Radio Better Offline: Brian Koppelman, Cherlynn Low & Mike Drucker

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 actor, writer and producer Brian Koppelman, Engadget Managing Editor Cherlynn Low and comedian Mike Drucker to talk about the current state of the tech industry, what AI can actually do, and what the tech industry looks like in the next year. Anthropic and OpenAI Have Begun The Subprime AI Crisis https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-and-openai-have-begun-the-subprime-ai-crisis/ Anthropic Is Bleeding Out https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/ Brian Koppelman https://www.instagram.com/briankoppelman/ Mike Drucker https://bsky.app/profile/mikedrucker.bsky.social https://mikedrucker.substack.com/ Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games https://www.harpercollins.com/products/good-game-no-rematch-mike-drucker?variant=43103018024994 https://www.amazon.com/Good-Game-No-Rematch-Video/dp/1335012699 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/good-game-no-rematch-mike-drucker/1145272268 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/good-game-no-rematch-mike-drucker/1145272268 Cherlynn Low https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/cherlynn-low https://www.engadget.com/about/editors/cherlynn-low https://bsky.app/profile/cherlynn.bsky.social https://www.instagram.com/cherlynnstagram/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:21Ed Zitron?

  Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare seeing is believing? Yes, I do.

• 1:46Ed Zitron?

  I'm Ed Zitron. This is Better Offline. I'm your host. Buy our merchandise, go to my newsletter, where'syoured.at. Anyway, fuck all that. Brian Koppelman is joining us here in the studio. He's the incredible writer, producer, and he's in the bear? Flipping bear, he's a real deal actor. He's also the co-creator, showrunner and executive producer of Showtime's Billions and Super Pump, The Battle for Uber. Brian, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Thrilled to be here with you, man.

• 2:10Ed Zitron?

  We've of course got Mike Drucker, the wonderful comedian, and of course you have a book, don't you, Mike?

• 2:13Speaker 05

  Yes, sir. It's called Good Game, No Rematch.

• 2:15Ed Zitron?

  Ooh.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  It's about embarrassing myself with video games throughout my entire life.

• 2:19Ed Zitron?

  Wonderful. I'll be embarrassing myself with tech on this show. Sherilyn Lowe as well, joining us from Man Gadget. How you doing, Sherilyn?

• 2:25Speaker 06

  I am about to down a protein shake, hopefully, yes.

• 2:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we were just talking about the Ninja Creamy and all our various slops.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  They're great. Ninja Creamy, I'll tell you, there's no endorsement out there for any of us. They don't need it because people just get these things and they immediately go to TikTok because they want to share how good they are.

• 2:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  They're honestly, they're so good. That's all I full endorse.

• 2:47Ed Zitron?

  Full endorsement. This is the Ninja Creamy show now. I'm going to get, what's great about this is literally anytime I mention any product, I will get an email from someone being like, here is a post from 2003 from the CEO, in which case they shot a dog. It's like so insane and he's like, Ed, how dare you bring up? I'm like, I don't know everything, please help me.

• 3:05Speaker 06

  Well, Fairlife's bottles have a lot of thalates in them, so you know, that's our, that's our thing today.

• 3:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I just eat like too much yoga. So I want to actually start with a really good thing. So Mike, you wrote a really great piece for The Gamer, I think that went out.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 3:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, very recently. It's called, I'm starting to worry this industry has no respect for the people who work on it. Why don't you walk us through the article? Because I think it's a good subject matter.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  Sure. Well, as listeners may or may not know, Microsoft recently laid off about 9,000 people, most of which were in their gaming department. Simultaneously, they were claiming that their gaming department's quite profitable and they're making a ton of money and everything's going well. I don't know if that's actually true, but they are saying that. And they've kind of also said that a lot of the money that they were paying these employees isn't, isn't about losses, it's that they want to move this money into AI development.

• 3:52Ed Zitron?

  Did they say that?

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, yeah.

• 3:54Ed Zitron?

  That's horrifying.

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, they didn't say that word for word, but it was very implied that the budget was, you know, they're more focused. That was kind of the language. The language was like, you know, as we restructure, we're more focused on AI going forward.

• 4:06Ed Zitron?

  It's just so ironic, it's like video games is one of the first real exposures to AI for most people.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:12Ed Zitron?

  I remember when Fear came out, anyone remember Fear?

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:15Ed Zitron?

  It was one of the first, one of the first, it was the first time a guy would like shove his head over and look around before just jumping up and getting shot. Yeah, it's just, the reason this really spoke to me, other than the fact it was very well written, is that I feel like this is the central problem with a lot of tech, entertainment, everything right now, where it's like, the people at top, and you make this point well in the article.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  That the industry is the problem, because the industry is not being piloted by the people creating.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. I mean, you know, and it's a problem that also extends to the, you know, Hollywood, which I also work in, because I'm famous. No, that's not true at all.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  But it's this problem that like, you know, a lot of the decision makers are not as close to the product as they used to be.

• 4:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  I mean, I mean, you could even say the same, same for things like Boeing, where, you know, you don't have engineers running the department anymore. You have business people who've been brought in because they're good at business.

• 5:05Ed Zitron?

  Well, track alliance.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And, you know, these people are far away from the product. They're far away from the development of it, so they see these, you know, workers as numbers on a spreadsheet. And for better or worse, video game development is a very long process. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of money.

• 5:21Ed Zitron?

  It's getting, it's getting longer.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  It's getting longer.

• 5:23Ed Zitron?

  The AAA horizon as well.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  And so it's, you know, very easy for these companies that are looking for a short term, you know, next financial quarter boost to go, we fired all these people. And this product wasn't going to come out for two years, so it really doesn't matter.

• 5:36Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing with Microsoft as well, they've, that's that, they've laid off 15,000 people this year as well.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  It's nuts.

• 5:41Ed Zitron?

  And it's, is the money really even going anywhere? It's just so confusing. But you're seeing it everywhere with Hollywood. There was the Acme versus Coyote thing. Oh, sorry, Coyote versus Acme thing, where they just like mothballed it, they're releasing it now, but they mothballed a movie.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:55Ed Zitron?

  To save on taxes. I feel like that shouldn't be a loophole.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  I, I hate that loophole. I hate the idea of that loophole. I mean, it almost reminds me of that loophole from, and Brian, you could maybe correct me on this, but remember like in the 90s, they made a Fantastic Four film they weren't going to release just so they could maintain rights for it, because the rights for it were, you have to make a movie to keep the rights, you don't have to release it.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  I don't remember that exactly, though now you say it, it rings a bell, but I don't have particulars on it. But I think what you're talking about, really the answer, I agree completely as you diagnose it with how depressing it is. But to me, these things feel like a systems response, like complexity theory.

• 6:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  And well, they're like systems responses to what's happening in the world as opposed to feeling like, because I think it's easier for us to look at the human being and go that motherfucker. And that may be a motherfucker. But another possible answer is that from afar, remove like something's happening, right? And when this thing is happening, it gets into quantum theory, but it is a complexity systems response to this giant change of artificial intelligence, having certain capabilities. And all of this, you can look at all of

• 7:23Speaker 04

  it. And I mean, we've seen people who had one set of beliefs for so long and on the record in your industry, completely switch. And they may think that's an autonomous decision they're making. But I have found a little bit of solace by reading about complexity theory, because that for me offers a potentially more not hopeful, but sort of a more complete understanding.

• 7:45Ed Zitron?

  So you're saying like a systemic response to conditions, because I don't know about the AI capability side, but the existence of capabilities potentially being there makes sense in that they're all trying to reconfigure for a future. They don't know if it's actually there. The generative AI doesn't seem to do it. But the potential of that, the idea of it is motivating them so much. Microsoft, of all people as well, should know how little money is actually being made from this, considering out of the 13.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  But that's it. But yes, but you executives, I also, because I've studied these people so much and written about them so much. And I understand how venal they are and how short term they think at times. But they're also.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I think looking at data that we don't have very often and they're trying to forecast out a long time.

• 8:34Ed Zitron?

  Why do you think they have data we don't have though? Cause like with Microsoft, for example, and I have probably studied such a Nadel too much at this point. I really, I learned too much about the growth mindset and Carolyn Dweck and all of that nonsense. But the data, if the data is there, they're acting very peculiar about the data because they're only making thirteen billion dollars this year from AI. Ten billion is AR, I was from OpenAI burning giraffes and whatever they put into the machine for chat GPT. But it's, it feels almost like they are reacting to what they hope will happen or what may happen. I'm just trying to work.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  The data might just be when, when everyone reacts to quarterly, like the problem in our business, the entertainment thing is that these people are responding to quarterly earnings calls that they have to make. And maybe the data isn't about the long-term, maybe the data is literally that we don't know that they're looking at is their little cohort of people and the exact moment they can exercise which kinds of options, some of which they have to declare and maybe some of which they are somehow able to flip on a different market.

• 9:39Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, that's what Anthropic basically, uh, Amazon did with Anthropic. They flipped their investment into a certain kind of thing that they could tax deduct. Little fuck.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  I mean, there's no doubt that there's heartlessness, but I, I just, because Drucker's here, I just want to say, you know, even in the most depressing times or in moments where the technology, the platform seems brutal, people's humanity can transcend it.

• 10:01Ed Zitron?

  Absolutely.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  And I remember in some dark days of Twitter, um, Drucker was, and it was really amazing, man. And I remember, you know, you and I don't know each other well, but we've known each other a long time.

• 10:10Ed Zitron?

  Like 20 years.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  And yeah, it's true. And, um, I remember that there were many nights you were like not sleeping that well, uh, sleeping at the wrong times.

• 10:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  And like sleeping during the day, up at night.

• 10:22Ed Zitron?

