Radio Better Offline: Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau & Ed Ongweso Jr.

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York city. Ed Zitron is joined in studio by Allison Morrow of CNN, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble newsletter, and Paris Martineau of The Information to talk about the collapse of the AI bubble, the goofy “AI 2027” fan fiction that has gone viral in the tech industry, and how the tech media faces a reckoning once the bubble truly bursts. Vote for Better Offline's "Man Who Killed Google Search" as the best business podcast episode in this year's Webby's! Open until April 17! Vote today! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/individual-episode/business Vote for Weird Little Guys in this year’s Webby’s! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/individual-episode/crime-justice Allison Morrow https://www.cnn.com/profiles/allison-morrow https://bsky.app/profile/amorrow.bsky.social Ed Ongweso Jr. https://thetechbubble.substack.com/ https://bsky.app/profile/edwardongwesojr.com Paris Martineau https://www.theinformation.com/u/parismartineau?rc=kz8jh3 https://bsky.app/profile/paris.nyc https://ai-2027.com/ New York Times article on AI 2027 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/technology/ai-futures-project-ai-2027.html CNN - Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown - https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/27/tech/apple-ai-artificial-intelligence/index.html CNN - The AI bubble may not be bursting, but tariff chaos is sure helping to deflate it https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/business/ai-bubble-markets-tariffs-nightcap/index.html WSJ - How Is SoftBank Funding Its Mega Investment in OpenAI? A Lot of Debt - https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/openai-softbank-investment-debt-51b4a130 TechCrunch - OpenAI reportedly mulls buying Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s AI hardware startup - https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/openai-reportedly-mulls-buying-jony-ive-and-sam-altmans-ai-hardware-startup/ --- 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.

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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• 1:07Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:11Ed Zitron?

  Hi everyone. Before we get to the episode, I just wanted to lead in and say, we are up for a webby. I'll be including a link. I know it's a pain in the arse to register for something. I'm sorry. I really want to win this. Never won an award in my life. It will be in the links. And while you're there and registered, look up the wonderful weird little guys with Miss Molly Conga. Vote for both of us. I'm in the best business podcast episode one. She's in the best crime podcast episode one. We can win this. We can defeat the others. And now for the episode.

• 1:48Ed Zitron?

  Every day I am punished and killed and you love to watch. Welcome to Better Offline. We're live from New York City, recorded straight to tape, of course, and I'm joined by an incredible cast of people. To my right, I have Paris Martineau of The Information. Hayden Barris. What is up? Edward Unguessa of the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Hello, hello. And the wonderful Allison Morrow of the CNN Nightcap Newsletter.

• 2:07Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 2:08Ed Zitron?

  And Alison, you wrote one of my favorite bits of media criticism I've ever read recently. Uh, do you want to actually walk us through that piece? Because I, I think it, I will link it in the notes. Don't worry, everyone.

• 2:19Speaker 05

  I'd be happy to. I wrote a piece, I think the headline we ended up with was like, Apple's AI is not the disappointment, AI is the disappointment.

• 2:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  Um, and this was inspired by, um, credit to where it's due. I was listening to Hard Fork with Kevin Roos on our, my husband and I were driving out to the country and listening to this and just getting infuriated.

• 2:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  Um, and basically their premise was, or at least Kevin Roos's premise was that AI is failing, or sorry, that Apple is failing this moment in AI.

• 2:52Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  And Apple has been trying, it's been like the laggard, you know, that's a narrative we've heard in tech media over and over. And it's like, Kevin Roos's point was like, oh, well, they should just start getting more comfortable with experimenting and making mistakes and, you know, violating everything that Apple brand kind of stands for and like force the AI into a consumer product that no one wants. And I was like respectfully, no.

• 3:19Speaker 06

  It's also such a funny argument, given that it was a mistake being made by Apple that resulted in the whole Houthi PC small group situation.

• 3:29Ed Zitron?

  Wait, what was that? Walk us through that.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  Uh, that was, um, specifically, um, how the editor in chief of The Atlantic ended up in a secret military signal chat.

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  Wait, I missed what?

• 3:41Speaker 06

  How, how have you missed?

• 3:42Ed Zitron?

  I saw the signal thing, but how did the?

• 3:44Speaker 06

  What? I'm sorry. Have you guys not been online?

• 3:47Ed Zitron?

  I don't use the computer. Better offline.

• 3:49Speaker 06

  Or better offline. Oh, gosh, I should leave them.

• 3:52Ed Zitron?

  I've been reading the scrolls.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  So basically, The Atlantic came out a couple of weeks ago with a, uh, article about how their editor in chief one day was suddenly added to a signal group chat.

• 4:04Ed Zitron?

  Signal guy.

• 4:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, a signal guy.

• 4:05Ed Zitron?

  But how did this Apple?

• 4:06Speaker 06

  So the Apple thing was, um, I'm forgetting who exactly. reported this, this was in the last couple of days, um, that how it happened was the con, like, you know, that thing that comes up on your iPhone where it says like, oh, a new

• 4:20Ed Zitron?

  Suggested contact.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  phone number has been found. Yeah, it was a suggested contact. Uh, and it happened because someone, I guess, in the government had copied and pasted an email, um, containing, uh, the editor in chief of the Atlantic's contact information in a message to, uh, I'm forgetting whatever government official.

• 4:37Ed Zitron?

  One of the guys.

• 4:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, one of the guys. And so he ended up combining the Atlantic EIC's information into a contact.

• 4:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  For, uh, some government dude. And that's how they ended up in, cause it then signaled when you connected to your contacts.

• 4:52Ed Zitron?

  I love the computer so much.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  So, I mean, that's, that makes me even crazier about the, um, hard fork take because it's like, you can't mess around with something like your phone.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  Well, in this particular instance, I take it all back. Apple AI is amazing. It gave us one of the best journalism stories of the year.

• 5:09Ed Zitron?

  You also made a really good point in here. I was messaging you this on the way in. You said, you made this point that there's a popular adage in policy circles that the party can never fail, it can only be failed. It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may be, for example, blame voters for their party's failings rather than the party itself. The same fallacy is taking root among AI's biggest backers. AI can never fail, it can only be failed. And I love this because it's, you get people like Kevin Roos, and there was a wonderful clip on the New York Times TikTok of Kevin Roos seeming genuinely pissy. He was like, I can't believe people are mad at AI because of Siri. And it's like, oh, what? They think it's shitty? Cause it's shitty?

• 5:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so shitty.

• 5:48Ed Zitron?

  They talk about AI like it's their child. Him and Casey act as if we've hurt ChatGPT. Sorry, Claude, they're Anthropic boys. And insane that Casey's boyfriend works Anthropic. I know he, he does the citation. Fucking, anyway, it's just so weird because it's like, we have to apologize for not liking AI enough. And now you have the CEO of Shopify saying, actually, we, you have to use it. Do you hear about this?

• 6:12Speaker 07

  Yeah. He said what? That you have to prove your job can't be replaced by AI?

• 6:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 07

  Or else it will be.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  And he also said that now. Now it's going to be Shopify policy to include in all of the employee performance reviews, both for your self-assessment and for your like direct reports and colleagues' assessment, how much this person use AI? And obviously, the uh, what's going on there is if you are not reporting that you use AI all the time for everything, you could get fired.

• 6:38Speaker 07

  Think Lorna just tried to overhaul hiring process so that they could have AI first or AI only, and then roll it back because they realized you can't replace all these jobs.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  My question is, I mean, this is something that's brought up on the show all the time, but who are these people that are encountering the AI assistant suddenly plugged into every app and being like, yeah, this is actually beneficial to my life and this works really well? Because it sucks every time I use it.

• 7:05Ed Zitron?

  Well, you made the the point in your article, Alison, as well. It's like, if it was 100% accurate, it would be really useful. If it's even 98% accurate, it's not.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Right. I think that was the point that, uh, you know, to his credit, Casey Newton made in the episode, which is that AI is fundamentally an academic project right now. And it's like, you can have all kinds of debates about its utility, but ultimately, is it a consumer product? And no, it's just like, it's failing as a consumer product on all fronts.

• 7:33Ed Zitron?

  And what's crazy as well is, I'm surprised he would say that considering everything else he's ever said, because he's, he quite literally has had multiple articles recently being like, ah, consumer adoption is up. In in, he had an article the other day where it was like, "Data provided exclusively from Anthropic shows that more people are using AI." It's like, my man, it's 2013 again. We're past this. You can't just do this anymore unless you're you. And so going back to Mr. Mr. Lutke of uh, Mr. Lutke of um, Shopify, I just want to read my favorite part of it. It says, "I use it all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface..." "You've heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, town halls and summit. Last summer, I used agents to create my talk and presented about that."

• 8:18Ed Zitron?

  So all this fucking piss and vinegar and the only thing you can use it for is to write a slop-ridden presentation to everyone about how good AI is without specifying what it does? I feel like I'm going insane sometimes with this stuff.

• 8:30Speaker 07

  I mean, in one way, that's great, right? You, the only place you should encounter it is maybe the team building retreats, you know? That's the utility of this shit.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  This reminds me a lot of like media 2012, 2013, where it was all pivot to video and what's our video, our vertical video strategy. And it's like, Okay, now what's our AI strategy? How are we injecting AI into everything we're doing? And it's like, well, to what end?

• 8:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 05

  What's the point?

• 8:55Speaker 07

  This is something that has been driving me mad, especially with partnerships we're seeing between media firms and these AI firms. You know, these are firms in the same sector that keeps lying to firms about how if you integrate artificial intelligence, this time it'll optimize your ability to find an audience or to get revenue, and we can include you in some esoteric revenue share program, or we'll be able to claw back some of the eyeballs and the attention that you're interested in seeking. But each time, it's actually just used to graft themselves onto services or to try to gin up excitement about these products, right?

• 9:33Ed Zitron?

  What's insane is this company has a multi-billion dollar market cap. And I'm just going to read point two. AI must be part of your GSD prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD product should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. How? Fucking how? Like, that's the thing. I have clients in my PR firm who will occasionally bring me AI things, and I'm every time I'm just like, this better fucking work. Like, just every, and to their credit, they do. But it's like, I have clients I turn down all the time, who are like, yeah, we're doing this. And I'm like, is this just a chatbot? And they're like, no. I'm like, can you show me how it works? No. I'm like, oh, cool. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be a good fit somehow, because you don't seem to be able to explain what your product does.

