Monologue: The Updated Pale Horses of the AIpocalypse

In this week’s monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the pale horses of the AIpocalypse - and how the AI bubble’s deepest weakness is that it’s almost entirely based on vibes. Anthropic’s new data center in Indiana: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/technology/amazon-ai-data-centers.html 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 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 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.

• 0:40Ed Zitron?

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

• 0:52Ed Zitron?

  In August of last year, I put out a podcast called "How the AI Bubble Burst", where I ran down what I thought would be the signs that things were collapsing, my pale horses of the AI apocalypse, if you will, which is something that reads really well, but when you say it out loud, not so good. The reason I put these together is that the bubble is unlikely to have one specific moment where things explode. Things like Bear Stearns' collapse during the Great Financial Crisis were such significant moments, in part because that was a public company, mortgages were a massive part and are a massive part of the economy, and indeed, there was billions, indeed, I think trillions of dollars resting on them. And I don't really think there's a situation like that, nor is there one where a public company collapses as a result of the AI bubble bursting. This bubble is different because it's so thoroughly based on vibes.

• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  I'll end up at some point doing a longer episode about this, but the long and short of it is that the actual core of the system, the real weak point, is actually Nvidia. Nvidia's continued success comes from the reliable quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year growth from selling GPUs, the graphics processing units that power generative AI and that people take and put inside of servers so that they can immediately start losing money. More than 40% of their GPU revenue comes from the other six companies in the magnificent seven: Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, Apple and Amazon. And Nvidia deeply depends on their continued and growing hunger for GPUs. It isn't just enough that they buy the same amounts, they must buy more. The rest of the Mag 7's valuations are dependent on continued growth too, which is what AI

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  is meant to provide them, but it's not really providing growth at all. Indeed, their growth stories are not really based on numbers, but vibes. They're based on feelings and the general warm, fuzzy feeling that dipshits get when they claim that AI is the future. Let me give you an example. Meta's stock jumped because they've announced a theoretical data center the size of Manhattan. Now, important detail here as well, Meta is making exactly minus dollars on generative AI. They're just putting generative AI everywhere. And yeah, giving people a little bit of psychosis, I imagine, feeling feeds full of slop. It's very bad. And you know what? It also isn't making them money. And right now, this is really good for the magnificent seven because they're not actually having to prove that AI is a big deal.

• 3:05Ed Zitron?

  People are basically believing it is because the AI trade, which means the value of these stocks remains positive. And honestly, it is currently a positive trade, even though it's based on effectively nothing. But seriously, Amazon may only make $5 billion in revenue this year on AI. And I mean revenue, not profit. Google maybe three to seven billion, Microsoft $13 billion, and $10 billion of that is OpenAI's compute. These are pathetic numbers, but these companies are let off because the AI trade still works. The possibilities are still there. Profits that don't exist today and don't appear to have any path to them either, they're coming. We swear, if we say agents enough time, maybe it'll work.

• 3:46Ed Zitron?

  The long and short of it is that everything about the AI industry is based on some level on lies, on lies both subtle and overt. And the general sense that generative AI is both the future and the future of the economy. There are a few real tangible things to point at, other than ChatGPT's 500 million weekly users and the tens of billions of dollars invested in AI startups. Or maybe the weird acquisition deals, like the $2.4 billion that Google just gave kind of AI code editor to windsurf, except Google took the staff, some of the staff, the C-suite, the R and D team for the $2.4 billion. And then Cognition, who makes the Devon coding bot, took the rest for an undisclosed sum. It's all really, really fucking weird.

• 4:29Ed Zitron?

  It's all very strange and yet when you look beneath the surface, there really are few returns. Windsurf's monthly revenue was 6.8 trillion, three million dollars a month, a ridiculously small amount, working out to about eighty-two million dollars of annualized revenue. Yet, based on the information's generative AI database, Windsurf was actually one of the highest-earning AI startups out there. Now, really, based on annualized revenue, meaning month multiplied by twelve, most AI companies make about a hundred million dollars annualized or less. No, really, that's about eight point three million dollars a year, a month. With since there's Eo, Weka, XAI, Together, Abridge, Glean, Perplexity, and they're all making about a hundred million dollars annualized. And I must be clear about how weird this stat is. Annualized just means the month of revenue times twelve.

• 5:13Ed Zitron?