  Half a dozen once.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  I remember him really like, like, um, very vulnerably talking about sadness and depression and getting. People to entrust sharing and him actively trying to like save people in a place where like where people were so callous almost by profession on there by like everything they wanted to do that right well everyone was at home playing Grand Theft Auto which could you guys fix that and get the next one out everyone's at home playing Grand Theft Auto and being callous and he was like literally going let me explain depression to you and what you can do and what the resources are and why you shouldn't kill yourself and which I think is great of course you would lead with empathy on this too and look at these

• 11:04Speaker 04

  assholes and think about all the engineers and it's the right way to process it I just think often it's not a binary.

• 11:11Ed Zitron?

  No, and that's the thing I've been saying like a lot about the show is yeah I talk about the pigs and the assholes and the scumbags and all different names and the voices I do for them but it's also about the fact that there is like I'm pissed off Casey Kagawa friend of the show said this to him a lot it's I'm brokenhearted romantic because things like what Mike did actually one of the reasons I read Endgame as well is it's like yeah there are a lot of these financial horrors in there but there's fun dorky shit online still there's still one like most of my friends are from the internet I know it's like I'm like the drill quiet crying like being online it's like like everything I got is through emails but I still think there is a lot of joy in this and I think the central

• 11:54Ed Zitron?

  thing about your article now is just like beneath this capitalism crush is actually some really like wonderful things being built there are still wonderful games being built yeah there's like an entire economy on Minecraft for better or for worse about selling mods and stuff there are people on Roblox other problems with Roblox obviously who are like building games on there and selling them there's still some cool shit happening in tech yes it's just being interfered with because every three months someone gets upset at them.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  Or finds a new way to make money off it which you have to you know shove into a new category.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  When you're saying the chase right like that's what it is right now I think that what you're talking about the like macro picture of everyone sort of having that reaction and I think we will course correct in time I think we're right now at that stage in history where It's not as cotton dried to me as the NFT crypto sort of bubble where like it was clearly

• 12:45Speaker 04

  That was criminals.

• 12:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  Fucking people over knowing it, con people.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Right, and I argue that on some level, these are criminals. There are criminals at play in this scenario right now. I will say that with what Mike was writing about in your article, the Microsoft thing was all the more like, I think when my team saw the news last week, my instant reaction was, didn't they just ratify a union contract with like their first ever in the US too? Like, to be saying that on one hand, we really care about workers' rights and really want to protect workers, and the other, you're like, and those are their quality people, right? And now we're like, oh, game developers, nah, 9,000 of you can go because AI NPCs are all the rage right now. And they really make a lot of sense, AI NPCs. They've never said a bad thing, never said anything that didn't make sense.

• 13:27Ed Zitron?

  How was that Nvidia demo from last year?

• 13:29Speaker 06

  Or was it this year? I can't remember.

• 13:31Ed Zitron?

  I think they've done two. Like, every year Nvidia wheels out a demo, it'll be like, the generative AI NPCs are here. And within one day, someone has made it Sersla. Or like, it's just said something insane.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  Or Tay, Microsoft.

• 13:42Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Tay was the 2016 AI bot that learned from the internet.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  To be racist.

• 13:46Ed Zitron?

  Like, kind of a proto Mecha Hitler situation.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Oh, that was Grok, too.

• 13:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Tay walked so.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Was that the Microsoft bot from like those years and years ago?

• 13:56Speaker 06

  2012 or something.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Oh my god, I forgot about that.

• 13:58Speaker 06

  It's been, but the thing is, back to Brian's point is that this keeps happening, and then we keep course correcting back. Like, it feels like there is a systems response. And Ed, I think you're looking for the joy. I wouldn't use the word intervening or interfering. I would say it's noise. And the way for companies and people existing in this industry to deal with that is to focus on what you think is good. I find the irony in saying that, which is I think these tech bros that you're referring to, Brian, they're also trying to focus on what they think is good. So they're cutting out noise from their perspective. And I don't know, it's that movie that was just released featuring those four dudes in the mountain lodge.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, mountain head, mountain head.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  Mountain head, yes. So it feels like that. It feels like everyone's got their little bubble, which is also at the same time created maybe and supported by tech. And if we continue to operate in silos, I don't know, I feel like I'm making a.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  If we only think of those, and often they are men in those roles, though they're not all, but often they are. If you think of some of those, you said bros, but if we only reduce them to those guys running around trying to kill someone in a sauna.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Where I think in a way it allows, in a way it allows us to like, um, not worry about them because we could just mock.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 15:15Ed Zitron?

  That's fair.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Some of them are smarter, like just raw synthesizing power.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Some of those people, not all of them, they're smarter than everyone in this building combined.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  A couple of them.

• 15:24Ed Zitron?

  I.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  And I'm not saying that that makes them.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Good or anything.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  In any way good.

• 15:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Or in any way good for now, because even if you say like, I agree with you that some of them may believe.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. That they're doing this.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  That they're doing good.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Right? But if they're thinking in thousand year chunks, that's really bad for people. Yuval said this, and Yuval, I think, is amazing. And he said, well, the problem is historians like me, he goes, you may look at it now. He was on a podcast, he said, you may look at it now and say, but those things worked out okay. Look where we are. But as a historian, I have to look at the cost of human life.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  That happened for all the intervals, all the little intervals to get from there to here. And that's really what you guys are just talking about, rightly so, is all the, you know, the devastation in the wake. But, but can I just ask, because you might all might be so jaded, but do you not think AI is like mind bogglingly great at times?

• 16:13Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  I, I, I can see the balance. I think Ed's like far off.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  You don't, wait, you really, I think it's like the single, I think it's.

• 16:19Ed Zitron?

  Why?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  The single greatest invention in my life.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  What is, what is your favorite thing that AI has done?

• 16:25Speaker 04

  I think the ability to have super high level conversations about really esoteric, about systems theory, right?

• 16:32Speaker 06

  Where does that info come from?

• 16:33Ed Zitron?

  How do you know it's correct in them?

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Well, you can, well, you have to do a bit of work, right?

• 16:37Ed Zitron?

  I don't want to talk to something that I have to verify constantly. I talk to people.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  Well, you have to do that with people too, Ed, to some extent. You can't trust everything I say.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  How do you feel about the automobile? Or is the horse drawn carriage still your thing?

• 16:49Speaker 06

  Dang.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  No, I'm just saying.

• 16:51Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm wondering what the point is.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  Mike looks very uneasy right now.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  I mean, the, the point.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  No, I just have jokes in my head.

• 16:56Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I'm sure you got rest.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  No, because I think you can decry the industry and the way people are using it. And I, again, I'm pretty sure I was reading Eliezer Yudkowsky before anyone.

• 17:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  In this room, I, I mean, how to actually change your mind is a book that I was obsessed with, gave out as Christmas gift.

• 17:10Ed Zitron?

  I can't take Yudkowsky serious. I just, it's like.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  You've got to take him serious. He didn't, I mean, you have to take, one has to take that guy's brain seriously. He, everything you guys are worried about, he called out 15 years ago. In detail.

• 17:22Ed Zitron?

  Okay. I mean, like, here's the thing. The automobile is not a comparison because we knew we had to go forward side to side and everything like that. Like, we had an actual use case for that. With generative AI, the way that these conversations happen, and large language models can be conversing with documents. It's one of the only use cases that is actually remotely useful because you can actually verify based on the parts of the document. Having a conversation with one of these, fine. It's a thing. I'm not amazed by it because there have been chatbots doing this with KMS since like, what, 2013, 2014?

• 17:52Speaker 05

  And the Eliza effect goes back to the 60s.

• 17:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and Eliza, even then, there's a Karen How's Empire of AI is a great thing about Eliza. The creator was just like, why is everyone so fucking impressed by it? Like, they're just like, really, it's like, what the fuck is this? I think what it is, is I am just not that impressed by it based on the larger discussion. Everyone acts like this is the fucking future, and it just feels like a growth of the past. What ChatGPT has become, for better or for worse, is what Google could have potentially been. It's insane that attention-

• 18:22Speaker 04

  I agree with you, but like, okay, I got a tick bite.

• 18:24Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  And you can literally, the second you get a tick bite, everybody says antibiotics, you gotta go. If you can't find the thing, I got a picture, I put it on there. The AI was immediately able to, and yes, I could verify it afterwards, because I called, the AI was able to say, this is the kind of tick it is, this is the area you're in, this kind of tick, you don't need antibiotics, you're not going to get Lyme disease. Here's why, sent it to my doctor, who, that, it's feedback, and they agreed. That'll be harder to do on Google.

• 18:52Ed Zitron?

  Why didn't you send it to your doctor before you asked him?

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Well, he doesn't, his job isn't to like, identify what tick it is.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I, oh, sorry, I misunderstood what you said.

• 19:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I want more clarity on the doctor thing. I raised my hand as you were talking because I'm like, did you trust the ChatGPT answer and leave it at that?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  No, then I, then I took that, when it said that, then I searched for what it said and compared, and it was right.

• 19:14Speaker 06

  Okay, so you-

• 19:15Speaker 04

  That it was a, it was a dog tick, not a deer tick.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Out of curiosity, and Ed, you might be able to answer this question, is that-

• 19:22Ed Zitron?

  And I don't actually know the answer. Is that iterative AI or is that generative AI? So we're using ChatGPT.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  It's a mix.

• 19:29Ed Zitron?

  Either that or Claude, I don't know which one. So that would be generative AI. Okay. And so that would still be, that is, and by the way, sounds like a use case. It is the growth of, so what were you saying?

• 19:39Speaker 06

  No, I was gonna, I think, I think a version of Google could have done that for you in the past too, before ChatGPT. What ChatGPT, the generative side of it is providing is the LLM, the natural language interface, about pulling a lot of different sources of data and putting that together for you. That is ChatGPT. You could have done that with Google. Or I think there were apps, right, that you could do a photo sort of recognition of that.