• 10:16Ed Zitron?

  But don't worry, this appears to be a problem up to the multi-billion dollar companies as well. It's just, it feels like the largest mask-off dunce moment in history. Just these people who don't do any real work, being like, it's the future, I think. I don't do anything real. And the pivot to video thing, I think, is actually a really good comparison, because I remember being in New York at that time, being like, I don't fucking like video. I don't like anyone. I don't think I want to consume video in the way that what it was, I'm like Mike and everyone. And they were like, oh, we're going to do this video and this. We're going to do everything video now. Video first, no written content. It's like, I don't know a single goddamn human that actually does that. And also, the other thing that Facebook was lying. That Facebook was just over, just claiming, like, averaging out the engagement numbers,

• 11:01Ed Zitron?

  and everyone was wrong. But that was the same kind of thing. It's like, very clearly, the people who have their hands on the steering wheel are looking at their phone. And it's fucking confusing, but it's so much worse this time. It feels more egregious somehow. Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, because it feels, I mean, we've had so many of these hype cycles, kind of back to back to back from even the horizontal video days of Facebook to vertical video to whatever the hell the metaverse was supposed to be. To, literally, in an ominous moment, as I was walking in to record this, I saw a guy wearing a leather jacket with Bored Ape Yacht Club on the back, and I was like, God. That's age 12. Yeah, I was like, that's...

• 11:40Ed Zitron?

  That guy rocks.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  What a cool dude. But it's like, how long is this going to last?

• 11:46Ed Zitron?

  I, I have been actually looking at the numbers recently, and I don't know either, because for SoftBank to fund OpenAI, it might require them to destroy SoftBank? Like, S and P is downgrading their credit rating potentially due to... Hell, yeah. Yeah, I know. Like, we're really at this point where it's just like, we've gone so much further than, like, the metaverse and crypto do, because those weren't really, like, systemic things. But this one, I think it's just the narrative has carried away so far that people are talking about a thing that doesn't exist all the time.

• 12:16Speaker 07

  I mean, in some elements, it kind of reminds me at the, near the end, or near the real peak, is when we started also to see metaverse and crypto, sustainable refi shit, where they're like, oh, actually, you know, we can fight climate change with crypto.

• 12:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  Putting, uh, carbon credits on the, on the blockchain. And so, there was, there was a moment where the frenzy, and the speculative frenzy, led to, like, world transformative visions that were bullshit. And I feel like we are, we are heading there, we're in that direction with artificial intelligence, where, you know, consistently, we've been fed, oh, this is going to revolutionize everything. But it feels like the attempt to graft it onto more and more consumer products, more and more government services, more and more parts of, uh, daily spheres of life as a way to, like, privatize almost everything or commodify everything, feels like downstream of the way cryptos attempt to, uh, put everything on a blockchain blew up.

• 13:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  I was thinking about this in a kind of like fundamentally cultural way where I think at some point in the last 30 years, there was a time when everything coming out of Silicon Valley was cool.

• 13:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Whether it was like useful or world transformative, it was cool and there was like an edge to it and people were like, ooh, that's neat.

• 13:36Ed Zitron?

  Yes, disruptive.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, disruption was everything and like, I think post like Facebook Cambridge Analytica era like 2016, tech has just stopped being cool and edgy. It's very corporate and like, I don't think the rest of corporate America has kind of figured out that Silicon Valley is not the cool thing anymore.

• 13:57Ed Zitron?

  And that they can't, that they're fully capable of being wrong and lying. Like that's, that's the other thing.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  They've gotten very good at fundraising and marketing.

• 14:05Ed Zitron?

  But they're also not like kids anymore. Like we, we talk, I still see people referring to OpenAI as a startup.

• 14:11Speaker 07

  Palmer Lucky is a kid.

• 14:13Ed Zitron?

  Palmer Lucky is a kid who looks like Leisure Suit Larry.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  And sells arms.

• 14:18Ed Zitron?

  Which is US government.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  He's almost a little kid. He's just a little guy. Well, we refer to them as startups, but also I think one of the most accomplished parts of AI marketing has been like, we always refer to them as labs.

• 14:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  So they seem like so academic and like good fundamentally and it's like, these are companies, like some of them might be part of, you know, a research institution or a university, but a lot of them are startups.

• 14:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, literal companies.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, they are companies.

• 14:48Ed Zitron?

  Like Anthropic is a public benefit, I believe, and it's, it's just remarkable. And I think what's happened here is that the narrative has gotten away to the point that we're really, the Dunst Maskoff moment I mentioned is people like Mr. Luque from Shopify, it's very clear he doesn't do any work. Like I think that anyone who is just being like, yeah, AI is the future and it's changing everything without specifying anything, doesn't do any work. I just don't, Bob Iger from Disney said AI is going to change, no, it's not. Bob, how's it changing your fucking life, you lazy bastard? Like, you're going to summarize your worthless emails that someone else reads as you lie on your Scrooge McDuck money?

• 15:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:28Ed Zitron?

  And it's just, it's so bizarre, but it feels like we're approaching this insanity level where you've got people like Shopify being like, oh yeah, it's going to be in everything as like OpenAI burns more money than anyone's ever burned. Anthropic lost 5.6 billion last year, reported by The Information. It does some incredible fucking work on this, I should say. And um, it just doesn't make any sense. And it's getting more nonsensical. You're seeing like all of the crypto guys have fully become AI guys now. And that was something I didn't like talking about at first because it wasn't happening in the, now it's all of them. They all have AI avatars. This guy called Jamie Burke is real, real shithead. This guy was like a, a crypto metaverse guy and he's now a full AI guy.

• 16:08Ed Zitron?

  Another guy called Bernard Marr, who is just a harmless Forbes, like a, kind of like an NPC, like one of the hollows from Dark Souls.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  Their diagram is increasingly becoming a circle.

• 16:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but he's onto quantum now, which is a bad sign. That's a bearish sign. When you've got one of the Forbes guys moving on to quantum, we're cooked.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  What about thermo?

• 16:28Ed Zitron?

  Who's thermo?

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Isn't there some like uh?

• 16:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh thermo, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's some scam.

• 16:33Ed Zitron?

  Thermodynamics, fuck yeah, I'm gonna become a thermodynamics influencer. I know what, I know what that means. I also know what that means, but if anyone could tell me real quick. But it's, I think the most egregious one I've seen, I sent this all to you. Ed, I think you and I have talked about this the most. There was one of the stupidest fucking things I've read in my worthless life. And it's called AI twenty twenty seven. Now, if you have not run into this yet, I, as a listener, it will be in the episode notes. I'm just, just gonna bring it up because.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  It is fanfiction. It is literally a thing throughout. I was like, is this fanfiction? This is fanfiction. Oh, this is interactive fanfiction.

• 17:10Ed Zitron?

  It is, and you can hit the buttons. What is this? How do we write it? Our research on key questions, what goals will future AI agents have can be found here. The scenario itself is written iteratively. We wrote the first period up to mid twenty twenty five and the following period, et cetera, until we reached the ending. Yeah, otherwise known as how you write stuff. Like you, you writing in a linear fashion. We then scrapped this and did it again. You should have scrapped it and all of it. Now, this thing is, uh, it's a, it is predicting that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the industrial revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess that what it might look like, otherwise known as making stuff up.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  Not even over the next decade. It go basically says it's going to be have superhuman like catastrophic or world-changing impact in the next five years. Like by 2023, we're either going to be completely overtaken by our robot overlords or like at a, you know, tenuous peace.

• 18:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it it's insane as well because it has it has some great headlines like mid 2026, China wakes up.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  I love that China was so far behind, you know, it's such a like, when did this come out?

• 18:18Ed Zitron?

  This came out like a week ago, and I've been sent it by a lot of people. If you're one of the people who sent it, don't worry, I'm not mad at you. It's just I got sent it by a lot of people. This thing is one of the most well-written pieces of fanfiction ever in that it appears to be like a Manchurian candidate situation for idiots. I'm not saying this is about the same thing, but anyway, Kevin Roos wrote up the piece in full. He wrote up a piece about this called, um, I'm just gonna say, the AI forecast predicts some storms ahead.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Some storms?

• 18:50Ed Zitron?

  Some storms.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  That's not even an accurate description of all of the storms it predicts.

• 18:55Ed Zitron?

  And the the long and short of this, by the way, I have read this a few times because I fucking hate myself. Um, the long and short of it is that a company called OpenBrain, who could that be?

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:05Ed Zitron?

  Uh, it could be anyone.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Anyone.

• 19:07Ed Zitron?

  Uh, OpenBrain, they create a self-learning agent somehow. Unclear how. Uh, all they add is just that how mu- how many terra flops it's going to require. And it can train itself and also requires more data centers than ever. How they get them, how those are funded, no fucking clue isn't explained. Probably the easy, actually, this is the fu- this just occurred to me. Probably the only thing they could actually reasonably extrapolate in here is the cost of data centers. That's the only thing, and they don't. Probably because they feel like, yeah, we need a tril- an actual trillion dollars to do this made-up thing.

• 19:42Speaker 07

  I do also want to add in here that, you know, behind the AI 2027 is, you know, one of the people connected to it, if I remember correctly, is Scott Alexander, who's this Guy that's part of the rationalist community, which is one of the uh, one of the groups that overlaps with effective altruist, accelerationist. Yeah, you know, so if it feels like it's frothy and fanfictiony and hypey. That's because these are the same people that keep, you know, that are connected to pushing constant hype cycles over and over and over again.

• 20:13Ed Zitron?

  And it's written to be worrying as well. It's written to upset.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  It's written to be worrying, but it also in the predictions for the next two years keeps talking about how uh, the stock market is going to grow exponentially and do so well. The president is going to be making all of these wise, informed decisions and having really deep conversations with the leader of Open Brain. And I was like, are you, that's why I asked, when did this come out? Cause I was like, maybe this was written a couple of years ago. But no, it is wild, like literally it says.

• 20:42Speaker 07

  It's like the Bene Gesserit kind of planning, like, okay, with the wizard's hat, he's gonna be born, he's gonna lead us to the promised land.

• 20:49Ed Zitron?

