither is Replit.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, but so.

• 9:04Ed Zitron?

  You can't raise on billions of valuation.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  No, no, saying, hey, we're, you know, kids have Chromebooks and we're gonna, you know, charge $10 a student or whatever. Like, you can't, of course, that you're not gonna raise, but you're not, you know, that's not a billion dollar business.

• 9:16Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  But the AI thing seems magical. And then, you know, the vibe coding thing happened. And, you know, as soon as the vibe coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in on this. And they deleted, they deleted every.

• 9:28Ed Zitron?

  Deleted it.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  So not just deprecated, right? So it's one thing to deprecate software.

• 9:32Ed Zitron?

  So it's like, and deprecate is when you stop supporting it, right?

• 9:34Speaker 05

  You say it's it's no longer supported.

• 9:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  You put up a big red scary banner on the top saying, your work is read only. You cannot create anymore.

• 9:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  That is a really mean thing to do.

• 9:42Ed Zitron?

  It happens.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  But it happens. Software changes, you know, Replit, for what it's worth, to be nice and fair to them. Like, they have investors and, you know, they're under the gun to provide some returns. And so, whatever, the teacher thing isn't gonna make them a ton of money, but they deleted the stuff.

• 9:57Ed Zitron?

  Which is why, and when you say the stuff, was this like projects that schools had been working on?

• 10:02Speaker 05

  It was, so a teacher says, I'm gonna spend two, three years putting in all my curriculum, all these markdown files, all this stuff, all these tests, I'm gonna configure all this stuff.

• 10:10Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  Deleted, gone.

• 10:12Ed Zitron?

  Monsters.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Deleted.

• 10:13Ed Zitron?

  Actual monsters. And now.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  But they, but they sent the warning email, Ed.

• 10:17Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  In July, when are teachers online looking at their work email in July?

• 10:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, classic, classic big month for teachers to be on the computer.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Well, for American teachers, yeah, it's not a huge month. So, yeah, in July, we say, we're gonna delete all your stuff, and then it's gone.

• 10:31Ed Zitron?

  And was there any way to back it up?

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Well, there was until they deleted it all.

• 10:35Ed Zitron?

  That's so cool.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  It's awesome. So they're an awesome, like, if you're a Replit developer, you know, when, when the next big thing comes up and Replit may decide to delete all your stuff.

• 10:46Ed Zitron?

  Well, Replit, they launched Agent Three.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:50Ed Zitron?

  That was my favorite launcher product I've ever seen, because I've mentioned this on the show before, but they, it's like, oh, it's an autonomous coding thing. And it's just the digital Mr. Bean. It's just like, why don't you go off and build me a software thing? And it just fucking spends $100 and goes, I don't know, you like this? I don't fucking care. And then they had to release a thing where you could make it think less. They had to like add tweaks to it because it was so bad. It's in, I actually feel like, and I'm not putting words in your mouth here. I feel like vibe coding may be just fraud. I think it's a fraud. I don't, it should not be legal to lie like, because it is a fucking lie.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  So, so I will, I'll defend the vibe coder platforms out here. Okay, but, but, but, so the, the defense, no, I mean, it's, it's, it is, it's fraudulent, right? I mean, like, if you say, hey, you don't know how to code at all. And, uh, yeah, just sign on to this website. And I mean, look at their marketing page.

• 11:44Ed Zitron?

  That's exactly what I'm loading.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Okay, perfect. Yeah.

• 11:46Ed Zitron?

  It's, um.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  With it, with a nice blue iPhone air.

• 11:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. Beautiful.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  I, I have the, I have the space black.

• 11:51Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah. The iPhone app, rise up. It's a great phone.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  It's a great phone.

• 11:55Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm not, Apple made me pay for it. Yeah. Turn your ideas into apps. What will you create? The possibilities are endless. And then it's a fake prompt that says, make me a business tool for marketing teams that helps generate professional business proposals. And then add automated backup and recovery. If, I think if you asked Replit to do that, it would cost $300 and nothing would happen. I, I think it would just.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:17Ed Zitron?

  Uncout a light, like barely functional code.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  So I wrote a post on this and I was excited to end, I was, I was excited to end the post saying, there has never been a successful thing ever. Unfortunately, Replit has added a set of case studies. And I think that they use, and so they, they, the case studies are, we sold to enterprises and we're gonna do prototypes of internal dev tools. Or not dev, not dev tools, internal like, you know, management software for inside your back office software.

• 12:48Ed Zitron?

  So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August. And one of them is how Zygnus saves $140,000 with Replit. And it, but it also cuts development time by 50%.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  But did, so then the question is, did the person typing stuff into Replit, did they know how to code?

• 13:07Ed Zitron?

  Exactly. See, that's.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Because if they know how to code, whatever.

• 13:10Ed Zitron?

  It's not vibe coding.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  It's not vibe coding.

• 13:12Ed Zitron?

  It's just, you could have used Kirsten, you could have used Windsor, you could have used any VS code or was it, what's the free one Amazon's doing now?

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Kiro, maybe.

• 13:20Ed Zitron?

  Kiro. And then there's the, I like the, the one that came out from China and everyone was like, that's gonna send information to the Chinese. It's like. Well, I don't know, but I don't think they're gonna, your clone of Flappy Bird is gonna be taken up by.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the way that the word vibe coding has the meaning that it has today, I believe, is you do not know how to code, you type prompt and you get app out. And I'm not gonna dox this person because they were nice to me once.

• 13:49Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  But like, there's a person online, like they just do like, oh, here's 100 days of AI. And I'm gonna make a fully functional software as a service company, fully, and I don't know how to code. And then you look at this person and they're typing in the prompts and it's like, they clearly have like a pretty strong technical background. And then the thing still doesn't work, by the way.

• 14:07Ed Zitron?

  That's so cool. Like, they know how things work and it's still broken.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I mean, whatever. This person was like a product manager or something. So like, they, they, they know what an API is, and they know what a web server is, and they know the names of the different technologies. And like, that's gonna get them part of the way there. But the idea that you can end to end create a software product that has some value.

