Are AI's Economics Unsustainable? — With Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron is the owner of EZPR, host of Better Offline, and author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Zitron joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the generative-AI boom is an unsustainable bubble ready to pop. Tune in to hear him debate OpenAI’s multi-billion-dollar burn rate, Microsoft’s leverage, and the economics behind ChatGPT. We also cover Nvidia’s GPU market, SoftBank’s colossal bets, advertiser drift from Google Search, and the hype around “AI companions." Hit play for a sharp, no-fluff conversation about the economics of AI. You can find Ed's newsletter at: https://www.wheresyoured.at --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Does the AI business have what it takes to survive? Our guest today says no. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Ed Zitron. He's the owner of EZPR, the host of Better Offline and the author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter. He's here to speak with us about his criticism of the AI business and why it may all soon collapse. Ed, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Great to see you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so we've had some varied, different varieties of critics on the show. We've had people who've said it's poisoning society. We've had people like Gary Marcus who've said that the progress is gone. We've had in various iterations, folks who've talked about how it can be used by bad actors to do things like enhance viruses. Soon we'll have someone who's going to come on to talk about escape risk. But you are in a different category. You really think that the business of OpenAI and the AI industry is unsustainable. Yeah, this is something we talk about a lot on the show. I'm very familiar with your work and it's great to have you here to discuss it.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just all very silly when you look at it. Right now, we're sitting there, the most important company in AI is OpenAI. They will burn probably 12, 13 billion dollars after revenue this year. That's based on projections. They also have no pro path to profitability. They don't have one. They claim twenty two, the information's reported a few times like twenty twenty nine, twenty thirty, they're gonna magically become profitable due to Stargate. Now, how will that happen? Nobody actually knows and OpenAI will not tell us because OpenAI doesn't really discuss their revenues other than in really vague ways. They go like, we have three billion business users. What's that about? When you look at the underlying finances, it's genuinely insane. And it's more insane outside of OpenAI.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  The information also reported that Microsoft will only make about thirteen billion dollars not profit, just revenue on AI this year. Ten billion of that is OpenAI's as your cloud spend. Three billion is them selling Copilot. That's an insanely small amount, man. Three billion is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. They do like eleven nineteen billion dollars in profit a quarter, and this is on fifty seventy billion dollars of capital expenditures. These numbers are terrible. There's an analyst, as quoted by Laura Bratner, Yahoo Finance, who said that he only thinks that Amazon is gonna make five billion dollars in revenue, again, not profit, this year on AI. They are spending a hundred and five billion dollars in capital expenditures.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  This is an insane situation and the fact that I am ever framed as radical or like a pessimist when I'm just doing very basic mathematics, it's kind of strange. I think it says something a lot about media in general, but also the tech industry in general. And people will say, oh, well, Uber lost a bunch of money. Give it the fuck up on that one. Uber lost a ton of money in co twenty twenty. They lost like six point two billion dollars. I think their worst year on record was like an eight billion dollar loss. But they had a product and then they used it to fuck over labor forces. Like they used it to, they just dragged those numbers down. But nevertheless, fundamentally different business and also not a big company, not Uber is not the face of the savior of the tech industry because that's what

• 4:22Speaker 01

  generative AI needs to be now. It needs to be bigger than the smartphone market. It's about four hundred and fifty, five hundred billion a year. Bigger than the enterprise software market, about two fifty billion. What the f- the current combined revenue of all the generative AI companies is like.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  And that's including the big tech companies. It's about thirty five, forty billion dollars. It's insane, man. It's insane. And eventually, this has to stop. It has, the growth is not there.

• 4:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. So we're just going to talk through your arguments on this show, and I think that I will pressure test them. And we'll just go through some of the objections.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  And like we do, you know, I don't think listeners need to agree with everything that Ed has to say. Uh, but I think I won't call you a radical. I'm going to give you a fair hearing today, and we're going to go through some of these claims.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  It is so strange, though, and I know that you're not characterizing it in this way necessarily, but the fact that the guy who was like, hey, this is losing billions of dollars and not making that much. I am the one getting the hearing. I, I know that that's not meant to be a negative characterization. But the my, my pointing at numbers that are out there that are ludicrous is strange and must be tested. Versus things like, oh, we'll have AGI in two or three years in the New York Times. It's obscene.

• 5:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, look, we, we test all of these claims here.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  No, no, and I know you do, but it's just in general. It's very strange.

• 5:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so maybe we'll talk a little bit about the general vibes around AI.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 5:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Later on, but let's just get right into where the value is here. Uh, so if this is going to all fall apart. It means that what's happened in AI has to be, I think, by definition, not valueless. Uh, but sort of there's a cap to however good it can get. You said, uh, in one of your shows, AI today is a fifty billion dollar industry. Masquerading as a trillion dollar solution from a tech industry that's lost the plot.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let me just throw this out to you. I mean, it seems clear to me that AI will be useful for search. You yourself have talked about how search is not a good product.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I don't agree with that fully, but I know, but keep going.

• 6:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's say it's half as good as Google. Google is at a two point one four trillion dollar market cap. So let's say it just gets half there, then it's already a sizable business.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  You're describing search as a product and search as a business. The largest and most successful search business is Google. Google makes what, like over a hundred billion on this a year? How do they do it? Well, it's simple. They own the search engine, they own the infrastructure, they own the advertiser, both the platform that sells the ads and the platform that buys the ads. These things are being mangled by antitrust. You ever notice how there's no other real competition? I think Bing makes like a billion, two billion a year.

• 7:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it's interesting because even in the antitrust hearings, because they're talking about now whether Google will be able to even pay Apple the twenty billion plus a year.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  One of the interesting details that has been overlooked in those hearings is that nobody, not Microsoft, not perplexity, or whoever it may be, can make money off of search in the way Google can.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And that, to me, suggests that fundamentally, there's a fundamental weakness in the business to grow to the size that Google, like, perhaps the search market is actually a bit smaller. I don't know how much smaller, but you're describing two things, which is, search as a product. And I do fully believe that if Google had tried to meaningfully innovate in search other than ways to make money and ways to screw consumers, OpenAI would have been nowhere near as big, because most people do use it. Because the big thing is, is that OpenAI and generative AI, large language models, are really good at inferring meaning from a statement. Really good is probably a push, but you can give it a vague question like, oh crap, what was that nineteen seventy-one movie with like some gangsters in it?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And it will have a much better time inferring the meaning than anything Google search has done in a while. That's a big reason. On top of that, people want answers. And Google has been hesitant, if not entirely resistant, to giving answers until ChatGPT popped up and then went, crap, we've got to make a really shitty version of this. And it's still a shittier version of what OpenAI does with search, which I think is a shitty job unto itself, because any search result that could be hallucinated is a dodgy one. And I think also Google has just given up any responsibility to their products and to any of their customers. I don't think people realize how much Google has had to do to make search that big a business. Huge advertising. And I mean, they bought, what was it? DoubleClick, was it DoubleClick way back when?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Like, they bought the rails for this a long time ago. And to your point, no one else has been able to copy it, despite there being multiple other companies that could, other than Meta, who has created a competing advertising product. But that's what search has become. Search as a product is very different to search as a business. All told, OpenAI would have to build such significant sales teams, ad tech. They would have to be a very different company because selling advertisements is very different to selling consumer ChatGPT subscriptions or enterprise, I guess. But even then, the information's reported recently that that's not going so good either. So we're in this weird situation where, yeah, you could say OpenAI could, SearchGPT could be this. What happened to that branding, by the way? You remember when SearchGPT was what it was going to be called? Now it's just ChatGPT.

• 9:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  The branding fell away because you just search within ChatGPT.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  I know, but it's like, they make this big thing where they're going to compete with Google, but it's like, what are you actually? And so, sure, they could make a, they've already made a compared to the Google. I think a lot of their success has come from the fact that you can't search on Google Search as well. Google Search does not understand what you're asking it. ChatGPT often does kind of, kind of, sort of.

• 10:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it does a great job with search in certain use cases.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's replacing Google for me.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it has for many other people, but that's the thing. That just means that Google Search is bad. It doesn't necessarily mean ChatGPT is good. And it's the inherent, one of the strengths of large language models is inferring meaning from what you're asking it. But making that into a search-sized business is an entirely different thing and will cost them tens of billions of dollars. Like, it's not something where, even if they could do it, humoring the idea, I don't think they will.

• 10:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk the idea.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  They would have to do tens of billions, like, Google owns thousands of miles of underground cable. They have content delivery systems all across the world. OpenAI doesn't own a damn thing of their own infrastructure. Even, this is the craziest thing that got reported recently. The Stargate entity does not exist.

• 10:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Talk more about that.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  It doesn't exist. They haven't formed it yet. Oracle said it on their earnings. It has not been formed yet. So Oracle is allegedly, though Elon Musk claims this wasn't true, you know, the classic truth guy, the guy who never lies, but he said that this isn't true. But Oracle is apparently buying, allegedly buying $40 billion worth of GPUs to put in the Abilene, Texas site for Stargate, the first, I think it's eight to 11 buildings, I forget. Now, OpenAI, who owns those buildings? Who knows? I think it's Crusoe. Crusoe just had to raise a $750 million credit line as well to build it.

• 11:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're data center builders.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're also, they've never done this before. They've never done HP, so high-performance computing before.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  It's also good. It's like when you look at the bits, it goes, oh, this is bad. Oracle has agreed to pay Crusoe, I think, a billion dollars for fifteen years. Like, they've, they have contracted Crusoe to do the work. OpenAI, according to the information, hasn't even signed a contract for the compute in, in, uh, Abeline. OpenAI has done a great job of getting other people to do the work for them. But if you think building a giant data center is hard, try building all of the ones you will need to make a modern search engine. Perhaps there are efficiency gains. Perhaps there are ways of doing, doing it differently. Who knows? But it's not something where they can just go, kudunk, kudunk, and now we're a search company as well. It's not that easy. And Sam Altman would love people to believe that.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Notice he's not really talked about competing with search though recently. Not really heard much of that. A few months ago, he had that story about ads within ChatGPT as well. Haven't heard any stories about the revenue from that either. That's the thing. Generally, when companies are doing well, they tell you and they boast, or they leak it surreptitiously in a very obvious way. None of the leaks coming out appear to be positive.

