Make Fun Of Them, Pt. 1

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron, of course.

And I want to start you off with a little bit of a question. Have you ever heard Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speak? You ever heard the words come out of his mouth?

Look, I'm going to share with you today some of the trench and insights from Sam Altman.

I'm going to start with this agonizing 37-minute long podcast conversation he had with his brother Jack Altman from last month. I warn you, he really is an annoying and stupid dickhead.

Well, I think there will be incredible like other products. Like there will be crazy new social experiences.
There will be like

Google Docs style

AI workflows that are just way more productive. You'll start to see like you'll have these like virtual employees.

But the thing that I think will be the most impactful on that five to 10 year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science.

Yes, this tech podcast is now actually a food podcast, and today's special is the word salad.

When asked why he believes AI will discover new science, Altman says, I think we've cracked reasoning in the models, adding that we've got a long way to go and that he thinks we know what to do, adding that OpenAI's O3 model is already pretty smart and that he's heard people say, wow, this is like a good PhD.

And that's the entire answer, by the way. It's a completely nonsensical answer.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, a company allegedly worth $300 billion to venture capitalists and softbank, he kind of sounds like a huge fucking idiot.

but head you cry you can't just call sam altman an idiot he isn't stupid he runs a big company he's super successful my counter to that is first yes i can i'm actually doing it right now and second if altman didn't want to be called stupid he wouldn't say stupid with a straight face to a massive global audience now when his brother jack asked so reasoning will lead to science going faster or just new stuff or both and by the way that is the question sam altman said i mean you already hear scientists who say they're faster with ai like we don't have ai maybe autonomously doing science, but if a human scientist is three times as productive using O3, that's still a pretty big deal.

Yeah. And then as that keeps going and the AI can like autonomously do some science, figure out novel physics.

At this point, Jack Altman asked if, and I quote, that is all happening as a co-pilot now. And I know it sounds like I may have maybe misunderstood him.
Maybe I read the transcription.

I didn't actually, I listened to the whole thing. In fact, Manasowski, my producer, producer, please play the clipping question.
Is it all that happening as a co-pilot right now?

Yeah, there's definitely not. Like, you definitely can't go say, like, hey, ChatGPT, figure out

new physics and expect that to work. So I think it is currently co-pilot-like, but I've heard like anecdotal reports from biologists where it's like, wow, it really did figure out an idea.

I had to develop it a little bit more, but it made like a fundamental leap. Now, this is a nonsensical conversation, and both of them sound very, very stupid.

To be clear, none of this is like poorly put into context. Like, they sound like this for the entire 37 minutes.
I didn't have to do anything.

I didn't need to make many moves to make them sound like stupid dickheads. They sound like it on their own.
Now, let's go to some of the more quotes.

So, so this is going to make new science or make science faster? asked Jack Altman. Yeah, I hear scientists are using AI to go faster, and citation needed there, Sammy.

But if a human scientist goes three times faster, need another citation there using my model that would be good also I heard from a guy that he heard a guy who did biology who said this helped and that's what Sam Altman fucking said even

even reading back the transcript I feel what little of my sanity remains kind of stripping away all of this is so good and so phenomenal let's give this man 40 billion dollars or more every year until he creates super intelligence that'll fucking work but I want to share with you some of the other incredible quotes from the genius mind of Sam Altman, a person with the integrity of Deepak Chopra and the ability to spout inane, vapid shit that sounds impressive to morons like, well,

Deepak Chopra.

You know, you hear these stories of people who like

use AI to do market research and like figure out new products and then like email some manufacturer and get some dumb thing made and sell it on Amazon and run ads.

Like there are people that have actually figured out at small scale in the most boring ways possible how to like put a dollar into AI and get the AI to like run a

toy business. But it's actually working.
Yeah. So that'll climb the gradient.
Now, you may wonder if the gradient is mentioned at some point elsewhere.

It's not.

But it is another clip.

So every year before the last, like, maybe up until last year, I would have said, like, hey, I think this is going to go really far, but it still seems like there's a lot that we've got to figure out.