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  For a while on Google.

• 19:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and to my knowledge, the parts of Google and Google Health Researchers with their AI divisions were working on apps that could identify different things, like skin things. So like, is that a bug bite or is that eczema kind of thing through the Pixel phones? I don't think they've ever broadly released it, but they were experimenting way before ChatGPT was even a thing. I would argue that I think the LLM portion of this is more about how it converses with you and how it like understands what you're actually concerned about. So if you didn't give it the exact words of, look up this thing and should I see a doctor? Even if you didn't input the see a doctor request, it might, you know, divine that that's what you really want.

• 20:33Ed Zitron?

  And this is the thing, like ChatGPT, I don't think would have been a big deal if Google had actually innovated in search at all. If they have.

• 20:40Speaker 06

  Instead of something adds into it?

• 20:42Ed Zitron?

  Google search has been the same for like 15, 20 years, except worse. What you were describing there, valid, it's inference, basically. It infers the understanding from the image and all this and then spits out an answer. It's a use case. I think that in the way you used it, that was responsible. The problem is at scale, that is not going to work out so great because. Oh, I believe you know way more about this than I. No, no, no, no, no. This is, I'm actually really, no, I'm genuinely glad you brought this up because it's like, but what about that? Is extrapolating out to the greater AI replacing jobs thing? Because that's where, where my principal problem is. People are taking what is what Google should have been in 2017 and turned it into this is going to replace half of workers.

• 21:25Ed Zitron?

  A quote from Dario Amade that was fucking made up, which he said off the top of his head. It's not, but sorry, just getting. Wario himself.

• 21:34Ed Zitron?

  How are you, Amade?

• 21:35Speaker 06

  I think what you're also bringing up, Brian, is that there is this marketing, I guess, problem with AI, which is that AI has existed for a very long time. And the current version that everyone's really obsessed with is Gen AI. And generative AI is all about what it can generate for you. Using large language models, using art, like creating art, creating videos. All of that stuff is this current iteration of AI we're all talking about. But the previous stuff has existed before. And this is all just more of the same. I think that's why so many of us in the industry are so frustrated with it. Because there's a misconception. There's also this idea that the jobs that it's trying to replace are in that field of coming up with art, music and words that are not jobs that A, pay well to begin with, but B, are the parts of our life that we want to replace, right? We want it repetitive.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  When I talk about Yeddowsky, the reason I do is that he was somebody who, he's right on your side in a way. I mean, his thing always was, this is not going to be a net good for society.

• 22:30Ed Zitron?

  That's not even where my argument is.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  And I'm sure you remember when Astro Teller wrote Exegesis. I remember reading that book like the day it came out. And it really did freak me out about what was possible. Now, we're not even there yet, right? It even isn't where that version of AI was.

• 22:47Ed Zitron?

  But Yeddowsky's.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Yeddowsky, yeah.

• 22:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeddowsky, sorry. I find him quite distasteful. But on top of that, he's a fucking AGI doomer. And he's saying, he's just, yeah, sure, if a frog had wings it could fly. It's like, yeah, if the computer wakes up and does this, this could be scary. He's one of the few people that seems to actually think about what AGI could do. But also, we're so far more off from it that I can't see him as anything but a grifter. Because all he is doing is grift.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  And he's been on it long before there was grift. And then he was on it as a nonprofit. No, he.

• 23:18Ed Zitron?

  Nonprofit grift exists.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  No, I mean, you're talking.

• 23:21Ed Zitron?

  Look at OpenAI.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Think about what I've written. You think I don't know nonprofit?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  What's the matter with you?

• 23:27Speaker 06

  You were looking at your solemnness.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  That's not in my domain, Exegesis. Brian won. Yeah. But he's, I have a different view. Now, I'm not saying all his opinions are correct. What I'm saying is that. That's somebody who flagged a bunch of these potential issues a long time ago. And of course, it shouldn't... It's horrible that these people in charge are so willing to slough off human beings. So excited. The moment they think there's this much of an edge. But also because of what I study in life, I can't be so... We've all of us who write about this stuff in fiction, right? You do it because, okay, you just have to report on something. You have to... I can take sort of like my partner and I can take what's in there and try to dramatize what might happen.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  And always would try to point out exactly that these motherfuckers will do all this shit. It's not surprising to me. It's horrific, but not surprising.

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• 25:32Ed Zitron?

  What bothers me as well with it, and I think you're completely right, and also like, I'm not completely saying everything you're saying is wrong. Like, you actually have well read on this, which is nice, because a lot of people who mention the AGI stuff don't read anything. Um, but I think the thing is as well is, so much about this AI AGI thing is not about what it can actually do. Yeah. The best fiction about AGI, my girlfriend Sarah showed me the Killswitch X-Files episode. Fantastic AGI episode. It's scary because it's not about the people making it, it's about the computer itself and the intentions spilling into it. A lot of what the AGI discussion now is, "And it will automate jobs," and that's the last time I'm gonna think about it before I say, "Here's Anthropic."

• 26:10Speaker 06

  I, I-

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  Kevin Rose. Uh, and it's, and I think what it is, is there are discussions to be had around what this stuff could do. If AI could do the things that they're saying it could do, if it could replace jobs, it would be doing it, but also, it would actually require a change in society. It's almost as if they're like, they want all of the profits from AI, all of the exposure and the ability to lay people off without actually doing anything to earn it. And it comes back to what you said about- Yeah. The people running this shit aren't even trying to build AI. They're not, Mark Zuckerberg's building a Manhattan-sized data center to build superintelligence.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  I wonder though, when you say, and you guys all speak to this, I wonder when you, when, um, when you talk about that Google could have done this, or should have done this, and then, it's a great point that you made about, um, that it is the way that it communicates, because what I wonder is, you're all experts. You're all native, early, um, adopters, native to, not only the internet, but native to tech.

• 27:09Ed Zitron?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  And so, sure, you could, you have used Alte Vista to do this stuff.

• 27:15Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Jeeves, for fuck's sake, right?

• 27:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's a baby.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  But I'm saying, you could have used all that, but for generations of people who aren't literate, and millions, billions of people-

• 27:24Speaker 06

  Sure, sure. Exactly.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  That, even if that was possible through Google Image Search, but you ever try Google Image, watch people try to do a Google Image Search?

• 27:33Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I agree.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  I'm thinking, this is all making it for people. Friendly to them, as you said. Yes. Easy for them. And I wonder if that's the.

• 27:43Ed Zitron?

  That's exactly what I'm saying. That's why people like ChatGPT. It's not because it's this amazing product. It's because it does what people go to Google.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  That's hard, but communicating well. Mm hmm. In an inviting, seductive way. Mm hmm. Is very challenging.

• 27:58Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So for tech people to do that to regular people is the amazing thing.

• 28:03Ed Zitron?

  What's insane is Google invented this tech. The attention, the 2017 attention is all you need paper was eight Google scientists. I just looked this up. I thought it was several. But it's like Noam Chizzi, they ended up paying like $2 billion for a character A just to bring him back. Google had this technology and had this movement just been, we're going to make inference of meaning better. Exactly what you're talking about. It would not be this big story. The thing is, they need it to be what you are describing are use cases, good, bad, whatever. They are things that people use it for. The actual things they're describing on I as a PhD level intelligence. It's going to solve physics. It's like, no, it's not. But if they say, what if Google search worked? They can't make a trillion dollar. They can't be like, this is going to be everything we need.

• 28:48Ed Zitron?

  We're going to build data centers. It's just because what you're describing, Brian, is not the most evil thing in the world.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Go back to Mike Drucker. Yeah. You really should be looking at it. Well, because I think what.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  I think in all these things, what I've learned, just being curious.

• 29:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Is to look at the incentives.

• 29:06Ed Zitron?

  Yes, that's what I've been saying.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  And Google was disincentivized to disincentivized to make search work.

• 29:11Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  For the user.

• 29:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Because of the profit agenda, right? You said, oh, should these things should make a fucking profit? But here's the thing, in a weird way, them not making a profit is better for the users.

• 29:22Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  And Google wasn't, but I'm sure it's all in the Google paper that nobody's fucking reading.

• 29:29Ed Zitron?

  I'm talking about the 1994 one.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  But I'm talking about for the user. I'm trying to, you're raising these amazing questions. But if I try to think about how to answer them. It's that these companies are like in the early days of social media and all this stuff in the beginning, they try to super serve the user to get you addicted to it so that then they can, but the incentive structure is what you gotta look at. And obviously, Microsoft's incentive structure has been locked in for a very long time. And that is for the people who have the most stock in Microsoft to make the most money. That's the incentive structure.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Google too, to an extent. And that's why they had that stuff for that long, but they never, because they never found a way to integrate it into all the different parts of its businesses that matter, the ads part, the search parts, the like.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  It's also their monopoly. They just.

• 30:09Speaker 06

  And they have a monopoly. They have no reason to be, but I don't know if you remember this Google I O twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, even twenty nineteen, when they first showed Kitchen Sync, which was their version of Chat G P T, but it wasn't as conversational. It was, you can ask this app to come up with ways to learn about a new hobby or to plan a thing for you. Before Chat G P T even was known widely to everyone, I think it was, OpenAI wasn't really even a thing. And it just wasn't a chat interface. And I think to Brian's point, the incentive that Chat G P T was, has brought to people and to my parents, who by the way, discovered Chat G P T last year, very annoying to me, but it, it's like, it's so much easier. It brings them into technology in a way that technology used to be kind of looking down on people for not knowing things. And, and you deal,

• 30:52Speaker 06

  you do away with that with the chat bot. My parents not only like feel so hip now, which, sorry, mom and dad, you're not, um, but, but also like, there's people who seek comfort in the companionship brought on by AI chat bots like Chat G P T.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  They're just differently hip.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  They are amazing.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're real.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  They dance at their age. I love that.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  That's actually lovely.