• 12:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, why do you think, so let's just go to this core issue. Why do you think that generative AI, generative AI can't be a good replacement for search?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Because right now, the unreli, the unreliability of search, Google search right now, was already a problem. I think that the core technology of large language models could really help with inferring meaning in search. I think it could at some point be useful in that way. The problem is, it's like replacing a bad thing with a slightly less bad thing. It's like, I guess you could do that, but I think that it's pretty evident that because nobody else has done it, including ChatGPT, uh, OpenAI even, that you can't really replace the business of search. But we are getting mangled up in the technology because, yeah, I think large language models are really useful for the intake of information. I don't know about the presentation of information at the other end. I don't think that they're great for research. I don't think that they're great.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I've used it for search and been like, this is a pain in the ass. This is not what I want. There's too much crap here. I have to sift through it. I can't trust any of this. So perhaps there are consumers who are just like, I can trust this. Bingo, bango. I'm done. Fine. If that's mediocre with, with shit with piss, I don't know what you call it. So it's kind of like.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  AI overviews is kind of doing that. It's just such a mess. Cause you can hear me kind of hesitating over the details, cause it's like, can you replace it as a product? Yes. Is it gonna be good at it? No. Yes, it's, you like it as other people do because it understands what you're asking it way better than Google search does. How has Google not copied that as well? That's the other thing.

• 14:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  They are in the process of copying it with AI mode.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  AI overviews are so crap and AI modes, it's.

• 14:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not saying that they're better than ChatGPT. I would say ChatGPT is better.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I'm not even saying.

• 14:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that the real argument around Google is the models, the models perform quite well on the leaderboards, but you don't see that proficiency when it comes to actually building it into the products.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  I don't think they even do it the same way. Because you ask a question to ChatGPT, it generates a result. With Google, it's like, oh, it feels just like a disinterested uncle. He's reading the newspaper with a kid, like knocking his knees, like, what do you wanna? I think it's fucking this. Here's a bunch of, leave me alone. Cause it's like AI overviews do not do the same things how ChatGPT handles search.

• 14:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  ChatGPT spits out an answer, for better or for worse. AI overviews goes, alright, here's, I think the answer with some links, I don't know if they're good. Here's some other links. What do you do here? I don't know, I'm just here to show you ads. And that's why it's so hard to use. Goodbye or hello. Please stay on the page. I need money. It's just a really weird, it, Google, it's so weird. It's just so strange. That you've got these companies with trillion dollar market capitalizations who run services that look like a dog's dinner. It's just insane to me and it's everywhere.

• 15:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Did you see the thing on Threads today?

• 15:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Talk about it.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So Threads, there was, um, I don't exactly know what happened, but everyone's messages were coming up as the same thing. So you had a bunch of accounts saying like, I don't know what's fucking going on. It's the same thing again and again and again. Threads is terrible.

• 15:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I agree with you on that front.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It's just, but that's the thing. I think the reason ChatGPT has been able to make any meaningful progress against search is not because of the proficiency of OpenAI, pretty, pretty good UX, works clean, pretty, pretty snappy. It's because everyone else has given up.

• 15:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  But isn't this how it's supposed to work? I mean, isn't it, no, let me, let me talk it through. Like, isn't it supposed to be that some company gets the lead in something, then a challenger comes through, builds something slightly better, and then puts everybody on notice that if you don't improve, you're gonna lose the lead?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Which is funny, though, because you're right. That's how it's worked. I think that that era ended like ten, fifteen years ago. I think that they kind of, we've not seen that kind of competition, and OpenAI is actually a great example, because to compete with big tech, you need big tech to support you. So you, my, OpenAI is a Microsoft subsidiary. That's what everyone needs to just accept right now, and what's happening in the news, which I imagine we're talking a bit. So there is no competition. There is an agreed-upon substance that they all agreed to sniff, and then they all sniff the substance and make money selling it. They all agree that AI is the thing they're doing now. So they're all gonna compete in the same kind of soft punchy way. You've got Amazon and Google

• 16:55Speaker 01

  backing Anthropic, you've got Microsoft backing OpenAI, you have this weird thing where Google filed a suit to try and stop their exclusive deal to sell OpenAI's models to Microsoft's. No one's trying to make better search. I don't think even ChatGPT is trying to be better search. They're trying to sell a thing by claiming it's AI that does something they can't really specify. They're not sitting there going like, how is this a better search product? Because if it, if they wanted that, they would have. They would have built a deliberate search product that represented it as search rather than just an everything search, a search for thoughts which may or may not be correct. A better search, I don't even know what a better search platform is, but that was not what OpenAI started with.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  That's not where, I don't actually think that OpenAI had much of a product vision.

• 17:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, for sure not. I mean, they talked about how they released ChatGPT as a demo and have sort of iterated on that since, but-

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Which is pretty much how, like, I was told by a reporter once, that apparently Microsoft saw ChatGPT, and the reason they bought all the GPUs was because they wanted it in Bing, that they wanted to do that in Bing. Hundreds of billions of dollars based on being like, what if Bing was better somehow?

• 18:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that didn't work.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  It did not work.

• 18:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's talk more about this because so I think the thing that's nice about the searching through these bots is that they do, I think, like you've talked about, they give you, they understand your intent better. Uh, I think they are getting better at presenting information and they are getting better at linking information.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, so let's just say that this continues on a trajectory where it does, even if it's not the core intent, it replaces, it replaces a good chunk of search. I'll just make the business argument here.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  And throw it out to you, which is that, yes, marketers really care a lot about the signal that they get from search or the fact that they can, you know, with some uh consistency, measure their media spend on Google and know if it's working or not. Uh, but ultimately, if people move from Google search to OpenAI or to some other LLM search, my anticipation is that the money won't go away. I think marketers have gotten and advertisers have gotten used, so used to spending online that they were, they'll be willing to spend even if they don't get the same signal like we saw.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  When you say signal, what do you mean?

• 19:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like whether people are going and buying the products that they're advertising.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I, just so I'm clear, your argument is that they'll spend the money even if it doesn't work as well?

• 19:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  When has that happened?

• 19:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I think one example, I'm curious what you think about this, is when Apple cut off Facebook's ability to measure whether people were buying after seeing their ads. And then Facebook got-

• 19:36Speaker 01

  That was the unilateral app transparency thing. So it wasn't just focused on Facebook.

• 19:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, right. Absolutely.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, they, I mean, you could also argue that Apple wanted to build its own app install business.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Which they absolutely did. They built their own app.

• 19:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  So maybe it was not entirely focused on Facebook, but you'd have to argue that Facebook was a big

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  motivation there. Um, advertisers are still spending a lot of money on Facebook, even if the signal is a little bit uh murkier than it was previously.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  That's because Meta has effectively a monopoly on so, on social networks, which are a different advertising platform. On top of this, right now, OpenAI, I don't even believe has an ad network. I'm not sure.

• 20:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, they don't.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  You know how multivested these things are. The infrastructure is not there. And the reason that Google makes so much money is because they built the infrastructure. And from what I know from digital advertisers, I know they're, they will try stuff, but they'll- Try stuff and if it doesn't work, they'll stick to what they know.

• 20:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Correct.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Now, if OpenAI can get great CPM, great CPA, fantastic, they've proven themselves. Can they do that at the scale of Google? I don't think they can and I don't, I don't know whether that, we don't know the exact cost, but we know they're burning billions. If they're losing billions of dollars, it don't matter how good their ads is. If the numbers don't add up, it, there's so much they have to spend as well. The staff they would require, I really should have brought, I should have looked up the amount of advertising staff that uh that Google has before this, but Jesus Christ, they don't have the people. And they are still hiring and hiring and have to spend all of this money on salaries. They have to, I think there was a, one of their executives recently said that they have this incredible pressure to grow.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Adding the pressure of building an ad network. And then building the market for it, because remember, you can't just say it's identical to search, cause it ain't.

• 21:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  These things aren't presented as results within a thing. They are presented as answers to a question. Theoretically, theoretically, that could have a different reaction, a more sticky one, but has anyone fucking proved that yet? Perplexity hasn't, they wanted fifty dollars a CPM. Bloody Aravind, he's got his head out of his arse, just pie in the sky right now. And I don't know that they have the time. I don't know that they have the time to do this, nor do I think that they have the resources, because they also have to do this. And build data centers and build a chip with Broadcom. All the crap they promised for twenty twenty six is bonkers.

• 22:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I, I think you're hitting on exactly what the problem is going to be. And we've talked about this on the show a bunch, which is that you can, you can attract. I think they will attract a large chunk, whether it's OpenAI or Google through their AI mode, which will evolve. I think we are going to see a lot of search funnel through these large language models eventually, but it's a different format.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a different experience. It's very easy to mess up. It's not a slam dunk that it happens. Do I think that if they get their advertising money, we'll probably follow?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Sure, if they get that.

• 22:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it's, it's an if, it's an if, and I think you're really um spot on and pointing out that this won't be a slam dunk. So let's talk quickly about some other uses, because you know, the promise here or the, the idea from these companies is that, you know, maybe you. Like you said, they're not saying that they're a search engine. OpenAI isn't saying that. So maybe you do some search and you build a search business, but then let's say your bot can also help people code better. So that's gotta be worth some economic value. So you can amalgamate.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Could it?

• 22:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, yeah, talk about your your view on whether these code co-pilots are valuable in any way.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  So they're valuable. They are valuable in the sense that software engineering loves automating shit. They love shortcuts. It's an industry that adores it, but I think that people misunderstand what a software engineer does. They don't just code. Sure, the junior level ones might, and there will be some early stage people, but we don't know yet, and the numbers being parroted are bullshit. Nevertheless, as you said earlier, I think this is a thirty to fifty billion dollar TAM, teleaddressable market business. I think that what's the IDE markets, development environment, I think that's like a thirteen billion dollar one. Like, there is a business there. Of course there is. It's the code has problems and there's tons of studies about it that suggest that there's real issues with it.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  But I think that's probably the most lasting one. But just because a business exists and is viable in some sense doesn't mean that it adds up to a trillion dollar industry or even a hundred billion dollar industry. And indeed, this is one of the most commoditized things. You've got a cursor came out of nowhere and everyone's like, wow, look, they're gonna be so big. Was it two hundred million ARR or something? It's like, great, that's a really solid public company, SaaS business. No one should be doing backflips. It's changing the world. Is it? It's making developers faster. Is it? How is it doing it? Which developers? These questions, they really harsh the flows, so people don't tend to ask them too much.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  But one of the common misinterpretations of my work is, and I've definitely said it like a year ago, so it is useless. There are use cases. It's just they're here, like the industry is this big and everyone's acting like it's the biggest thing ever. And it's just. It's not like they want it to replace coders. It's actually not going to because of the hallucination problem, because of the probabilistic nature. There was this insane fucking blog man that was on Techmeme. Where this guy, this guy was like, something about AI critics.