And there's another clip. If something goes wrong, I would say, like, somehow it's that we build legitimate super intelligence and it doesn't make the world much better.

It doesn't change things as much as it sounds like it should. And just one more.

So, yeah, I think the relativistic point is really important, but like, you know, to us, our jobs feel incredibly important and stressful and satisfying. And

if we're all just making better entertainment for each other in the future, maybe that's kind of what at least one of us is doing right now.

It's gobbado gook. It's nonsense.
It's bullshit peddled by a guy who has only the most tangential understanding of the technologies company is building that made him a billionaire.

Every single interview with Sam Altman is like this. Every single one, ever since he became a prominent tech investor and founder.
Without fail, every time.

And the sad part is that Sam Altman is alone in this.

Sundop ishai, when asked one of Nili Patel's patented 100-word plus questions about Joni Ive and Sam Altman's new and likely heavily delayed hardware startup, had this to say.

I think AI is going to be bigger bigger than the internet. There are going to be companies, products, categories created which we aren't aware of today.
So I think the future looks exciting.

I think there's a lot of opportunity to

innovate around hardware form factors at this moment with this platform shift. So I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

We are going to be doing a lot as well. And I think

it's an exciting time to be a consumer. It's an exciting time to be a developer.
So I think looking forward to it. The fuck are you on about Sundar?

Your answer to a question about whether you anticipate more competition is to say, Yeah, I think people are going to make shit we haven't come up with yet, and uh, hardware of some sort will be involved.

Well, I think Peshai is likely a little bit smarter than Clammy Sammy, in the same way that Sachinadella is a little bit smarter than Sundar Peshai, and in the same way that a Golden Triever is smarter than a Chihuahua.

Well, that's it. None of these men are super intelligences, nor when pressed do they appear to have any actual answers or regular intelligences.

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Now, if you've read the newsletter version of this episode, you'll come across a multi-paragraph answer from Sachinadello when asked on Dwakesh Patel's podcast how Microsoft will reach $130 billion in revenue from AGI.

I'm not going to read it out here, and I don't hate you enough to include a clip. But the question was, how do you get Microsoft to $130 billion in revenue?

And Satchinas Dadello's answer is like 150 words. And it's like, abundance, explosion, GDP will grow, industrial revolution, inflation adjusted, percentages.

The winners will be the people who do stuff and then productivity will go up. I will link to this interview in the episode notes because it's fucking nonsense, just like the rest of them.

And and I have this idea I have this concept I've come up with and it's that we need to stop idolizing these speciously informed goobers while kinder souls or Zitron haters may hear this and say um actually Sachinadell is very smart stop I want to stop there and I suggest that you have a smart person who comes along and tells you what smart sounds like because smart don't mean long words and nothing it means actually knowing the shit you're talking about

And look,

really, a truly smart person should be able to speak clearly enough that their intent is obvious and clear.

Now it's tempting to believe that there's some sort of intellectual barrier between you and the powerful.

That these confusing and obtuse things they say, that's the sound of genius, rather than somebody who has learned a lot of smart sounding words without ever learning what they mean.

But Ed, they're trained to do this. I am someone who has media trained hundreds of people, and there's only so much you can do to steer someone's language.

You can't say to Sundopishe, hey man, can you sound more confusing? You can, however, tell them what not to talk about and hope for the best.

Sure, you can make them practice, sure, you can give them feedback, but people past a certain stage of power or popularity are going to talk whoever they want.

And if they're big, stupid idiots pretending to be smart, they're going to sound exactly like this. Why? Because nobody in the media ever asks them to explain themselves.

When you've spent your entire career being asked friendly or friendly adjacent questions and never having someone say, wait, what does that mean?

You'll continue to mutate into a pseudo-communicator that spits out information adjacent bullshit.

I am, to be clear, being being very specific about the question, what does that mean?

