Radio Better Offline: Gare Davis, Victoria Song, Allison Morrow

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CoolZone Media

This is War to Extermination, fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth.

Souls rotten from the orgasm drug, flesh shuddering from the ovens.

Prisoners of the earth, come out, storm the studio.

This is Better Offline, and I'm Ed Zittron.

We have an incredible studio guest assortment today.

We have the wonderful Victoria Song from the Verge.

How you doing, Victoria?

I'm good.

She's great.

And we, of course, have Alison Morrow of CNN.

CNN Nightcap newsletter as well.

Yes.

Wonderful.

And, of course, Gare Davis.

The wonderful Gare Davis, who didn't insult me on Blue Sky for being late because I was on time of CoolZone Media.

Gare, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me again, despite our

brief fight on Blue Sky.

A tiff.

It was not even a tiff.

It was a friendly thing.

Buy some merchandise, though, if you're listening to it.

We have new hoodies, we have new t-shirts, we have new hats, and we have an upcoming challenge coin that you can spend your money on, and it will flow somewhat to me.

That's what's great.

But today, we're talking talking about artificial intelligence.

There have been a few stories in the media.

Alison is fresh back from vacation, so she's about to learn about all the good things that have been happening.

But I'm going to start with one of my favorite stories at the moment.

And this is the negotiation between Microsoft and OpenAI.

Now, the negotiation is, just to run this down, because OpenAI, by the end of the year, needs to become a for-profit entity.

It's a little more complex than that.

It's the for-profit part of a non-profit needs to convert.

That alone will be difficult, but Microsoft owns 49% of this company's future profits and a bunch of other stuff.

They get a revenue share, they get rights to all of their IP through 2030, and all these other things.

And OpenAI has said, okay,

what if we give you 33% equity, less revenue share, and you don't get access to all our IP?

And understandably, Microsoft has said no.

So we are in the funniest possible scenario here in that Microsoft could literally just fold their arms and let OpenAI die.

And

I feel like at the moment, this is an under-discussed topic because this is a gun to Sam Altman's head.

And everyone's just kind of acting like it's fine.

I guess maybe it's just too complex.

I don't know.

It's confusing to me why more people are a little bit worried.

Anyone?

Numbers hard.

Numbers hard.

Math's scary.

Math's scary.

That's, yeah.

But

I think why I'm going so insane about it is this could kill OpenAI 100%.

Like, this is...

They don't turn into a for-profit.

They're dead, dead.

And I'm just wondering why everyone's just kind of chilling, walking around about it.

I feel crazy.

I think it's just the sense that, like,

that seems implausible to most people.

Like, if you look on it, like, maybe, but you know, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the sense that Kleenex is synonymous with tissues right now.

So, you know, we're at a point in time where when you see the big, the big one

of like a tech thing, you kind of feel that they're infallible.

It's It's sort of like saying, well, if Apple doesn't get its ducks in a row with these tariffs, they're fucked.

In which case you're like, are they?

Are they?

It's like a Marvel movie.

At the end, are they dead?

Are they really dead?

Or will they come back in some mutated form in Avengers, like part 72, The Avenging?

Right.

And I think everyone's still under the spell of Sam Altman.

Right.

There's a sense that he's the visionary who's going to lead us into this AI utopia.

And, you know,

I and others, we know, a bunch of us have reported that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors.

But I think investors and shareholders and people who, like, frankly, the people who work for him desperately want to see him succeed.

I think Silicon Valley wants him to succeed.

So maybe it's just a willful blindness.

Yeah.

It's the most strange time in history because Victoria, you've written quite a lot about this.

When you look at the actual things that this shit does, it don't do that much, right?

Like,

you've been on the lead AI on the verge for a few months now.

Have you seen anything exciting at all?

Uh, define exciting.

Anything that you looked at and you felt delighted by in any way?

Um, because I'm genuinely curious.

By delighted, I think delighted is a strong word.

Have I seen things that have been surprising?

Yeah, with some of the like I wrote a story not that long ago about the what I call the hug and kiss generators.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, exactly.