• 14:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's crazy. We would have heard about it. No, that's kind of, and your demo where post is really good about this, because it was kind of like, look, you can do the proof of concept, you can do this, but we've never seen the next stage. And someone else did a really good one, was like shovelware. They said, where's the shovelware? Where's the crap software? Was they, I remember the first times I was on the internet, the amount of weird shareware shit there was, just like different forms of IRC clients and shit. There were people making weird software. Why isn't that happening?

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, so you'll see, okay, I made Flappy Bird, I made a weird thing. I made like, I, you can make little, small pieces of software for yourself that maybe have a little bit of value. It is fun. It is a novelty.

• 15:06Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  If you know, like, but then it, then it doesn't work. Like, it's, so I, I do not know, I'm, I'm a web developer.

• 15:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  So I know how to do web apps.

• 15:14Ed Zitron?

  I can't code for shit, so.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, whatever. But like, it's that, that's what I know. That's, that's what I've been doing. I've been coding for whatever. And I know how to do that. I do not know how to make iPhone apps.

• 15:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 05

  So I was like, okay, you know what I'm gonna do? They just announced Claude, whatever. Cause I'm interested in this stuff. I'm an early adopter. I don't.

• 15:30Ed Zitron?

  And also, if it did what it, however I may feel about AI, if it actually did what, if vibe coding was real, that would actually be a huge deal. That would be a huge fucking deal. Well, I wouldn't. I would have all my ethical concerns, but if I could actually build software without knowing anything, wow, that would be great. Never been the case. But you tried, though.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  Well, so I tried. So my idea was like, okay, I use my phone too much. I'm gonna make an app called App Snooze. It takes, so you say, I want Gmail, I want it snooze for a half hour.

• 15:58Ed Zitron?

  Got it.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  So that when I open up the Gmail app, it uses this screen time thing and it says blocked. And then 30 minutes is up, I get it back.

• 16:04Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  That is impossible to make using iOS, essentially, without like a substantial amount of work. It's based on like the limitations of how Apple does their stuff with screen time. It just cannot be done. So I typed this stuff in. Claude is like sitting there. It's like, oh, yeah, you're awesome. You are killing it, dude. This is a great idea.

• 16:24Ed Zitron?

  You got this.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  You got this. Yeah. Which it actually does say. And one of their, I've been watching like the World Series or whatever and a lot of NFL and like the chat GPT ads, we can hopefully talk about that.

• 16:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I haven't caught any of those.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, well.

• 16:36Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan.

• 16:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:41Ed Zitron?

  And I try not to watch. If I needed to watch a poorly conceived product, I could just use my season tickets, but I sold them. So wait, but keep going, though.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  Okay, well, so it's like, you got this. But then it's, this is the, whatever. So they have Haiku and they have Sonnet and they have Opus.

• 17:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  So whatever, awesome names. But so they have Sonnet, which is the really good one, you know, just hack.

• 17:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's very well respected.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  It's supposed to be, Claude's supposed to be the good one for coding. And so I was like, I'm gonna pay, I'm gonna pay $20. I'm just gonna see what happens. If I can get this thing on the App Store, that'll be great. I'm gonna charge 99 cents. Let's see if I make 100 bucks.

• 17:18Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  See if I make my Apple Developer account back.

• 17:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  Dump the 100 bucks into the Apple Developer account. Awesome on Apple, by the way. You can't actually do half the app coding that you need to without paying 100 bucks.

• 17:29Ed Zitron?

  So good.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  That's a business.

• 17:30Ed Zitron?

  That's, that's Apple, baby.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  But anyways, so I do that. I want to make my 100 bucks back. But it cannot be done.

• 17:36Ed Zitron?

  Well, the app, you couldn't build the app, though, it's.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  Well, but because of like literal limitations in how iOS works in terms of like, you can't have a timer that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just not a thing that Apple should do.

• 17:48Ed Zitron?

  There was this thing called Brick, where there's a physical device as well, but that feels like a Bluetooth.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Something's going on with Brick. I don't know.

• 17:54Ed Zitron?

  But here's, here's the thing as well with all of this. You just made me think, it is weird that the app doesn't just go, yeah, I can't build that, mate.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  It would be nice if it did say that, and it was, this was weird. I had never observed this behavior before. And again, I've posted online, like, okay, you know, this, you know, three Bs in Blueberry, that thing.

• 18:14Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Whatever. And people, I posted that on LinkedIn, and someone was like, you are lying. And I post my link.

• 18:21Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  I post the link to the chat, and they're like, you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid.

• 18:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's prompt in action.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Like, you have a system prompt that says, like,

• 18:30Ed Zitron?

  Be stupid as shit.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  I did, yeah.

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Be a piece of shit.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Ah, dude, I messed up. I put be stupid in my system.

• 18:37Ed Zitron?

  I should have put, I should have put be smart.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  If I put smart, it would have worked.

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• 20:47Ed Zitron?

  So on this, you just reminded me when I was dicking around with Claude Code. So I did a story a few months ago about how, you know, I don't know if you've seen like Vibrank where it's got like people on Claude Code spending like $50,000. I love those people. I think they're awesome. Well, to try this myself, I went on, I was like, what is the most token intensive software you could build me? It's like, oh, yeah, an autonomous car and a metaverse. I'm like, cool, build all of that. And it just sat there for hours. And I don't even know what spat out at the end.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, it certainly, well, you could have a trillion dollar startup on your hands.

• 21:16Ed Zitron?

  But it's just.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  You should check out that code.

• 21:18Ed Zitron?

  It's so sick that these things don't even go like, yeah, we can't do that. Like, I can't do an autonomous car startup. I don't have any training data. Very basic.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  But if it was, if it was, if that thing was smart or useful, right? It has the ability to look things up online.

• 21:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  It should have looked through the documentation and it sort of said, well, what can we do with timers? What can we do with screen time? Can you hook up a timer to screen time?

• 21:38Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  We'll let you do this in the background and get the half hour timing correctly. And it's like, it's, it's, it's demo ware and it allows you to build demo ware.