  Customers churn. Customers churn, so your ARR may go down when you have a few people drop out. It may spike arbitrarily because you've increased prices. And it's just, it's a very bad statistic to use, yet people are not really looking at the other thing, which is, that's not a lot of money. Eight, eight point three million dollars a month. You have ad agencies that make several times that. Ad agencies bank ads on Facebook and Google. These are terrible fucking companies. I mean, outside of the hundred million ARR side, you've got Midjourney, who are inexplicably profitable, we'll look into that, and Neo4j, and they make two hundred million dollars a month, uh, sorry, two hundred million dollars annualized, so about sixteen point

• 5:56Ed Zitron?

  six million dollars, which is, again, not amazing. None of these are amazing. These aren't great. These would be okay startups if they were profitable, and they're absolutely not. But right on the tippy-top, behind Anthropic and OpenAI, is AnySphere, who makes Cursor, and they make five hundred million dollars annualized, or about forty-one point six million dollars a month, which is bad, because in June, all of their prices got increased by Anthropic, and on top of that, they had to change the pricing, and now Cursor kinda sucks. Go on their subreddit, check it out. Anyway, this is why you don't like annualized as a stat, by the way, because I reckon their July revenue might be a little bit lower than forty-one point six million dollars, but we'll never know.

• 6:39Ed Zitron?

  No, because, well, unless someone reports there. If you've got any numbers on any of these companies, my signal is ezitron, E Z I T R O N dot seventy six on signal. Please send me anything you have. I love numbers. Anyway, past that point, it's only Anthropic and OpenAI. And I've left out a few companies like Turing and Scale. They don't make AI products. They're consultancies. But the long and short of it is this industry doesn't make much fucking money. The actual returns from it aren't that very good. It's not very good at all. But the reason I'm telling you all these numbers is that I need you to know that this industry is not held up by the actual businesses or their revenues. None of these companies are profitable, and it certainly isn't held up by the actual products themselves.

• 7:22Ed Zitron?

  And I'm sure you've got an AI friend who's come to you and said, oh, I use it for this. See how far you get them in the conversation before they just say they're using it like a search engine. We had this whole thing with Brian on the, on the podcast this week. It's like, yeah, really emphatically talking about the fact that he got a slightly sexy search engine that may or may not get things right. That can fool you into believing you're correct about something, which isn't a fucking product. No, if it was, people would be making money. It's ridiculous. But even in areas like coding, coding, the one place where people can point and go, look, look, users like this. Look, Edward, look at them. A study from nonprofit group Model Evaluation and Threat Research found that despite developers believing AI coding tools sped them up by twenty four percent.

• 8:07Ed Zitron?

  Coding tools actually increased the completion time of their tasks by nineteen percent. It actually, it slowed them down. Oh my God, every week with this industry, I feel like I'm going insane. It's like every week there's this goddamn story like this. I still have people who tell me it's the future. I feel like I'm going insane. But as a result of AI being a nearly entirely vibes-based economy, the pale horses of its apocalypse will be vibe shifters rather than defined events that would logically change things. Remember DeepSeek? That was a clunky story. So you had a Chinese model developer that may be cheaper. It was cheaper to train, much cheaper to train, but still cheaper to train.

• 8:46Ed Zitron?

  And their model might be cheaper and it is comparable. I mean, I've certainly made my hay with the episodes and interviews I did around it, but I'm surprised that shocked the market. There are bigger, nastier stories. But if that can do it. Well, basically, anything could. One thing that really spreads like information poison into the heads of business idiots everywhere who are saying, "AI now, please," without really understanding what it does. It's unlikely to be one big pop, but several little dudes from the bubble deflating. So let's get to it. Here are the signs to look out for. Freshly updated, and if you have any ideas, please do reach out. I'd love to hear from you. We'll start with an obvious one. Any price increases or decreases are OpenAI and Anthropic. And I called these increases in August, and I had decreases because, as I've mentioned

• 9:31Ed Zitron?

  in the subprime AI crisis, there is now a race to the bomb for model developers. OpenAI cut the price of their O3 reasoning model by 80% in June in an attempt to undercut Anthropic's Claude for Opus, which launched May 22nd, I believe. And we've already begun to see price increases, too. Anthropic added service tiers and OpenAI priority processing for enterprise customers to give them uninterrupted service in June. And I must be clear, when I say enterprise, I mean any AI company that has customers at scale. So AnySphere, Cursor, Glean, and the like, they are enterprise customers, and they are very likely having to pay these prices. Now, here's another one. Anthropic and OpenAI may move away from monthly subscriptions, and indeed, any AI company may do this.