• 31:11Speaker 06

  I, but the thing is, if you look at the use of Gen AI from the last, and I think I talked about this on that Kevin Roos episode I was actually here on, but, um, the use of Chat AI services has changed, right? It used to be like very interest based and very search based, but it's now companionship based as the top few uses. And that's why people are drawn to it. And I think that, I mean, one last point that came up really when I was like listening to you talk at is that like, the incentive for them to push towards like, yes, let's go towards A G I. It's not just like laying off people. It's also who can get there first. It's the race of like.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  It's not, it's.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  The tech AI ego thing, the tech AI, the tech CEO ego thing. And then from the ego standpoint, then they push down to profit.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  But so many businesses are like, but so many businesses are already. Sort of the industries are already acting in bad faith. Oh, yes. Yeah. Um, like, OK, look at the here's here's you want to I'll give you not a you like a real industry that I think will be transformed by it. And I think that's not a bad thing is like money management. Money management, which is a billions.

• 32:13Ed Zitron?

  With generative AI?

• 32:15Speaker 04

  AI already can replace. AI works well with very set parameters, you're right.

• 32:20Ed Zitron?

  Between AI, though.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  But, well, you can you can do that.

• 32:23Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I'm saying.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Look at that whole business. That whole business is about a front. Money management, but I'm not talking about the high net worth. I'm saying in general, people who use for their retirement accounts, money managers.

• 32:35Ed Zitron?

  Wealth front future advisor.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  All that stuff. But within those companies, they're they're they're front facing language of humans who are just trying to keep you invested.

• 32:44Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  They don't know that stuff. They are not offering value really, and they're taking this big percentage from regular people trying to save for their retirement. And they're bleeding off my in the end, they're going. I was listening to like.

• 32:56Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm smiling because you were right already. This was the 2015 through 2020 wealth.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  No, I know that all that stuff, but I'm talking about even now, like big banks, like the big banks. I'm not talking about their their AI front. I'm saying that I was listening to a talk given by Josh Brown is. And one of his partners, I think.

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  And he was talking about how essentially all of the.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Back end of all that stuff, meaning you might still have a person talking to the user to the but everything else is going to be done by.

• 33:31Ed Zitron?

  I just.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. In the businesses. I think it was Michael Batnick from his company was talking about that.

• 33:36Ed Zitron?

  Because here's the thing with that is from my knowledge of basically financial regulation, they don't want an LLM touching much of this. They there's a lot of stuff within financial research happening now with generative AI. There's a ton of companies doing like insanely high compute burn to do these massive. Kind of like evaluations of stuff. I don't know if anyone wants to touch the money with LLMs and they've actually been quite resistant to it, partly because they don't know how they work. Like, they truly don't know.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Oh, I know the black box thing.

• 34:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that and so it's like. A lot of these things also, when are they gonna happen though? Because they've been saying this for two years.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  But do you think there's a scenario, do you think there's a scenario where this, this goes, this goes away? I don't think it goes.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  I would love it too, but I think we're past that point.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Is that what you think?

• 34:21Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  You think it's gonna, you think it's gonna reveal itself as, as being fraudulent for what it

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  I'll explain.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  reports to be?

• 34:27Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I think you're going to see, what, call him a shot. So I believe that OpenAI will, as an ongoing concern, eventually go into nothingness. Matt Hughes, my editor, believes they'll become a patent troll. I actually think it's an amazing thing. I think that what we experience of large language models will vastly pull back. I think there will be rate limits.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  What do you mean pull back?

• 34:48Ed Zitron?

  As in, there'll be rate limits on ChatGPT. People are gonna be horrifyingly sad because those companions.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Their companions are gonna go away.

• 34:54Ed Zitron?

  No, they're not gonna go away. They're just gonna be much, much, much more limited. And I think that everything we see today, the kind of, and you look in any of the reds behind any of the serious, like, GPTs, they're all kind of saying like, yeah, we know that the abundance, the free ride is over. So, no, it's not going away, but you're not gonna hear about it constantly. And everything you use today is going to be so severely rate limited or dead. Those companies that are charging for generative AI things, beneath the surface, all of the API rates behind these companies. So the things that you plug in to run the models are vastly subsidized by big tech and by the companies.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  But so what's, so Aldebaran goes away and, but Google takes over?

• 35:32Ed Zitron?

  Uh, well, Google Gemini exists, but the Gemini requests perhaps don't hit the LLM as much. They have.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I'm using it as a parallel.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  I'm saying the parallel, right?

• 35:40Speaker 06

  You're kinda saying there's consolidation that's going to happen.

• 35:42Ed Zitron?

  But it won't be this big thing where you hear about it all the time. I think you were going to.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  It will just be the backend of lots of stuff?

• 35:48Ed Zitron?

  It will be, oh no, it will just be something that sits there.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  There's a smaller in scale, right?

• 35:51Ed Zitron?

  It's also not good as a backend. Large language models are not good backend.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  I understand, yeah, they're good at talking to you.

• 35:56Ed Zitron?

  They're good at talking. And the one thing where. They can, they can divine stuff as well.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  One thing we're, we're kind of circling on the consumer level that we're not talking about is it's still a novelty. Now, I think it's gonna be, continue to be used. I do think that people are gonna continue to make, uh, lists and scheduling and.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Summarize my.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Summarize my thing or like, you know, what's a good vacation?

• 36:14Ed Zitron?

  And there are on-device models that are able to do that.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Right. I just think that right now it's such a big deal that everyone's using it because it's cool, because they, you know, your parents hear about it, because you're told you should use it for work.

• 36:24Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  And I do think that it'll stick around. I do think there'll be a contraction in the sense that, you know, it'll be a cool thing, but I think in 15 years, it's no longer to be as funny to produce like a picture of a pig with like Mickey Mouse's head and three boobs. And I feel like now that's a big, big novelty.

• 36:40Ed Zitron?

  Some comedy is timeless.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  But like, but I just don't imagine that in like 15 years, having the same novelty as it does now.

• 36:46Ed Zitron?

  15 years?

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Or five years, 10 years.

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  If you take away all the headlines, if you take away all of the money and you actually look at what's there, it is everything you've, what you're describing is probably the most useful thing. It's like, do I know this? Uh, okay, this seems plausible. I'm going to double check it. It's kind of like what in Carter could have been. I don't even mean that sarcastically.

• 37:05Speaker 05

  No, that's a good point.

• 37:06Ed Zitron?

  I, as a very cool child, I was very cool, would sit on in Carter for hours reading stuff because it was kind of good. Wow, you have access to everything. And I think human beings are curious. So of course they're gonna talk to it if it talks back. Yeah. I just think right now there is no business model. That's the biggest one. The biggest one is there really is no business model. Ads do not work. Ads are not going, how do you put, you inject ads within an L and M. Look at what happened with Grok. Grok happened because they tried to make a, let's make it just, how do we crank up this racism dial? And like, how do we mess with this system prompt? But the thing is, those subtle changes for even advertising will be bad. Perplexity's been talked about doing ads for a fucking year, not heard much of that, Aravind. And it's like, on some level, regardless of how

• 37:49Ed Zitron?

  useful it is, the economics do not make sense. They're nothing like an Uber. Uber was such, you, yes, you well know. Still don't make sense. Uber was a complete fucking, and it still barely makes sense. They're raising another 1.2 billion dollars, but you can at least tell someone exactly what Uber is and why you'd use it. And it's just kind of chugging along through necessity. I don't know how necessary chat GPT is. A large language model, a Google Gemini, and Google is claiming they're doing efficiency stuff. That could last. I think it will be heavily rate limited.

• 38:21Speaker 05

  I, I'm, I'm certain you are all right about the business models and the viability of this from a business standpoint. You know so much more than I do. I'm, I'm learning and it's fascinating. As a, a user of it who is not on the inside of the business, I

• 38:36Speaker 04

  My prediction is you're dead wrong.

• 38:38Speaker 06

  No, Brian.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  What will happen? Oh, go, go. It's gonna become the dominant thing in most of society in lots of ways.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  I think here's.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  People are gonna use it and be, it's gonna be part of them. Um, like William Gibson predicted a really long time ago. Like, I think that it's fine, that I think it's bad at creative things, the thing people think it's good at. I don't, it's bad at that. I don't think it can write a story. Yet, none of them can convincingly write a story like Drucker could. Like, there's lots of that stuff that's not there yet. I, I have no idea, again, you all know way better than I do the science behind it. But you were asking about working out before. You could, there are 95% of people who are trainers. Can't do as good a job of programming. And you could play different AIs against each other and are good at asking questions.

• 39:23Speaker 06

  That's also because 90% of them are influencers with no serious background.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Yes, but I'm saying even if you talk to science, but, but, because you can show programming. It can track for, it can just, now, you may, you may, and I'm sure you're correct. That's not the AI doing it, it's other people could have done. But the way AI can program and interact with you. And allow you to catch up. If someone asked me, all day long, people are asking me, wait, wait, look, questions about programming. Well, I can't program for you. I don't know you well enough.

• 39:53Speaker 06

  Not yet, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  But I, if we talk generally about what your goals are, I could definitely talk to ChatGPT or Claude. And build something that you could then iterate. That's a search engine. We're describing the iterations of search, though.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  But it's packaged in this way now. Go ahead.

