Monologue: The Year Ahead

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the seeming collapse of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines, and why the AI bubble can’t survive the death of OpenAI. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! Kylie Robison’s scoop about Thinking Machines: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2011572331798548899 Max Zeff of WIRED’s follow-on story: https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-cofounders-leave-for-openai/ 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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• 0:38Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to your first Better offline monologue of 2026. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:51Ed Zitron?

  We're back from CES and we've already had a great conversation with the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus. And this felt like a good time to take stock and talk about what I see happening in the year ahead. Also legitimately, thank you all for listening at CES. It was one of the best weeks of my life and we made some amazing stuff. And you've all sent wonderful emails and such. Love hearing from you. But let's talk about this year. I have a strong gut instinct that this is the year of reckonings for the AI bubble. Nothing I've seen in the news, the markets, or hearing from people I talk to behind the scenes suggests that things are improving at all. In fact, it kind of feels like when your dog takes a shit somewhere in your apartment, but you can't quite find it. There's that little stink, but it's not strong enough to give you an idea of where it is. But you know, one day, without fail, you're going to find a nasty brown delight under your foot.

• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  Colorful similes aside, though, generative AI is not becoming cheaper, more effective, or more efficient. Nvidia's new Vera Rubin GPUs are likely to be more expensive than ever, in part thanks to the ever-increasing price of RAM and in part because of its single-vendor monopoly, which allows them to set prices, well, to stun. And the other thing with them as well is they're going to allow people to use the same racks from Blackwell, so the things you put the GPUs into, but only for the beginning of Vera Rubin. Then they're going to move to these giant, I think they're called Kyber-Rax. The current ones are called Oberon. Someone will email and correct me, but it's one of those two. The new one is going to require an entirely new cooling system, architecture. It's all very good. But on the subject of things that are also very good,

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  I believe we're also on the verge of the multiple con jobs of the AI bubble collapsing too. In July of last year, former OpenAI CTO Miriam Marati, who barely appeared to be able to get out a fucking sentence in every interview I've seen, founded Thinking Machines, raising $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, all while refusing to tell investors what product they'd make or what the business plan was or how they'd make money or anything like that. Naturally, investors were like, "Take my money, please. I need to give this to you, Miriam. I am an idiot, I'm a moron, I'm a goofball. I just love wasting money." Now, when this happened, they were able to poach OpenAI's VP of Research for post-training, Barrett Zoff, among two other staffers I just really can't engineer the excitement to name.

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  And then a few days ago, as reported by a friend of the show, Kylie Robertson of Call Memory, Zoff was fired from Thinking Machines after telling Marati he was considering leaving, with Wired's Max Zep reporting in a follow-up that the firing involved Zoff sharing confidential information with competitors. What confidential information? What possible information could he have had? About the things they're not building? About the bullshit? Who knows? I think she just fired him because she was mad that he was leaving. What the fuck is Thinking Machines building exactly? They put out a single AI thing last year for, and I quote, "Controlling every aspect of model training and fine-tuning or some such bollocks." I realize I'm being a little dismissive, but I just do not have it in me anymore to find excitement over every single one of these two

• 3:47Ed Zitron?

  or three or whatever fraudulent... Okay, not literally fraudulent, I have no evidence of that. This is a libel, blah, blah, blah. It's not fraudulent, it just looks like bollocks. I can't be excited about the new asshole who raised $1 billion or $2 billion to do nothing. I don't have it in me anymore. I'm not going to read a sentence about post-training or fine-tuning and pretend that means anything. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Nothing has... Change, nothing is going on, everyone is wasting money. And I, I can't care about who looted billions of dollars from venture capitalists last. Nor do I believe that anything should happen to this venture capitalist other than being tarred and feathered by the limited partners.

• 4:28Ed Zitron?

  These people aren't building anything. They're huffing their own farts and getting paid tens of millions of dollars to do it. I'm sick of hearing about them. And I think this is the year we see this kind of con die. We're long past the point at which generative AI has made sense. Bloomberg reported last year that there were one hundred and seventy eight point five billion dollars of data center deals in the US alone in twenty twenty five. And based on my rough analysis, there's less than a billion dollars of actual compute revenue outside of hyperscalers who are just trying to move it off of their balance sheet so their earnings look better. The demand isn't arriving and neither are the products and all of this speculative money sloshing around is going to zero. I also want to be clear about something else I keep hearing about. If OpenAI dies, the AI bubble bursts with it.

• 5:13Ed Zitron?

  Mr. Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations had a piece in the New York Times a few days ago saying that he believed OpenAI would run out of money by July twenty twenty seven. Adding that, and I quote, "An OpenAI failure wouldn't be an indictment of AI, but merely the end of the most hype-driven builder of it." He also said that the probable result is that OpenAI would be absorbed by Microsoft, Amazon, or another cash-rich behemoth, which I am going to sit down and reread a lot of my newsletters because I'm pretty sure that's fucking lifted from my work. Like, OpenAI being absorbed by Microsoft, I know I fucking said it. If you can find it, email me, easy at betteroffline.com, and I will give you a big thumbs up in a photo. But I want to be clear, in any case, if OpenAI dies, the bubble bursts aggressively and brutally.

• 5:56Ed Zitron?

  OpenAI is the biggest brand name in AI, Sam Altman is the only well-known founder, and ChatGPT is the only AI product with any consumer penetration. And no, Microsoft and Google renaming products doesn't count, nor does Nano Banana. I can't believe I, I nearly got away with saying or thinking about Nano Banana for a week.

• 6:18Ed Zitron?

  More importantly, OpenAI is the only company with any real demand for AI compute outside of Anthropic, another company that relies on billions of dollars of venture capital and subsidies to stop itself from falling over and dying.

• 6:30Ed Zitron?

  As you can hear, I'm a little bit heated on this subject because I'm really, really sick of hearing this. I'm really sick of hearing things from these AI boosters are getting more crazy, more defensive, claiming that this is an OpenAI bubble, not an AI bubble. What do you think happens when AI companies try and raise money after OpenAI dies? Do you think investors are gonna think, you think they're gonna do the Tobias Funke Polly thing from Arrested Development, where it didn't work for them, it'll work for us? No, they're gonna say, oh shit, oh shit, the one company with all the press, all the money, all the infrastructure, all the attention, all of the governmental support died on its ass. Why would I invest in more in this? And I realize venture capitalists are fucking

• 7:15Ed Zitron?

  stupid at the best of times, but even by this standard, I think that they're going to be too scared to put the money in. And I don't think anyone else is gonna be able to justify it either. But I do think, by the way, AI boosters are about to get real crazy out there. I think you're gonna see them say it's an OpenAI bubble, not an AI bubble, then we need these investments to beat China, then they're gonna blame people like me, AI skeptics, they're gonna say Luddites destroyed innovation. And if you hear them, know that in reality, the people destroying innovation are the ones diverting more than half of all venture capital to invest in unreliable, unproductive, unsustainable, and unremarkable software in pursuit of creating the future of digital slavery. I'm

• 7:57Ed Zitron?

  sick of these fucking people, but that doesn't mean I won't be here to tell you all about their collapse. I'll be back next week with a three or four parter, and it's gonna be a bomb burner. You're gonna love it. Zitron out.

• 8:15Speaker 02

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• 8:47Speaker 00

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• 9:17Speaker 03

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• 9:30Speaker 04

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• 10:13Speaker 04

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• 10:16Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.