Powerful CEOs and founders never ever ever get asked to explain what they're saying, even when what they're saying barely resembles a sentence, let alone an answer. But let's get clear here.

Let's think about a hypothetical scenario where your friend just said their dog died. You'd say something like, oh no, what happened?

And they, let's say they responded with, well, my dog had a tragic, yet ultimately final distinction between their ideal and non-ideal state due to the involvement of a a kind of automatic mechanical device.

And when that happened, we realized we'd have to move on from the current paradigm of dog ownership and into a new era, which we both feel a great deal of emotion about and see the opportunities within.

You'd probably be a little confused and ask them to explain what they meant. You'd ask, what do you mean by an automatic mechanical device? What does that mean? They'd then reply with, yeah, exactly.

And that was part of the challenge. You see, like the various interactions we have in our day that are challenging, we see a lot of opportunities in assailing those challenges.

But part of the road to getting around them is facing them head-on, which is ultimately what happened here.

And while we were involved, we didn't want to be, and so we had to make some dramatic changes. At this point, you still don't really know what happened.
Did a car hit their dog?

Did they hit their dog with their car? In this scenario, would you nod and say, damn, man, that sucks. I'm glad I have such a smart friend.
Don't know what happened to their dog, though.

Or would you ask them to explain what they're saying? Would you perhaps ask what it is they meant?

Look, Pajai, Altman, Nadella, they've always given this kind of empty-brained intellectual slop in response to questions because the media coddles them.

These people are product managers or management consultants, and in Altman's case, a savvy negotiator and manipulator known for, and I quote, an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture as an investor at Y Combinator, according to the Washington Post.

And by coddle, I mean that these people are deliberately engaging in a combination of detective work and amnesia, where the reader or the listener is forced to simultaneously try and divine the meaning of their answer while also not thinking too hard about the question the interviewer asked, most importantly, because the interviewer forgot already.

Look at most modern business interviews.

They involve a journalist asking a question, somebody giving an answer, and the journalist saying, okay, and moving on to the next question, occasionally saying, but what about this?

When the appropriate response to many of the answers is to ask them to simplify them so that their meaning is clearer. Look at them.
Listen to them.

Now, a common response to all of this stuff is to say that interviewers can't be antagonistic and I just don't think a lot of people understand what that actually means.

It isn't antagonistic to say that you don't understand what someone said or that they didn't answer the question you asked.

If this is antagonistic to you, you are, intellectually speaking, a giant fucking coward.

Because what you're suggesting is that somebody cannot ask somebody to explain themselves, which is what an interview is.

And I imagine nobody really wants to do this because if you actually put these people on the spot, you'd realize the dark truth that I spoke of a few weeks ago.

That the reason the powerful sound like idiots is because they're idiots.

They sound like business idiots and create products to sell to business idiots because business idiots run most companies and buy solutions based on what the last business idiot told them.

Now I know some of you might hear this and say, these people can't be stupid. These people run companies.
They make big deals. They read all these books.

And my answer is that some of the stupidest people I have met in my life have read more books than you or I will read in a lifetime.

Well, they might sound smart, or they might be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or saying this product category should do this, none of these men, not Altman, Beshire and Nadella, actually has a hand in the design or the creation of the things that their companies make and they never ever ever ever ever ever have.

Regardless though, I have a larger point. I believe it's high time we started mocking these people and tearing down their legends as geniuses.

They're not better than us, nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build other than their share price, which is a meaningless figure, and the accumulation of power and resources.

These men are neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start treating them as such. These people are powerful because they have names that are protected by the press.

They are powerful because it is seen as a kind of unseemly to mock them because they're rich and running a company, a kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming of an adult.

We are at most customers. We do not owe these people anything.

We are long past the point when any of the people running these companies actually invented anything they sell.

If anything, they owe us something because they're selling us a product, even if said product is free and monetized by advertising.

While reporters, as anyone, should have some degree of professionalism in interviews or covering subjects, there's no reason to treat these people as special, even if they have managed to raise a lot of money or their popular product is like used by a lot of people.