• 40:09Speaker 06

  The thing that three of us are going to tell you are at different levels. I think Ed's coming to you at the business model, the very like micro level.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  I'm sure he's right, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  And sure, and, and, and, yeah, that's the way, kind of how it's got to play out financially. And Drucker's come in with the like medium level of the like use case and everything. And I'm gonna tell you that at the top level, I'll draw another parallel for you, which is two things come to mind. One is how. Bitcoin and crypto, very exciting. Everyone found a novelty factor and it ran for everyone. Wanted to make NFTs and crypto a thing. And then now it's kind of dialed back down to a less fever pitch and more of a regular body temperature pitch. The macro metaphorical level is what I'm gonna say. I think AI will dial back down to that Norman normal regulatory sort of body temperature. And then to draw another parallel Tinder was everyone was making their app the Tinder of this Tinder of real estate. And what you're describing is like an interface that works

• 41:00Speaker 06

  really well for something like a use case. The chat GPT model is an interface that works really well for question and answers, seeking help, assisting you with things. That might never go away. That might just get built into every app as access to LLMs becomes easier for developers. They'll build it into the Bank of America chatbot. They'll build it into everything. And so I think that's where it balances out eventually over time, maybe through rate limits. I don't know that that's going to be the way. I think some consolidation might happen.

• 41:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but rate limits on actually accessing it.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  The question back and forth for the people who are using chat GPT, right?

• 41:32Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that will come too. But I think eventually we're talking like five years with Druckers. I think with the rate limits maybe in the short term, but I think even longer term than that, we're seeing

• 41:42Speaker 06

  that might eventually go away. Those apps may not even exist standalone.

• 41:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I think I actually don't know if I fully disagree with you about everything you're saying. It's just that the scale of what we're talking about might be different. Everyone having a large language model to access, just saying that this is the future we're talking about, doesn't really change that much. I don't like the economics effect. I know I'm gonna do the business bullshit thing I do, but it's

• 42:08Ed Zitron?

  the economic effects are quite limited right now. Now, if you're saying everyone will have a large language model and it will be hamstrung in some way or what have you, fine, I can I can buy that for good or for bad. I could see that happening. I just don't think that it goes much further than what we see today. And I think what you're describing is what Google search should have become. And like, that was what, I remember when Bard came out, I wrote about this. I was kind of like, surely what chat GPT is, is what search was meant to be, right?

• 42:34Speaker 04

  As the Coen brothers said, you know, sure, if a frog, you know, had

• 42:40Ed Zitron?

  Had wings.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass hopping. You know what I mean? And so.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  And I'll say that, you know, I think that even as it's completely absorbed into our culture, we're still going to be on the phone, listening to an AI list medical options and going, "Human, human, operator, human." Like, I don't think that's going away.

• 42:59Ed Zitron?

  Walgreen 771.

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, like, I don't think, like, I do think that people are gonna be like, "Yeah, okay, I'll talk you through my problems, until I hit this part with my insurance, and I just want a human right, right, right now." And I don't think that's going away.

• 43:10Ed Zitron?

  No, not at all. I, and weirdly, I actually think we're really more on the same page than they may have seen, because it's like, my whole thing is, what you're describing is a use case. I think there are real harms, but I think we kind of agree where the dangers would be. My thing is, is that people are extrapolating from that to this insane level. Like, this whole, they keep talking about agents everywhere, you've got Matthew McConaughey.

• 43:32Speaker 06

  But agents is kind of what I'm describing, which is like, every app, every service has its own chatbot, more or less. They're just using a different word for it.

• 43:39Ed Zitron?

  They're just using a different, yeah, and, I mean, that's kind of what, like, Bank of America already has a chatbot, and it does, it does not work. It's the bot you use when you're trying to search for a transaction.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  What Mike's talking about, for sure, the human, of course, we all do that. I guess I think it'll fool us better.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  That's fair, that's fair.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  I don't think, right.

• 43:57Speaker 06

  Oh, it's already fooled a lot of people very well.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  It's fooled people into killing themselves.

• 44:02Speaker 06

  Oh, god.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Well, that's, tell you, that old character AI, of course.

• 44:05Ed Zitron?

  It's so cool that Google paid $2 billion for them.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  I'm not making an argument that it's, this is a beneficent force.

• 44:10Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 44:11Ed Zitron?

  No, I wasn't accusing you of that.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  I mean, in any way, shape, or form, like, I, like I said, I've been reading about this for so long. But I do think that to just sort of, that's why I brought up the horse and buggy, because, no, the, the people who wanted the horses, right? They were right about a lot of stuff, about the harms it would do.

• 44:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, the pollution.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  The pollution, the noise, the way it would take us away from our communities. Like, they were right about so much. What they were wrong about was the inevitable march of the future and time.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  That's, I think, the same, before coming to this podcast, I was reading Mike your piece, and I was like, "Oh, yeah, are we, like, in the Industrial Revolution, forgetting about the Agricultural Revolution, forgetting all the revolutions that came before?"

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Because I've seen it all from when I was, I remember when... AOL showed up and copy serve and I remember I was invited on message board when I was 14. I'm 59, like this guy I knew had a message board in New York and had to dial up and I mean, so I've seen this, so I'm an early adapter of stuff, even though I'm an old dude, I'm, I'm, but not from a tech side, from a user side.

• 45:10Ed Zitron?

  I was, I was on use that as an 11 year old.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  This is the single, as a, just as a user, meaning I don't know how it works or why.

• 45:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  But I can explain to you why people are so fascinated and NFTs, I was on, you could find the old tweets going, calling people. Buy one, are you fucking mad?

• 45:26Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  I don't know what kind of early doctor you are. People is like literally like why I started doing what I do, but like, no, of course I recognize that as a con from the moment one. But this doesn't be like a con to you? But even when you say the Bitcoin thing, it's at 120 today. Yeah, I know.

• 45:42Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  So Bitcoin won. There is actual value, yeah. And NFTs were always huckster devices to separate suckers from their money. And look, Theodore Veblen said, and David Mamet quotes it all the time, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Every profession fucks over the regular.

• 45:59Ed Zitron?

  Yes, I think that's super fair.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  And there's no doubt about that.

• 46:02Ed Zitron?

  It's the big short speech about the people who get harmed.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, Mamet was ahead of that by 20 years, but you gotta, you gotta look at it. And not me, Mamet.

• 46:09Ed Zitron?

  And then, and then me.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  But, um, but so, uh, you, you gotta just understand that it is very effective for people.

• 46:18Ed Zitron?

  I'm just trying to bridge from what you're describing to the automobile, which changed everything. I don't think large language models, I think they're going to create harms. I think there are going to be things that change, but it's like, what happens now? Because what we have right now is basically what we've had for two years. If you want to email me about reasoning, please do, I will email as much as you want. But the thing is, you look at this and people are going, okay, and then this will happen. It's like. That thing that with an L L M that goes and does something really basic thing, an L L M that you tell to go and do a thing online, they are bad, bad at it. There was a Salesforce study that said it's like thirty five percent. They like it was like thirty something percent. They fail,

• 47:02Ed Zitron?

  or that was the only ones they completed.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  I don't think I've never asked an A I to do a task for me. I'm saying I've never asked it to do it. Do one of those agent kind of functions. I wouldn't. I agree with you. I wouldn't. Well, I don't think it's there yet. I mean, for again, as a user, but research, I've had good research done.

• 47:17Ed Zitron?

  Really?

• 47:18Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, the A I and Gen A I has done a lot of good stuff in the medical fields too, right? CRISPR and all of that stuff. There's been a lot of discoveries about what sort of mutations you find in certain types of cancer that like I don't think humans could have done

• 47:31Speaker 04

  If I want to study an industry to consider writing about it, I can ask, you have to ask good. I mean, it's like in anything else, right? I can ask really good questions of an A I and send it, you know, for the $200 a month model one where they'll do that research thing. And if I ask it to do research and then you can, it'll like, it will come back. And maybe you have to send it back three times, but the speed and accuracy, yeah, but you can very quickly

• 48:00Speaker 06

  It accelerates the stuff, right?

• 48:02Speaker 04

  A lot of it because you can, like the book list thing that I can't fathom being that irresponsible, like those idiots who in the paper. But you literally, all you have to say to them is when it presents any kind of list, all you say to it is go verify that list, please.

• 48:15Ed Zitron?

  How do you know what right is?

• 48:17Speaker 06

  Or verify it myself. I mean, I would verify it myself, right? At some point.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  But you go verify the list. It immediately goes, you're right. I was hallucinating. These three books don't exist. That happens. Then you go do it one more time and make sure that these titles are available in these stores. Then they'll give you links and then you can go look at.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  So it's about the prompting that you're doing.

• 48:36Speaker 05

  And I think sometimes we're splitting here, though, is you're, both of you are extraordinarily intelligent people who have done a lot of research in your life. So you know how to do those things. You know how to be like, I need to follow this up. I need to search this, make sure. I do think that one of the problems, again, coming from like the low level consumer level, is it's often being marketed as an impartial refer- impartial refer-

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Oh, you're totally right, Mike. You're totally right. It's not that. You cannot. You'll be fucked so bad if you use it for that.

• 49:01Ed Zitron?

  But most people don't interact with it like you do, is what I'm saying.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Well, but, but they can.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  They can. And I agree with you. They can. I think it's almost, oh, but it's, it's-

• 49:11Ed Zitron?

  They don't lead them to do that. It's not like they have things that guide them. I would-

• 49:14Speaker 04

  This is really interesting here, what you're saying about this. Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I think that, you know, when you see people, and we all saw the Grok Nazi thing, but if you see people on Twitter, they don't use, they, I would say fewer use it to do Nazi shit as much as they go, "Hey, Grok, is this true? Is this true? Is this true?" And depending on what finger is on which scale, the answer's different each time, but I think that there's a lot of people-

• 49:37Speaker 04

  So I understand why you're saying, I, I did, I haven't been on Twitter since October, whatever that date is. So I don't know, but I, I would never, of course, you can't just say, "Let's go to the AI," as though that's a final arbiter, and certainly not today, but it's been 2025.

• 49:55Ed Zitron?