  It's so good as well because the people who've sent this to me have been very concerned just because they're like, this sounds scary. And I really want to be clear, if you read something like this and you're like, that doesn't make sense to me, it probably doesn't make sense to anyone because it's nonsense. This thing is, um, let me read just one cut from it. The AI R and D progress multiplier, what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress? We mean that Open Brain makes as much AI research progress in one week with AI as they would in 1.5 weeks without. Who fucking cares, Matt? What, what are you talking about? If a frog had wings, it could fly. Like, what, what you? And what's crazy is, and I know I bag on Kevin Roos, it's because he's a nakedly captured

• 21:29Ed Zitron?

  part of the tech industry now. I am in public relations and I'm somehow less frothy about this. That should tell you fucking everything. It is insane that the New York Times, at a time when you have SoftBank being potentially downgraded by S and P, you have OpenAI raising more money than they ever raised, $40 billion, except they only received 10 billion. And they'll only get 20 billion more by the end of the year if they become a non-for-profit, which they can't do. No, no, no, no. Kevin Roos can't possibly cover that. He needs to go and take his, a solemn looking fucking photo of some. I'll swipe, I can't even get my phone.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  I do really love all of the incredibly solemn, moody feature profiles.

• 22:06Ed Zitron?

  And I'll put the link in there for this.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  He's got seventy-five pockets on his choreo.

• 22:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, my man is ready to.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  Oh, the AI.

• 22:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Oh, that's, that's where it is.

• 22:13Ed Zitron?

  And it's just him, like, this guy's sitting with his, his hands clasped, like, staring mournfully into the distance. This is what you're spending your time on, Cat. And I'm just gonna read some Kevin Roos. The AI prediction world is torn between optimism and gloom. A report released on Thursday decided it lands on the side of gloom. That's Kevin Roos's voice. Um, but my favorite part, part of this, by far, I'm, I'm gonna take a second to get it, because Ed, I sent this to you as well.

• 22:37Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 22:38Ed Zitron?

  Uh, where is it? So also, a lot of this is, oh, here we go. If all of this sounds fantastical, well, it is. Nothing remotely like what Mr. Kokot, Taljo and Mr. Lifland are predicting is possible with today's AI, AI tools, which can barely order a burrito on DoorDash without getting stuck. Thank you, Kevin. I'm so fucking glad the New York Times is on this.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  And that was at the end of it, right? Like, you set up this whole article and it's like, these guys have these doom predictions. And that's the other thing about the, like, the altruistic AI guys all have told themselves this story and they all believe it. And they think they are like the Prometheus bringing fire to the people and like warning the people. And it's like, you guys have sold yourself a story with no proof.

• 23:24Ed Zitron?

  I, I don't know. I feel like they're just scam artists. Nothing about this suggests they believe in anything. You can just say stuff. Look, it works.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  Literally, the, like, second sentence in this is that in two months, there will be personal assistants that you can prompt them with tasks like, order me a burrito on DoorDash, and they'll do great stuff. There, there are so many things that go into ordering me a burrito on DoorDash. What restaurant do I want? What burrito do I want? How do I want it to get to me? Where am I? It can't do any of those things, nor will it.

• 23:54Ed Zitron?

  He gazed out the window and admitted he wasn't sure. And the next few years went well and we kept AI under control, he said, referring to one of the writers of the piece. He could envision a future where people's lives were still largely the same, but where nearby special economic zones filled with hyper-efficient robot factories would churn out everything we needed. And if the next few years didn't go well, maybe the sky would be filled with pollution and the people would be dead, he said nonchalantly. Something like that.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  You know, one of the things I really, really.

• 24:21Speaker 07

  Um, love about, I don't know, it's just, it's so frustrating because we're, we're constantly fed uh, these, you know, sci-fi esoteric futures about how AI, powerful AI, superhuman AI is around the corner and we need to figure out a way to accommodate these sorts of futures. We need, and part of that accommodation means restructuring the regulations we have around it. Part of that accommodation means entertaining experiments, uh, grafting them onto our cultural production, grafting them onto consumer goods. Part of that means just like, you know, you know, uh, taking it on the chin and figuring out how to use chat GPT. But in all of this, just more or less sounds like you need to, the marketing's failing on you and you need to step up.

• 25:04Ed Zitron?

  Yes, you need to believe, you need to believe in this.

• 25:08Speaker 07

  You need to do your part, you know, to summon God.

• 25:10Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, it goes back to what you're saying now. It's like you failed AI by not believing.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, and if you're bad at it, it's your fault and not the machine's fault.

• 25:20Ed Zitron?

  You just learn.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  And to Ed's point, I think like all of this like predicting of the future and this like revolution is like, they have told themselves a story that is, this is inevitable.

• 25:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  And that there are no choices that the human beings in the room get to make about how this happens. And it's like, actually, no, we can make choices about how we want our future to play out. And it's not going to be just Silicon Valley shoving it down our throat.

• 25:44Ed Zitron?

  And on the subject of human choice, if this shit is so powerful, why have their mighty human choices not made it useful yet? Like, that's the thing, it's, and you make this point in your piece as well. It's like, AI can never fail, it can't be failed, failed by you and me, the smooth-brained Luddites who just don't get it. And it's like, why do I have to prove myself?

• 26:03Speaker 07

  And listen, you know, the Luddites, they have more grooves on their brain than Kevins. So he needs to, I think it's, it's worth embracing a little bit, you know?

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• 27:34Ed Zitron?

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• 28:19Speaker 07

  And yeah, I feel like Rob Horning wrote this newsletter a few weeks ago that I think he was honing in on this point that LLMs and these generative AI chatbots and the tools that come out of them are in some ways a distraction because a lot of these firms are pivoting towards how do we, you know, create all these products, but also how do we figure out, you know, government products that we can provide, right? How do we get into defense contracting? How do we get into arming or integrating AI into arms? And increasingly, it feels like, you know, yeah, your AI agent's gonna be able, not gonna be able to order your burrito. But these firms are also, you know, at the same time that they're insisting superhuman intelligence is around the corner and we're gonna be able to make your individual

• 29:03Speaker 07

  lives better, are spending a lot of time and energy on use cases that are actually dangerous, right? And it should actually be concerning, in generating kill lists, right? Or facial recognition and surveillance.

• 29:15Ed Zitron?

  Which is already being around now and isn't generative.

• 29:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, it isn't generative, but they, but the firms that are offering these generative products are spending actual, you know, the stuff that they're actually putting their time and energy into is, you know, the sort of demonstrably destructive tools, under the guise and the, in the kind of murky covering of it's all, you know, artificial intelligence, right? It's all inevitable, it's all coming down the same pipeline, you should accept it.

• 29:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it's, I think the thing is as well is those guys really think that's the next big moneymaker, but I don't think anyone's making any money off of this. No one wants to talk about the money because they're not making any, like no one, like I think I've read the, I've read the earnings calls, I'm not gonna listen, of every single company that is selling an AI service at this point, I can't find a single one that wants to commit to a number other than Microsoft and they'll only talk annualized, which is my favorite one.

• 30:06Speaker 07

  ARR.

• 30:07Ed Zitron?

  ARR, but ARR, but the thing is ARR traditionally would mean an aggregate rather than just 12 times the last biggest month, which is what they're doing.

• 30:17Speaker 06

  No, that's the classic setup used to be at ARR.

• 30:19Ed Zitron?

  I refuse to, I don't know, I'll burn my clients' arses to the ground with that one, because it's like you can't just fucking make up a number, unless you're in AI, then you absolutely can. It's just frustrating because, and the reason I bag on Newton-Roose, other than all the others I've listed, is the- I feel like in their position and in the position of anyone with any major voice in the media skepticism isn't like something you should sometimes bring in it's not you don't have to be a grizzled hater like myself but you can be like hey even if this did work which it doesn't how does this possibly last another year and the reaction is no actually it's perfect now and will only be more perfect in the future and I still get emails from people because I said once on an episode if you have a use for AI please email me

• 31:03Ed Zitron?

  a regret of mine um every time I get an email like that it's like so it's very simple I've set up seven or eight hours worth of work yeah to make one prompt work and sometimes I get something really useful it saves me like 10 minutes yeah and you're like great and what for it's like oh just some productivity things what productivity things they stop responding yeah and it's just I I really am shocked we got this far I'm gonna be honest at this point I'm I will never be tired because my soul burns forever but it's exhausting watching this happen and watching how it's getting crazier I thought like as things got worse people would be like well CNN stepping up it's like watching the times and some parts

• 31:47Ed Zitron?

  of the journal still feed this also the journal has some incredible critical work on it it's so bizarre the whole thing is just so bizarre and has been so bizarre to watch in the tech media

• 31:57Speaker 06

  I mean I think part of it is also just because investors have poured a lot of money into this and so of course they're going to want to back what they have spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on and much of the tech media involves reporting on what those investors are doing thinking and saying and whether or not what those people are saying or doing is it's often not based in reality

• 32:23Speaker 05

  yeah I say as not a member of the tech media so I have like kind of a general assignment business markets econ that's kind of my jam and when I come when like AI first started becoming the buzzword like chat GPT had just come out I was like oh this sounds interesting so I was paying attention like a lot of journalists were and you know like we've hit limitations and I think part of the reason it's gotten so far is because of the narrative is so compelling curing cancer we're gonna we're gonna end it's my favorite one not my favorite one silliest one is like we're gonna we're gonna end hunger

• 33:01Ed Zitron?

  nice

• 33:02Speaker 05

  okay how How? Also, the problem of hunger in the world is not that we don't grow enough food. It is a distribution problem. It is a sociologic, it is a complicated problem. What, what actually is AI going to do also that you're going to need human beings to distribute it? It just like if you push them one step.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  If you read the 2027 AI thing, it explains that the AI is going to give the government officials such good advice. They'll be actually really nice and caring to poor people.

• 33:34Ed Zitron?

  And what's crazy is, here's the thing, and I'm glad you brought that up. One thing I've learned about politics, particularly recently, but in historic, historic means. When the government gets good advice, they take it.

• 33:45Speaker 07

  Every time.

• 33:46Ed Zitron?

  Every time. Every time they're like, this will, this is economically good, like Medicare for all, which we've of course had forever. And never, and came close to numerous times decades ago versus now when we have it. And I think the other funny thing is as well with what you were saying, Alison, is like, yeah, it's going to cure cancer. Okay, can it do that? No. Okay, it's going to cure hunger. Can it do that? No. Okay, um, it's easy then. Perhaps it could make me an appointment. Also, no. Can you buy something with it? No. Can it take this spreadsheet and move stuff around? Maybe.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  Sometimes.