So they're these

apps.

They're called hugging and kiss AI generators.

So you take a picture and like they're at, they were advertised in a kind of skeevy way where it's just like, oh, you take a picture of you and your crush and make them kiss.

And like that is a thing that you can do.

AI doesn't understand what to do with tongues yet.

So, you know, I was generating very cursed content for theverge.com.

That was those horrible things you're sending me, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I sent you some horrible things.

Awful.

In terms to the AI bots, a lot of humans don't know what to do with tongues either.

No, but they really don't know what to do with the tongues.

Like, you know, you're supposed to make people kissing.

And so, like, I generated a couple videos of me and Edward Cullen because, not because I'm like a Twyhard, but because he was like a preset in the app.

Right.

And, you know, you just watch yourself kiss Edward Cullen with full-on tongue and you're just like, huh.

But

it's the wrong tongue.

It's wrong tongue because honestly, it's like if you told a toddler what kissing looks like and they just, you know, imagined two faces smooshing together and like things coming out of the mouths and odd rhythms, that's what it looked like.

I mean, I could be wrong here, but I assume most of these products are made by straight men who do not know what to do

with the tongue.

These apps are just very like

weird, but you know, so I tested them.

I deep faked my parents'

parents at my wedding, and I was like, oh, this makes me feel weird.

I have emotions that

mom's teeth are not correct in this story.

But, you know, so that was just like one of the, I think one of the things that I've tested most recently.

And I went, oh,

this is.

something.

No, I mean, the thing that I've seen this with is like this, this woman who made like a video of like her mom hugging her as a kid based on like an old picture.

Right.

And it's like, this is, I've never seen a video of my mom before.

And it's, you start obsessing over this this like artificially generated video when you're ignoring you you you actually have a picture of your mom hugging you yeah like you you can look at like that and that actually is Her and that is like what she looks like.

Yeah, and what versus watching something imagine not imagine just generate put on like a skin suit of your mom hugging you which just isn't like it's weird the video is not real but the picture is I just it's it's a bizarre thing I feel a little

I felt very judgmental of it before I tried it and then I tried it and I sobbed I like genuinely sobbed because that's interesting.

That reminds me of

the VR thing where you're reconnecting with dead family members

on VR headsets, which yeah, people were very skeptical of.

And then I saw some people try it in Japan, and they

totally broke down.

It's because like when I like, I think the phrasing that I used was like, I know it's fake.

It didn't look anything like my dad.

I gave him hair.

My dad had never had hair in his life, but like the shape of it was was enough to

sketch this part of me that was very much longing for my father to have been able to go to my wedding.

So doing it, I was like, this is weird.

I don't feel, this is not comforting.

It's not comforting, but it's.

Makes you feel bad.

That nausea is indicative of the hyper-reality problem.

Yeah.

Which, which people like Altman and the whole, the whole industry are

rapidly pushing us towards.

And the hyper-reality problem.

Can you break that down?

Well, I mean, I guess the term gets used in a few different ways, but it's like the more something so fake that it's more real than real.

And we see this problem with a lot of the VR stuff.

But now

you see this a lot with

AI-generated images, which are like quote-unquote photorealistic, but they're like too photorealistic because they're being trained on a data set of highly photoshopped images.

So it looks like reality, but it looks more than reality.

It's stronger than what reality actually is supposed to be.

And that's like completely poisoning the data set.

But this can affect you emotionally, too.

Yeah.

But the thing is, that gets me about this is you look at everything.

You look at all the AI stuff.

And this is a fairly old example at this point.

And I'm not insulting you with...

This is nothing bad about your point.

It's just they've not been able to find a doodad or a gizmo that at least brings you cheer.

Um,

I mean, you can, if you are twisted, and my mind is twisted, and you like come up with some prompts that are truly cursed and no editor will let you publish in good faith like yeah you can have a little fun with it

talking about a thing that people use to do something normal no yeah no that's it's it's I mean it it it helped that one kid graduate from UCLA so there you go which one was that oh this it's just been a viral video the past like two weeks of this guy like showing the prompts he used to graduate from college like during his graduation ceremony so cool yeah

That's the thing I've pointed out a lot: AI has found a lot of use cases.