• 24:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  And he used all.

• 24:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  My AI skeptic friends are all nuts.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I ran that through a couple of software engineers like Carl Brown over Internet Bugs, and they just kind of fucking laughed at it. Cause he was saying something and it said, oh yeah, mediocre code's fine. Is it now? Is mediocre code fine? How do you think like Carl Brown from Internet Bugs brought up a heart bleed? That was like one thing that a bunch of software engineers missed for years in an open source product. Just because we, we as human beings can catch things doesn't mean we will. And just because it might be able to catch something wrong with your code doesn't mean it will either. But I trust a human over that more. If we're turning ourselves over to something we know to regularly get things wrong, I don't know how much infrastructure you can turn that over to, which is the only way you're getting to these massive revenue streams.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Unless you can really rely on this, they've already got code automation things they hadn't before large language models. So yes, use cases, but how big are we really meant to believe that Curse is gonna make five billion a year? Is that gonna happen? Hey, is Curse profitable? Has anyone asked whether Curse is profitable? You go and you see like a company like U.com and one's saying, wow, they got a valuation of a billion dollars, annualized revenue of like, I'm gonna misquote this, it was like 12 million, 20 million dollars. That's insanely small, man. This is crazy. It's just nonsensical almost. And everyone's saying that because we are here, we will be 70 miles in this direction in two years.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  It just confuses, I guess it doesn't confuse me. I think people want it to be true.

• 26:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, that's, that hits on the question of whether you think. These models are done with getting better because there's like undeniable, there have been undeniable leaps from something like a GPT three to a GPT four. And so I think you get an environment.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  But that, when did GPT four O come out?

• 26:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, let me just finish the question, then you can shoot it down.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Getting too excited.

• 26:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, I would say that there is, you have an environment where you get the twelve million dollar valuation, uh, funding, or the twelve million dollars in revenue and the billion dollar valuation, where you have venture capitalists and not going to stand on the table and defend venture capitalists.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 27:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  But where you have them say, there is potential for this technology to get better. And therefore, if this company continues to do what it's doing, uh, and the technology gets better, then maybe they can hit that market.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they'll, they'll bet on ten of them. And if one of them actually hits where, uh, where they think the puck is going, excuse the sports metaphor.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I get you.

• 27:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Then they will, then they'll be, you know, well rewarded for it. And so that's why I think you're seeing this environment. It's all predicated on the belief that these models will get better. So I am curious to hear your perspective on why you, do you, do you factor that into your analysis? Or do you think it's kind of done?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I think the word better is where we need to start.

• 27:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  What does better mean? This is actually a point made by Jim Cavieiro at Goldman Sachs last year. It's like.

• 27:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah, that was a great report.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Better. But what does better actually mean? We look at these benchmark tests, which are built specifically because these models can't really do regular testing. You can't really give them human testing because they don't do, they don't do the things that they're meant to do. So better does not mean, actually, it might be Darren Asamoah glue from, um, MIT who said it was in the same Goldman report. But it's like, better does not mean more capabilities. It does not mean that these models now can do a new thing. Even reasoning, what, what happened there? What, I mean, it allowed some more, it helped with some coding things, sure, but, and there was some growth, but it's to what end? What can we do now? What is the new thing?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And I think that's the craziest thing. I don't, I don't know what I'm meant to be. I'm a, I love news crap. I knew, I love gizmos and gadgets and all that shit. I, if there was a way that chat GPT could do something for me, I would make it do it just because I'm like, cool. This is why I love technology. I love doing things.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  What's new? What's new? And if the argument is, look, it's improved coding by XYZ. Awesome. Describe it in that term. Describe it in the terms of boring software as a service or cloud compute. Talk to, talk about it like you talk about Docker. Talk about it like virtualization. Talk about it like a technology that's a branch off. Don't talk about it like it's replacing everyone forever, always, because it isn't doing it. So I, by the way, you're completely right with the VCs. They're doing exactly what they've always done, which is make a bunch of bets, talk a mop, see when you get in, like, see what happens, because that's venture capital. That's it. That's the root of it. I'm not defending it either, but it's, they're not doing anything different. The problem is, is that we're in hysteria. We really are. We're in a hysteria. I had someone tell me, a source tell me

• 29:37Speaker 01

  that there are, it's very rare that venture capitalists see the books, the actual accounts, and they almost never see the codebase. That's wild. It's fucking crazy, man. And it only gets worse because as deals get more popular, it's like, you don't want to do it. I've got five more assholes over here who will. So, which is the mark of a classic bubble. So it's like, nothing about what I'm writing or saying comes from a place where I'm like, this, this is something that I've walked into and said, this sucks, I hate it. But because when ChatGPT came out, I dicked around with it for hours and hours, trying to find out why everyone was so excited. So excited. Everyone was so excited. I'm like, okay, so it can generate crappy text?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Like, this is, like, this is the most, like, twenty, like, nineteen-year-old at college ass text. No wonder it can replace college students who aren't taught to write. It writes like them in the same kind of bland intro body conclusion way. Okay, not a business. But the actual use cases of this stuff have never emerged. They've never emerged. The reason that we keep hearing about agents but never about what agents can do is because the most common feature of agents is that they fail. There was a Salesforce paper that came out fairly recently that said, I think that they just categorically break down on multi-step processes. Like they only complete like thirty something percent of them. Multi-step processes, by the way, referring to tasks in general, could you think of just one thing? But they failed at a remarkable amount of one step ones.

• 31:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you're you're answering the question about what happens when the models get better. It's that they don't.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  They're not getting better.

• 31:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  But this is the well, well, I think.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  You're saying also when?

• 31:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, let's go step by step, right? If the models get better, then they're able, they'll be able to handle these multi-step processes in a way that they can't today because they are brittle.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.

• 31:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I hear what you're saying, but but like, like, like I said, like, so you're. Let's circle back to the question I asked you at the beginning of this conversation, which is like you, you're, you're pretty confident that there's no more improvement. Because I asked you about improvement and you said there's no such thing as improvement or we can't feel improvement. But now you're saying.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I'm saying that improvement is a is a metric that they have gamed with the benchmarks.

• 31:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I'm not, I, so this is interesting with the benchmark side of things.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I I really think that like they're useful in some ways, but they're not the be all end all. And it's weird to talk about, and I'm sure you have a response to this, it's weird to talk about the vibes of the models, but like.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Really is, though.

• 32:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's do it. I do think that you can with GPT uh uh oh three, oh three from uh OpenAI. It's definitely the vibes are better than GPT four. It just feels like it's able to do more.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I tried oh three out the other day.

• 32:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  I took a photo of a thing I had hung up and I said, how much space from the bottom of that photo of that picture, the poster to the floor? It took four minutes. It wrote multiple Python scripts to give me the wrong answer.

• 32:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, this is why, I mean, it is interesting that, and this is why I think people are talking about how they're going to be good at some things and not good at others.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so there'll be some like capabilities where they're going to be quite effective and some like the one you.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  And the thing is, that's a reasonable position. If that was how this industry had been solved.

• 32:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they're not selling it that way.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. If it was, no, I really want to say this.

• 32:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Except Sundar Pichai is from Google talking about jagged intelligence, but I think.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Oh, God, jack off intelligence, fuck. I find that so disgus- that man last year, he lied about what agents can do. It was during I O, he said, oh, yeah, you can have an agent that will be able to like do a full shoe return with a thing with your email. And I went, and that was theoretical. What the, why I can't go and lie to the bank, why can he lie to the market? It's just, I think though, getting back to the point, because I think it's important to say is, if they were selling this as, yeah, this is kind of unreliable but interesting tech, and we're expecting it to, there are some things it can't do, there are some things you shouldn't rely on it, very clear about that, I wouldn't hate it. If it was just like, this is what I, until you get to the stealing from everyone and horrible environmental stuff, and then it gets even worse again.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  But putting that aside, if this was being sold as like an experimental branch, or even just a industrial use of cloud compute, okay. I would, I wouldn't judge them for that, I'd judge them for everything else. But they're not selling it this way. You've got Andy Jassy claiming, oh yeah, we're going to replace an indeterminate amount of people at an indeterminate time in some way or somehow, I'm not really sure how, but it's gonna happen and it's on the front page of fucking Techmeme. It's insane. The idea that Techmeme had Sam Altman's gentle singularity, we should be calling 911 and doing a welfare check on that man. That thing was fucking insane. The, if I said that, they would check me for a concussion. Some of the things, Sam Altman suggested that we'll have data centers that build themselves.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Just, that's the thing, that is the real distance. Because you've got what large language models can do, and as far as them getting better, better how? They'll increase those percentages? There is a very clear, and Gary Marcus was just on talking about this, there's a very clear gap between what a large language model can do and what it needs to do to be reliable. And that gap, I think, is much larger than people realize. It's the classic problem with all AI, with self-driving cars even. Where it's like, it's not the fact that it can't do some things well, it's that it can't reliably do anything. Self-driving cars require someone watching them on all times, just in case. You can't do that with ChatGPT, there's too many people. So. It's just this interesting industry-wide cognitiveness, I guess.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It's insane. It drives, when I, when I talk about this stuff, it makes me genuinely worried how many people have been taken by it.

• 35:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  You brought up this statement by Andy Jessi, by now it'll be a few weeks old, about how he wants to replace.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  He thought.

• 35:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  He wants to, well.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Oh, he wants.

• 35:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wants to replace people with AI or believes that it will be a people replacement. And I think that is, so I've talked, we talked about search and coding. I think the thing that's been unspoken so far is that when it comes to the valuations for a lot of these companies, they're gonna need to have to replace full-time employees, or at least the work that a full-time employee does in order to be successful.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Agreed. And people either want completely autonomous or they want Jarvis. They want to be able to say, I need you to look up blah, blah, blah. Okay, give you an example, Manus. Is it Manus, Manus?

• 36:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  It should be Manus. I asked Manus to look up every article written about me in the last two years. It could be a list of links in the spreadsheet and I probably guess like a hundred of them is what, what the actual number. Eleven minutes later and a ton, like a ton of Python, these motherfuckers could love Python. It gives me 11 links.