• 34:22Speaker 07

  It can write a robotic sounding script for you to make the appointment yourself.

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  Wow.

• 34:27Speaker 07

  You know?

• 34:28Speaker 05

  I mean, I would even say that like, I, I, I could give the benefit of the doubt to researchers who are really working on the scientific aspects of this, like, I don't, I'm not a scientist. I don't know how to cure cancer. But if you're working with an AI model that can do it, like, God bless. But businesses actually do take money-making advice and money-making technology when it's available. And I think about this all the time with crypto, which is another area I cover a lot. It's like, if it were the miracle technology that everyone or its proponents have said it is, businesses would not hesitate to rip up their infrastructure to make more money. And like, no one's doing it. And it's like, oh, well, they just haven't, they haven't figured out how to optimize.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  It yet. It's like, that sounds like a failure of the product and not a failure of the people using it. So I get back to the whole like AI cannot fail. It can only be failed. And it's the same with crypto and a lot of other tech where it's just like, this is not a product that people are are hankering for.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  And I think part of the notable thing is when we do see examples of large businesses being like, oh yeah, we're gonna change everything about our business and integrate AI. We're gonna be an AI first company. The products that end up coming out of that are, there's an AI chatbot in my one medical app now. Cool. That does nothing for me. When I'm trying to search the Amazon comments on a product, suddenly the search box is replaced with an AI chatbot. That's not doing even one tenth of what you've promised.

• 36:01Ed Zitron?

  The same product every fucking time.

• 36:03Speaker 06

  It's just an AI chatbot that isn't super helpful.

• 36:06Ed Zitron?

  And it's great. I remember back in 2015, 2016, I had an AI chatbot company. They took a large repositories of data and turned it into a chatbot you'd use. I remember pitching reporters at the time and them being like, who fucking cares? Who gives a shit? This will never be, like a decade later, everyone's like, this is literally God. I cannot wait to go to the office of a guy who wrote fanfiction about this and talk to him about how scared I am now. I can't wait for AGI. And I've also said this before, but what if we make AGI, none of them are gonna do it, doesn't exist, but and it didn't wanna do any work. That's the other thing, like they're not, they don't, Casey Kagawa, friend of the show, made this point, has made it to me numerous times, which is, they talk about AGI and Roos did this as well, like AGI this, AGI that.

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  They don't wanna define it because if you have to start defining AGI, you have to start talking about things like personage. And like, is this a citizen? Is this, can this thing feel pain? Because surely consciousness could feel pain. Oh, you could take pain out that has every real consciousness. None of the, and hey, how many is one? Is it, if it's, is it one unit? Is it a virtual machine? Like there are real tangible things. And you know, they don't wanna talk about that shit because you even start answering one of those and you go, oh, right, we're not even slightly closer. We don't even know how the fuck to do a single one of these things ever. And I honestly, the person I feel bad for this as a joke is Blake Lemine, I think his name was from Google.

• 37:27Ed Zitron?

  If he'd have, if he'd have come out like three years later and said that he thought the computer, this guy from Google who thought the Lambda, the AI there was.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  The guy who was like, the chatbot is real and I love it.

• 37:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, had that come out three years later, he'd be called Kevin Roos, because that's exactly what Kevin Roos wrote about being AI. Several years, like being AI told me to leave my wife. And Kevin, if you ever fucking hear this man, you're worried about me dogging you, I'm gonna keep going. Do your fucking job, mate. Anyways, um, it's just insane because I am a gadget gizmo guy. I love my doodads, I love my shit, I really do. If this was gonna do something fun, I'd have done it. Like, I, I've really spent time trying and I've talked to people like Simon Wilson, Max Wolf, two people who are big LLM heads, who are, who disagree with me on numerous things, but their reaction is kind of, I'm not gonna speak exactly for them, but is basically, it actually does this, you should look at this thing, it does not, this is literally God.

• 38:22Ed Zitron?

  But it all just feels unsustainable economically, but also I feel like the media is in danger when this falls apart too. Because the regular people I talk to about ChatGPT, I pretty much hear two use cases. One, Google search isn't working, and two, I need someone to talk to, which is a worrying thing. But, and I think by the way, that use case is just, that's a societal thing, that's a sign of the lack of community, lack of friendship, lack of access to mental health services, and also could lead to some terrible outcomes. But for the most part, I don't know why I said for the most part. I've yet to meet someone who uses this every day and I've yet to meet someone who really cares about it.

• 39:03Ed Zitron?

  Who like is like, if this went tomorrow, like if I didn't have my little anchor battery packs, I'd scream. If I couldn't have permanent power everywhere, like if I couldn't like listen to musical day, that'd be, make me real sad. If I couldn't access ChatGPT, I would not, who cares?

• 39:17Speaker 07

  That's because you haven't tried Claude yet.

• 39:19Ed Zitron?

  I've tried the shit out of Claude, I've tried Claude so much, and it's just, I don't know. I, I feel like people's response to the media is gonna be negative too, because there's so many people that boosted it. There was a Verge story. There was a study that came out today, I'll link it as well in the notes, where it was um a study found that most people do not trust, like regular people do not trust AI, but they also don't trust the people that run it. Mm hmm. And they don't like it. And I feel like this is a thing that the media is going to face at some point. And Roost this time. Baby, you got away with the crypto thing. You're not this time. I'm gonna be hitting you with the TV off to share every day. Um, but it's just, I don't think members of the media realize the backlash is coming. And when it comes, it's going to

• 40:00Ed Zitron?

  truly, it is going to lead to an era of cynicism, true cynicism in society that's already growing about tech. But specifically, I think it will be a negative backlash to the tech media. And now would be the great time to unwind this versus tripling down on the fanfiction that, and I have been meaning to read this out. My favorite part of this by far, I say, and of course flawlessly have this ready. Why our uncertainty increases substantially beyond 2026? Our forecast from the current day through 2026 is substantially more grounded than what follows. Thanks, motherfucker. Awesome. That's partially because it's nearer. But it's also because the effects of AI on the world really start to compound in 2027. What do you mean? They don't. That's, you, you're claiming that.

• 40:46Ed Zitron?

  And I just, I also think that there's the greatest subtle problem that we have too many people who believe the last smart person they listen to, and I say that as a podcast runner. Like the last investor they talked to, the last uh expert they talked to, someone from a lab.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. Well, I think that gets to, if you just push the proponents, and this is like, I've, I've come into AI skepticism as a true, like, I'm interested in this. I'm, I'm interested in what you're pitching to the world. And when I hear, and I hear, like, CEOs of AI firms get interviewed about this all the time, and they talk about this future where everyone just has a life of leisure. And we're lying around, writing poetry and touching grass and like, everything's great. No one has to do hard labor anymore. They have that vision, or they have like the, you know, P doom of 75 and like, everything's gonna be terrible.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  And, but no one has a really good concept. And that's why this is so funny, the fanfiction of like, what happens in 2027? It's like, no one has laid out any sense of like, how the job creation or destruction will happen. Like, in this piece, they say like, Oh, there's going to be more jobs in different areas, but some jobs have been lost. And it's like, how? Why? What jobs?

• 42:04Ed Zitron?

  They get oddly specific on some things, then the meaningful things, they're like, yep, there'll be jobs.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the stock market's just gonna go up.

• 42:11Ed Zitron?

  And it did number go up all the time, as it is right now as we report.

• 42:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, I believe they say in 2028, uh, Agent Five, which is the super AI, is deployed to the public and begins to transform the economy. People are losing their jobs, but Agent Five instances in the government are managing the economic transition so adroitly that people are happy to be replaced.

• 42:33Ed Zitron?

  I would not.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  GDP growth is stratospheric. Government tax revenues are growing equally quickly, and Agent Five advised positions show an uncharacteristic generosity towards the economically dispossessed.

• 42:44Speaker 05

  You know what this is? We failed to uphold like, public arts education in America, and a bunch of kids got into coding and know nothing but computers, and so they can't write fanfiction.

• 42:57Ed Zitron?

  No one's fucking.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Writing is bad.

• 42:58Speaker 06

  Not enough people spent time in the minds of fanfiction.net.

• 43:01Ed Zitron?

  No one's been shipping anyone.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Like, this is clearly, this is just like, someone wanting to have a creative, like, vision of the future, and it's like, it's not interesting or compelling.

• 43:13Ed Zitron?

  It's joyless.

• 43:13Speaker 07

  I mean, that's why they brought him on, that's why they brought Scott Alexander on, because, to write this narrative, right? Because that's what he spends a lot of time doing in his blog, is trying to beautify or flesh out why this sort of future is inevitable.

• 43:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 07

  You know, why we need to commit to accelerating technological progress as much as possible, and why the real reactionary or, you know, anti-progress perspective is caution, or concern, or skepticism, or criticism. If it's not nuanced in a direction that supports progress.

• 43:47Ed Zitron?

  I just feel like a lot of the AI safety guys are grifters too. I'm sorry, they love saying alignment, just say pay me. Like, I know that we should have, I get the occasional email about this being like, you can't hate AI safety, it's important. It is important. Generative AI isn't AI, it's just trying to fucking accept it. They're not, if they cared about the safety issues, they They'd stop burning down zoos and feeding entire lakes to generate one bastard Garfield, as I love to say. But they would also be thinking about the actual safety issues of what could this generate, which they do. You can't do anarchist cookbook shit. It's about as useful. Phil Broughton, friend of the show, would be very angry for me to bring that up. But the actual safety things of it steals from people, it's destroying the environment, it's unprofitable and unsustainable.

• 44:30Ed Zitron?

  These aren't the actual, these are actual safety issues. These are actual problems with this. They don't want to solve those. And indeed, the actual other safety issue would be, hey, we gave a completely unrestrained chatbot to millions of people, and now they're talking to it like a therapist. That's a fucking, that's a safety issue. No, they love that. They love-

• 44:46Speaker 06

  I do think that one criticism of the AI safety initiatives that is incredibly politically salient and important right now is that they are so hyper focused on the long term, thousand, hundred years from now future where AI is going to be inside all of us and we're all going to be, you know, robots controlled by an overlay that they are not paying attention to literally any of the harms happening right now.