• 10:16Ed Zitron?

  This is a huge pale horse. When companies start moving away from simple business models, so 20 bucks, 100 bucks a month, or they start changing those so the returns aren't, so the returns, the actual usership isn't obvious, isn't obvious how much you can or can't use, that's a sign that the company is trying to contain costs and indeed fuck with their customers a bit. And we've already seen a little bit of this with how Cursor changed their pricing, or Claude Max, the $100 or $200 a month subscription from Anthropic, which has now changed things to say you get more usage at the higher tiers than the $20 a month Pro subscription. How much more? It isn't clear. Go to Claude's subreddit, you'll see a lot of people who are constantly saying, "I don't know what the rate limits are." And that's working as intended, by the way.

• 11:01Ed Zitron?

  Anthropic is tweaking things very clearly on the backend. We do not know what they are. There are rumors that they are quantizing models, so making them smaller, dumber, cheaper to run, but still doing comparable things, or just not having as much access within peak hours. These are unsubstantiated rumors, but I've seen enough claims of them that they're worth mentioning. These are signs that things are getting bad, or that they need to make things more profitable. And really, any and all cost increases on consumers by any AI service are a pale horse as they suggest the company in question is trying to deal with these ruinous costs. Remember, there are no profitable AI companies. It's fucking crazy. We are three years into

• 11:41Ed Zitron?

  this dog shit and there's none of them. Okay, Search AI, they are an AI data training company. That does not matter. It does not matter. If you've got a car that has a horrible fuel economy, you don't point at how well oil is selling to say that the car's good. They're different things. Anyway, any and all rate limits at any AI startup are a huge pale horse because these companies are spending a shit ton of money and they're in having to run these massive infrastructural operations to keep things going. Those things are expensive. Power in particular is expensive, so any mediating those costs is necessary. If you see it with other companies, it's even worse because it means that OpenAI and Anthropic

• 12:23Ed Zitron?

  are turning the screws on them. Now, another obvious one, of course, is any funding or revenue problems from the remaining AI software companies. Glean, Harvey, AlphaSense, any sphere who makes Cursor, as I mentioned, or Replit, for example. It suggests that the funding required to keep these companies going is running out and their business models aren't working. And I want to make one real clear point here. I'm kind of repeating myself, but it's necessary. These companies are symbolic of whether generative AI will work. The, I realize ChatGPT is the big sexy one, but if you can't build software on generative AI and sell it for a profit, there is no industry here. Every single major cloud computing revolution has started because there was profit. And fucking hell, it's nothing like Amazon Web

• 13:06Ed Zitron?

  Services when it grew. I'm tired of hearing this point. I think I have to do a thing about it because I'm fucking sick of it. It's nothing to do with it. Nothing. It's not remotely similar. The only similar thing is their goddamn data centers. Godf- Calming down. But on the subject of data centers, any delays to Stargate or Amazon and Anthropic's new Carlisle, Indiana build out? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are running into capacity issues. This is documented well, both by the companies and reporting from outlets like The Information. And they need these projects to happen. Because right now, it's very obvious Microsoft is not going to expand their infrastructure for OpenAI. And Anthropic, well, they need Amazon to do it, but data centers don't grow like weeds. They take forever to build.

• 13:52Ed Zitron?

  I don't even know when the Carlisle, Indiana data center is going to get built. Fucking hell. What a mess. Every time I think about this, such a mess. All right, one final pale horse, and this is my favorite one. Anything that happens with SoftBank and their ability to raise money is a big pale horse, the palest of them all, actually. Because SoftBank is critical to everything. SoftBank is the money behind OpenAI. SoftBank is the money behind Stargate. SoftBank is financially responsible for Stargate, by the way. And if OpenAI doesn't move into to Stargate, and indeed if Stargate never happens, Oracle gets left with forty billion dollars of chips unused and Crusoe, who they have to pay a billion dollars, I think? Have a fifteen-year lease with them? What a mess.

• 14:37Ed Zitron?

  But as I've said, the actual bubble bursting will be slow, annoying and unsatisfying at times. But these pale horses are the signs that things are falling apart. I will as ever keep you up to date on when these signs are happening, what they mean, why you should care. I'll probably say fucking shit a few times when I do so. Really appreciate you, love you all, thanks for listening.

• 15:03Speaker 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.

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• 16:27Speaker 04

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