They're just all kind of bad.

They don't generate money.

Right.

They don't generate money and they take away,

this will be a metaphor that you relate to.

I can't remember who said it first.

It was a tech columnist.

Anyway, it was about

letting kids use AI to do their homework is like going to the gym and having a machine lift the weights for you.

Like the point is the process and the learning and AI just kind of subverts that, which can be useful if you're coding or doing some high-level technical stuff, I suppose.

Yeah.

It's not my area, but

even then it's like with the coding stuff, they massively overstate what coding, like coding is only one part of the software engineering stack.

And even then, you can't like have, they're like, oh, I could build an entire application.

Could it?

Has anyone actually, and this is Matt Hughes, my editor brought this up the other day.

He's like,

all this bullshit, Kevin Russian bullshit about, oh, vibe coding is taking up.

Oh, God.

I've not seen one fucking vibe coded company.

Man, the phrase vibe coding.

I haven't heard this before.

Vibe coding is way.

It's horrible.

It's horrible.

Like at Google I.O., they're like, vibe coding.

And I was like, please kill me.

Because

what does it even mean?

So here's what it's meant to mean.

It's meant to mean that you as a person do not understand software.

True, true.

You are able to use the coding thing to build software.

And the idea, which the massive liberty they take from there, is that because someone can do a thing like this, whether it works or not, whether it's secure or not, who cares?

It means that someone who doesn't understand coding at all could build a huge company that does whatever.

It's kind of like if you saw the, you ever see, watch The Simpsons, anyone?

There's an episode of The Simpsons where they rebuild Ned Flanders' house and like the rooms get smaller and they're like, this room has no electricity, this room has too much electricity electricity, and all the hair stands up.

It's like seeing that and being like, holy shit, these people could build a city.

It's fucking insane.

And of course, there is a Kevin Roos article in the New York Times where he's like, that's

oh my god, I made a recipe application.

It's just real like peekaboo moments in AI.

And I know I've been ranting about AI for what feels like seven years now, but it's only one.

But it's just, I don't know why more people, again, I get the Microsoft Open Air, I think.

I do.

But I don't get why more people aren't more alarmed.

There's nothing.

There's not a thing.

There's not a thing that you can point out and be like, wow, this is actually kind of fucking cool.

It costs too much money.

It requires stealing.

It boils legs with all these things.

But at least we have this.

Not really.

I genuinely, I'm not even asking the question sarcastically anymore.

I'm just like, anything?

Anything.

Anything.

One thing that I don't mean kind of works.

I mean, this is a tool that I use every day, like a Dropbox style thing.

I don't even mean a file.

I just mean a useful piece of software you can point to and go, I use this and it's good.

I have one, but I don't know how much of it is LLM based.

Do you use Otter in your work?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, like Otter is a dictation service.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Transcription.

I was just going to say

transcription.

I was just going to say closed captioning.

That's like the only thing.

It's like Dropbox has integrated

auto transcriptions for almost all their uploads, and that makes my job really easy because I have to do a lot of interviews and now I can just refer to that.

And if I need a more complex transcription i can send it to one of our services but but no like that's that's it but like that's llms have been doing that for a long time yeah it's just transcription i'm not even being a misanthrope i'm just

so much money is going into this so much money is not going into other things and the only thing we're having popped out is hey we've got a google search that kind of works but doesn't and we can do transcriptions which they did almost immediately i feel i feel like that like rev had their ai transcriptions almost immediately yeah they've been around for a there were various companies i've worked with an ai transcription company dead now um a couple years back with the like 2023 i think it was it was like meeting transcription zooms had it i was i was using rev's ai transcriptions back in 2020.

yeah it's just like

it feels it feels like i'm going insane sometimes it feels like when i read these stories and they're like and the revolutionary power of ai but you look at it it's like you don't even have a funny you have a funny thing i guess a joker level thing Yeah, I think the problem is, is just like we are promised one thing, right?