• 45:09Ed Zitron?

  Or are they deliberately not talking about the harms today because then they'd have to do something at work when they get h- down.

• 45:15Speaker 07

  You know, it's like when 972 mag reported on how Israel was using or trying to integrate artificial intelligence until it generated its kill list and targets so much so that they started targeting civilians and use that to fine tune targeting of civilians. You know, I saw almost nothing in the immediate aftermath of this reporting from the AI safety community, you know, no, almost no interest in like talking about a very real use case where it's being used to murder as many civilians as possible. Silence. You know, and that's a real short term concern that we should have.

• 45:44Ed Zitron?

  But that's, that would require the AI safety people to do something. And what they do is they get into work, they're making quarter of a million dollars a year. They get into work, they load Slack, they load Twitter, and that's what they do for eight hours. And they occasionally post being, being like, by 2028, the AI will have fucked my wife. And everyone's like, god damn it, no, not our wives. Um, eh, right.

• 46:05Speaker 06

  The final frontier.

• 46:06Ed Zitron?

  But it is all like, they don't, they want to talk about 10, 15, 20 years in the future because if they had to talk about it now, what would they say? Because I could give you AI 2026, which is- OpenAI runs into funding issues, can't pay CoreWeave, can't pay Crusoe to build the data centers in Abilene, Texas, which requires Oracle, who have raised debt to fund that, to take a bath on that, their stock gets hit, CoreWeave collapses because most of CoreWeave's revenue is now going to be OpenAI, Anthropic can't raise because the funding climate has got so bad, OpenAI physically cannot raise in 2026 because SoftBank had to take on murderous debt to even raise one round, and that's just with like one minute.

• 46:45Speaker 07

  You're getting me excited here.

• 46:46Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no. The next newsletter, baby, and probably a two-part episode. But that's the thing, they don't want to do these because they get, okay, they would claim I'd get framed as a skeptic, they also don't want to admit the thing in front of them, because the thing in front of them is so egregiously bad. With crypto, it was not that big, Metaverse, it was not that big. I do like that Meta burned like $40 billion, and there's a Yahoo Finance piece about this, just on mismanagement. Like, it's just like, they, like, I love-

• 47:11Speaker 06

  It's also sick that they renamed themselves after the Metaverse.

• 47:13Ed Zitron?

  It's so good, yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 06

  Can't go back.

• 47:15Ed Zitron?

  Can't go back, yeah, like, they should get Meta AI, they should just change-

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Oh, they should add an I at the end.

• 47:22Ed Zitron?

  They should just add an I at the end. It's just, if anyone talks about what's actually happening today, which is borderline identical to what was happening a year ago, let's be honest, it's April 2025. April 2024 was when I put up my first piece, being like, hey, this doesn't seem to be doing anything different, and it still doesn't, even with reasoning, it's just more-

• 47:40Speaker 07

  You just wait for Q3, Agent Force is gonna-

• 47:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Agent, no, Agent Zero is gonna come out.

• 47:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:46Ed Zitron?

  Actually, the information reported that Salesforce is not having a good time selling Agent Force, you'll never guess why.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 47:52Ed Zitron?

  Turns out that it's not that useful due to the problems of generative AI. If only someone had said something which the information, I, I've bagged on the information a little bit, but they are actually doing insanely good work, like Corey Weinberg, Juro Sawa, Alicia Gardizi, Paris, of course, but I'm specifically talking about the AI-

• 48:08Speaker 06

  The AI team is fantastic.

• 48:10Ed Zitron?

  And Stephie Pollock, so of course, and like, it's great because we need this reporting for when this just collapsed, so that we can say what happened, because it's going to, if I'm wrong, and man, would that be embarrassing, just gonna be honest, like, if I'm wrong here, I'm gonna, I'll look like a huge idiot, but- If if I'm right here, like, everyone has over leveraged on one of the dumbest ideas of all time. Like, silly, silly. It would be like crypto. It would be like if everyone said, actually, crypto will replace the US dollar. And you just saw like the CEO of Shopify being like, okay, I'm gonna go buy a beer now using crypto. No, this is gonna take me fifteen minutes. Sorry. That's just for you to get the money. Actually, it's gonna be more like twenty. The network's busy.

• 48:50Ed Zitron?

  Okay, well, how's your day? Oh, you use money, huh? Yeah, okay. Yeah, you should let that guy in front of me. This is gonna be a while. But it's what we're doing with AI. It's like, well, AI is changing everything. How? It's a chat, it's a chatbot.

• 49:02Speaker 07

  What if we have a Uber scenario where maybe they abandoned the dream of like this three trillion dollar dressable market? That's worldwide. They abandoned the dream of like being monopoly in every place. Um, and and and focus on a few markets. And some algorithmic price fixing so that they can figure out how to juice. Uh, fares as much as possible, reduce the wages as much as possible, and finally eke out that profit. What if we see, you know, some of these firms, uh, they pull back on the ambition or the scale, but they persist and they sustain themselves? Because they move on to some smaller vision.

• 49:38Speaker 06

  Occam's razor, that's the most likely situation, is that, you know, AI tools are useful in some way for some slice of people. And make a lot of, maybe, maybe, let's be optimistic, it makes a sizable chunk of a lot of people's jobs somewhat easier. Like, okay, was that worth spending billions and billions of dollars and also burning down a bunch of trees?

• 50:01Ed Zitron?

  Has that happened, though?

• 50:03Speaker 06

  No, I'm just saying that's could be, I think, best case scenario.

• 50:07Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying, like, we haven't even reached that yet. Because with Uber, it was this incredibly lossy and remains quite a lossy business, but still delivers people to and from places and objects from to and from places.

• 50:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, you you don't have to, you know, as much as I hate them, I'll give them credit, you know, you don't have that, no, no, less drunk driving, you know? And some transit in in parts of cities where there's there's a, there's there's not much in the way of public transit, right?

• 50:32Ed Zitron?

  Um, this is like if Uber, if every ride was thirty thousand dollars and every and every car weighed a hundred thousand tons.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  When you factor in the externalities, just like.

• 50:44Ed Zitron?

  But that's the crazy thing. I think generative AI is so much worse as well, pollution wise. But even pulling that back, it's like, I think OpenAI just gets wrapped into Copilot. I think that that's literally, they just shut this shit. They're like, they absorb Sam Altman into the hive mind. And he, I think, also, my chaos pick for everyone is Sachin Adella is fired and Amy Hood takes over. If that happens, I, I think is Prometheus the one who can see stuff? I'm fucking, I don't read.

• 51:11Speaker 07

  No, he's, he gave fire to Mortals.

• 51:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh, tech me. I just spit fire. Um, it's, it's just frustrating. It's frustrating as well because a lot of listeners on the show email me and they took like teachers of being like, oh, they're forcing AI in here. Librarian, oh, this AI being forced.

• 51:26Speaker 06

  I mean, the impact on the educational sector, especially with public schools, it's really terrifying. Especially because the school districts and schools that are being forced to use this technology, of course, are never the private wealthy schools. It is the most resource-starved public schools that are going to have budgets for teachers increasingly cut. Meanwhile, they do another AI contract and off-source like lesson, the sort of things that these companies, the ed tech AI things pitch as their use case is lesson planning, writing, report cards, basically all the things that a teacher does other than physically being there and teaching,

• 52:09Speaker 06

  which in some cases the companies do that too. They say instead of teaching, put your kid in front of a laptop and they talk to a chatbot for an hour.

• 52:17Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing. And the school could, of course, I don't know, spend money on something that's already being spent, which is teachers have to buy their own fucking supplies all the time. Teachers have to just spend a bunch of their money on the school. And the school doesn't give them money, but the school will put money into ChatGPT. It's just, ah, they should ban it at universities as well. Everything I'm hearing there is just like real fucking bad, like the.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  I mean, the issue is from talking to university professors, it's like impossible for universities to ban it.

• 52:46Ed Zitron?

  Can you elaborate?

• 52:46Speaker 06

  They're seeing, I guess, professors are, the obvious example is like essays, like.

• 52:53Speaker 06

  Professors get AI-written essays most of the time and they can't figure out whether they are AI-written or not. They just notice that all of their students seem to suddenly be doing worse in class while having similar output of written assignments. There are very few tools for them to be able to accurately detect this and figure out what to do from it. Meanwhile, I guess getting involved in trying to prosecute someone for doing this within the academic system is a whole other thing. But on the, in K through 12 especially, it's been kind of, it's been especially frustrating to see that some of the biggest pushers of AI end up being teachers themselves because they are overworked,

• 53:38Speaker 06

  underpaid, have no time to do literally anything, and they have to write god knows how many lesson plans and IEPs for kids with disabilities and they can't do it all. So like, well, why don't I just plug this into what's essentially a chat GPT wrapper? And that results in worse outcomes for everyone, probably.

• 53:56Ed Zitron?

  I have, and so I have some personal experience with IEP. I don't think they're doing it there, but they're definitely doing it elsewhere. And if you've heard, if you've heard IEP, that fucking kills me.

• 54:04Speaker 06

  That's one of the things that these tools often pitch themselves as.

• 54:12Ed Zitron?

  I want to put my hands around someone's fucking.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  Can you describe what an IEP is?

• 54:15Ed Zitron?

  It is, I forget what it stands for.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  I think it's Individual Education Plan. I might be wrong, but it's, that's the vibe.

• 54:20Ed Zitron?

  Generally the plan that's put for a child with special needs, so autism being the most obvious one. It names exactly what it is that they have to do, like what the teacher's goals will be, like socio.

• 54:32Speaker 06

  They like legally have to do all the things in that document.

• 54:35Ed Zitron?

  And it changes based on the designation they get. And so like it's different if you get, there's like an emotional instability one, I believe. And nevertheless, there's like separate ones and each one is like the goals of where the kid is right now, where the kid will be in the future and so on and so forth. The idea that someone would use chat GPT, and if you're listening to this and use chat GPT for one of these, I fucking hate you all so bad. I understand you're busy, but this is very important. Nevertheless. Wow, how disgraceful as well, because it's all this weird resource allocation done by people. And I feel like the overarching problem as well is it's the people making these decisions, putting this stuff in, don't do work. It's school administrators that don't teach, it's CEOs that don't build anything, it's

• 55:16Ed Zitron?

  venture capitalists that haven't interacted with the economy or anyone without a Patagonia sweater in decades. And it's these, and again, these VCs, they're investing money based on how they used to make money, which was they invest in literally anything and then they sold it to literally anyone. And that hasn't worked for 10 years. Alison, you mentioned the thing 2015-ish. That was when things stopped being fun. That was actually the last time we really saw anything cool. That was around the Apple Watch era.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:42Ed Zitron?