Because if that were the case, we'd have far more coverage of defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

They made $1.71 billion in profit last quarter and haven't had a single quarter under a billion dollars in the last year.

I realize I'm being a little glib, but the logic behind covering OpenAI is at this point, they make a lot of money and they have a popular product, which is also a fitting description of Lockheed Martin.

The difference is that OpenAI has a consumer product that loses billions of dollars and Lockheed Martin has products that make billions of dollars by removing consumers from the earth.

Both of them are environmentally destructive. Covering OpenAI doesn't seem to be about the tech, because if you looked at the tech, you'd have to understand the tech.

You'd see that the user numbers weren't there outside of the 500 million people using Chat GPT, and of course referring to the generative AI industry.

And of those 500 million people, very few are actually paying for the product.

And that the term user encompasses everything from the most occasional person who looks at chatgpt.com out of curiosity or the people using it as part of their daily lives.

If covering open AI was about the tech, you'd read about how the tech itself doesn't seem to have a ton of mass market use cases and that those use cases aren't really the kind of things that people pay for.

If they did, there'd be articles that definitively discuss them versus articles in the New York Times about everybody using AI that boiled down to I use ChatGPT as search now and I heard a guy who asked it to teach him about modern art.

Yet men like Wario, Dario Amade and Clammy Sam Altman continue to be elevated because they're building the future, even if they don't seem to have built it yet or have the ability to clearly articulate what the future actually looks like.

Anthropic has now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will blackmail people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system, something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so.

Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves. Sadly this is all a result of the halo effect of being a guy who raised money, or a guy who runs big company.

We must as human beings assume these people are smart, that they've never mislead us, because if we accept that they aren't smart and they will willingly mislead us, we'd have to accept that the powerful are well bad and possibly unremarkable assholes.

And if there are untrustworthy people that don't seem to be smart, we have to accept that the world is deeply unfair and caters to people like them far more than it caters to people like us.

We do not owe Satchinadella any respect just because he's the CEO of Microsoft. If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the state of Microsoft's products.

Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess that only sometimes works, leaving workers spending 57% of their time either in Teams chat, Teams meetings, or sending emails according to a Microsoft study.

MSN.com is an abomination read by hundreds of millions of people a month, bloated with intrusive advertisements, attempts to trick you into downloading an app, and quasi-content that may or may not be AI generated.

There are few products on the modern internet that show more contempt for the user, other than of course the former Skype, a product that Microsoft let languish for more than a decade, so thoroughly engorged with spam that leaving it unattended for more than a month left you with a hundred unread messages from Eastern European romance scammers.

And Microsoft has finally killed it in May. Great job, Satya, you fucking plat.

Anyway, products like Word and Excel don't don't need improving, but that doesn't stop Microsoft from trying to bloat them with odd user interface choices and forcing users to fight with prop-ups that use an AI-powered copilot that most of them hate.

Why exactly am I meant to show these people respect? Because they run a company that provides a continually disintegrating service?

Because that service is such a powerful monopoly that it's difficult to leave it if you're interacting with other people or businesses? I think it's because we live in hell.

The modern tech ecosystem is utterly vile.

Every single day, our tech breaks in new and inventive ways, our iPhones resetting at random, random apps not accepting button presses, our Bluetooth disconnecting, our word processors harassing us to try and use AI while no longer offering us suggestions for typos.

And I'm referring to Google Docs, you're not insane, it's happening.

And our useful products replaced with useless shit, like how Google's previously functional assistants were replaced with generative AI that makes them tangibly worse, so that Google can claim that they have 350 million monthly active users on fucking Gemini.

Yet the tech and the business media acts like everything is fine.

It isn't fine. It's all really fucked.

You can call me a cynic or a pessimist or throw trash at me or throw tomatoes or try and hose me down when I go outside or call me every name under the sun, but the stakes have never been higher and the damage never more widespread.

Everything feels broken and covering these companies as if it isn't is insulting to your readers and your own intelligence.