You're promised this personalization, this automatic, this automation that it's going to know you.

And like, we've been fed through so many generations of like science fiction, what we think AI is going to be.

And this is not that.

This requires so much work from you to train it.

Like, you have to understand the language

to prompt ChatGPT or any of these other AIs in order to get something remotely useful.

So you're actually having to learn a new language.

And like, if you look at the most successful ChatGPT prompts, they're like four paragraphs long.

They're insane.

You have to, like, you have to be preempting what

this thing could be.

Like, I had, I was just like, you know, to your point about vibe coding, I'm not a, I'm like a spreadsheet girly, but I'm not like an advanced spreadsheet girly.

And I was trying to pull some data insights from this set I was looking at.

And I was like, okay,

I don't know fuck all about spreadsheet formulas besides like the really basic ones.

How am I going to do this conditional logic program?

Let me ask ChatGPT.

And it took me so long just to figure out the stuff.

And it was always wrong.

And because I could like, because I understand math, I could parse out how to fix the completely wrong formulas it was giving me.

But that was such a painful process.

And so was the output even that good?

Oh, no, it was an excellent output.

I got a beautiful spreadsheet.

That's cool.

How much time would you say you invested?

Two and a half hours.

Nice.

Victoria,

you're a journalist who understands math.

Like you're a rare and special.

Yeah, you know,

I was just basically like this,

the fact that this conditional if-and statement is not working or it's working opposite to what I want for to find this one particular data set is driving me cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

It's very simple.

I know how to do the math manually.

Why can't the computer tell me how to write it to the other freaking computer?

That took me two and a half hours.

I love innovation.

And I think that that speaks to the larger problem, which is generative AI isn't completely useless.

If it had been sold as it is, which is

kind of niche cloud software, like cloud compute stuff, they wouldn't have been able to fund any of the data centers.

If we'd have been like, all right, we're going to be able to, in two and a half hours, give you the world's best spreadsheet.

wouldn't It

have a decent spreadsheet.

The thing, even the asterisks have asterisks, and it's

just,

I feel like, and the feedback I get from listeners is very much that everyone is like a lot.

I don't get any emails from people being like, hey, actually, man, I have the most useful thing.

I get the occasional bright spark.

It's like, I have, over the course of hours, created a very useful thing that I use sometimes.

It's like, cool.

Okay.

I

fine.

Bidet sounds more useful than that.

Like, I'm trying to think of other innovations that exist that could be.

Yeah, everything is more useful.

Like, Apple Pay is more useful than any of the shit that they've built.

But it's this thing where we are being told again and again and again that it's the future.

And we're being told that it's this ultra-complex thing that we'll never understand, which leads really neatly into my favorite story of the week, which is all of you, I assume, have heard about this Meta offering $100 million to OpenAI staff and how there's this big talent war, and four people just left OpenAI to go to Meta.

Alison, you're on vacation, so you missed some of this, which is probably best for your mental health.

Oh, I saw

the seven-figure bonus story came out right before I went on vacation, so I was

everywhere.

I can't blame for that.

Oh, no, absolutely.

Get the bad way to a 401k that's fat and sizable.

Yeah.

No, no.

I think it rocks.

I think it's great.

I think they should demonstrate.

There was a part of the Erin Wu from the information had a great story about this, where she was talking about how some people, like, oh yeah, I just threatened to quit and they gave me more money.

I would join one of these companies in day two, she'd be like, fucking quit, Mark.

What are you going to do about it, Mark?

I'm going to go right back to OpenAI.

They're going to give me this money.

And then Mark Zuckerberg will give you whatever you.

He's been flying them to his house in Tahoe, and they're still saying no.

That's the best part.

The people are just like, nah, I don't want to.

Don't want to mate.

But it might be because they're all in a weird, I'm going to say click, but

I want to believe poly situation.

So all, okay, I have no, no knowledge that they're fucking, but the recruits on the list, which refers to the meta list for potential people that they could hire,

typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London.

They're usually in their 20s and 30s, and they all know each other.

They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power.

And their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued.