  As that.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  I think that's my problem, is it's being positioned that way. And I think you're absolutely right. I think you're absolutely right how useful it is, especially if you have the skill to use it. I think the problem is, it is being marketed as, "This is a catch-all solution. This is a panacea to your knowledge problems." And, you know what I mean?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Of course, there's a dumbing down. Well, it is like believing Rockstar Games that, that they're gonna get fucking Grand Theft Auto out, right? I mean, it's no different. I mean, I literally would, look at the actuarial table. If you had to build one on my life expectancy verse when the next fucking iteration of GTA, I might lose.

• 50:30Ed Zitron?

  But here's the thing, here's the thing though, with you describing the research. It isn't an invalid use case. What you're describing is how people use Google Search to do research. They pull up a bunch of stuff, they go through them, they look at it, and they go, "Is this right?"

• 50:42Speaker 04

  But that's a slog.

• 50:43Ed Zitron?

  It is a slog. What you're describing is a slog.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  No, no, it is not. It's a pleasure. It's not, no, you gotta be honest about it. It is a total pleasure, not a slog.

• 50:51Ed Zitron?

  I should be clear. I'm also, I have actually used these things. I've genuinely tried, because I'm, I love my dude, that's Magismos, and I've really, I've sat down and been like, "What am I missing?"

• 51:01Speaker 04

  You just became Paul McCartney.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  That was a true Paul McCartney moment.

• 51:06Ed Zitron?

  He has not accepted my invite for the show, though. No, he had not invited me. My mom would be so happy. No, it's just-

• 51:16Ed Zitron?

  I really feel like this keeps coming back to the you are using it in a totally fine way. I'm mad at the fact that everyone's like, and this is the only thing you'll need. You can fully trust this. This is the best thing. The information's the best. You're looking at it and going, this is a way of digging through information and passing stuff and having a conversation with the information.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Lowest comment in the broad society.

• 51:33Ed Zitron?

  Yes, the lowest.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Lowest comment, but unfortunately, yes, you're right. Our educational system is really fucked up. Disadvantaged people have no chance. Mike went to a school that allowed people from disparate areas to get. We gotta, yeah, we gotta reform the education system in the country so that everyone has a fair shot. I agree.

• 51:49Ed Zitron?

  But there's a very basic.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  So let's do it.

• 51:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but there's actually a very basic thing we don't have to.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 51:53Ed Zitron?

  There should be regulation that says that these things need big fucking disclaimers that say, hey, check everything. They won't do it because the incentives we discussed, but that would actually be, I think, or the stealing is also bad. I think the environmental damage is bad, but I think we agree on that.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:08Ed Zitron?

  It's just.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Safeguards are always great, but safeguards, but then you gotta figure out who decides what those safeguards are and who's. Like you talked to Bill Gurley, he'll talk about regulatory creep, right? So where do you wanna? I'm just saying, you smart guy.

• 52:19Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, I agree with you.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  He's a smart person and he's thoughtful about this stuff. And so how, who do you want? Do you want the, I mean, with this, you want the current government deciding?

• 52:31Speaker 04

  Guardrails, who's to do?

• 52:32Ed Zitron?

  But here's a very basic guardrail. It's just a disclaimer that says everything with generative AIs, blah, blah, blah, that you cannot.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  Some of them have it now, but they're all in preview, right? And that's probably what they're couching against.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  They do say right on, um, chat GPT now, it says.

• 52:44Speaker 06

  GPT Gemini.

• 52:44Ed Zitron?

  Double check every single time.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Yes, it says it every single time.

• 52:47Ed Zitron?

  Really?

• 52:48Speaker 04

  Every single time.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  And Apple Intelligence.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  I saw it today, actually, for sure.

• 52:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, because they, they have been criticized, but to Brian's larger point, there are guardrails put in place into a lot of these. I'm most familiar with the Gemini's and the Apple intelligences and the Amazon ones of the world. And they, their guardrails are around like, um, CSAM, right? Child sexual abuse material or like not presenting people's faces or like trying to avoid photorealism because then you get very deceptive very quickly. You don't see any of that in Grok, maybe it depends.

• 53:17Ed Zitron?

  I just looked.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  I know, I mean, I.

• 53:18Ed Zitron?

  I just used.

• 53:19Speaker 06

  Which one, GPT? I don't use.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  GPT does really, it does, but I'm not gonna turn on my phone.

• 53:23Ed Zitron?

  No, but I'm like, I'm just like, here's the. Thing, if they're there sometimes and not others, that's also bad. Yeah. Like, it's like, it's in, it's because when you've got people who are killing themselves, people that are having, it was Miles Clay, I think it was, or Rolling Stone wrote this piece about people having psychotic reactions. Yeah, I agree, this, this administration have probably done well regulating this, but the answer being let's regulate nothing is terrifying.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Well, it's really, but it is confusing because if you think about, let's say, Facebook.

• 53:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  There's no doubt that Facebook was used in Myanmar to foment a genocide. People were warned inside, who knows where it got to, this is very well documented.

• 54:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  How could one, after the fact, it's, okay, we, it's really hard to sort of figure out these use cases. And then should all social media have gone away? Like, some people think it should be all social media.

• 54:19Ed Zitron?

  I feel better about that if Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mostly say it for the list.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:27Ed Zitron?

  Because also the yellow.

• 54:28Speaker 04

  No, but if I know, I'm a Luddite.

• 54:29Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's good.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  If I know, your listeners know.

• 54:32Ed Zitron?

  He did an internal letter in 2016, 2017, where he said that all things were justified for growth, including a terror attack. And that's kind of how they approach everything.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  No, it was monstrous. Like, when I saw that Myanmar thing, it made me say, like, I should never use Facebook. I mean, I think that is as bad a thing as I've ever seen. I mean, literally.

• 54:50Ed Zitron?

  But this is still an example, though. And Meta's LLM allows children, and Jeff, Jeff Horowitz reported this at the Journal, allowed children to, like, have sexual conversations with John Cena, very peculiar. Like, there was like.

• 55:05Ed Zitron?

  Let's be super clear with not John Cena.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  You said with John Cena.

• 55:12Ed Zitron?

  I just want to say it was not John Cena. It was just John Cena. I mean, I was in a jail for a hundred years.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  On the bear, I was in a scene with John, lovely guy, and he definitely wasn't doing that.

• 55:24Ed Zitron?

  No, no, he seems like a guy. I'm saying it was the voice of John Cena you're allowed to have pedo conversations with. But again, it's this lack of restriction because no particular technology is evil at its core.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  That's fair.

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• 56:51Speaker 06

  I think what Brian was saying, and I don't know if I'm misinterpreting you, but like it's, there is some fatigue at seeing these things throughout, all the pharmaceutical warnings you get the end of every commercial, every warning you're gonna get from Gemini from now on, every Apple intelligence warning that's like, notification summaries can be wrong sometimes, like sometimes you just, I see them on my phone.

• 57:09Ed Zitron?

  Where are you seeing the notification warning?

• 57:11Speaker 06

  I'll show you later.

• 57:11Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, I believe you. I'm like, why am I not seeing?

• 57:14Speaker 04

  What I'm saying is that, but why I brought up Myanmar is, no, we, as a society, unfortunately, we default to the convenient, fun, easy thing. Yeah, that's accurate. What we all should have done when Facebook, and I'm not even blaming, exactly, like you can blame Boz, I don't know enough to blame anybody there. We know that the technol, that Facebook itself was used by these generals in Myanmar. Right, yes. And nobody took pause, like, like, um... I think very few people left Facebook as a result of that. I I think so. I just don't know what the fix is for these problems because we gravitate like bees to honey.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  But there there are also like tools that can be used as weapons and it depends on the perpetrator and the person using these, right? And it's an age old question. Again, coming back to the industrial and agricultural evolution. This can be just a tool for hacking a plant off of its husk, or it can be used as a murder weapon. Back to AI can be very informative, very helpful for people who need companionship. It can be used like people will send me scam texts all the time. The the technologies keeps keeping up with them and filtering them out, so they keep changing their spam. Bad actors are gonna bad act. That's just the way it's gonna be. What can we do? We can. I stopped using Facebook. I try to educate my parents every single time they use a GPT answer with me. I'm like, Mom and Dad, stop using that. But then they just keep using it because they're the sort of person that's susceptible to this.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  They will just use it because convenience and they don't want to do the actual work of maybe the Google search method, which you were saying at. Or they just want something that's easy and they don't care if they get it wrong, maybe.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  I guess I love the idea of you using your brains to figure out how to make these things safer and more useful as you agitate within the industry. I think trying to

• 58:58Speaker 04

  trying to find a way for them to disappear seems

• 59:01Speaker 06

  It's impossible.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Impossible. And and again, like NFTs were obviously gonna disappear. But the underlying Bitcoin thing wasn't because there's too much. Well, the moment this election happened. The moment this election happened, Bitcoin was going to 200. Bitcoin was going because

• 59:17Ed Zitron?

  And what sucks about that is we could have stopped crypto. I was writing about it at the time. I was and the only

• 59:22Speaker 04

  How are you gonna stop crypto?

• 59:23Ed Zitron?

  Uh, by informing people about the inherently criminal aspect that underlies everything, the fact that tether is more than likely in the hands of multiple different group. I tried and I failed. And you know what? It sucks, but you try, you can put ideas out there, you can see if people pick them up. And I mean, that's kind of what you do there. Um, in the case of crypto, it's such a weird thing as well because it's there, but it isn't. It doesn't really do anything other than fund things or be funded. And it just kind of exists where it's just like they kind of, they don't even, I kind of respect the fact they don't even try and be like

• 59:55Speaker 04

  You're literally, you're talking the Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett's book. That's what they always, I know, but that's what they always said, um, because of that. That that's their whole Point that it, forget the blockchain, it doesn't really do, you know, it can't really do anything.