• 36:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  I tell it, you missed a few. Gives me another nine after another 10 minutes, I think it was. Is this how close, is this replacing, who is this replacing? Because it's not even replacing offshoring, which I think is what companies really will plan to do. They just want to ship people overseas and get cheap labor. It's always been the case. Google loves it. People I've talked to at Google, they're saying, yeah, they're just getting rid of people and replacing them with contractors in India or in other countries and the global south as well. It's very strange what's happening. I think that, I'm actually shocked that so many reporters are still saying agent with a straight face because. What job is being replaced? Code is, no, sorry, it's not. You've got companies firing people and claiming AI.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  But notice that none of these big sexy Kevin Roos stories about replacing people actually include a single fucking person replaced. Now, Christopher Mims had a story in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago, a really good one, where it was artists, art directors and copy editors who had been replaced with AI. But the real story was they had been replaced with shittier versions of their product. Their process was not replaced. Their job was not replaced. They were basically contractors rejected by idiot, business idiots, as I call them. People that don't really understand the process of their work. And it's fucking tragic, but there are some jobs that will get replaced. Not as many as they're saying by people who are assholes who don't respect their customers, who want to do a shitty job and always will. And they would have found another way to do it.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  They would have gone on 99designs, they would have gone on Fiverr. They would have found cheap labor to do the labor that they don't respect. But there is, right now, and I don't think there's going to be, any replacement of labor at the scale that they're discussing. My evidence is nobody's bloody done it. You have all the king's horses and all the king's men. You have Google, you have Apple, you have Salesforce, you have ServiceNow. You have all these companies who could not talk about AI more if they tried. Where is the agent? Because if they did this, if they actually were doing the thing they're claiming, they'd be making tens of billions of dollars extra. They'd be making an absolute shit ton. The information reported a few months ago that Salesforce does not expect any growth from AI this year.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  That is absolutely bonkers for a company that's rebranded, and I paraphrase here, as an agent-first company. It feels like the most egregious lie I have ever seen told in business history. Just completely obscene. And people are lapping it up and it's insane.

• 38:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I think with this software as a service companies, uh, there's so much broken in SaaS today that you can put AI in there potentially and like paper up some of the problems with like systems talking to each other and trying to synthesize information that you have in your systems to make sense of it because it's spread all over the place and takes hours to pull reports. So that's a possibility. Uh, and maybe that's economically valuable.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Your argument is that their systems are so poorly designed, they can't put AI in them, yeah?

• 39:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, my, my argument is that speaking of broken products that AI fixes, they might be the most broken of all products.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  With an opportunity for AI there.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Fully agree. And also, if anyone was going to make money off of it, though, one of the companies that it's not like a situation where one company is ahead of everyone else. OpenAI isn't ahead of everyone else other than scale. And I would argue they got that because literally every single media outlet has been talking about AI for three years. And when they talk about AI, they say ChatGPT. It is the world's best marketing campaign ever. Sam Altman is a genius for that. And he's also like a business idiot whisperer. He can talk to guys that run companies that don't know how their companies work and just be like, yeah, we're going to replace everyone. It's going to take two minutes. It's going to be the best thing. Donald Trump or Jason.

• 40:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  He sounds like Trump, yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  No, he really is like he's like the soft spoken Trump. But he, it's just, it's so strange when I get kind of animated about it because when you start talking about it, I'm not even saying anything. I'm saying some objective statements to be fair, but when you just say like, they haven't done this yet. They haven't done this yet. There really isn't evidence they can do it. Like, really, there isn't. They don't have, it's not like they have a whiz bang moment. Like you, Waymo is imperfect, but you can get in a car in San Francisco and it will drive you around. And you could do that a few years ago in very controlled spaces. But we don't even have a controlled space where an agent's doing something really cool.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And I think the closest they're gonna get is like an agent that can do purchasing on a platform. And I think that that's just because they'll connect APIs to APIs. We're not, that doesn't feel terribly far away, but that's also not a trillion dollar industry.

• 40:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  And are you, are you potentially underrating the bureaucracy part of this? And the fact that like, big organizations, which this could help, they move slow. There's bureaucracy, there's approvals, there's owners of different groups. Like, it's tough for them to do anything. So maybe it's a people problem and not as much a technology problem. Maybe it is, as you would put it, a business idiot problem.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  I would buy that if it was not everywhere and no one had done it. If it, if it was a few people, I, I understand the argument. It's like, if there were a few people that had done this and like, they'd done a ramshackle one, but it was kind of working. It's like, ooh, that would be cool. Would it, it's still like, if someone was doing it in a smaller situation, I don't know, wouldn't OpenAI be doing it? Like, if, just real blunt, wouldn't Anthropic be doing it? Wario Amadeus out there saying, oh yeah, we're gonna replace like, what, 10 to 20% unemployment, 50% of white collar.

• 41:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't think he said, did he say unemployment?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, he did.

• 41:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know that he said 50% of entry level white collar jobs would be gone.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  10 to 20% unemployment as a result of this. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I apologize, but the 50% thing was on. Allison Morrow from CNN has the best piece on this.

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, we actually read that on the show afterwards.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  She is, she is possibly the best living business journalist. She's absolutely fucking incredible. So, the thing is, wouldn't OpenAI have these agents? If they could do this, wouldn't they be doing this? Indeed, someone once made an argument to me online that I actually found quite compelling, which is, why would you sell AGI if you made it? Why would, if you could make an agent, sure, you could sell it to everyone, but you could just run an incredibly profitable business with like, nobody. The one person billion dollar company. Wario Amadeus been promising everyone.

• 42:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Next year.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Next year, oh, sorry, it's in 2026 with the chip from Broadcom. That's another thing with Stargate, of course, the Stargate in the UAE. Also, the device from Jony Ive, that's also coming. All of this is gonna happen in, what, six to 12 months? I can't wait for the future, but the thing is. Where is, where's the beef? Where's the thing? Where's the money even? But the money isn't there, the product isn't there. And anyone putting this to people who love AI, quote unquote. Where's the thing? Why are you actually excited about? Not what could it do? What does it do today that even makes you? And if the answer is, wow, it's kind of like a living encyclopedia. Okay.

• 43:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I give you a different answer to that?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And this is, again, this is, we've been talking a lot about use cases. I do want to spend a little time talking about the business of these companies. But I think it's worth bringing up one use case we haven't brought up yet, which is companionship. That is the number one use case, I think, surprisingly.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 43:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was an H B R article that put, pointed that out.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Was that a rank? I thought that that was just a list. I didn't know it was a ranking.

• 43:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it was a ranking. And it became number one.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  And it's clear. Man, that is not a business.

• 43:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is clear, well, people are becoming friends with these bots.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're paying for them.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It seems, and I'm not a big fan of the fact that people are replacing.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't love it at all.

• 44:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Friends with AI friends, but they're doing it.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  It's, oh, it's a sign of something wrong. It is a, we are a decentralized society. We do not have the shared spaces where we regularly meet people. Tons of people remote working, which is great, but non walkable cities means that people aren't meeting people regularly. Yeah, that is a use case. We don't know the scale of it. If I had to actually guess, I think the majority of people using Chat G P T are using it like Google search. I'm deadly serious. I think that there is a growing amount of people using it. And I think it's a deeply unsafe technology. I also think that is one of the most easily commoditized businesses in the world.

• 44:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  To make AI friends or AI search?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I think, well, kind of both. But really, AI companions feels like something that Chat G P T, again, because they are all over the place with all their use cases. It's something that they're getting because they are the biggest name said to everyone at all times. It's something that can be replaced by. Any number of other things. Hey, did you read the story about Meta? And how you can have John Cena sext your child? Oh, man, you didn't. No, there was a story Jeff Horowitz.

• 45:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did read that.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Jeff Horowitz, the goat, the goat himself of the Wall Street Journal, where you could have pedophile conversations with Meta's AI. So people are using Meta.

• 45:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, was it, was it?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  It was, you could explicitly have it have, you could say you were underage and it would have a conversation with you. I think they've closed the gap now. It's a great story, incredible journalism by Jeff. But it's like, yeah, people are using this and people are likely using it in sick ways and it's disgusting. And hey, imagine if we'd have regulated tech. Imagine if we'd ever done that, if we had like an EPA for tech, if there was any restraints on these companies. But no, there aren't because what, what if we didn't have growth forever? But nevertheless, it's a use case, but what does that use case prove exactly, other than this can do that? And people are somewhat easily fooled. It's the same.

• 45:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  The jet, the use case that Jeff Horowitz brings up in the Wall Street Journal is not one that I think is gonna be a common one.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Companionship.

• 45:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Companionship is.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Wait, you don't think that a, that a teenage, a horny teenager would try and talk to one of these things about sex?

• 46:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That, I hope that the labs build the.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I hope, I really, no, I genuinely mean this. I'm rooting for Meta and everyone to stop this. They need to. It's fucking horrifying. But yeah, that's a use case. Is it a business? Is it not something that can be easily?

• 46:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would argue that if they get the friendship right, it is a great business because of.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Who is they in this case? And how big, how big could that be?

• 46:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it could be a big one. I mean, again, this is not, this is not the direction I'm rooting for the technology to go into. But if you have AI that replaces a friend for you or is your companion, you would easily, I mean, pay twenty dollars a month. I think that would, that would be an easy subscription charge.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  But let's get into the business thing, though, because I posted this earlier and I mentioned it earlier. For this to be as big, it would need to be the size of the software.

• 46:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is that because of the funding? Sorry, you said.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  It's because it's because of the investment in infrastructure. It would have to be bigger than smartphone markets at four, four fifty, five hundred billion a year, bigger than the enterprise software. We can take that side if we just focus on the consumer use cases. For that to happen, this business would have to, for OpenAI, I think they've estimated they're going to estimate, it's these wank, just total nonsense. I think they've said like one hundred and twenty six billion dollars of revenue a year by twenty twenty nine, something like that. And just to be clear, Netflix made about thirty nine billion dollars in subscriptions last year and Spotify made sixteen billion dollars. So you're telling me that whatever this market is, is going to be bigger than both of those doubled? Is that the plan? No, I'm not saying you here, I'm just saying.