• 21:45Ed Zitron?

  But it didn't even build a demo of this.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Well, so no, it built me something I was kind of excited about because it, it let me pick the app. So I picked Gmail and I picked 30 minutes and then it, it, it worked. Gmail is turned off.

• 21:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  30 minutes elapsed.

• 21:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Gmail is not back on.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so you just cut Gmail.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Well, no, I mean.

• 22:03Ed Zitron?

  You have not been in your email since.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  Well, no, yeah, exactly. Sorry, customers. If you have been emailing me, it's because my app is messed up. No, but, but it, it was like, it just lied, right? I mean, and so like, that's, imagine being someone, I'm a software developer. So like, okay, whatever. Like, I'm gonna, I don't know iOS, but like, I'm gonna go on Apple pages and see what's up and I'm gonna ask some meaningful follow-ups and determine that this didn't work. And okay, I lost my hundred bucks on the developer account. But if you don't know. Out of code, you're gonna be like, what are you gonna do?

• 22:31Ed Zitron?

  Well, there's nothing you can do because the reason I read the Replit pages and the Cursor pages and the Cursor one, it's people that can code a little.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  At least, or yeah.

• 22:40Ed Zitron?

  A little bit, but Replit is just, it's 50% and same with Loveables Reddit as well. Loveable is another, for listeners, it's another AI coding platform sold as a vibe coding thing. And it's all, it's 50% people being like, I've spent $300 and then like 10% people just lying. People like, I just reached 12,000 M R monthly recurring revenue. Uh, it's all good for me. And everyone being like, can I see it? And they never respond. And then there's the, there's the people who are like, looking for a Replit developer.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:10Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, so you're looking for someone that can write software, write and build software. Interesting. Like a software developer, one might say.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  I don't know where to find one.

• 23:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  It's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to do that. But yeah, we don't need them. We can just, we talk into the thing and turn your app into reality.

• 23:30Ed Zitron?

  Except you could, it's just, it is really crazy how much vibe coding has proliferated, considering how fucking, it's nothing.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  Well, so, but so if you need, like, if you need a prototype, so if, like, this whole thing boils down to if, if the expectations were real, if it was like,

• 23:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Turn your, turn your sentence into a prototype of an application in minutes.

• 23:55Ed Zitron?

  Okay. Yeah. Like an MVP.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  That's not, not even a MVP is like, needs to work. But.

• 24:01Ed Zitron?

  Well, okay. No, sorry. I thought you were saying hypothetical world where it works.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Well, no, yeah, sorry. Well, no, in a hypothetical world and where it does, what it does today, you can get like a mock-up.

• 24:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  If it's a build a semi-functional wireframe mock-up of your application that you could show to kind of validate your idea to your friends in minutes.

• 24:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  For $30 or however much your credits end up being, that's fine.

• 24:24Ed Zitron?

  But does that happen, doesn't it?

• 24:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could kind of do that. If you're lucky, if you roll the dice.

• 24:28Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing. It's always, if you're lucky, there's enough asterisks on this. It's just insane that it's got this far. Cause I've read a lot of vibe coding articles. And if you read like Kevin Roos, of course, and the Times and people like that, you read these articles and you'd think, wow, you can just do this. You can just go and do this. This is the, the future is today. But it's not really. Not really the case at all.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  But I think that the, the, the thing that's so like pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue.

• 24:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  You just, you just two words.

• 25:00Ed Zitron?

  You're prompting it wrong.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  You're prompting it wrong.

• 25:02Ed Zitron?

  David Gerard, David Gerard thing, but no, it's, yeah, you're prompting it wrong.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  You're prompting it wrong. And so, and there's no real way to disprove that because can we go back in time and like, cause it's all this probabilistic stuff. And so, so I have a, a, a post that I've put up and it's, it's code doesn't happen to you. That's my thing.

• 25:20Ed Zitron?

  Go on.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  So it's, it's my, cause I, you know, taught programming for a while. So if you're teaching a, a new programmer, sometimes if they have like, if they've kind of gotten unlucky and they have a bad attitude, they're, you know, and it's not their fault, but they might think like coding is really mysterious and it's really weird.

• 25:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  And I type code in and I press run and it doesn't always do what I want. And so I'm just gonna like mess around.

• 25:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  And like vibe coding is like a productionized version of code happens to you. It's like you press button, code pops out, it does mysterious thing. And then like, you know, it's so it's like, it's like that idea, which was the wrong way to program, but like, that's the way we're doing it. Like, and we're gonna sell it to you.

• 25:57Ed Zitron?

  What is the right way though?

• 25:58Speaker 05

  The right way would be a computer is like, you, you operate a computer, you turn it on, you open the coding software that you're going to use, whether it's an online software like my wonderful software, or you know, something like VS Code, like something for professionals, whatever. And you type in code and you run it. And then the computer like executes it, runs the code according to the programming language.

• 26:20Ed Zitron?

  Code is instructions.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  Code is instructions and the code like happens deterministically. And maybe if you're, you know, developing a game, maybe there's some random elements to the software that you're developing, but there's no randomness, like the randomness is under your control.

• 26:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So it's, it's the difference between treating it as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions.

• 26:38Speaker 05

  It's instructions. And so like, if you're, if you're a really good programmer and maybe you're whatever, maybe you use AI to, to save you some typing and you still have that good attitude, whatever. Like you can use this safe typing. That's fine.

• 26:48Ed Zitron?

  I mean, that's the only real that like that, that feels like the only consistent thing is just filling in blanks that you know you could yourself. Like it fills in, it's autocorrect.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  And I'm like, I'm not gonna.

• 26:58Ed Zitron?

  Which maybe. Useful.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna lie, like I I use it.

• 27:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, like I, but I I used to have a paid GPT account, but I don't trust it to do like the the models. And this is one of the things that I brought in my post is the models like aren't better now, right?

• 27:12Ed Zitron?

  They're not better?