• 1:00:08Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, though, there was real money in that, which there isn't in generative AI. And I think that what's funny is this convenience thing you're talking about may actually be their downfall. Because those 500 million weekly active chat GPT users are costing them billions of dollars. It's probably all gonna.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Fascinating. That is fascinating.

• 1:00:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  They mean their popularity is gonna destroy those companies, not, not, not the underlying tech, but that the companies themselves, that's fascinating. I'm really, like I'm saying, you're teaching me something. I had no idea about that.

• 1:00:38Ed Zitron?

  I'll explain it very simply, which is OpenAI last year spent $9 billion to lose $5 billion. Anthropic spent $5.3 billion. No, sorry, they, they spent like nine, seven, eight. They spent billions to lose $5.3 billion, of which a chunk of that was just given to Amazon for servers. It's very fucking weird. They lose money, their conversion rate on ChatGPT is awful. So 500 million, I think they have 15.5, 60 million paying subscribers. They don't publish monthly active users, because if they did, you could do the math and see it's trash. And on top of that, they just can't find a way to make money. They lose so much money. So what's more than likely is, yeah, these companies might die. LLMs will hang around because there are use cases.

• 1:01:23Ed Zitron?

  And Google is like, Jeff Dean over at Google is one of the least evil tech people. There are actually people there who like the tech and give a shit about it. And there's more efficiency stuff coming out of Google's models. The thing is, what we see today, I do not believe is, I think the most annoying scenario is gonna be the longest life large language model with unlimited access is gonna be on fucking Meta. Because of their unrestricted tripe that's on every fucking app. But I think things like ChatGPT are just gonna be limited. You may still have people who use them in the way with the gym.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  But it's interesting what you're saying about, um, maybe the, maybe an answer, and you think about the industrial revolution is eventually. Is that people are gonna have to be trained on instead of firing nine thousand people, train nine thousand people.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Become prompt engineers.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  And yeah, become prompt engineers and and the fact that they didn't, I mean, look, no one is less surprised than me by incentive structures, making these motherfuckers act like evil, um, completely non caring, you know, monsters. But if they can be convinced that there's a profit motive in training people.

• 1:02:27Ed Zitron?

  There's no profits.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  No, if they can be convinced of it.

• 1:02:30Ed Zitron?

  No, but I must be clear, though.

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  But eventually, but in all these businesses, there was no profit until there was profit.

• 1:02:34Ed Zitron?

  Nothing even.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  How long did it take Amazon to become profitable?

• 1:02:37Ed Zitron?

  Amazon took about eleven years with AWS, but AWS was the concern that reduced costs for Amazon itself to run their.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  But in two thousand, a lot of people thought it was never gonna become profitable, right?

• 1:02:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but that's not the same logic.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  It is the wrong.

• 1:02:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but no, but the economics are completely. It's completely different economics.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  Can I ask though, Brian, how much would you pay to keep using chat G P T a month?

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  I'm a I'm a bad, I I'm I'm older and I've done well and I've I've, do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:03:01Speaker 06

  Do you pay anything right now, I guess, is the question?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  I paid two hundred dollars a month.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  Two hundred a month, okay, so Google one's like two fifty a month, right?

• 1:03:07Ed Zitron?

  Why do you pay two hundred?

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  That's a lot of money.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  Because for the supercharged research.

• 1:03:11Ed Zitron?

  You can get the research on the twenty bucks a month one, though.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Not the same level of the research.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  That's an interesting thing to point out, too, is that you're getting better quality by paying for a higher.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  Yes, I'm aware of it, it's unfair.

• 1:03:21Ed Zitron?

  No, but seriously, is there a quality difference?

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you look at it, we could, yeah, I mean.

• 1:03:24Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:25Speaker 06

  But Mike's saying this is the how's the profit?

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  They say there's a quality, they would tell you there is an and in the amount of them, whatever the user, what is it, the rate?

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  So they sell you shit products to make you buy the less shit product?

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know if they sell you shit product, but you're saying the use rate, I, someone told me, someone I trust a lot, a person who's tech savvy was like, this is when that happened, they used it for a while. And a couple of months ago, um, I was in a meeting with someone and they were like, if I was gonna tell you to spend money on anything, spend two hundred bucks a month.

• 1:03:52Ed Zitron?

  You want to know something crazy, though?

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:53Ed Zitron?

  They lose money on every 200 buck a month customer.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  I believe you because they're because I'm using because when they do that search, you're saying it's burning so much.

• 1:04:01Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing.

• 1:04:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Ed Zitron?

  How likely do you think that that will continue? Because the deep research stuff.

• 1:04:07Speaker 06

  Is it charging you more or are you gonna quit, I guess?

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  Yes, well, of course, there's a number very soon. I'm already at the.

• 1:04:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're very high end of it. Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. Double this. I would not. I would not pay double.

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Because I guarantee I would not pay.

• 1:04:19Ed Zitron?

  And I will be honest, and this is not even me being like a hater or anything. It may not be that cheap, uh, because right now, it's the big story in my newsletter, please.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  What's it? 500 a month?

• 1:04:29Ed Zitron?

  For a 200 a month power user who's already lose using, pardon me, losing the money. They lose so much money on them that it's like 400, 500, a thousand dollars a month. Claude code right now, which is slightly different because the way they do context stuff. Nevertheless, on the 200 dollar a max user on Claude, they are, they could be losing. They, they had someone on, I saw on Twitter, they spent 10,000 dollars in compute on a 200 month subscription. These are the majority of power users. Power users go nuts, as you well know. This is why I'm so pushy on the economics, because what we are seeing today, it's like if every Uber weighed 40,000 pounds and the fuel was giraffe blood. It was just like this insane economic, and I sound like I'm kidding, but

• 1:05:13Ed Zitron?

  the economics are completely bonkers. So as much use as you're getting today, I just don't know how practically they'll provide that. And they might be cheaper models, but the cheaper models not might not be able to do. I assume you use O3?

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:05:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Which takes a lot. I, yeah, and sometimes it still takes such a long time.

• 1:05:30Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  To even have a conversation.

• 1:05:32Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  An incredibly long.

• 1:05:33Ed Zitron?

  How much of this is sustainable long term? And I know the business stuff is annoying because you still have your experience, which you like.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  No, it's not annoying. It's fascinating. I'm fascinated by the whole thing. And this is great.

• 1:05:44Ed Zitron?

  It's just the long term here, and I'm talking long term as in 18 months, is I don't know if we will have deep research at any price point approaching the one we'll have in that period.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  Well, the deep research is the only reason anyone should pay the money.

• 1:05:57Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, though. The only reason that people should pay is a thing that is not sustainable and has no. So when you talk about how we bring this towards like an AWS situation.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Ed Zitron?

  AWS is like profitability was built on infrastructure expansion. It was because they were building the rails of cloud writ large. It was never in the billions and billions a year with no, there is no path to profitability here. Uh, there was one model that OpenAI said they were going to deliver to OpenAI, uh, Microsoft in 2023 called Arrakis. Uh, and and it, and they failed to do it. They have yet to discover a, or make, because it may not be mathematically possible, a really good large language model that can do the kind of reasoning like that, that would be reliable and have the web search tool.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  And I want to say you do have to, when you talk about prompts, sorry, I was thinking about this when I was learning about complexity theory. I read this book by a guy named Neil Thiess that I love. He's a professor at, at NYU and I'm not good at physics and I really want to understand quantum physics. And so I, I, I would ask questions, right? Do research on this and then find a way to be able to explain it. So go read these books, go find documentaries. And then I just quickly realized at some point that the, that the AI hadn't, it was clear to me it hadn't read something. Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 06

  Cause it doesn't have access to.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  But I could figure it out. It hadn't. And I just said, like, did you really look at that video? Like it was video. I go, did you really look at that video? That speech? And then it immediately went, no, you got me there. I didn't look at the speech, but I'm going to go now, find it a different way. So you do, and you do have to be

• 1:07:29Speaker 06

  Vigilant.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  acculturated to having those kinds of.

• 1:07:33Ed Zitron?

  Crazy.

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  Uh, I like, you have to maybe have advanced degrees or have trained yourself. I, so I'm, I'm not, this is fascinating, right? Because I take for granted the steps I, I take for granted.

• 1:07:44Speaker 06

  Your learned behavior, right?

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  To, um, and make my way through the world.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  And like the way that I would interrogate something like that to get to an answer that's useful.

• 1:07:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. As opposed to maybe my parents would be like, oh, okay. You watched that video? Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Right. Right. That's your answer. Right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they might get wrong information from it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  I can't argue with that. You're right about.

• 1:08:05Ed Zitron?

  And I think that a lot of this, a grand theory of this comes down to. I think people have a lot of questions and not a lot of people to ask them to. Questions about their life, how they're feeling, then.

• 1:08:16Speaker 06

  That's the loneliness thing.

• 1:08:17Ed Zitron?

  I think it starts with the medical side where it's. It's quite hard to ask a doctor a question in any country. It's hard to know whether they and also doctors regularly make you feel annoying. I'm not talking about my doctor, he loves me. Uh, but you can't go to a doctor regularly with little questions. They don't have the time because they must maximize profits or they are busy, one of the two.

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Ed Zitron?

  And ultimately, we are sitting there going, I've got this weird rash or like I might leg itched in this place in the same day, three days running. What could that mean? And you can't really Google that.

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  It's just cancer, that's what WebMD tells you.

• 1:08:50Ed Zitron?