So these stories have a thread through them I'm really enjoying, which is that the writer and the companies don't know what these people are doing.

And I just feel like they are scamming.

I think they're scamming them.

Another quote from the Wall Street Journal, Megan Borodowski, I believe it wrote this, The handful of researchers who were smartest about AI have built up what one described as tribal knowledge that is almost impossible to replicate.

Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough.

We are very aligned on research directions and interests, one of them wrote.

I hope we get to work on more stuff together in the future.

They are fucking lying to them.

I'm sorry.

They are just making shit up.

This has to be.

I think that this is the funniest thing ever.

I think that this is a true revenge of the nerds situation.

Have they reinvented collective bargaining?

They have.

They've basically done unionization.

It's amazing.

Good for them.

No, I love it.

Higher education is really expensive.

They have a lot of debt.

Yeah, I love this.

I think that they should ask for more money.

I think they should all get together and just refuse to take less than 50 million a day.

Eight figure side.

Nine figure.

Sky's the limit.

Sam won't want to burn anything.

But back to Erin Wu here.

This is another quote about this, which is from Inside the Great AI Talent Auction, the deals, the free agents, and the the egos.

But a senior leader at another of the major AI labs said it was hard to know what research specialties actually mattered for improving AI models.

AI is a field where researchers are designing such complicated systems that it is difficult to break up one aspect of the work from another, the leader said.

Ultimately, they said, recruiting often comes down to word of mouth, the game of knowing a person or having worked with them before.

It's a scam.

Isn't that just like normal

job stuff, like word of mouth, knowing, having worked with someone before and going, yeah,

it feels like hyper-focused silicon valley

stuff generally you know what they did at the job generally you do and mark zuckerberg

they we did ai

hi i'm morgan sung host of close all tabs from kqed where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life there was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my loved life?

I think we will see a Twitch stream or president maybe within our lifetimes.

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There is a WhatsApp group.

I think it's called Recruitment and it's the party emoji.

And that's where Mark Zuckerberg invites people.

He has this little weird little WhatsApp

hole.

He invites people.

He's like, hey, I'm Mark Zuckerberg.

Do you want all the money in the world?

What do you do?

I don't care.

And apparently one of the metrics they measure them on is citations in papers.

I genuinely think this is a scam.

It's genuinely a scam.

I think it's the coolest scam of all time.

It's nerds versus management consultants.

So, nerds versus different types of nerds.

Management consultants are not nerds.

Actually, I want to say management consultants are not nerds.

They're jocks.

I would agree with that.

I would agree with that.

I can say it.

They are professional deck makers about, and they go, in slide one, we can see that number go up.

Yeah.

In slide two, we can see number flat.

Here's a pie chart.

Bada bing, bada, bada.

And someone else made it.

Buzzword.

Yes.

That's it.

Yes.

I can see it.

It's jock shit.

Yeah.

I went to a drama private school.

I know.

I've once.

This is not shocking.

Yeah, I thank you.

All boys as well.

It's seven.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I was like the dumbest kid in that school, which is really, and I was the fattest as well.

So school was great for me.

But you run into a lot of people who can memorize a lot of things, but don't know how to put them together.

There's no real like synthetic thought.

It's all just like, I don't know, like having a big pile of information that they arbitrarily draw from and they don't really know what any of it means.

Sounds familiar to all the AI fitness summaries that I've been suffering through.

I just wrote a thing about it.

That's what's on my mind.

Tell us about that.

What's the AI fitness shit been doing?

This is.

Yeah, so I ate it during a run last week.

Yeah, no, it was too hot outside.

And I was, you know, I was on the Vox Union Bargaining Committee, so I've been sleep deprived for two months.

Also, congratulations.

Salute.

Yeah,

congratulations.

It came down to the wire, but we averted a strike.

It was real great stuff.

And I basically was like, oh, now time to look into my fitness and wearable data from this time period and kind of gain insights.

And it was just like not that, it was beyond.

I called my article the unbearable obviousness of AI fitness summaries because it was just not great.

But to my point, I ate it.

on this run.

You can kind of see my hands fucked up.