• 47:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I want to answer this question because I'm the one that threw it out there. Look, I think that we are inevitably going to see some of the funding that's gone into this industry go to zero or very low. Without a doubt.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Some maybe, I mean, if you take it in aggregate, we'll see if it pays off. Some will win, I think, but many will lose.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  What does winning mean, though?

• 47:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, they'll get their investment back.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Yeah, that worked out for scale, scales investors.

• 48:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, exactly. So there will be, there will be big, big exit. I think OpenAI will, will IPO at a certain point.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  I think that that is an astonishing leap of logic.

• 48:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, because, okay, you're talking, you want to talk about the structure and the fact that they may never be able to.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Even if they go public, do you think that they, these horrifying books are going to look good to the markets? There is nothing in the markets that looks like this dog. A company that burns five billion, loses five billion dollars by spending nine billion dollars.

• 48:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know, Ed. I mean, CoreWeave is up like an insane amount since its IPO because people are interested in a story.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  That's, that's cool. That's cool. They don't lose anywhere near as much as OpenAI.

• 48:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're, they're eighty one, CoreWeave itself, which is literally just an infrastructure company that sort of resells Nvidia chips.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Does it?

• 48:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, you, you tell me eighty one billion dollars, uh, uh, market cap and. Since their IPO, they're up three hundred twenty five percent.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely wild. So they have a very small float, by the way, most of which is over like Nvidia and MagnaTal.

• 49:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  So CoreWeave will probably raise another ten billion dollars by selling another share sale. They can plug away for a few years, but what happens if the AI bubble bursts, if growth slows? CoreWeave is a business heavily built on GPUs, on raising money based on they. Here's an interesting question. Is it round tripping when Nvidia sells GPUs to a company that they own part of, that they own part of the stock in, that they have a one point three billion dollar Project Osprey uh cloud deal with? Is it round tripping if they sell them the GPUs that CoreWeave then takes the GPUs, raises money from institutional investors based on the value of those GPUs and then uses that money to buy more GPUs from Nvidia?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. Maybe if we had a government to look into that. But fundamentally, CoreWeave and OpenAI are even more insane businesses. CoreWeave owns stuff. They have actual buildings. Now, I don't think that they're ever going to scale. And I do think that that dog will die. And I will dance. Mostly because people, people think that stock valuations actually change anything about my argument, which that, that article really drove me. Mouth of madness.

• 50:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  The reason why I brought it up is you said, is the market gonna read the books about OpenAI?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  But let me finish though.

• 50:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hold on, but I, I'm just saying that the market can go with a story.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  But OpenAI has no assets, really. They don't, they, Microsoft owns their IPO, their pre, sorry, their IPO, their intellectual property. They own their, they, OpenAI owns no infrastructure. They have their staff. They have the research. Wait, Microsoft also has that. They have the exclusive right to sell. No, wait, Microsoft can also sell their models. They don't own Stargate. They don't own the GPUs within any of the servers. In fact, they don't even make enough, I've referred to them as a banana republic, because they require in exterior money to come in constantly. Because when you look at what OpenAI is, they don't own very much of anything. They own part of CoreWeave. They had about three hundred and fifty million dollars worth of CoreWeave stock. That's, that's fun.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  By the way, OpenAI's deal with CoreWeave is pretty much the only way that CoreWeave can uh raise more money. So I hope nothing happens with OpenAI. That's the thing. OpenAI is an asset-light business with research and IP that's owned by another company. They don't have much to trade other than their name. And their name is insanely strong. They really do. But as a company, they would have to IPO, expose themselves in a way that they never want to. Because they would have to say, all of the material deficiencies within the company, they would have to list the genuine risks. And the risks would be, every single thing I'm saying. They would say, Callwave had to amend their S1 to add the counterparty credit risk from OpenAI. Because OpenAI, if they stop paying Callwave, Callwave

• 51:47Speaker 01

  doesn't get a bunch of their revenue. OpenAI starts paying Callwave in October 2025, just as Callwave's second loan, DDT-L2, starts requiring them to pay probably more than OpenAI will be paying them. This is the systemic risk I'm talking about.

• 52:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  500 million user consumer product?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  That loses them money, that converts horribly.

• 52:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, I want to talk about that. Let's take a break and we'll be back talking a little bit more about the infrastructure costs of OpenAI and what ChatGPT is underneath the hood. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

• 52:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 53:17Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 54:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 54:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ed Zitron. He is the host of the Better Offline Podcast. You could also get his newsletter at where'syouredat? What's the? Where'syoured.at? Where'syoured.at? Great domain name. I know. So, so let's talk a little bit about the money that OpenAI loses. And I, so I've been listening to your podcast. And whenever someone brings up this argument that they will learn how to deliver what they have today more efficiently, your next line is something like, I will squash you like a bug. Or I will compact you like a cube in a cart. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's accurate. So do that to me, Ed, because, because, I mean,

• 54:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  the stuff is, without a doubt, getting cheaper to run. Why do you say without a doubt? Because if you look at the, I mean, you could just look at the way that they're, oh, shoot. Now you got me. No, but that's the thing. If you look at the, what the price that they're selling this stuff at, it's lower. That doesn't mean a goddamn thing, man. Well, what about, okay, so now let's, so here I am in the trash compactor. But, but I mean, if you think of, you don't think, so do you deny that there's any algorithmic efficiency being had within these? I'm sure they're trying, but the one publicly known one. You think that this is sustainable? They had, they were selling, so GPT-4, OpenAI's GPT-4 was three cents per 1,000 tokens.

• 55:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Prom tokens. Oh, for many is, uh, it's a, what is it? A dollar ten per million tokens. It's much cheaper.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you think that they're just losing more money as opposed to becoming more efficient in the way that they're.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Maybe there's some calculation where they're losing less money, but they're still losing money.

• 55:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, there, there have been, I'm going to get a little out of my depth here because I'm going to talk about model architecture. But there have been architectural innovations that have made it cheaper to run these models, like the mixture of experts model.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  When you say these models, which are you referring to?

• 56:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, you could talk about, uh, I mean, yeah, big foundational models.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Okay, but we're talking specifically about OpenAI.

• 56:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Open AIs. So I think they do use, I mean, let's just talk about the mixture of experts model, right? So instead of lighting up the whole model to get an answer, they will channel your query into the area where they think the model can answer. I mean, the, the, the folks who built DeepSeek, it seems like that was a big part of the way that they were able to make it cheaper.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Right. Why do you think, okay, I shouldn't really be asking the questions, your podcast, with DeepSeek? Isn't it weird that we didn't really see any efficiency gains discussed by a single one of the model companies? That none of them even seem to do the same thing, other than perplexity, releasing like a seventeen seventy-six version of R1 without the Tiananmen Square thing? Just one of the, Aravind's, he's like, he is so, so lame.

• 57:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, you brought this up a couple of times. Just let it out about perplexity. What don't you like about them?

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, they're an insanely badly run company. They, they did like thirty-five million, they lost in, I forget exactly how much they lost, but they did refunds or discounts for like thirty million dollars. They're literally giving money away to make people use it. And even then, they only have like fifty million users. Uh, I also think that as a CEO, Aravind just goes and says shit that is just annoying. He just, he could be.

• 57:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm surprised that you're saying that you want him to behave better.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  It's not that I want him to behave better. I wish he'd just be more direct about what perplexity can do. But every fucking few weeks, he did this whole touchdown dance after the Google search trial. And then nothing else. He's not, it doesn't feel like he's trying to create a competitor to Google. It feels like he's making a Silicon Valley hero story out of himself, and it's boring and lame, and it's a bad business. Give it up. Okay, that means, I don't mean like shut down the company, but. He's good at raising money, I guess. But back to the back to the model thing and the efficiency thing. Yes, they are losing money because it just real easy one. They would be saying if they won't. You think that Sam Altman, if they had managed to make this profitable, would not go out there and tell everyone. He absolutely would.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Also, he'd be telling investors immediately. They one of the great reports of the information. I quote them a lot because they're doing some of the best tech journalism out there.

• 58:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which reporter?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Uh, it was, um, might be an Anissa Gardizi or Stephanie Palatso. John Victor over there is excellent and our fucker is gonna come. Corey Weinberg's done some excellent work on Koi. There's also a new person there who I'm forgetting who did.

• 58:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a good number.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  No, but like they've got like a really excellent team, but where was I? You would get leaks that say that they've gone profitable and that would be.

• 58:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I don't think they want to go profitable. They're just trying to, at least at the moment, most startups at this stage don't want to be profitable.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Uh, OpenAI's stage?

• 58:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think so.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They're on like the equivalent of like series D or E. That's absolutely when you go profitable.

• 59:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so again, let let me just.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  And then they need to go public.

• 59:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm gonna bring up their side of it, just for sake of the argument. Um, I think what they're trying to do is get this technology in the hands of as many people as possible, and they understand that it's a more capital intensive technology than most others.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And?

• 59:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so therefore they're not profitable.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  So that they.

• 59:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I don't think there is.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Is there a magic profit?

• 59:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, that's that. That's what I was gonna bring up. I don't think there is a switch that they could flip today and be profitable and deliver the same quality of models.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I think.

• 59:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Could they just like switch Chat GPT to GPT four and potentially be profitable? Maybe?

• 59:37Speaker 01

  They Sam Altman has suggested that they would take away the model selector months ago. He he likes to say stuff and then just they disappear. Gets the articles, nothing happens. Very good for Sammy. It's the thing is, I think that what's happened is everyone thought about a year and a half ago that this was gonna change. It was going to, because there was that big jump from GPT three to GPT four to GPT four O. There was the multimodal side. It was like a oh, this is really interesting. The voice mode was interesting. It's like, oh, I can extrapolate from here that we made this big ass leap. So in six months, we're gonna be here and then six months after that, except it was like, and six months, we're gonna be.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Here and then maybe we're here and another six.

• 1:00:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  For listeners, Ed is doing the very incremental.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Doing like a very small hand gesture. So that's the thing. I think that they're all wrapped up in it. And yeah, OpenAI is absolutely trying to get as many users as possible. The problem is if you're losing money on each one and also their conversion rate. Here's my favorite OpenAI stat. Well, more of a question I always ask, which is, why do they not show monthly active users? They talk weekly. And the reason is because if you compared what their real monthly active users would be 500 million weekly. So I'm going to guess 700 million monthly. Divided by the 15.5 million customers that pay for it. That's a dog's doo doo of a conversion rate. That is so bad.