• 27:13Speaker 05

  Well, GPT three was okay and then GPT four was like much better.

• 27:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  And then GPT five is trash.

• 27:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  I mean, right, relatively speaking, maybe it's a little bit better and maybe it costs OpenAI more, which is a big development.

• 27:25Ed Zitron?

  Very fine.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Great for them and whatever.

• 27:28Ed Zitron?

  It cost them less, but it cost more.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  Costs more. But so so it's not getting better. So there was a time where I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy into this. I'm an early adopter. I'm kind of, I'm kind of a booster. Like I I I was cured by by going to where's your ed dot at. That's, is it dot com?

• 27:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just where's your ed dot at?

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Oh, where's your ed? Nice. Okay. Well, where's your ed dot at cured cured me a little bit of this because I'm like, and I've just had some situations where it's just failed me so. Poorly like there was a confluence of events this summer where I was just like, no.

• 27:57Ed Zitron?

  What happened?

• 27:58Speaker 05

  I'm done with this. Uh, first of all, I got a strong recommendation from uh, GPT. To buy a software called the script, which is like uh, editing. So, because I I have, I have a YouTube channel and I wanna like, I I'd say a lot of ums and ahs and maybe I'm saying some ums and ahs right now, whatever. Who cares?

• 28:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  And but I I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make this YouTube channel. I want the production quality to be decent. If there's a shortcut for me. Seems like AI might be able to do this. So G P, I'm like to GPT, I'm like, what is good AI? Get rid of ums and ahs software.

• 28:31Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  It's just the script.

• 28:32Ed Zitron?

  Kind of like a Google search.

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh yeah, so yeah, whatever. It's an okay Google search.

• 28:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  Whatever. And so it said, you gotta use the script. And I said, cool. And so I put in my credit card, twenty bucks or thirty bucks or whatever the, whatever it was. Just I put in a recording and just completely mangled it.

• 28:45Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  And it's just like, the audio was unusable.

• 28:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  It was, it was off by an eighth of a second off my voice. And it's just like, there's no way, there's, I have no recourse.

• 28:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  And I'm not an audio engineer. And so I just, okay, like I vibe, I vibe edited my, my video and it just ruined it.

• 29:01Ed Zitron?

  It's almost like every promise they make is it's gonna automate everything. It's like, ah, not really, as long as you know what you're doing.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  But but this was like a meta level thing where the AI recommended me, other AI also screwed me over. And so I'm like, okay, this is like, this may, this is like, because I was using it to search, right?

• 29:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  And so, but but it failed me a search because it's just. emphatically and then you look because then I was like, well, what's wrong? Am I, is it a skill issue? Am I stupid? And so I look and Reddit is just filled with like, this is the worst software. This is the worst software.

• 29:32Ed Zitron?

  I used the script very briefly and all I wanted to do was take a bit of audio and turn it into a video with the text happening. That's the way you read their marketing material. You would look at it and think it would take two seconds. Took me about forty five minutes. And it was just by the end of it, I'm like, I don't even want to fucking do. I'm so angry. Because it's like, this should be a button press. The whole point of AI bullshit is meant it should be a button press. And it never is. But wait, well, there are other events, though.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Well, so there's that. And so there's that. And then it's like, so I'm also, so I'm a web developer.

• 30:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  And so I'm not very good. I can't program mobile apps. That's a thing that I can't do. Don't know how. I'm also not very good, like, infrastructure systems programmer, whatever. That's, you know, cloud stuff, whatever. I'm not, I'm not great at that. But that is an aspect of my job that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure, difficult stuff.

• 30:24Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  Over the years, I've actually gotten quite a bit better at that.

• 30:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  And so that used to be a use case for me for GPT was like, oh, I'll ask it some infrastructure related questions. Like, I know how to code. I can piece the, I can put the puzzle together and, you know, this is actually going to save me a little bit of time.

• 30:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  But I have outpaced GPT's ability in infrastructure development. So it's like, okay, well, I'm doing this project and it's not helping.

• 30:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  It's just wasting my time. Okay. No need for that. The description is BS. And then I learned from Editron that this stuff is horrendously expensive.

• 30:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  So it's like, if this was just regular software as a service and it costs pennies to operate and, you know, it was like, kind of helpful, whatever.

• 31:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, be inoffensive.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  It would be like, it's fine, whatever. There's a company. They offered me this eight, this thing and it didn't work and, you know, it happens.

• 31:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  But it's like, in the context of a world in which this is the future, this is magic. In a click of a button, you get perfect audio out. If that's the promise, in the midst of all this, and an AI is recommending to it. This is like meta leveled, like, all like, idiot situation. And then it's, and then it's the dress. Disastrously expensive.

• 31:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  Like, what is the point? What is the point of all of this?

• 31:34Ed Zitron?

  The point is, we need to sell GPUs every day. And literally, in the car here, they announced a seven-year, $38 billion deal between OpenAI and Amazon Web Services. It's just like, why? So that we can, so that they can do Sora 2 more, so they can generate more copyright infringement? It's, and, but have, do, have you in the past used these coding models a lot, or is it just kind of like on the side?

• 31:58Speaker 05

  I have, so even, like, I will say, even like two weeks ago, I had a very discreet task where it was like, in this one situation, I want to do this one little thing.

• 32:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  And I, I knew exactly what it was. And I was lazy. And so I said, write, write the code. And so I, I put in, and then this is a joke comment, and people should do this more often. I put in, I, I pasted in the code, and I said, this code comes courtesy of ChatGPT. If you have any issues with this software, please contact OpenAI. That's what I wrote in my code. And I shipped it. And it worked.

• 32:28Ed Zitron?

  Great.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Whatever.

• 32:29Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  That's cool. It saved me 20 minutes.

• 32:31Ed Zitron?

  That's, that's, then that's the thing. That's the whole AI bubble. It's like.

• 32:35Speaker 05

  But I, I'm not a paying subscriber anymore.