I'm playing basketball.

My knees are fucked up.

So

I was basically like, all right, let me see what all of these things said about my data.

And could I find, could I get these AIs to say, like, hey, you've been like really strung out over the last two months.

Your sleep schedule has been supremely disrupted.

Your metrics are completely off.

These are all things I know from looking at my baselines and knowing what they are.

But could I get it to say you showed ha, like you've shown signs of elevated risk of injury?

Not a single one of them could do it.

And Stravo's was like the most egregious because it's like, you had an intense run.

And I had uploaded pictures of my injury.

I had like uploaded a note saying that I had like injured myself pretty badly.

There was no like context of like what I should do with that.

It was just, it's literally stuff like, you ran 3.1 miles.

It was 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was slightly higher effort than other efforts that you've made in the last 30 days.

Have a nice day.

And I was like, that's useful when you put it right next to a chart that says the same thing.

Your elevation was 88, you had 88 feet of elevation gain and it was up and down during your run.

And literally, it's next to a thing that says elevation gain, 88 feet, and a graph that shows up and down.

Like, it's that

race.

Yeah, there's no intelligence.

Like AI, there's no intelligence.

It just feels like the thing it should be able to do already.

This is what people want it to do, because at least in my field, where you generate a massive mountain of like quantified self-data that you're looking at and you want insights from, I wanted Aura to tell me like what my average weekly number, like how many hours per week do I sleep on average on a 12-month basis?

And then how much of a sleep debt did I incur in this specific week?

And it's like, ooh, we can't do that.

We can only do it the most recent week and the most recent month for trends.

And I was like, that's fucking useless.

I have six years worth of Aura data that I should be able to mine for that kind of insight.

And I can't do that.

So that's not at all useful for what I, for like the purposes of what I was trying to prove.

And so I ended up arguing with this thing for like an hour.

I feel like you did prove something, though.

Yeah, I did.

I did.

But it was at the same time just like.

It's sort of like a Wikipedia.

It's like a book report written by a fourth grader who decided to read the entry of the book on Wikipedia instead of actually reading the book for insights.

So it's like,

here you go.

Here you go.

It feels like the most elementary thing it should be able to do.

I have over a decade of fitness data.

Yeah, and I still don't have shit.

I don't, it told my aura ring the other day.

I got aura, I got Somni, I got the thing that electrocutes your head.

Yeah, that's why I'm so smart.

It's like I just watched the X-Files episode with the computer bit.

That's what's happening to me.

I'm getting electrocuted every day.

I got aura, I got the eight sleep in Vegas.

I got all sorts of gumph.

And I don't know a single goddamn thing.

It told me two days ago, I am like, something is wrong.

Yeah, I'd slept three hours, two days straight.

It was just a bad combination of bread ice.

And it's like, yeah, you should do something about that.

It's like, thanks.

I'm glad I pay you $10 a month for, but this just feels like the obvious thing.

How does it not know how?

And maybe it is just the ultimate limitation that we've been complaining about.

It's just kind of insulting.

I don't know.

Yeah, not to be like, I don't want to be the hippie here because I use Strava and I like track my

workouts and things, but it's like, I know when I'm tired,

and I know when I'm hungry, and when I've eaten too much or eaten too little, like, you know, why do we need the computer to do that for us?

Is a real question.

And it's part of this like consumer trend of just trying to get AI into every single app on my phone.

And it's like, I don't need Strava.

Like, Strava's doing great for me for what I need it for.

I like it to show me how many miles I ran that week and like what my bike ride to work looked like.

I wanted it, I like, I would have loved it to be like, okay, so when you go run after a prolonged break, particularly in hot weather, you have self-reported an increased number of injuries.

That's the type of shit that I want.

And so it's like, so seeing that it was really hot after a prolonged injury, you have a real bad habit of getting injured after that.

So like, you dumb-dumb.

Yeah, missing.

This is the pattern.

Drink some more water.

Drink some more water.

Do the thing.

So like that.

is the type of insight I would have liked after this most recent run where I ate it.

Well, the last three months, I've increased my cardio a shit ton playing basketball.