  And it was the last, really the end of the hype cycles, the real, the success ones, at least, they haven't had one since then. VR, AR, XR, crypto, metaverse, the Indiegogo and Kickstarter era.

• 55:55Speaker 07

  Sharing economy.

• 55:55Ed Zitron?

  Sharing economy.

• 55:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:57Ed Zitron?

  But these all had the same problem, which was they cost more money than they made. And they weren't scalable. And this is the same problem we've had. What we may be facing is the fact that the tech industry does not know how to make companies anymore. Like, that may actually be the problem.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Can I add one thing to what you said about people who don't work? I think there are people in Silicon Valley, and I don't, I'm gonna get a million emails about this, but there are a lot of Silicon Valley men who are white men who don't really socialize.

• 56:26Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  And I think they are kind of propagating this technology that allows others to kind of not interact. Like, so much of ChatGPT is designed to, like, subvert human interactions. Like, you're not gonna go ask your teacher, or ask a, excuse me, or ask a classmate, "Hey, how do we figure this out?" You're just gonna go to the computer? And I think that culturally, like, I, you know, people who grew up with computers, God bless, but, uh, you know, we need to also value social interaction. And it's interesting that there are these, there's this very, like, small group of people. Often who lack social skills, propagating a technology to make other people not have social skills.

• 57:12Ed Zitron?

  And I think there's also a class aspect to that because

• 57:15Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 57:15Ed Zitron?

  I grew up particularly with like food on the table. But one thing I grew up was I don't trust any easy fixes. Nothing is ever that easy is something that I kind of a if something seems too good to be true, too accessible, there's usually something you're missing about the incentives or the actual output. So no, I wouldn't trust a computer to tell me how to fix something because I don't fucking like you made that up. I like it isn't this easy. There's, there's got to be a problem. Problem is hallucinations.

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• 59:12Ed Zitron?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 59:23Speaker 03

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• 59:58Ed Zitron?

  And we're back. So we didn't really lead into that ad break, but you're gonna just have to like it. I'm sure all of you are gonna send me little emails, little emails about the ads that you love. Well, I've got to pay for, got to pay for my Diet Coke somehow. So back to this larger point around ChatGPT and why people use it and how people use it. I think that another thing that just occurred to me is, have you ever noticed that Sam Altman can't tell you how it works and what it does? You haven't noticed none of these people will tell you what it does? You, I've read everything Sam Altman said at this point, listened to hours of podcasts. He's quite a boring twerp, but on top of that, for all is yapping and yammering, him and Wario Amadei don't seem to be able to say out loud what the fucking thing does. And that's because I don't think that they use it either.

• 1:00:42Ed Zitron?

  Like I genuinely, I'm beginning to wonder if any of the people injecting AI, sure, Sam Altman and Dario probably use it. I'm not saying it fully, but like, these aren't people, how, the next person that meets Sam Altman should just be like, hey, how often do you use ChatGPT? Gets back to the, it reminds me of the remote work thing, all these CEOs saying, guys should come back to the office. How often you in the office exactly? And I think that this is just a giant revelation of like, how many people don't actually interact with their businesses? That don't interact with other people, that don't really know how anything works, but they are the ones making the money and power decisions. It's fucking crazy to me. And I, I don't know how this shakes out. It's not going to be an autonomous agent doing whatever. Also, okay, that just occurred to me as well.

• 1:01:25Ed Zitron?

  How the fuck do these people not think these agents come for them first? If the AGI was doing this and they read this about, these people fucking, they worked it all out. I need to kill them first.

• 1:01:36Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, that kind of gets back to what you're saying where it's like, you know, if we entertain the fanfiction for a little bit. Is the frame of mind for these agents, if they're autonomous or not, how are we thinking of them? Are we thinking about like their persons or if they're, you know, the bottomized in some way?

• 1:01:55Ed Zitron?

  Do they have opinions?

• 1:01:56Speaker 07

  You know, and I think really it just gets back to like, you know, part of the old hunt for like, you know, a nice polite slave.

• 1:02:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 07

  How do we figure out how to reify that relationship? Cause it was quite profitable at the turn of like industrial capitalism and yeah, I think, you know, it's not a coincidence that a good chunk of our tech visions come to us from reactionaries who think that the problem with capitalism, the problem with tech development is that a lot of these empathetic egalitarian reforms get in the way of profit making. You know, I think similarly, you know, the hunt for automatons, for certain algorithmic systems is searching for a way to figure out, how do we replicate, you know, human labor without the limitations on extracting and pushing and coercing as much as possible?

• 1:02:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 07

  With, you know, your agent or something else.

• 1:02:48Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, yeah, sure, the idea of an autonomous AI system would be really useful. I'm sure it could do stuff. That sounds great. There are massive, as you've mentioned, like sociological problems. Like, do these things feel pain? If so, how do I create? Anyway, um, but in all seriousness, like, sure, an autonomous thing that could do all this thing would be useful. They don't seem to even speak to that. It's just like, and then the AI will make good decisions. And then the decisions will be even better. Then Agent Seven comes out and you thought Agent Six was good.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  It's like they don't even speak to how we're going to get to the point where Agent One knows truth from falsehood.

• 1:03:21Speaker 07

  Well, that's inevitable.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  Of course, yeah. You know, we just, we just need to give it all of our data and everything that we've paid money for, required other people to pay money for, and then it will finally be perfect.

• 1:03:34Ed Zitron?

  And it doesn't even make profit of any kind. That's, that's the other thing. It's like people saying, well, it makes profit. It is the profit seeking. Is it profit seeking? It doesn't seem like we've sought much profit or any.

• 1:03:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  That's also, I think, a good point of comparison to what you were talking about earlier, Ed, with the comparison to Uber, Lyft, these companies. Companies that achieved massive scale and popularity by making their products purposefully unprofitable. By charging you five dollars for a thirty minute Uber across across town so that you're like, yeah, this is going to be part of my daily routine. And the only way they've been able to squeeze out a little bit of profit right now is by hiking those prices up. But trying to balance it to where they don't hike it up so much that people don't use it anymore. And AIs at the point where like for these agents, I think some of the costs are something like thousands of dollars a month.

• 1:04:25Ed Zitron?

  But they don't exist.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  They don't work already. And it's like, you're still not making money by spend by charging people that much money to use it. What is the use case one where this even works? And if it somehow did manage to work, how much is that going to cost? Who who is going to be paying twenty thousand dollars a month for one of these things?

• 1:04:44Ed Zitron?

  And how much of that is dependent on what is clearly nakedly subsidized compute prices? How much of this is because Microsoft's not making a profit on a Zio compute? OpenAI isn't making anthropicism. What happens if they need to? What if they need to? They're going to check. That's the subprime AI crisis from last year. It it's just, it's it's.

• 1:05:04Speaker 07

  Well, that's when you get the venture capitalists insisting that that's why we need to, you know, do this AI capex rollout. Because if we build it out like infrastructure, then we can actually lower the compute prices and not subsidize it anymore.

• 1:05:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's a thing. But that's the other thing. So the information reported, the OpenAI says that by twenty thirty, they'll be profitable. How? Stargate.

• 1:05:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Ed Zitron?

  And you may think, what does that mean? And the answer is Stargate has data centers. Now, you have to, I just have one little question. This isn't a knock on the information. This is their reporting, what they've been told, which is fine. A little question with OpenAI, though. How? How does more equal less cost? Because this thing doesn't scale. They lose money on every prompt. It doesn't feel like they'll make any money. In fact, they won't make any money. They'll just have more of it. And also, there's the other thing of data centers are not fucking weeds. They don't grow in six weeks. They take three to six years to be fully done. If Stargate is done by. Next year, I will fucking barbecue up my padre's hat and eat it live on stream like I will. That's if they're fucking alive next year. Also, also, the other thing is getting back to twenty twenty seven as well.

• 1:06:09Ed Zitron?

  Year twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven is gonna be real important for everything. Twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty six is when Wario Abad says that anthropic will be profitable. That's also when the Stargate data center project will be done in twenty twenty six. I think that they may have all just chosen the same year because it sounded good and they're gonna get in real trouble next year when it arrives and they're nowhere near close.

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  I can't wait until all of those companies announce that because of the tariffs.

• 1:06:35Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 1:06:36Speaker 05

  That they have to delay their timeline and it's like completely out of their hands. But no, the tariffs, you understand the tariffs.

• 1:06:44Ed Zitron?

  I got a full. Act of God. I got a full roasted pig. I'm gonna be tailgating Microsoft earnings, April twenty third. Cannot wait. Yeah, you should go to like a data center.

• 1:06:55Ed Zitron?

  Have a marching band on the end of Severance. Yeah, it's, but that's the thing like that. I actually agree. I think that they're gonna, there's gonna be difficult choices. Sadly, there's only really two. One, capex reduction, two layoffs or both. Hmm. Because they have proven willingness to lay off to fund their capex. But at this point, people are like, they're asking to what end? Like, why are we, why are we doing this? It just, it feels like the collapse of any good or bad romantic relationship. Where just one party's doing shit that they think works from years ago and the other party is just deeply unhappy and then disappears one day. And the other party being. This just happened. I watched an episode of Lost last night and it just happened. This is a.

• 1:07:38Ed Zitron?

  Lost, Lost is a far more logical show than any of this AI bullshit, but it's. Let's not get that crazy. It's a bad show. It's a bad. No, I wouldn't say that either. Talking about something that's very long, very expensive and never had a plan, but everyone talks about like it was good despite it never proving it, lost. Um, yes. Sorry, I have some, I really do have some feelings on that.

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  You're gonna get, you're gonna get some emails.

• 1:08:01Ed Zitron?

  I, I'm sure.

• 1:08:02Speaker 07

  You're gonna get an email from me.

• 1:08:03Ed Zitron?

  He is texting me.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Ed is writing an email right now, he's very quiet.

• 1:08:07Ed Zitron?