• 32:37Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's even worse for them.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I, I just, you know, because it's, it's, the, the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with that code because it was so easy. Uh, you know, it was, it was finicky. It was annoying. There have been situations where I, I'm saying, you know, I say, oh, there's a bug in this code. I paste it in and it looks it over and it, I, it saved me in aggregate, tens of hours in the last three years.

• 33:01Ed Zitron?

  That's fine. Like, it's like, if it was regular SaaS, I'd be like, cool. Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  I, I, if it was, I think that's kind of part of why I canceled the subscription, because if it was, you know, whatever, you need to value your time. You know, I could, if it, if it was 20 bucks a month and it saved me an hour a month, hey, you know?

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like, like Tripit or Flighty, like, like a useful little bit of software we pay for and it does a thing.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  And if it was.

• 33:22Ed Zitron?

  And it wasn't stealing from everyone and burning down. Like, it's just, it, it only makes sense if it was cheap and it's the literal opposite. If this was like cheap, like cheap CPU-driven share, then fine, sure. But it's like. I, one day, I think we're going to find out how expensive this is and it's going to scare the shit out of people. But you know what? That, that actually makes me want to move to a specific post you made, your scaling laws post. Let's talk about this.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:47Ed Zitron?

  You were a booster at one point and you read the stuff, sure, but you wrote a very eloquent piece about the scaling laws, about how, and I've tried to work this into my work, but it's, we can have, I don't know if I'd call it empathy, but some understanding of how we got here with the AI bubble, because when GPT-4 came out, it does seem like tech people had a reason to be excited.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  I was so excited.

• 34:11Ed Zitron?

  What was exciting?

• 34:12Speaker 05

  It was awesome. You talked to it and it was just like this, I, I would ask it coding problems that I found, so I was still a teacher at the time. And I was like, oh, man, like I have the AP computer science exam coming up and I need to like come up with practice problems. And I was like, generate a set of thirty practice problems. And I obviously read them over and did my due diligence and I, you know, I tried to, I, I did a good job putting them together, but it's like, these are decent.

• 34:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  These are decent practice problems and like this is, this is useful software. I did not understand how expensive it was. But there was, there's a, the number of things that would have to happen.

• 34:45Ed Zitron?

  I will also give you, so the read, the listeners don't get mad. To be clear, GPT-4 was 2023.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:51Ed Zitron?

  We had, we were very early in understanding, I mean, the environmental damage was there early.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 34:56Ed Zitron?

  But they were also promising the effects on, but it took a full year until June 2024, when they, it came out, the OpenAI would burn $5 billion. So like early on, we didn't really know the costs either. And if, I'm sure someone will find a fucking link. Anyway, keep going.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Well, so, but so I was, I was pumped up because I, I saw GPT-3 was, I, I, you know, I'm a tech person. And so I remember seeing early demos of GPT-3 and it was like interesting novelty. It would say stupid things and it was kind of cool. And it could even generate sentences. That was awesome. 3.5 came out and GPT, whatever, ChatGPT is like, oh, this is pretty cool. Yeah, I, I can use it as a search thing and it says that I'm good, which I, I like when people say I'm good. Do you like when people say you're good, Ed?

• 35:38Ed Zitron?

  Uh, doesn't happen very much, but I think I, you know what? I'll be honest. I know that there's something, I think mentally about me where all of the anthropomorphization pisses, not even pisses me off. I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut up. I think I was bullied too much as a kid that like compliments don't work on me anymore.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  I, I do want to write a, I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't ChatGPT, if it was like box, get text.

• 36:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  And there was no anthropomorphization. If it was just like, this is a thing that can generate usable or interesting or like code for you. But there's no chat element to it. That would actually make it a lot better to me. Like, it's the anthropomorphization of like, oh, you're talking to a person. That really makes me mad.

• 36:17Ed Zitron?

  Yes, and also I find every time it goes, you got it.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  You got this.

• 36:20Ed Zitron?

  Just shut up, shut up, shut.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  So in one of these NFL ads, literally, I don't know if they're like doing a nod to the haters or what, but they like take, we're going, we're going a couple of levels.

• 36:31Ed Zitron?

  I'll make sure the link is in the.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, no, there's like four of them. Hopefully they're on YouTube, but it's like a guy doing, he's, he's trying to do a pull ups. And it's like, here's your pull up plan. Like, you need to do one pull up and then you should do two pull ups. And then you should do four or five pull ups. And like, eventually you will be able to do several pull ups. And then at the end, it's like, you got this.

• 36:53Ed Zitron?

  Okay, if, so the plan is you do more pull ups over time. You could probably just work that out by doing, doing pull ups or texting a mate. I, see.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  But nobody said you got this.

• 37:04Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, exactly. Actually, no, my, my friend Mac, when I text him about pull ups, he, he says much, he's like, you fucking got this. I think he may have literally, it's just, that's the commercial?

• 37:14Speaker 05

  That's the commercial.

• 37:15Ed Zitron?

  That's the commercial.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  But it's, yeah.

• 37:16Ed Zitron?

  The commercial, you, people watching the NFL and they're like, oh shit, why should I use chat GPT? Oh, it's going to tell me a pull up plan where I increase from one to several.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  One to several.

• 37:27Ed Zitron?

  You got this.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  You got this. I mean, I didn't pause, I mean, maybe, I did not pause the commercial, but I, it could, it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle. I don't know, but the bullet, the bullet, because it has to have a bullet of the list. I, I am pretty sure, and I might be lying, and so whatever, you know, send me some hate mail. But like, I'm pretty sure it said like, do a couple, wait a week, you know, drink a protein shake and like, you know, do a couple more.

• 37:49Ed Zitron?

  It's just Google search, except it makes up the results. That's all, there's three fucking years.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  So I have a, I have a new idea, which is that it's Yahoo answers, but the person has a lobotomy and was like, it just did cocaine.

• 38:01Ed Zitron?

  That's Yahoo answers. Yahoo wants, that's just Yahoo or Quora.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  But it's like, but it's like light speed.

• 38:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like the fastest, well, Quora now is GPT. Like they do, because Adam D'Angelo is on the board of OpenAI.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Sweet.