Look at the state of your computer or phone and tell me anything feels congruent or intentional rather than an endless battle of incentives.

Look at the notifications on your phone and count the number of them that have absolutely nothing to do with information you actively need.

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Now, as I wrote the newsletter version of this and this script, I got a bunch of notifications and I'm going to recount them because most of them are still on my phone.

I have a notification from Adobe Lightroom, an app I use occasionally to edit photos that tells me to elevate any scene, now enhance people, sky water, and

and more with quick actions. I don't know.

ZeroCam, an app that brands itself as the first anti-AI camera app where you capture moments, not megapixels, and got a ton of press about being this stripped-down app, sent me a notification asking if I took a photo today.

Amazon notified me that there's a deal picked just for me, a battery pack that I bought several months ago.

Every single company that sends notifications like these should be mocked and possibly put in prison.

But if we have accepted such vile conditions as the norm, I just believe that society is kind of lost.

Apple should be targeting feathered for allowing companies to send spam notifications, yet they're not, because by and large, Apple is less vile and exploitative than Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, who also get pretty much a free ride.

Now, if you're listening to this as a member of the tech press, seriously, please look at your daily experience with tech. I'm begging you.

Count the number of times that your day or a task is interrupted by poorly designed software or hardware, such as the many, many times Zoom or Teams has a problem with Bluetooth, or a website just doesn't load.

Like sometimes Google, you type google.com into the bar and it just doesn't load.

This also happens with other websites. Like type something into your browser, it just doesn't work.
It just happens. So cool.
How about when software you're

using either actively impedes you, like did you want to use AI or just refuses to work in a logical way, such as Google Drive? Look at this. You're covering tech, right?

Maybe you should cover that the tech ain't working so good.

There are tens of thousands of stories like this every day, and if you talked to actual people, you'd see how widespread it is, or maybe, I don't know, see that it's happening to you.

Look, I'm not trying to call anyone out, which is why I'm not using specific names, but there are people responsible here, and the tech media writes about them every day.

I realize it seems weird to constantly vent that a company is releasing broken, convoluted software, but hey, if you can write 300,000 stories about how crime-ridden New York City is why can't we write three of them about how fucked Microsoft Office is or Google searches or even just one like one a month one

and why can't we talk to the people in power about it Why can't we ask them questions? Is it because the questions are too hard to ask?

Is it because it feels icky to interrupt Satchinadella as he waffles on about using Copilot his entire life by saying, hey man, Microsoft Teams is broken. Tons of people feel this way.

Why is it so fucked? Or why have you let MSN.com turn into an AI slop hub or just a hub of disinformation? Oh no, you say, oh no, I won't get my access. Oh, I'm going to lose my access.

Who gives a shit? Write a story about how Microsoft has become so unbelievably profitable as its products get worse and talk about how weird and bad that is from the world.

Ask Nadella those tough questions or publish that Microsoft's PR won't let you.

These people are neither articulate nor wise, and whatever intelligence they may claim to have doesn't seem to manifest in good products or even intelligent statements.

So, why treat them like they're smart? Why show them any deference or pleasantries?

These people have crapped up our digital lives at scale, and they deserve contempt, or at least a stern fucking reception.

I realize I'm repeating myself again and again and again, but why is there such a halo around these fucking bozos? I'm serious. Why are we so protective of these people? Why?

We're more than happy to criticise celebrities, musicians, professional sports players and politicians. Fucking barely.

But the business class is somehow protected outside of the usual willingness to say that Elon Musk might have maybe done something wrong. I'm also not denying there are critics.

We have Molly White, we've got Edward Ongueso Jr., Brian Merchant, and at a major outlet no less, CNN, one of the greatest living business writers in Alison Morrow.

I believe that tech criticism is a barely explored and hugely profitable industry if we treat tech journalism less like the society pages and more like a force to hold the most powerful people in the world accountable as they continually harm billions of people in subtle ways.

People are angry and they aren't stupid and they want to see that anger reflected in the stories they read. And the meek deference we show to the dumb fucking tech arseholes is the opposite of that.