• 1:01:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you're saying that they're giving the lower number that's more active because they don't want to make it seem like very few convert.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  They don't want to. They don't want the conversion rate out there. They don't want people to say, oh, you have a conversion. I can't do math very well. Me and me and ChatGPT share a problem. Um, it's.

• 1:01:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, just throw a number up.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  No, but.

• 1:01:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Be very confident about it, Ed.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Two percentage-ish, like a really bullshit conversion rate. For the most notable company in the most notable industry with all the press and all the marketing. That's their conversion rate. That's bad, man. It means that they can't work out. And no one else can work out what the hell to sell this on. Indeed. Sam Altman loves to say, oh, yeah, I can't wait to see what you build with it. Mate, what are you building with it? You're the fucking owner. And they want their API business. It sounds like also weirdly Anthropic is doing better on API. But they're selling more, a larger percentage of their business is API. But they still lost like 5.2 billion dollars last year. It's completely insane.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  But it's, it's just so strange because you can have something this big that fails. You can have something this big. And when I say fail, I don't mean. ChatGPT goes down and everything and all the people in the building get thrown out. It would be somewhat messier and I can go into that at some point. But I think the. We are in a moment of mass delusion where no one really wants to talk about these numbers because when you talk about them, they're scary. And here's why. Okay, magnificent seven stocks make up about thirty five percent of the US stock market. Nineteen percent of that is made up by Nvidia. Nvidia's revenue, I believe, is like high eighties based on GPU sales.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Data center revenue in the last earnings from Nvidia was below analyst's expectations. No one really wanted to write about that one because Nvidia is pretty much holding up the stock market on some level. It is every time Nvidia earnings come around, there is some story on like Take Him From Baron says, I love Nvidia. And then everyone else says, I don't know, I hope that this is good. It really is like, I hope that this is good. I think you're right about that. And the reason Nvidia is making all the money is that everyone's agreeing to buy GPUs. Today, and so a couple of weeks later from this, obviously, Amazon said something that they're using that someone, it might have been Anthropic, forgive me for wrong, but they're using five hundred thousand Tranium GPUs, their own.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  What happens if Tranium takes a meaningful chunk out of Amazon's spend with Nvidia? That's a chunk of revenue gone. What happens if Microsoft's data center pullback means that they eventually finish retro, because I'm assuming that they are retrofitting Blackwell chips into into their previous service. I would humor that argument. OpenAI is if Abilene, Texas goes well, which I don't know if it will, for that's forty billion dollars of revenue once for Nvidia. We are basically saying that Nvidia will continue growing because it's not like Nvidia could just keep doing this well. The market requires growth forever. Nvidia, we are saying that within the next year or two, Nvidia will be making a hundred and or more billion dollars in GPU sales.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  And the year after that, it will be a hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty, a quarter. That's, I'm the crazy one for suggesting that's bad. Well, I think that there's. And this is all dependent. Yep. On one thing, the continued purchase of GPUs for generative AI. What happens if that's not the case? What happens if, I don't know, there's, say the efficiency gains are there, say that happens. Say that Google, they mentioned that one H one hundred can run one of their Gemini models, I forget which. What if that is how they scale? Wouldn't that mean they need less GPUs? So, put aside all of the gains and the growth.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Nvidia is just holding everyone up and the capital expenditures from the rest of the magnificent seven is holding Nvidia up. What happens? What happens? What happens? The market goes tits up? Do you think the market will go, yeah, well, they're not buying the GPUs and Nvidia is doing badly, but we still love AI? Fuck no, they're gonna say, what did we spend all this money on? I'm going under the bed, I'm gonna find the pornography you've been looking at, you're all in trouble. Because people don't like tech right now, people are pissed at the tech industry. And this is all vibes, man. Because when you look at the numbers, numbers are bad. So, yeah, my long and short of it is, the reason I am alarmist about this is these numbers are alarming. And I am shocked and actually kind of disgusted at some people in the media for not being more alarmed.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Because if things progress in the way, and I really think it will, in this way. People's pensions, retirements are gonna be fucked. So much lies on this. Retail investors make up a large chunk of the buying for Nvidia as well, recently as well. It's so worrying. And the growth from AI isn't there either. These companies are not making shit tons of money. Microsoft, two quarters straight, said they would tell you their ARR for AI. They think it was one quarter, they said ten billion ARR, which is month times twelve. Next quarter, they said thirteen billion. Next quarter, they just didn't bring it up. Probably because the growth rate's flat. What are we doing, man?

• 1:06:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that there's, that you're right, that a lot of this trade is predicated on scale working. And that is a lot, that is a risk. Because, I mean, what we're hearing from the tech companies is that they're getting diminishing returns from scale and like in terms of making these models bigger, building up the GPU clusters, training them with more data, like it's not.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Out of data as well.

• 1:06:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true, that's true. And I think maybe that's why you see the scale acquisition from Meta.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 1:06:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Because it's one of the most, like, top of the market bullshit. Fourteen billion dollars for Alexander Wang, a labor abuser at scale. I mean lowercase s there. And on top of that, basically cutting off the fuel supply for multiple companies for training data at a time they're running out.

• 1:07:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it's interesting because a lot of those companies are, they're cutting it off on their own. But yeah, you're right.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  OpenAI was moving away.

• 1:07:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're right.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  But Google was their biggest customer and they pulled away.

• 1:07:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I think just going back to the scaling thing, everybody is now admitting that there are diminishing returns for making these models bigger. Uh, and I think we're really going to hit a point where they're going to say, do I need, if I'm, you know, okay, I'm just buying this month, you know, billions and billions more Nvidia chips to make my model a little bit better. Um, do I need to be doing that?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just to go back to a conversation that I had a couple of weeks ago, or now a month plus, um, with Sergey Brin, where he said he thinks that the improvement is going to largely be algorithmic.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Meaning what?

• 1:07:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of these models, meaning not by adding, um, more GPUs and data, by like actually changing the algorithms inside these models to make them better.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Things like reasoning, okay? I'm just saying that like, right now within.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Algorithmic, anyway.

• 1:07:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's just talk about it. Uh, right now, within these tech companies, there is a consideration that maybe scale, scaling up these models isn't what's going to get them there. And then there is that risk to Nvidia.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  And he.

• 1:08:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  And if that goes down, then it could be a problem.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  It will go down. Like, that's the thing. At some point, putting aside my feelings about AI, at some point, there will not be enough space. There will not be enough space for these GPUs. There will be not enough space on the earth to fill with them. There will eventually not be a need to, are you saying that my, because the assumption here that this keeps going is that Nvidia either comes up with a completely, like the Ruben, for example, are we meant to believe that everyone who's just getting Blackwell, when Ruben comes out, it's going to go, yep, I definitely need that? Is that, that is the gamble. And. It's just, it's kind of scary because whether or not AI succeeds, because also the growth isn't there. The software sales aren't there, even if they made the software sales profitable tomorrow.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  The actual revenue is really piss poor, like it's not that much, even if OpenAI was profitable. Okay, they're the biggest AI company, cool. Are they going to a hundred billion a year? Bullshit, no. And also, if they made it profitable, someone else would and they would get price fucked. It's just, it's such a brittle industry. There's never been anything of this scale this bad within tech. You can say the fiber boom, but no, you didn't have every single software company selling a fiber solution. You did every consumer, we just didn't have apps back then in the same way. But you didn't have Notepad and Microsoft Word trying to sell you fiber or saying the new glory of fiber is here. Partly because of the society we lived in at the time, but it's like, this is bonkers.

• 1:09:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  The argument that Nvidia's would make, it would be that eventually AI use is going to be so intense that you'll actually need more GPUs to fulfill that demand.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Fascinating. What I, Jensen Huang, I give him credit, he's got great leather jackets. Sounds like horrible to work with, but.

• 1:10:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why do you think horrible to work with?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  The reports, like there have been multiple, multiple reports of it, like he's an aggressive CEO. Probably worse, it's probably better, but he's an aggressive fucking CEO and he humiliated someone at CES. It was someone at CES, Soundguy, and he called him out by name in front of everyone. Disgusting. You have, you have a bazillion dollars, you should be, you should be happy to be there, but he'll never be happy. He wants some more GPUs. It's, it's frustrating though. I understand, but also what's Jensen Huang meant to do is go up on stage, be like, yeah, we're fucked. We're gonna, people are eventually not gonna buy these, I should let you know as the CEO. No, he's not gonna say that, he's gonna say, yeah, well, there'll always be, he's done it before, he'll do it again. That's the, Nvidia will be fine long term. They're actually positioned because they make real things and Jensen Huang is a pretty good CEO.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  They have actual innovation there, they have tons of different layers to the company, the actual value creation. They have the monopoly on the consumer graphics market, they do make good stuff. There's a lot of problems with their consumer hardware right now, well, sorry, consumer graphics hardware right now, there's. Where basically they've killed the mid-market. It that sucks, but still a business that sells things and owns things. The rest of them, right now, I think it's more likely that at some point they go, why are we doing this? This is so annoying. This is so annoying. It's so costly. I think Sachin at Della is also really tired of Sam Altman. From everything I've heard, based on by which I mean red, I'm not like it's sourced with them. I wish I'll fly on the wall in those.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Everything that's been reported, Journal's done some really good reporting on this, has basically said that that relationship is frayed because I think Sam Altman thought he had more power than he does. And Redmond, you're against the ultra monopolist. You're against like the OG, the Michael Jordan of monopolies. Like they beat the antitrust claims with MS Dos and Windows.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  You, I know what we're going to talk about this at some point, but the conversation that's on the conversation, the story about the whole threat of antitrust from OpenAI.