  But you can't really Google that, but ChatGPT, whatever, can do an impressive impression of it. Or, in your case, Brian, and I think this is reasonable, lead you in a direction towards like a Mayo Clinic article about a particular thing. Something good raised to your doctor. That makes sense. People are lonely. People just have weird questions and I think that there is partially a bad side where it's like everyone wants everything immediately. We must have everything we want immediately. But also, people are curious and we are more disconnected as people. We are more decentralized as people. We don't meet people. We don't have, we are by at scale overworked, underpaid. So we don't have the time to be generous with our time.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'll give you one other use case though, because and it goes to the, the question of training, training. But you could use this for, you said your parents dance or whatever. So I'll tell you that, um, if you are somebody who is all use like deadlifting or squatting with a barbell as an example. If I put a thirty second clip into ChatGPT and I say, please watch this. Tell me, is this form at risk of injury? How should I modify it? Is it good enough? What do you think about the load of this weight? The answer it will give is, and I, I have checked it against like the world, the answer it will give is outstanding. And that's, and that's how would you get that in another way? I don't think there is, and that's a very small example.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  Well, that's different than search. There's an expert, no, that's.

• 1:10:17Ed Zitron?

  It's searching using a video.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  No, it's not.

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  The matching is a bit less sophisticated in the regular Google search.

• 1:10:24Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm saying that, no, that is.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  It's not merely matching it against a perceived perfect form. It's looking at your femur. Literally, it'll go with your femur size. This is the kind of squat that you could do if I low bar versus high bar. Here's why. Here's what this looks like. You're over mid.

• 1:10:38Ed Zitron?

  I'm agreeing with you. I'm just saying that search as a term has grown to look at this image and compare it to these sources, which is theoretically what search.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  But then in the good language, right?

• 1:10:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, no, it's the natural language.

• 1:10:49Speaker 06

  Simplifies the steps, yeah.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  How to fix it.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  But I do worry if you ask a bad quest, like if you not ask a bad question, phrase a question incorrectly. And I'm not saying you. If one phrases, let's say they ask a fitness question, but they phrase it a little bit weird and the answer they get is harmful, it almost, I'm worried about.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  Nightmare.

• 1:11:09Speaker 05

  Situations like that. And also it feels like we're removing an element of human responsibility or accountability where it's like, well, the machine answered weird rather than like a doctor answered weird.

• 1:11:20Ed Zitron?

  And I think that lots of corporations love that idea.

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  They love that because it's like, if I, if my AI accidentally denies your insurance, it was the AI, it wasn't us.

• 1:11:29Ed Zitron?

  It's the algorithm. It's the same algorithmic pass on thing. But I think you're right in the, that is kind of cool. I also have used those three because I do pay for this. I'm not a baseless hater. I did ask, what's the distance between this bottom of this photo frame and the floor? And it spent 10 minutes to give me a completely insanely wrong answer. They're not good with numbers.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Oh, fascinating. See, the other day in this example I just gave you, it said, I can't, it just said like, I can't see.

• 1:11:58Ed Zitron?

  Which is good.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

  That was great.

• 1:11:59Ed Zitron?

  They should do that.

• 1:12:00Speaker 06

  What version are you using for this?

• 1:12:01Ed Zitron?

  O3.

• 1:12:02Speaker 06

  Both of you using the same model?

• 1:12:03Ed Zitron?

  I was using O3 on ChatGPT plus though. So now I, now my.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  Try the pro.

• 1:12:08Ed Zitron?

  Now my, I don't know how I feel about giving Clammy Sammy 200 bucks.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Just try it for a month and see what it does.

• 1:12:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I don't.

• 1:12:14Speaker 05

  You can write it off.

• 1:12:15Ed Zitron?

  I don't want to write.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  I already gave 200 bucks to Wario Am a day. No, because I would love you to do that and then call me and say it's the same. No, no.

• 1:12:21Speaker 06

  Try the same result.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  No, I would love you to tell me. I'm now actually really curious. I would love you to say to me, dude, just spent 20 bucks, the same, that would be.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  Then you could save your 180 a month.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that'd be great news, please.

• 1:12:31Speaker 06

  I am, what Mike was bringing up, I thought was going to be similar to the point I had been mulling over when you were talking about the training stuff, which is that we already deal with due to like, you know, capitalism, lower barriers to entry, an influx of individuals who may not actually be fully equipped for the jobs they purport to do. So whether it be journalists like myself, or like, again, fitness influencers or trainers that say they have whatever types of physical health degrees that are just the result of a 10-hour course online, that sort of thing.

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  We're already dealing with the like, quality dilution of like, information coming from sources like that. To throw AI into the mix feels like making it even worse, like harder than ever to tell what the truth is. And I don't know about you all, but I find myself gaslighting myself all the time now, regardless of like, my own life, whether it's the truth in the world, whether I'm being too sympathetic to multiple different perspectives. I don't know what the truth is anymore. I can't tell you what the cold, hard, scientific truth of anything ever is. And that's where it's led me.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  You also have to be willing, I agree with, that's a brilliant point. I think one of the things I would say to people, if someone asked me, what, how do you, how should you communicate?

• 1:13:35Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  I, I would say, and it's really painful for people, like, because I've seen them talk online about what they love about, um, conversing with AI. You gotta say, click every toggle that says, be mean, tell me the truth, don't tell me I'm smart. Yeah. Like, you gotta instruct it to really be withholding in that way, if you want to actually engage, so that, so that you're right, you're not getting gaslit. Because yes, I agree that, and this is dangerous, the default setting is to gaslight you. You gotta actually go, I don't need to hear that. Glaze you, I think the young people.

• 1:14:10Speaker 06

  Glaze you.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Sure. Wait, can we talk about one topic before we're done? And, okay. You didn't hear the producer just laugh out loud. Just one, can we talk about just one, I think they used to say glaze, but can we just talk about one, um, positive, purely positive tech thing that happened the last week? Okay. July 4th. Okay. Who, who's on TikTok and knows all about the anti-pasto party in Texas? The biggest story on TikTok? Please.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  Was it the one that one person went to? Yeah, okay.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  It's the greatest thing. Please, run this through this. Okay, this, they're in Texas? These people have a July 4th party. There's a woman, she's just moved there recently. Her kid becomes friends with someone else's kid and this woman, Sarah is the parent of one boy, says, "Come with me over to these people's party." Woman A makes the apotheosis of all antipasto salad, the greatest salad you've ever seen in your life, goes to their house.

• 1:15:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  And these people are like, "Who's this stranger in our house?" And they kick her out, even though she brought this incredible. And she goes home, gets on TikTok and she's crying. And she's like, "I brought this salad and they kicked me out of their house." And the entire internet defended her.

• 1:15:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  And loves her so much. And it's like, it's an incredible story. Everybody I know is like, everybody of all ages, like nieces and nephews of mine, and then older, people older than me are all sending, and it's an amazing thing. It's a huge community has rallied to hate these fucking people and to love her and her homemade mozzarella and homegrown tomatoes that she brought to their house.

• 1:15:46Ed Zitron?

  That's like scaling local news.

• 1:15:48Speaker 06

  I saw something else, but yeah. No, I saw something else altogether.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  It's really worth finding.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  But like Reddit does things like that too.

• 1:15:53Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, Reddit, like this is, I liked ending this on a positive note. That's lovely. Reddit does, you can say something.

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, no, community and social forums like that, that's what the internet is great for. And not a lot of AI is present in a lot of that.

• 1:16:07Ed Zitron?

  And it's almost Reddit, especially right now, has got good because it isn't there. The CEO keeps thinking of shoving it places, but even on the better offline Reddit, we've got nearly 9,000 of you now. Hey, guys. But it's great because I, one of my biggest stories I wrote recently was on Cursor and them falling apart. And it was because someone on the forum was just like looking through their stuff like, "Ah, you", and everyone had this full conversation about it. You've got these people out there in this morass of fake stuff or generated stuff or SEO stuff. You've got genuine people. There is still a joy to all of this crap. I love Blue Sky as well, but Reddit has really just, I'm shocked.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  I spend a lot of time on Reddit. I read it.

• 1:16:47Ed Zitron?

  I'm shocked by how much I love it.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  There are groups I won't ever go to on.

• 1:16:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  Pick your own.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  I mean, I know, but I'm saying, you know, like, but, but there where people have a hobby or a thing like whether it's music, you know, you're like, I Take stuff. Yeah, it's great. And you must love the like, the Claude Reddit, because they hate every day. Someone's like, why does Claude suck today? You must love that.

• 1:17:09Speaker 06

  I love r slash Google, yes.

• 1:17:11Ed Zitron?

  I, I like r slash SAS because it's all just people like running SAS. No, it's all people's software. No, no, no, you're thinking of a different SAS one. I'm talking S A A S.

• 1:17:21Speaker 06

  Oh, software as a service.

• 1:17:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm a loser. So, um, no, you watch people being like, my app has been up for six months and it's made seven dollars. Should I continue? A bunch of people are like, yes.

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  And those subscribe.

• 1:17:31Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I kind of love them.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Ed Zitron?

  That you've got these niches, but I hate to say it. I do need to call this episode.

• 1:17:37Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:17:38Ed Zitron?

  Brian, where can people find you?

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, Instagram.

• 1:17:42Ed Zitron?

  Yes, we'll have a link to there as well.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 05

  Uh, you can find me on Instagram at Mike Drucker is dead and on Blue Sky at Mike Drucker. And, uh, buy Good Game No Rematch. It is a book that's available digital, hardcover or audio with the audio read by myself.

• 1:17:57Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 06

  Very nice.

• 1:17:57Ed Zitron?

  Shirlen?

• 1:17:58Speaker 06

  Uh, I'm at engadget.com or on threads at Shirlen Instagram, C H E R L I N N S T A G E R E N.

• 1:18:04Ed Zitron?

  Type in Google, the man who destroyed Google search. That's me. I'm Ed Zichon. Thank you so much for listening as ever. This is recorded in the wonderful New York studio in iHeart Radio. Daniel Goodman, of course, is our producer. Thank you so much, Daniel. Thank you all for listening.

• 1:18:25Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

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

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