  Water pistol emotion, emoji like a hundred times. Yeah, it's, I think it's just, I can't wait to see how people react to this stuff as well, when this, because I obviously will look very silly if these companies stay alive and somehow make AGI. AGI is killing me first, like the gravedigger AI truck is gonna run me over outside my house, it's gonna be great. But I can't wait to see how people explain this. I can't wait to see what the, it's like, oh, we never saw the tariffs maybe.

• 1:08:37Speaker 05

  Right, and I talked to an analyst just last week who's like a bullish AI tech investor, and he said, he said already you're seeing investment pullback because of expectations in the market, that there was, these stocks were overbought in the first place. And now there's all this other turmoil, external macro elements that are going to kind of take the, you know, the jargon of like the froth out of the market, they're gonna, it's all gonna deflate a little bit. And so I was asking him like, is the AI bubble popping? And he says, no, but tariffs are definitely like deflating it and, and delaying whatever progress that we are gonna be promised from these companies is gonna be delayed.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  Even if it was gonna be delayed, they were gonna find other reasons. This is a convenient macro kind of excuse to just say like, oh, well, we need, we didn't have enough chips, we didn't have enough investing, we didn't have enough compute. You know, be patient with us, we're gonna have, the, the revolution is coming.

• 1:09:37Ed Zitron?

  What's great as well, talking of my favorite Wall Street analyst, Jim Cramer of CNBC, so CoreWeave's IPO went out. I just need to mention, we are definitely in the hype cycle because Jim Cramer said that he would sue an analyst, DA Davidson, on behalf of Nvidia for claiming that they were a lazy Susan. As in, as in, basically what the argument is, is that Nvidia funded CoreWeave, so the CoreWeave would buy GPUs. And at that point, CoreWeave would then take out loans on those GPUs for CapEx reasons, CapEx including buying GPUs. So very clearly, and also you tag Gil over at DA Davidson, you and me, Kramer, in the ring.

• 1:10:16Ed Zitron?

  But it's, we know we're in the crazy time when you've got like a TV show host being like, I'm gonna sue you because you don't like my stocks. I think that like we're going to see like a historic washout of people and the way to change things is this time we need to make fun of them. I think we need to be like actively, we don't need to be mean, that's my job. We can be like, to your point, your article, Alison, it's like, say like, hey, look, no, what you are saying is not even rational or even connected to reality. This is not doing the right things. Apple Intelligence is like the greatest anti-AI radicalization ever. I actually think Tim.

• 1:10:51Speaker 06

  It's so bad.

• 1:10:52Ed Zitron?

  It's so fucking bad.

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  And I, before it even came out, I like downloaded the beta. I was like, I'm gonna test this out because, you know, I talk about this thing on my podcast sometimes and it's so bad.

• 1:11:04Ed Zitron?

  It's so bad.

• 1:11:05Speaker 06

  It's, I like turns it off for most things, but I have it on for a couple of social networks. And I mean, I guess with the most recent update, got marginally better, but it's still constantly tells me so and so replied, dear blue sky skeet. I check, they didn't. That person didn't even like the skeet. I don't know where that name came from. And this happens like every other day. It's just completely wrong. I'm like, how?

• 1:11:29Ed Zitron?

  My favorite is the summary text for Uber where it's like several cars headed to your location. You're gonna die, bitch. Kalanick, Kalanick mode, activate it. No, it's, it's great as well because I usually don't buy into the Steve Jobs would burst from his grave thing. I actually think numerous choices Tim Cook has made have been way smarter than how Jobs would have done. This is actually like he's gonna burst out of the ground thriller style. Actually, did, doesn't that zombies pop out? Anyway, um, because it's nakedly bad. Close, it's not a great reference, but it's nakedly bad. Like it sucks. And I've never, I've, people in my life who are non-techy, her, will constantly be like, hey, what is Apple Intelligence? Am I missing something? I'm like, no, it's actually as bad as you think.

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  And I mean, it's also small other things beyond just the notification summaries. The thing that every time I highlight a word and I'm trying to, sometimes I might wanna use fine definition or any of the things that come up, I have to scroll by like seven different new options under like right click or double click thing.

• 1:12:32Ed Zitron?

  And you hit writing tools, it opens up a screen wide thing.

• 1:12:34Speaker 06

  Yes, it opens up a thing and I'm like, who has ever, who is trying to use this to rewrite a text to their group chat? Who is this for?

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  I feel like Apple, to its credit, is recognizing its mistake and it's clawing it back and like delaying Siri indefinitely. I mean,

• 1:12:53Ed Zitron?

  I what? I don't know if I agree on that one.

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  That's fair.

• 1:12:56Ed Zitron?

  Because the thing they're delaying is the thing that everyone wanted. I think they can't make it work because the thing they're delaying is the contextually aware Siri, right?

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  Yes, they're quote unquote delaying it. I

• 1:13:07Ed Zitron?

  It doesn't exist and never existed.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 1:13:10Ed Zitron?

  Apple's washed.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  You think I'm

• 1:13:12Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  I mean, but that's the thing. It's the most brand conscious company on the planet. And I wrote like when they did their June revelation of the Siri AI is going to come out. And they said it was going to come out in the fall and then it was coming out in the spring and now it's not coming out ever? Question mark. But throughout the whole like two hour presentation, the, the letters AI were never spoken. Artificial was never spoken. It was Apple intelligence. We're doing this. We're doing our own thing. It's not, you know, because they already understood that when you say something is like, that looks like it was generated by AI, you're saying it looks like shit, you know?

• 1:13:52Ed Zitron?

  And the suggestions are also really bad, too. I've had like over the last few weeks, a few people give me some bad news from their lives. And the responses it gives are really funny.

• 1:14:01Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:01Ed Zitron?

  It'd be like someone telling me something bad happened. It's like, oh, or like I'm like, what was the worst one I had? It was like, that sounds difficult. And it's like a paragraph long thing about like a family thing they had. Like, and, and it's not even like got like any juice to it, like I didn't read too long. Those would be funny suggestions, but like it can't even, it's, it's proof that I think that these large language models don't actually, well, they don't understand anything. They don't know anything. They're not conscious, but it's like, they're really bad at understanding words. Like people like, oh, they make some mistakes. They're bad at basic contextual stuff. And we had Victoria Song from The Virgin the other day, and she was talking about high context and low context languages.

• 1:14:45Ed Zitron?

  And I said, this is, I can only speak English. I imagine not being able to read or speak in any others, that it really fumbles those. And I, if there's, if you're listening, you want to email me anything about this research. How the fuck does this even scale if it can't like, oh, we're replacing translators? Great. You're replacing translators with things that sometimes translate, right? Sometimes?

• 1:15:05Speaker 07

  Sometimes.

• 1:15:07Ed Zitron?

  It just feels also inherently like that feels like an actual alignment problem, by the way. That right there, that feels like an actual safety problem. Okay, if we're relying on something to translate and it translates words wrong. And you know, especially in other languages, subtle differences can change everything. Maybe that's danger. No, no, no, we got the computer wake up in like two weeks and then it's gonna be angry. And that's the other thing. We're gonna make AGI and we think it's not gonna be pissed off at us. I don't mean Rococo's modern basilisk or whatever. I mean, just like if it wakes up and looks at the world and goes, these fucking morons. Like you need to watch Person of Interest if you haven't. One of the best shows on actually on AGI.

• 1:15:48Ed Zitron?

  Like genuinely, you need to watch Person of Interest because you will see how that could happen. When you allow a quote unquote, perfect computer to make our decisions. Also, when has a computer been particularly good at decision making? I don't know. I feel like so much of this revolution, quote unquote, is based on just the assumption that the computer makes great decisions and it oftentimes doesn't.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  No, it often does not.

• 1:16:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 06

  Why would I think that the same search function in Apple that cannot find a document that I know what the name is? And I'm searching for it. Why would I think that that same computer is gonna be able to make wise decisions about my life, finance and personal relationships?

• 1:16:28Ed Zitron?

  Because that's Apple and this is AI.

• 1:16:30Speaker 06

  Oh, that's true. That's, that's, I'll show myself out.

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  I don't know how much is AI versus just like a good translation app. Like I genuinely don't know like.

• 1:16:41Speaker 06

  Well, it's because AI is such a squishy term that we really don't like.

• 1:16:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  In some way, like I guess AI could be expanded to include a lot of modern computing.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  Like I can see travel and like emergency situations where you need, where like a good AI translator would be like a real lifesaver. Just as a small aside, I was just in Mexico. Uh, and my stepkids were using Google Translate and it were like kind of remembering Spanish and you know, blah, blah, blah. Go into a coffee shop and I wanted to order a flat white. And so I use Google Translate to say like, how would you order a flat white in Spanish? And it said to order a blanco plano. Which means flat white, but like across Mexico City, there are wonderful coffee shops. And you know what they call them? Flat whites.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  Like, isn't it an Australian coffee?

• 1:17:34Speaker 05

  I learned that very quickly with the help of Reddit, because I went to the barista and ordered a blanco plano. And they were like, who are you? You crazy gringo cat.

• 1:17:44Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, I speak English.

• 1:17:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, it's the functionality is very limited on those things. And it's just like, also, it gets back to like, if it's 100% reliable, it's great. If it's 98% reliable, it sucks.

• 1:18:01Ed Zitron?

  And and just as an aside, did any of you hear about Joe, like the latest like quasi fraudulent thing with Joni I've that's happening?

• 1:18:09Speaker 05

  I just saw the headline.

• 1:18:10Ed Zitron?

  So Sam Altman and Joni I've founded a hardware startup last year.

• 1:18:15Speaker 05

  Actually, I do.

• 1:18:17Ed Zitron?

  That has built nothing. There is a thing they claim there's a phone without a screen.

• 1:18:21Speaker 07

  Sick.

• 1:18:22Ed Zitron?

  And OpenAI, a company run by Sam Altman, owned principally by Sam Altman and Microsoft, is going to buy for half a billion dollars. This company that has built nothing, co-founded by Sam Altman.

• 1:18:34Speaker 07

  Sick.

• 1:18:35Ed Zitron?

  If I feel like there should be a one law against this.

• 1:18:39Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:18:40Ed Zitron?

  But it's just like, what have they been doing? And this is just kind of cliched to say like, quote, the big short, but like a big part of the beginning of that movie is talking about the increase in fraud and scams. And it really feels like we're getting there. And R I P to the humane pimp, by the way. Rest in peace. You won't be missed, motherfuckers, two management consultants, both like indignity, eat shit.