• 1:12:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, just just bring it up now, now that you've brought it up.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's just been on my mind ever since I read the story. So right now, OpenAI, in this wonky thing, is trying to convert part of itself into a for-profit entity with control from the nonprofit board, which Sam Altman's still on, but whatever. Part of that conversion requires Microsoft to say, okay. And Microsoft says, okay, well, we'll convert in exactly the way right now. Forty nine percent of shares and we'll continue having your IP and up until you get AGI, which is no. And we also get to sell your models exclusively and we have all your research too. Sounds great to us. And Sam Altman said, no, actually, you should get thirty three percent. You shouldn't be able to have access to our IP after a certain point. Also,

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  the Windsurf acquisition. I don't know if that's ever going to happen because Microsoft is, according to the Journal, is Berber Jin over there. Apparently, the Windsurf acquisition has become a major problem because my OpenAI is saying, well, we can't give you the IP from them. You compete with them with Copilot. And Microsoft says, actually, our contract says you have to. We get and the line in the article is hilarious. It's like Microsoft gave the blessing for the Windsurf acquisition under the current terms. It's just like, yeah, of course they did. And the thing is, OpenAI has allegedly hinted at, by which I mean leaked to the Journal, I assume. I don't I don't have any interior knowledge there, that they were considering an antitrust action. Against Microsoft for some reason, people sign away their First Amendment rights and NDAs

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  all the time, like they, people make contracts to give away their rights all the time. It's not anti-competitive because you don't like a contract. Also, even if they filed it today, good luck seeing that shit in front of a judge for three years. You don't have that kind of time. The fact that they're saying that suggests that things are desperate because understandably, Microsoft said, oh, also my, um, OpenAI wants to reduce Microsoft's revenue share. It's like, uh, I put it in a monologue I recorded today as like, being in a hostage situation, putting a gun to your own head and saying, if you don't give me what I want, I'll give you the hostages and kill myself. Cause it is, it's like, Microsoft, the only reason Microsoft would agree to these terms is because of reputational damage, because Sam Altman believes he is the most popular, well-liked special boy in the world.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And I think he believes that Microsoft would just roll over. And Microsoft said, why, why should we bother? We don't have to do that. And sure, they could work it out. There's every chance that Microsoft just goes, oh, fuck it, I don't care. But also, why would they? Why would they? Why would they do that? What possible value? Indeed, now it would be a reputational harm to Microsoft. It would suggest that Microsoft can't negotiate. And then the information had another story today where it went, so a couple of weeks ago, where it was saying that OpenAI has been undercutting Microsoft in deals, selling their models and undercutting their enterprise subscription deals.

• 1:14:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  And just making a deal with Google, by the way.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Oh, the Google, well, oh my God, are you talking about the Google compute deal? This is my favorite deal ever signed. Okay, here is how the Google deal works. OpenAI is contracting Google for cloud compute. Google is contracting CoreWeave to serve that compute. Why would OpenAI not just hire CoreWeave? Well, I'm, I assume Google needs to add some revenue, even if they're probably just losing, but it's the most strange situation I've ever heard, just, I feel like we need more tech analysts who just look at the absurdity of all this, cause it is absurd. But no, so within this situation, you've got OpenAI competing with Microsoft to sell their own models and undercutting them. Microsoft provides all their infrastructure. Sure, Microsoft probably fears some anti-competitive action if they start taking measures against

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  OpenAI, but Microsoft never.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  I don't think that Microsoft has to provide them the discounted like a quarter of the price as your costs, which they at least as recently as last year were providing them. I don't think Microsoft has to give them any of the things they have to. OpenAI signed a dogshit deal, a really bad deal, that made sense at the time because I assume that they thought this would do something different than it did. Now they're in a price war and what OpenAI is doing, the undercutting thing? That's a Michael Jordan, sorry, Michael Jordan, the Michael Jordan of monopolies, I should say, that's a Microsoft move. A Microsoft move just go, I'm just gonna lower the prices until you die. You can't do that when you lose billions of dollars a year, dickhead, you've got. Microsoft does that because they have the ability to just go, we will pay ourselves using our monopoly over business software.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  We will use it over a monopoly over Azure and one of the three companies that really makes meaningful cloud revenue. Like, that's the thing, Microsoft can bankroll that crap. OpenAI can't. And on top of that, if OpenAI does an antitrust action, I think I mentioned it earlier, 2,000 people in Microsoft's legal department, 2,000 people. You've got a small army, you've got more people working legal at Microsoft than work at OpenAI all told. It's just brazen and I think that, I think it could, there is a chance, I'm not saying it's for sure, but Microsoft could kill OpenAI. Because they need to, by the end of the year, OpenAI must convert to a for-profit entity or SoftBank does not have to give them more than $20 billion total. SoftBank's already given them $10 billion.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Another problem, another, just that this is a small one, I, I'm sure this is easily gonna be solved. SoftBank, to give OpenAI that money and to buy Ampere for, I think, 6 billion or something, they had to get a one-year, $15 billion convert, convertible, um, bridge loan even. And it, they had to go to 21 banks. Hurt their credit rating? Yeah, um, I think that there, there was a threat, like, there was a story, there was a consideration of hurting their credit rating, I don't think it's happened yet. And on top of that, SoftBank does not have the money to do the next, the next thirty billion dollars. They don't have it. They would have to raise more money.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Now, another story that went out where it was saying that now they're going to the Saudis and they're going to Reliance, I think in India. And it's like, you don't go and do the Saudis unless things are not looking good. And SoftBank is, so if they raise another thirty billion dollars, SoftBank will only be providing twenty billion of that. So ten billion will be syndicated. So OpenAI on top of SoftBank having to do all of this gumf to make this happen, to have, find money that they don't have. They will have to raise ten billion dollars, one of the largest private rounds of all time. And if they succeed, they will have to do it again and again and again and again and again. Because OpenAI will be, according to their own projections, burning money until twenty twenty nine, twenty thirty, when Stargate, which will somehow exist,

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  which will also require another nineteen billion dollars from SoftBank that they don't have. Once that happens, they will go profitable somehow. It's just really strange that this is considered a, like an outlier position versus arguably one of the least stable financial situations in history. And perhaps not tantamount to the subprime mortgage crisis, because that was so, that was so clearly like when you saw the fundament of it. I don't think that if this, I am not an expert in mortgage security, so forgive me, but I can't imagine it would have happened in the same way if it happened today, just because there was more access to information. But in that case, we just had millions of consumers with loans they couldn't pay off.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  That was bigger and would have more widespread damage because there are people losing their houses and then it fucked the economy. I don't think this is going to be super far off when it happens because of the Mag Seven problem in Nvidia. And what's holding it up is one company that burns billions of dollars. Their sugar daddy out in Japan, run by Masayoshi Son, who is well known for losing money and making really bad investments. By the way, another question, all the reporters talking about the three billion dollars a year in agents that SoftBank was gonna buy. Where's the fucking reporting on that? Absolutely egregious, almost as egregious as people claiming OpenAI had closed a forty billion dollar round. They didn't do that. They ain't got the money. No one's got the money. Why is OpenAI raising money for a round that they claim was?

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  It's just, it frustrates me because people will get hurt.

• 1:20:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let me, what is the best argument against the claims that you're making? Have you heard one?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Honestly, I would love to. It very much is if a frog had wings, it could fly. It's like, if they get better, sure, if they manage to make this much, much cheaper and they end up working at a thing that could sell really well, sure.

• 1:20:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I ask you, you run a PR firm, that's your core business.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:20:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  That that's what brings in the most revenue.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Um, with easy PR, no, it's, I mean, it's spread across the businesses.

• 1:20:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, okay.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  As in like, as in like.

• 1:20:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Media and a PR.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, how do you, as someone who owns a PR firm, decide that this is, I'm just curious, this is not like.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  A lot of my business is working with journalists.

• 1:20:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  To pitch clients to them.

• 1:20:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  And I stay away from AI stuff. Like, I, I don't work with, I worked with a consumer TV company. I didn't write about anything like that for obvious reasons. The thing is, a lot of my business is talking to journalists. Journalists want to be presented stuff that matters to them, that comes from a person who's considered and read their work. The fact is, I can sit there and read their work all the time. It's what I've done for like ten, fifteen fucking years I've been doing this business. Like, it's the same thing, except I started writing. And yeah, um, I fairly well demonstrated that I understand what I'm talking about in the writing I do. And I also firewall that very precisely.

• 1:21:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it hasn't hurt the PR firm then?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:21:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  No, and in fact, the client, clients kind of like it. Like, they, they appreciate the fact that I can elucidate that I understand business. And it's one of those things where, yeah, it is, at some point, the media stuff will probably take it over, but I'm just, I'm having a great time doing all of it. On top of that, when it comes to doing PR, doing media relations, so much what PR people don't have is basic knowledge. And I do pride myself on knowing what I'm fucking talking about.

• 1:21:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  And it helps, and it's great. And also, there are strict firewalls. CES is a great example. So I had a client at CES at the time. I would pitch them for the show, pitch a journalist to come on my show beforehand, before I pitched them the client. Because I didn't want any possible situation where they thought for even a second, even though I don't think they'd think this, that them saying no to my client.

• 1:22:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Anything to do with the show. And it, and there were, there were people that said no to stuff who came on the show, and it was fine. Who gives a shit? Like, it's like, they, they are separate entities. And my clients are very respectful of that as well.

• 1:22:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can we just take a moment of levity because the way I first found out about what you do was when, speaking of CES, I think you told, you told like a bunch of people that you would meet them at Updog and they would say, what's up dog? And you would say, nothing much, you?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that was so much fun. They were so pissed. They were so.

• 1:22:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  You got them good.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  You panned someone to get, no, that was great as well.

• 1:22:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what happened there?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  So what it was, was I was, I had, was heading back to England, I think. It was a few days before I headed back. And I was getting spammed. And it's like, I'm not, I went to CES because I think I had a blog at some point that got me in the media system. They screen light you automatically. So I said, okay. Um, I'm just going to respond to these people who have not, and none of these people have considered who I was for a second because they just spam me. So I respond with like, can you send me more info on Updog? And they'd be like, what's up dog? I'm like, nothing much. What's up with you? Most of them didn't respond. Some responded, I can't believe you do this. I can't, this is so unprofessional. One of my favorite tweets to me was like, oh, making fun of your peers. You're a real douchebag. I have that tweet somewhere. It's so funny. Cause it's like, look, if someone got me like that, I'd be like, oh, fuck.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Like, it's like yesterday I said to my dear friend, Casey Kagawa, I said to him, um, you have hit this number of paying subs. They said, you'll never eat all those. And I got so pissed at him because it was such a good dunk because he was suggesting I was talking about sub sandwiches. Not a great joke, but he got me good. If you get done with a funny joke in a professional scenario, you should enjoy the fact that you're not having to talk about business for a second. I don't judge anyone who failed for that. You're a fucking PR person emailing a bazillion people. Laugh with me. We're all having a good time, or you should be. Apparently a major agency that was sent a company-wide email saying, warning, Ed Zitron, which is really funny and uh.

• 1:24:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was your screen name for a while?