As I've said before, we live in an era of digital tinnitus, nagged by notifications, warring with software ostensibly built for us that acts as if we're the enemy.

And if we're the enemy, we should treat those building this software as the enemy in return. We're their customers and they've failed us.

The entire approach to business owners in the tech media is ridiculous. These people are selling us a product and the product fucking sucks.

Put aside however you feel about generative AI for a second and face one very simple point. It doesn't do enough.
It's really not cool at all.

And we're all being forced to use it rather than the obvious benefits that everyone claims it has just making us do so.

Now, I realize some members of the tech media may want these people to succeed or want to be the person who tells everybody that they did so.

I get that there are rewards for you, promotions, new positions, TV appearances repeating repeating exactly what the powerful did and why they did it, or a plush role as a company's head of communications, but I am telling you, your readers and viewers are waking up to it, and they feel like you have contempt for them and contempt for the truth.

It's easy and common to try and dismiss my work as some sort of haters' bullshit, a cynical approach to a tech industry that's trying brave new things or some other such shit.

In my opinion, there's nothing more cynical than watching billions of people get shipped increasingly shitty and expensive solutions and then get defensive of the people shipping them and hostile to the people who are complaining that that the products they use suck.

I'm angry at these companies because they have at scale torn down a tech industry that allowed me to be who I am today, and their intentional and disgraceful moves fill me full of disgust.

I've watched the tech media move away from covering technology and more toward covering the people behind technology to the point that the actual outputs, the software and the hardware we use every day, have taken a backseat to stories about whether or not Elon Musk uses a computer, which is meaningless, empty gossip journalism built to be shared by peers and nothing else.

And please, please do not talk to me about optimism.

If you are blindly saying that everything OpenAI does is cool and awesome and interesting, you aren't being optimistic, you're telling other people to be optimistic about a company's success.

It isn't optimistic to believe that a company is going to build powerful AI despite it failing to do so. It's propaganda.

And yes, this is also the case if you simply don't do the research to form a real opinion. I am not a pessimist because I criticize these companies and framing me as one is cowardly and ignorant.

If you're so weak-willed and speciously informed that you can't see somebody criticising a company without outright dismissing them as a hater or a pessimist, you're an insult to journalism or analysis and you know it in your wretched little heart.

My art sings with a firm belief in the things I think, founded on rigorous structures of knowledge that I've gained from reading things and talking to people, because something in me is incapable of being swayed by something just because everybody else is.

You're assuming people are right because it's inconvenient and uncomfortable to c to accept that they may not be, because doing so so requires you to reckon with a market-wide hysteria founded on desperation and a lack of hypergrowth markets left in the tech industry.

Worse still, in engaging with faux optimism, you are failing to protect your readers and the general public. And if that's what you want to do, ask yourself why.

Why do you want these companies to win? What is it you want them to win? Do you want them to be rich? Do you want to be the person that told people they would be first?

What is it that you want? What is the world you want? and what does it look like? And how does doing your job in this way work towards creating that world?

This isn't optimism. It's horse trading or strategic alignment behind powerful entities.
It is choosing a side because your side isn't the reader of the truth.

If it was, even if you believed generative AI was powerful and that they simply didn't understand, your duty would be to educate the reader in a clear, set, and obvious way.

And if you can't find a way to do so, acknowledging that and explaining why. True optimism requires you to have a deep, meaningful understanding of things so that you can engage in real hope.

A magical feeling, one that could bore you through the most challenging times. What many claim is optimism is actually blind faith, the likes of which you'll see at a roulette or a crabs table.

Or, of course, knowingly peddling propaganda.

Breathe, Ed. Breathe.
It can't get you behind the microphone. Anyway, we live in hell, as I've said before.
Just like Churchill once said, when you're going through hell, keep going.

When you're in the middle of a good rant, keep keep ranting. Tune into the next episode where I will pick this right back up.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattasowski.
You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattasowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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