• 38:14Ed Zitron?

  So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now. So cool.

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• 39:57Speaker 06

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• 40:31Ed Zitron?

  But early on, it was exciting and there were these scaling laws. Walk me through through the listeners who might not understand.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  Sure. So yeah, so the post that I wrote, which very nicely called eloquent. So if I could pay you $20 a month to kind of just send me stuff like you got this.

• 40:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll just I'll email those. You got this.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay, that's great. I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah, if you could just do that, I'll pay you 20 bucks a month. No, but so there was an idea that if you increase the size of the models, I'm not an AI.

• 40:58Ed Zitron?

  That's fine.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  I'm not an AI scientist. And so in this post, I said, I'm not an AI expert or an economist, but like you look at this chart, this chart that they had, and you can like the thing, and I actually think I cited my sources. The original like paper, basically about the scaling laws, they have this chart that is incredible. It is like make model 10 times bigger, get nice jump in performance. Make model 10 times bigger, get nice jump in performance. And then the idea is like, okay, well, if we just keep making it 10 times bigger, we will get like, who knows how good they can get.

• 41:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  And it kind of, and it did work.

• 41:31Ed Zitron?

  And it was working for a minute.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  That's how they went up to the best of my knowledge. That's how they went from 3.5 to four. I mean, there's a number of, they have smart people over there.

• 41:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  Like, I mean, we can be honest that like, they're doing clever stuff.

• 41:43Ed Zitron?

  Smart is also a very subjective.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 41:45Ed Zitron?

  But like, these are people who are experts in mathematics.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're doing hard, real math and they're getting results. Like the fact that it can do what it does is incredible.

• 41:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it. If that was all they were saying.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  If that was all they were saying, if they were just like, we did research and we've created this incredible piece of technology that feels almost alien at this point. I mean, or at the point when we discovered.

• 42:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  Now it feels like, you know, just we take it for granted that it's kind of this trash thing. But like, at the moment when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh, like this is actually crazy.

• 42:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  And the idea was we make it 10 times bigger and we will get a similar jump in performance. And that is GPT 4.5, which is like a footnote in history.

• 42:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that was.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  That was released and Sam Altman was just like, uh, yeah, well, we need a big model.

• 42:31Ed Zitron?

  It was the best announcement ever. I'm actually gonna put, but from what I remember, Miss Clammy Sammy was like, yeah, you know, it's, I'm just gonna do it from memory. I remember it's. It was like, yeah, good news. It's really good for writing. Bad news, it's really compute intensive. And everyone was like, yay.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  And in the announcement, I did quote this in the post, because I don't want to make stuff up and like, whatever, but they literally said with each 10x, with each order of magnitude, you know, 10x, increase in model size, we will get an improvement in performance.

• 43:03Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  But like, where's the, like, where's the big improvement?

• 43:06Ed Zitron?

  Right, it's gone.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  I don't, I think that was them, I think that was the moment, I don't know what day they announced 4.5, but like, I think.

• 43:13Ed Zitron?

  February something in 2025.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was the, that was game over.

• 43:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 05

  And then they did the reasoning stuff, and the reasoning stuff was not.

• 43:19Ed Zitron?

  Well, the reasoning thing was September 2024, and I, my favorite thing about that was reading all the tech press, writing about it, and being like, can any of you tell me what this does? Can any, can any of you tell me why this matters? To this day, and I'm, by the way, I'm not actually, it took a minute for me to work out what the fuck, and it's just a hat on a hat thing. It's like, instead of spitting out an output, it goes, what would the output be? Oh, I will, I will go through it and choose these steps, which is, it's test time compute and it's meant.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  And I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out, where, because I was like, okay.

• 43:52Ed Zitron?

  It was still the height of the fever, though.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  I know, but I, so I asked it a hard question. So I did a, I did a math degree and a computer science degree.

• 44:00Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  So I was like, take this topic from sophomore year abstract algebra, and do this like visualization of the thing.

• 44:08Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  And I took one of the early reasoning models, whichever one it was.

• 44:11Ed Zitron?

  Like O1.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  O1, sure, sure. Because it's like, you have a PhD level thing in the pocket. Okay, so PhD level thing, should be able to take a sophomore math, sophomore in college math concept and visualize it.

• 44:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Should be able to do that. And then it didn't.

• 44:24Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 44:25Speaker 05

  And then I kind of just didn't, I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I, hmm. And then I just didn't think about it, and then I just kept on kind of hoping that something exciting would happen.

• 44:37Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I can, and a bit of empathy here. I get if you're, and at that time, so it was September 2024, a month later, they'd raised 6.6 billion dollars to get a credit facility of 4 billion dollars. Like, they, it looked like. OpenAI was going places, unless you're like me and you've read every single possible financial thing you can get a hand on and you've obsessed over the numbers. But I can get why someone who was stick within the booster ring might not immediately be like, fuck. Because, yeah, I don't know, people hadn't built things with reasoning. And it did actually take a few months for people to work out products with reasoning.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, and whatever. I mean, I don't know what the improvements were and they improved on the benchmarks. That's fine. It's kind of like, and I'm sure that the coding results are marginally better.

• 45:22Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, you know, marginally.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:24Ed Zitron?

  It's always margin.

• 45:25Speaker 05

  But now it's marginally. But that's the thing. Three to four was sick.

• 45:29Ed Zitron?

  Huge jump.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  That was sick. That was not marginal. If you had, if you had, if your lights were on, if you were paying attention and you typed a thing into three and you typed a thing into four, you should be impressed.

• 45:38Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I, I remember the jump. I wasn't doing better offline at the time. Didn't do that until February twenty twenty four. But I remember being like, oh, that's, but I remember just being like, okay, now what? Like, I was, I was, it was like, wow, we made a computer do this and this. Cool. Okay. Now what?

• 45:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so like, I was vaguely aware of the, of the line chart that I mentioned in that post. And so I was like, oh, like, all they had to do. It was like, it is a freight train towards like actual really cool thing. Because it's like, just make it bigger. And therefore, if we just need to make it bigger, then we do need more compute.