I would love to see, and it has all the stuff and this doesn't feel that difficult, if it could say, yeah, your cardiovascular has improved.

Aura likes to occasionally be like, yeah, you're four years or two years younger than your age cardio-wise.

And it's like, don't get me started.

The fuck does that mean?

Don't get me started on those like longevity metrics.

But just, there's nothing useful to it other than I'm a data pervert and I like looking at the numbers going, hmm, number up, number down, why?

but even then, the simplest things are kind of hard to get.

With Strava, you have to go through like three menus to just see how much you've worked out.

There's like eight different options.

None of them, you can't turn any of them off.

There's one about biking because I used to bike.

I don't bike anymore.

I don't need that.

Now you need to share the biking, mate.

Got to make sure it's zero miles, you fucking idiot.

You loser.

It's just.

It is the wider thing of tech just not being for us anymore.

Almost.

It's like, hey, got some data, I guess.

Pay me now.

Pay me.

And even then with Aura and A, I've been using them for five years, six years.

You know what?

I've never got a single bit of advice about my sleep.

I've never had it say, oh, what if you did this?

Nope.

It'll be.

Have you tried using the chat pot that's in Aura?

No, I thought about it yesterday and I was like, I'm going to get angry at this.

It's actually one of the better implementations.

Does it work?

It's one of the better implementations if you like.

Know how to talk to it.

Okay, how do I talk to it?

Well, you have to be very specific about the information that you're wanting.

So you're like, tell me about my sleep trend, and I've noticed that I have this problem.

What are some ways that I could

get around that?

Or it's just like, do I show signs in the past month of sleep irregularities?

If so, like, what are some the thing is, like, the things it's going to tell you to do that are actionable are going to be like, well, duh.

Right.

It's really only helpful if this is your first foray into fixing your health, into fixing your health.

If you've literally Googled anything before, have any base knowledge of like you should have consistent sleep schedules.

Maybe just don't eat ice cream before bed, like common sense things like that.

Not going to necessarily help you.

But, you know, other things I were, because I'm also, I've got a CGM at the moment.

And so it's just like.

Is that a constant glucose monitor?

Yeah, yeah, continuous glucose monitor.

And I was like, I've had a lot of stress.

Does stress impact glucose levels?

And it was like, yes, it does.

And I was was like, okay, cool.

That's nice.

Nice to know that it's high because of that.

And then it'll remember that when you ask it questions in the future.

So you just have to be like...

It's just kind of useful.

You just have to talk to it so much and like kind of train it.

It's like, literally like training a toddler.

So the amount of effort that you're putting in versus what they're telling you, like all the insights, they'll be so personal.

personalized and so automated.

It's like you just have to do all the work to make it useful, which appears to be the AI theme.

Yeah.

You have to do an immense amount of legwork and like training and thinking like an AI in order for it to spit out something that might make you go, huh?

Wow.

Which is so cool.

I love living in this wonderful period.

I saw Wired mention this thing called Limitless earlier.

Have you heard that?

Yes, yes.

It's the class.

It's like B.

The thing that you're doing.

Yeah, I was saying

the AI device that constantly listens to you.

What is Limitless, though?

It's similar.

It constantly listens to you and generates insights based on listening to you constantly.

Stephen Levy, the Larry Bird of

big wet kisses in tech journalism, wrote about it like it was the future.

And it's just like,

I just wish some writers would experience humanity just once because the idea of someone constantly listening is not fun or good, nor has it ever really worked.

I don't want to age anyone here, but I feel like we're roughly the same age and we experienced kind of the revolution of social media as this kind of like, oh,

look at how cool it can be if we're able to connect

en masse all the time anywhere.

And that was cool.

That was revolutionary in its time.

And now we're at kind of like the denouement of that.

And

it's turned us all inward.

We're all like tracking our personal data and like, you know,

we're more isolated than we've ever been.

Not entirely social media's fault, but doesn't help.

We're like talking to our AI therapists and our AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

I don't know how many people are actually doing that, though.