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  It was, it was. Was it, man? Good callback. Real OG fan. I, no, it's, um, yeah, that was really, it was really funny. I meant no harm with it. And I think anyone who took it, anyone who took offense to that, go outside.

• 1:24:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me, let me ask you this to, to end. I mean. We have, we have listeners here, I think that believe in the power of AI are working in it, are implementing it, are building it, and some that are concerned about it, worried about it, and really are curious about the business side of things. And sometimes those people overlap. You build a sizable audience among people who are really concerned about this. And I think that every time we do a show about like the downsides of AI, people grab on to it. I mean, even with the Gary Marcus show, like there are people that will like go in the comments on YouTube months afterwards and be like, this helped me like sort of have come down from all the AI based fear.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  I didn't know like that yesterday.

• 1:25:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what do you think, why do you think people are so concerned about this technology? And why do you think the criticism of it resonates the way that it does?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  I think there's a few things. I think one is the most obvious, which is I think anyone would be afraid of someone taking their job. I think it's a natural thing of the thing I have, someone might take it. And when you have the entire media and most public companies saying, I can't wait to replace humans, you mean nothing to me. Yeah, that's scary. People, when you have Ezra Klein and Kevin Roos saying AGI is just around the corner, baby, and it's going to change everything. Now it's that they never say how. That's very scary. And this is not saying people are stupid or uninformed. The average person does not have my very special stupid mind where I'm like, I must learn all the numbers. And most people don't have the time to sit down. They have jobs, they have families,

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  they have things to do, more fun things, I imagine. So they see the fucking news and they get scared. And then I think there's a layer deeper where tons of people realize that something is being, they're being told a lie, that they go and use chat GPT and they go, okay, this search is better. My friend talks to it like a therapist, which is worrying. But they keep describing, they referring to big companies, Sam Altman, as the next big thing, the power of AI. But when a regular person looks at it, they go, this isn't, this isn't what they're saying. But everywhere saying it is, and their bosses are saying AIs and everything. And I think that people feel this cognitive dissonance and they feel it profoundly. It's the same way they felt about the metaverse. It's the same way they felt about crypto, AR,

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  VR, all of these things, but none, none of those were this pungent. And you've really just seen companies so horny for the idea of replacing people. They're so excited. They shouldn't. You as a CEO, unless you care more about your shareholders and growth, which is Andy Jassy's MBA, as are all of them, I think. I think all of them other than Mark Zuckerberg have MBAs now, all the major big tech CEOs. I don't know if Jensen does. Anyway, um.

• 1:27:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, let's let's get this right. So.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  I think Tim Cook does, Sachin Adella, Sundar Pichai, he worked at McKinsey.

• 1:27:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Andy Jassy. I even think the guy who replaced Andy Jassy at AWS has an MBA.

• 1:27:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, okay.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Pretty sure I'm correct on those. If I'm if I'm wrong, score me. Um, but people realize that there's a disconnection by from what's being told. And yet they are very clearly seeing how lascivious people are around the idea of replacing them. So they have this dual offense of you haven't even built the future yet, but you're doing the touchdown dance and you're so proud of the fact you replaced me. You're so excited to replace a real person. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have fake friends. Sam Altman wants you to have fake coders. And then they see that the outputs are kind of shit. They see that it doesn't really replace people. It replaces an aspect of labor and a small aspect of labor in exactly the same way that bad bosses mistreat their employees, do not value their labor.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  I had this thing I wrote called The Era of the Business Idiot, did a three-part episode on it. And my principal thing is I believe throughout most power structures, there are people that do not understand work, that do not want to do work, and exist as a kind of ultra-middle manager. I think Sam Altman is their antichrist, which sounds dramatic, but hear me out. Sam Altman is the single most gifted business idiot whisperer of all time. He convinced, look at what he's done. I think he's reprehensible, a real scumbag, but I cannot, I cannot ignore the work he's doing. Just, he convinced fucking Oracle to do all these chips. He convinced Masayoshi Son, Sachin Adella. Of course, he's confident that he can con Microsoft. I think he's wrong, because he's done it before. He convinced

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  everybody that generative AI was the future without really proving it. Someone else did that work for him. Someone else built ChatGPT. How many of the people who built ChatGPT is still there? Ilya Sutskevich, respect to the guy for just doing his own scam, Mir Murati, same deal. I get a Steven Levy piece being like, yeah, they're gonna build an AI thing. And I'm like.

• 1:29:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh my god, oh my god.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  And then on top of all of this, you have this bullshit about AGI, the most fictional of all fictional concepts. I I've said this a few times, it's like having a bunch of billionaires saying they're going to hunt and capture Santa Claus. It, we are closer to the Ninja Turtles. I'm deadly fucking serious. I've talked to biologists. That's about as firm as Sam Orman can get with AGI too, because that's the thing. You have all these people hearing that there's going to be this conscious computer. And they're fucking scared of that, of course they are, even though it's a complete lie, even though it's a falsehood because Kevin Roos had was at a dinner party with some other credulous people.

• 1:29:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't like Kevin Roos.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  I think Kevin Roos was very good at his job and he has now gone anti-remote work, pro-metaverse, pro-NFT.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Multiple, the pudgy penguins column was disgusting.

• 1:30:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  What was that?

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  He joined a Penguin NFT club.

• 1:30:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  That was the article. There was the helium one as well.

• 1:30:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  I will say, and I think it's important to note, unlike crypto, metaverse, um, AI feels different to me.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  It is different.

• 1:30:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is, it seems far more useful.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  There are more products, there are more actual, I will, I, indeed, when this bubble started, I pushed back on people, said it's just like crypto, it's just like metaverse, because there was a thing here.

• 1:30:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  It wasn't as big as people said, no, but the egregious lie with the metaverse was like, we've made a VR space, this is worth one hundred bazillion dollars now. But with Roos, he did an article about helium, a crypto company, and then Matt Binder, I believe, over at Mashable. You got outplayed by Mashable, man. Actually, Binder's amazing. Not, not, tons of great people there, that's, anyway. With Roos, he did this story where he was like, yeah, helium works with Lime and Salesforce. Turns out they didn't. Turns out they didn't. Matt Binder went and asked and they went, they went, no, we didn't. Kevin Roos added by saying skeptics have suggested, or critics have suggested, that this wasn't the case. It's like, motherfucker, come on. I don't like Kevin Roos because he has this amazing power, he has this huge audience,

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  and he chooses to support the powerful. He did a story about AI, an AI welfare guy, an AI welfare guy being added to Anthropic. Just a Ninja Turtles expert, it's, we will find the ooze, the ooze is here, by talking about-

• 1:31:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I thought that was an interesting story.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  I thought it was fucking stupid because it didn't discuss the welfare of AI. If you discuss the welfare of AGI, if we have a conscious computer, you are describing a slave. If this thing has consciousness, you now have issues of personage.

• 1:31:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you open to the idea that it could be?

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  I think it could be possible in thirty fifty. I think we are.

• 1:31:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're just now saying you're open to this idea of AGI.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  I'm open to the idea in the same way that I'm open to the idea of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the sense that if we got the ooze that could do it, AGI, we do not have evidence it's possible. We don't understand how humans think. How the fuck are we meant to create it in a computer? But say we do, and this is the dirty part of the conversation no one wants to have. Say they succeed. Are you saying that this conscious being that Microsoft owns, by the way? Microsoft owns this conscious being with intelligence and consciousness and a personality. Are you saying we wouldn't let that free? Because what you were describing there would be a slave.

• 1:32:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it should not be the goal.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  I know, but that's what they're thinking. Now, they could say, oh, we'll do it, but we'll make it so its consciousness just focuses on doing whatever Salesforce wants. Still a slave.

• 1:32:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  This is the thing. If Kevin, I genuinely would have respected Kevin had he done that thing and then had a really like agonized discussion, which is genuinely interesting. Saying, what would be the ethical ramifications of owning a conscious thing? Fascinating.

• 1:32:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But doesn't that story that the that the labs are thinking about this kick off that conversation like? I don't think that you can expect.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I'm Wario Amade. I have decided that.

• 1:33:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  That I'm never calling him his real name.

• 1:33:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, all right.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Um, Dario, I'm sorry, Dario.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  I am. I am him. I am trying to work out reasons for people to invest in me in the future. I think probably give, let's call it a million dollar salary, probably a couple mil more in stock. I'll make a new guy. A new guy will come in and his thing will be AI welfare. What does that mean? What if it's life? We can do a Google Doc, back and forth. Karen Howes, Empires of AI, does an excellent job of discussing how many of these people fart in a glass and sniff it? Because they have jobs there where they just say, I'm gonna, what if this happens? What if this happens? It's a marketing spend and it worked. It worked on a guy who it's worked on before. Kevin Roos did an article recently about a company claiming that they were going to replace workers. You know what they hadn't done? Even created the environment they do it in.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Kevin can do good journalism. He's done really good. The Young Money he did is great. Like, there is actual things. Casey Newton is the same way. Like, they're good journalists. They could do good journalism. They could even do, if they were optimists, they could engage in actual optimism. There'd be interesting things. The welfare story is a great example. Man, having a conversation in The Times about what's considered human or not, where have they not been doing that elsewhere? Anyway, I was like, um, it's just, it's this frustrating thing where the, ultimately, the people that suffer will be the people who depend on the markets for their pensions. The people, the markets do eventually affect the workforce. And on top of this, the other thing is that we've got major

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  people in the media, hot and heavy over the idea of replacing people. Hot and heavy, they're excited. I think that's disgraceful on top of it. Who are you fighting for? Who are you writing for? It isn't clear.

• 1:34:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. I think you and I will disagree on Kevin Roos and on some other things, but I am, I am glad that we've had this discussion.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:35:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, I don't agree with everything you've said. Uh, I think it was good that we had a conversation where we, you know, brought some of this out there, tested it. Uh, and, and I think the one thing I'll say is, I leave open the space that you're right.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's, and I think that, that is why I think you have a very interesting perspective on this. And I think that's why it was important for us to have this conversation.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  I'm really happy to be, and we've talked a good amount about this.

• 1:35:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, we have.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  And like, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 1:35:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Well, thank you for coming, folks. If you're interested in the podcast, it's better offline. The newsletter is where'syoured.at. Uh, and it's also the Still Alive and Kicking, ezpr, ezpr.com. All right, everybody. Thank you, Ed.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:35:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you for watching or listening, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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