• 46:08Ed Zitron?

  And the reasoning models were, you finally got another way to throw compute because it's the training compute and more compute to generate an answer, test time compute. Wow.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. So like, that's, that's where the, the freight train is over.

• 46:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 05

  And I, and I just, four point five came out. Didn't really think about it that hard. They start doing the reasoning stuff and it's like, okay, well, they have marginal improvements and they say it did really good on a math Olympiad or whatever. And like, that's, that's interesting. But, but then it's like another whole year goes by. And then, and then G P T five comes out. And like, what, what was that?

• 46:41Ed Zitron?

  It was nothing. It was so strange.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  And so that, that was the final. So when I'm talking about my confluence of events that cured me of my boosterism. Like, I started reading your stuff about it being expensive.

• 46:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  But then I was like, this is interesting. I've started reading this guy Ed's posts. G P T five is coming out next week. I wonder if this guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg on his face.

• 47:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  Because like, you might have been scared. I, I wonder.

• 47:03Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I, I wasn't because I have the stone will of the Buddha, but it's, I was also just like, when it. When reasoning was coming up, going back to 2023, they did some real shit. The rumors around that. Q Star, it was like, the reason Sam Altman got fired was they found a terrifying new AI. They kind of like drummed up. There were leaks about it. There were leaks about levels of intelligence. There was all of these big leaks. There was really no leaking around GPT-5, other than a Wall Street Journal story towards the end of 2024. Where it was like, yeah, it's costing a shit ton of money. It isn't working very well. Like the leaks, the reason I. Because the thing is, I mean this to this day. If I am wrong about all this, I don't think I am. I will admit it. I will explain why.

• 47:47Ed Zitron?

  But GPT-5, I wasn't particularly worried about because it did, I could not fucking tell you what the, what it was gonna be like. No one really. If you go back to 2023 and you look up GPT-5 stuff, the shit that people are saying is insane. There was someone saying it would be completely autonomous. And it would turn weapon systems against people. There's bonkers shit. But getting up to it, yeah, it was kind of a proving point. But it was just another fucking model.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  Well, and so, and so that I, you and I had started exchanging emails because I, whatever, I saw your podcast and I sent it on my post over and it was, it was, it was interesting talking to you. And then I, I, when that, when that announcement was going on, I emailed you and you got a lot of emails coming through. But I said, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, they announced paywalled chat colors.

• 48:31Ed Zitron?

  Yes, I go through it. No, no, I remember this, but go through this.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  In the announcement of GPT-5, the biggest thing ever, they're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow. Which they still haven't released.

• 48:44Ed Zitron?

  They still haven't released that?

• 48:46Speaker 05

  I don't, well, I'm not a paying, I'm not a paying subscriber, so I, I've never seen a yellow.

• 48:50Ed Zitron?

  I, I'm paying for chat GPT plus.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  See, you can turn it yellow.

• 48:53Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna see if I can do this live on air.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Yellow or pink, green might be an option.

• 48:58Ed Zitron?

  My window color.

• 49:00Speaker 05

  Well, the model's not gonna.

• 49:02Ed Zitron?

  On GPT.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Uh, are you Googling or?

• 49:04Ed Zitron?

  GPT. No, I'm gonna ask it because it's fucking insane if this does, searching the web. Yes, you can change. They did.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Well, they did. Can you though?

• 49:13Ed Zitron?

  Um, on some platforms, you can change the accent color. God, this fucking stinks. The fact that you can't ask a product what it does.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Well, if you, if you can't ask like. I don't know what's a good, but I mean, if you can't ask, if you can't type into a Google Doc in 2007, what does Google Docs do? That's unsurprising.

• 49:32Ed Zitron?

  But that's because Google Docs is a place to write words. This is meant to answer things.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  Well, I know that's what I'm saying, but it's like they've, they claim that it's this all, you know, all, all knowing omniscient thing and it cannot tell you how to turn, shouldn't it have just done it for you?

• 49:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Or like give me the button.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  It should have, it should have said, Ed, great question. Would you like it to be blue, yellow, pink?

• 49:50Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 49:51Speaker 05

  Or, or Charizard orange and, and like, but where was the, where was, that's what it should have done.

• 49:57Ed Zitron?

  And also the idea that that was one of the announcements is very cool. I love the idea that like it's the biggest moment ever. And you can now make chat G P T brown. It's insane. It's insane.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  I don't know if brown is one of the supported colors.

• 50:10Ed Zitron?

  Probably not.

• 50:11Speaker 05

  For next year.

• 50:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  That, that relies on the compute, actually, the Oracle deal unlocks brown.

• 50:17Ed Zitron?

  Unlocks brown. Oh my God. It's so cool that we've built our entire economy on top of this as well. But, but the G P T five thing is, it was such a weird moment because watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good. There was the whole Theo white, wait, not Theo wait, and that's, isn't the information, Theo. There's this fucking guy. Now I'm gonna, I really shouldn't have blanked. I've mentioned him. He did a whole thing about G P T five. I'm gonna look this up live on air. This is a professional show. Where he did a whole thing saying G P T five was the most amazing thing ever.

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Oh, and then walked it back.

• 50:53Ed Zitron?

  And then had to be like, yeah, actually, yes, Theo, Theo Brown. There we go. Theo Brown, he did the thing saying, I'm scared of how good G P T five is. Then a week later, he's like, actually, it's not the same as when I used it, which is crazy as that, that should have been a scandal. Like, why was that the case? But everyone just kind of moved on. But I, I don't know what we're meant to be excited about next. Okay.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  Well, G P T, G P T six.

• 51:18Ed Zitron?

  Well, yeah, it's just, but also what's that meant to the, because G P T five was this weird kind of like myth in the future. It's like when we reach this, everything will get better. But now it's like, we're gonna get Claude Sonnet five, I guess.

• 51:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, whatever. I mean, you're gonna get the next one. But that's the thing is like, if it's just continued marching. Improvement. What am I?

• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  What?

• 51:38Ed Zitron?

  What are we doing?

• 51:38Speaker 05

  It doesn't, it doesn't make me, that does not make me excited. And yes, it can save software engineers typing time and whatever. I mean, if you know what you're doing, you can get a lot done. I guess that's fine. If that's the way you like to work, if you like to type stuff in and wait on loading screens and get your code out. And review it, that's a way to do programming. That's fine.

• 51:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it's.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  It's literally fine. I'm actually, like, I'd sound super sarcastic, but like, that's literally fine.

• 52:02Ed Zitron?

  No, but that's literally fine would be if this was a $10 billion industry. If they were selling it as like the equivalent of virtualization or like some side thing to the greater cloud and compute. Not the entire future revenue engine, because it isn't.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:19Ed Zitron?

  That at all.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  No, I mean, and, and so I, you know, I run a business and I, I think that, so a thing that startup people say is they say like, you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good.

• 52:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  If like, one of the criteria is if it went away today, would your users like throw a fit?

• 52:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 05

  Would you throw a fit if ChatGPT got uninstalled from your phone? You would not, eh, but like, you know, would the general person be that upset? And I don't think they would.

• 52:44Ed Zitron?

  I think that there would be a contingent of people who'd be very upset.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  If, if you have a like parasocial, I don't know if that's the right word. If you're like in love with your GPT, then that would be like a death in your family. And that's very sad for you.

• 52:56Ed Zitron?

  Which would be horrible. And indeed, they, but it's like, I've been saying this for a while. It's like, and I say it to boosters and it's like, if this disappeared, would your life change? Would, would it really change that much? And like, well, I used it for baby names. I've used it for, it's like.

• 53:10Speaker 05

  You named your baby after it?

• 53:11Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm just saying, like, if, if you.

• 53:13Ed Zitron?

  If you've got a baby name from ChatGPT, that's.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  That's tough.

• 53:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's really bad. The more, that was said to me by a booster, the more I think about it, and I'm like, brother. One day your child is gonna hear this.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  Because all they do is they sell a book called like the baby name book. And it has like a list of names in it.

• 53:30Ed Zitron?

  I don't fucking know. Read some books. Like, just think about it. Yeah. I'm gonna, one of the most important choices, the identity of a future human. I'm gonna send it to incorrect Google search.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:43Ed Zitron?

  It's. It's depressing, but it's also quite funny because I feel like this era has really revealed who just doesn't know anything about fucking it. The people who are just like will believe anything or will just believe that they are smart at something because a machine told them they are.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:59Ed Zitron?

  That they got this.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  You got this.

• 54:01Ed Zitron?

  You got this.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  So someone online posted, I can't wait for the day when there's an AI agent that'll tell me when my friends' birthdays are.

• 54:09Ed Zitron?

  Fuck, there's no other way to do that.

• 54:11Speaker 05

  There's no way to do that.

• 54:12Ed Zitron?

  I.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  I don't have.

• 54:14Ed Zitron?

  Like some kind of calendar?

• 54:15Speaker 05

  No, no, it's got to be.

• 54:17Ed Zitron?

  A reminder.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  And so that's like, that's what's happening now is that in the like startup space or just people building technologies, like what we're going to get, or if you like, watch the ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you are going to, agent is going to do the thing that software is supposed to do. Like software, so like I got sold at one point, accounting software.

• 54:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  That was AI.

• 54:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 54:39Speaker 05

  The AI is going to categorize your transactions.

• 54:41Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  Can't do it. I bought, I was at a conference and it was, you know, whatever, May, May 20th, May 21st, May 22nd. I go to Starbucks, I go to pizza, I go to a thing. They're all travel related expenses.

• 54:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 05

  One is travel and then the Starbucks is client conversation.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  That's what I decided.

• 55:01Ed Zitron?

  Client conversation.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  And so I had a meeting with this, the founder of the thing. And I was like, dude, like, what are you, what is it? What is this?

• 55:09Ed Zitron?

  What did they say?

• 55:10Speaker 05

  Well, they were just like, you know, sometimes it makes mistakes. We should get on that.

• 55:12Ed Zitron?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  So that's, that's my accountant.

• 55:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. You, my whole thing is, I know it's, I think with all of this AI coding stuff in the big, in the big tech realm, something's going to break, something really, but someone's gonna, someone's gonna do something stupid.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, so back to Replit. I mean, I think that they, I kind of hope that they're, I don't know if I hope that they're first to go. I mean, whatever. They're nice people working there. So that's the unfortunate thing is there are nice people working at these.

• 55:41Ed Zitron?

  There are people with jobs who like it will involve.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Like I don't, I wouldn't want to ask for people to get laid off who are hardworking people. And some of them are like cool scientists who have studied hard and they're like nice people.

• 55:53Ed Zitron?

  And it's the grim part of all this is like, these people are going to lose fucking jobs.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  But it's, I mean, it's the executives who, you know, obviously piss me off for just lying through their teeth, right? I mean, those people deserved it. And they're, but you know, they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happen to them.

• 56:06Ed Zitron?

  This, which is why we need to write things to put their name, because at some point there needs to be a record of this.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Of course, yeah.

• 56:13Ed Zitron?

  So I'm gonna wrap it there. Charlie, where can people find you?

• 56:16Speaker 05

  So I have a blog, blogcharliemeyer.co, which is like where kind of my writings go, but I'm also trying to set up a newsletter. So that's csmyer.substack.com and my name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R.

• 56:31Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. And I, of course, am Ed Zitron. You can find me on the internet at google.com. That's where I live. I will put all the links to Charlie's stuff, of course, in the episode notes, but it's good for you to hear it now. And yeah, should have a monologue coming up this week. I know I did an announcement where I said I was going to have a big story. That is on hold, not because anything went wrong, but because the scale of the information I got has changed dramatically. When I eventually talk about this, it'll be a lot of fun. Otherwise, catch you soon.

• 57:06Ed 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.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.

• 57:39Speaker 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.

• 58:12Speaker 02

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