• 1:19:03Ed Zitron?

  Jesse Lou, Jesse Lou Rabbit, I'll one your next motherfucker. When you, when your shit's gone, I'll be honking and laughing. Your customers should sue you.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  The description, so my colleagues, the information reported this, um, joining I've Sam Altman news. And the description for the device really, uh, makes me chuckle. Designs for the AI device are still early and haven't been finalized, the people said. Potential designs include a quote unquote phone without a screen and AI enabled household devices. Others close to the.

• 1:19:32Speaker 06

  Project are adamant that it is quote, not a phone and quote. And they're gonna spend, they've discussed spending upwards of 500 million on this company.

• 1:19:41Speaker 05

  This is like a bad philosophy class where it's like, what is a phone that's not a phone?

• 1:19:47Ed Zitron?

  Semiotics for beginners, Jesus fucking Christ. Oh my god. And that's like, that's the thing as well. Like, this feels like a thing the tech media needs to be on as well. Just someone needs to say, I'll be saying it. Like, this is bordering on fraught. Like, it seems like it must be legal because otherwise there would be some sort of authority, right? You can't do anything illegal without anything happening. Hmm. But it's like, this is one of the most egregious fucking things I've ever seen. This is a guy handing himself money. One hand had, this is, should be fraught. Like, this is, like, how is this ethical? And everyone's just like, oh, yeah, you know, this Kevin Roos, maybe you should get on this ship, find out what the phone that isn't a phone is.

• 1:20:28Ed Zitron?

  What the fuck? And also household appliances with AI, maybe like something with the screen and the speaker that you could say, like, a word to it and it would wake up and play music. Like a Roomba. Yeah. A Roomba with AI.

• 1:20:41Speaker 05

  Just declared bankruptcy.

• 1:20:42Speaker 06

  DJ Roomba, put it on the blockchain.

• 1:20:45Ed Zitron?

  I remember that, Roomba dead? Why Roomba dead?

• 1:20:47Speaker 05

  I think they, I don't know, actually. I remember I read the headline.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  They were supposed to be acquired by Amazon, but I think the deal fell through under Lena Khan's FTC, I'd assume.

• 1:20:58Ed Zitron?

  Sick.

• 1:20:59Speaker 06

  And then.

• 1:20:59Ed Zitron?

  Got him.

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  Also, one quick note on the Johnny Ive, Sam Walton thing. I guess it's notable that Altman has been working closely with the product, but is not a co-founder. And whether he has an economic stake in the hardware project is unclear.

• 1:21:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 06

  You know, he just seems to be working closely with it.

• 1:21:17Ed Zitron?

  He just hangs out there.

• 1:21:20Ed Zitron?

  What? Like, he's just hanging out there and taking a salary in an equity position. Whoa.

• 1:21:24Speaker 06

  I do think it's very interesting, all of these different AI device startups that have popped up in the last couple of years. And my question for them is always just like, to what end? Like, people didn't like Amazon Alexa.

• 1:21:38Ed Zitron?

  And it also lost a huge ton of money.

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. And Amazon's still trying to make it work. Siri's never been super popular. And I just don't like, one of my co-hosts on the podcast, I, we're on Intelligent Machines, is obsessed with all these devices just because he's like one of those tech guys. Leo, yes. He's, and we love to make fun of him for it.

• 1:21:59Ed Zitron?

  We love.

• 1:22:00Speaker 06

  He, his latest device is this thing called a bee.

• 1:22:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we just had Victoria Song on talking about this. The thing that records everything.

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  It records everything all the time and then makes, puts that up in the cloud and then I guess doesn't store the full transcripts, but does store a little AI-generated description of everything you did and whoever you talked to that day. And there's no way, I mean, he's in, Leo's in California, which is not a one-party recording scene. You gotta get consent from everybody to record and the bee is not doing that. But it's just baffling to me because I'm just like, I guess. He's like, well, it could be nice to have record of all of my days, all the time. And I'm like, I guess, but to what end?

• 1:22:42Ed Zitron?

  Just record it.

• 1:22:43Speaker 06

  Just record it.

• 1:22:44Ed Zitron?

  Write it down.

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, write a diary.

• 1:22:47Speaker 05

  There's, there's literally a Black Mirror episode about that.

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  I believe it's the first episode of Black Mirror.

• 1:22:53Speaker 05

  Where everyone has like a recording device and it, and then it does, when I was, when you were talking about this on the show, I was listening, thinking like, in this Black Mirror thing, it reminded me that like when Facebook started having like all your photos collected under your photos and like how we started reliving so many experiences online.

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  It's never been pleasant.

• 1:23:15Speaker 05

  And like, look at how happy you were like six years ago, you know, like, and it creates this like cycle. Like, imagine if every interaction, every like romantic interaction, every sad, everything you could replay back to yourself. It sounds like a nightmare to me.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  I do think it's also just a night, like humans, we're not built socially to exist in a world where every interaction is recorded and searchable with everyone forever. Like you would never have a single friend. Romantic relationships would dissolve.

• 1:23:47Ed Zitron?

  Yes, eternal sunshine on the spotless mind. Like great, great move. But even then, like, memory is vastly different to the experience of collecting it. Like, just existing, like, we are brain slot, I don't know, my brain just goes everywhere. But like, compared to memory, which can be oddly crystalline and wrong. You can just remember something, you can remember a subtle detail wrong, or you can just fill in the gaps, memory sucks.

• 1:24:10Speaker 07

  Also, doesn't having like a device that constantly records everything? A road at the impulse, or maybe the drive to be as present, you know, because you're like, well, I can refer to it.

• 1:24:19Speaker 06

  It's also got huge privacy implications where suddenly the cops could just be like, yeah, we're just gonna take a recording. We're just gonna subpoena everybody who was in this area's B device. Uh, and then suddenly get a recording of everyone's days ever that was just happened to be in this place. Because we think a crime could have happened there.

• 1:24:37Ed Zitron?

  But I think that there's an overarching thing to everything we're talking about, which is these are products made by people that haven't made anything useful in a while. And everything is being funded based on what used to work. What used to work was you make a thing. People buy it and then you sell it to someone else or take it public. This only worked until about 2015. It's not just a zero interest free era thing, it's. We have increasingly taken away. The creation of anything valuable in tech from people who experience real life. Like, our biggest CEOs are Sam Altman, Wario Amade, Sundar Pichai, MBA, former McKinsey, Sachin Adel of MBA. I mean, Tim Cook, MBA, like, these are all people that don't really. Interact with people anymore and the problems, the people in power are not engineers, they're not.

• 1:25:23Ed Zitron?

  Even startup founders anymore, they're fucking business people. Making things that they think they could sell, things that could grow the raw economy, of course. And we're at the kind of the pornographic point where it's like a guy being like, what could AI, what does AI do? Well, you can just throw a bunch of data and it can give you insights. Well, what if we just collected data on everything happening around us ever? That would be good, then you could reflect on things, that's what people do, right? And I actually genuinely think. There is only one question to ask the B found on that, so are you wearing one of these now? And how often do you use this? Because like, if they use it all the time, I actually kind of respect. Them, I guarantee they don't. I guarantee they don't and they'll they'll probably say something around a lot of privileged information as opposed to everyone else who's not important.

• 1:26:08Ed Zitron?

  And this fucking Joni, oh, it's going to be a phone without without a screen. What can you do with it? I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. I only get paid fifty million dollars a year to do this.

• 1:26:18Speaker 06

  The question is also, who wants a phone without a screen? The screen's the best part. I love the screen.

• 1:26:23Ed Zitron?

  They don't.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  I love to hate the screens.

• 1:26:24Ed Zitron?

  But they don't talk to anyone. They don't have human experience. They don't have friends that like they have friends who are all like have fifty million dollars in the bank account at any time. They just like exist in a different difficulty level. They're all going it very easy. They don't really have like predators of any kind. They don't really have experiences. So they're what they experience in life is when you have to work out what you enjoy and because they enjoy nothing, all they can do is come up with ideas. That's why the rabbit are one. Oh, what do people do? Uh, order McDonald's? Can it do it? Not really, but it also could take a photo of something. It could be pixelated.

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  You could kind of order an Uber through it, maybe.

• 1:27:02Ed Zitron?

  What was great was the rabbit launch, the rabbit launch and he tried to order McDonald's live and it just didn't work. It took like five minutes to fail. It was, and that's the thing, like, I feel like when this hype cycle ends, the tech media needs to just be aggressively like, hey, look, fool me thrice, shame on me. Like, like, maybe, maybe next time around, we can ask the questions I was asking in twenty twenty one where it's like, what does this do? Who is it for? And if anyone says it could address millions of people, it's like, have you talked to one of them, motherfucker? One of them. Well, I think we can wrap it up there, though. I think, Alison, where can people find you?

• 1:27:41Speaker 05

  Uh, you can find me at CNN dot com slash nightcap. Uh, I write the CNN Business Nightcap. It's in your inbox four nights a week.

• 1:27:48Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. Ed?

• 1:27:49Speaker 07

  Uh, I write a newsletter on Substack, The Tech Bubble. I co-host a podcast, This Machine Kills, with Jason Sodowsky. Um, and I'm on Twitter at Big Black Jacobin.

• 1:28:00Ed Zitron?

  You're on Blue Sky too, right?

• 1:28:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, Blue Sky at Edward Anguoso Junior dot com.

• 1:28:05Speaker 06

  You can read my work at the information. I also host a podcast called Intelligent Machines and you can find me on Twitter at Paris Martineau or on Blue Sky at Paris dot NYC.

• 1:28:18Ed Zitron?

  And you can find me at at EdZitron dot com on Blue Sky, Google. Who destroyed Google search? Click the first link. It's me. I destroyed Google search along with PuppaGorraga Van. Fuck you dude. If you want to support this podcast, you should go to the webbies. I will be putting the link in there. I need your help. I've never won an award in my life. It's the best episode, sorry, best business podcast episode. We are winning right now. Please help me. Please help me win this. And if I need to incentivize you further, we are beating Scott Galloway. If you want to defeat Scott Galloway, you need to vote on this. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

• 1:29:02Ed Zitron?

  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 dot com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline dot com or visit betteroffline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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