I know a lot of them are, but I think that like the narrative, like the step back narrative right now is just like, well, there should be a next thing.

It shouldn't just be social media was cool and the internet was cool for a while and things are getting kind of stale.

And it's like, well, what's the next thing?

And I think, I think tech journalists can be guilty of this sometimes of feeling like, well, 2012 was really exciting.

So 2022 has got to be just as exciting.

And 2025, boy, can't wait.

Maybe the technology is just not there yet.

And it's going to take a lot longer than anyone expects.

Or maybe this is just not the right approach because the way LLMs work is that it's a mirror.

And like we have tech journalists left and right failing the mirror test and like not understanding that when you talk to Chat GPT or you talk to these AI girlfriends and boyfriends in a different avatar, you are just talking to yourself in the mirror.

It is a digital version of talking to yourself in the mirror, which can be useful.

It can be useful to talk to yourself in the mirror.

There's a reason why people go like, you're great.

Yes.

Awesome.

Or like

sometimes you need to like hear yourself think out loud and that can be useful and helpful, but that's what you're doing.

Like you have to understand that you are talking to yourself.

You are just having a conversation with yourself.

And I think a lot of people don't get that.

They don't, they think they're talking to a higher intelligence.

Literally, no, you are just talking to yourself.

If yourself could Google a little faster than you currently do.

And that was the gist of Kashmir Hill's

amazing New York Times piece about the people who really fell into a rabbit hole around these chat bots.

Like ChatGPT convinced them that they were in a matrix like you know alternate universe and like one guy committed suicide didn't he pull a knife on a cop or something yeah he like told the bot that he was gonna kill himself do suicide by cop and then his dad was like worried about his mental health did call the cops and he was like listen i think my son's gonna try to kill himself by attacking you and guess what he did because the chat bot was like and guess what the cops just came right over with the

guns blue.

And it's like, yeah, you know, some of mental health.

What do they need?

Oh, they definitely want to die by a cop.

Well, let's pull our guns off.

What I'm saying is our society's not in a good spot right now.

No, our society is not prepared.

Our policing is prepared to arrest rather than help or service.

So

it's the natural, I think it's all of this is the natural comeuppance of a society built with very little intention.

And

because that's the thing, it is vibes.

And large language models are the ultimate vibe slop.

It's something built with no real and people love to say, well, Sam Walton's plan, Sam.

No one has a single goddamn plan at all.

That's why there are no use cases.

Because if anyone sat there and went, what can we do with this?

They'd go,

Fuck,

I don't know.

I don't.

Is there anyone that we can pay $100 million to?

Well, you can do anything that you can imagine.

That's why Andy Jassy is saying, the future is up to you, guys.

Imagine

on solo.

I can imagine a lot.

And it's, but that's the thing.

Like,

Alison, you had an excellent piece on this.

It's like the whole job loss.

story is just them being like, please, please, up the shares, up shares, go, number go up, please.

Yeah, it's like, I have to say this because everyone's paying attention to me.

And it's like, I'm sure shareholders and investors on Wall Street are saying, what is your AI strategy?

And how are you planning to massively lay off your staff so that you can cut corners and replace people with AI.

And so you have someone like Andy Jassy come out and say, you guys are all doing great work.

We've built incredible products.

Alexa, everyone loves it.

Spoiler alert, no one loves Alexa.

It's stupid.

And as a result of that, sometime in the near future, I won't say when, but sometime soon,

a lot of you are going to be laid off or have your jobs changed by AI.

And

I'm shocked every time one of these CEOs does this, we report it out as if it's like, oh,

it's true.

God in heaven just said, like, this is what's going to happen.

And that is what's going to happen.

Like we had, you know, banner headlines saying like

Amazon CEO says AI is going to take your jobs.

And it's like, well, he didn't really say how or when or by what mechanism.

And there's no evidence of it happening yet.

So what are we talking about?

I think that there is an alarming amount of journalism that's excited for it, or there's just a doomerism behind it.

I think you can replace the word AI in a lot of these articles with just God.

And, like, this is something that we talked about the first time we met in Vegas, right?

Is how all of these

people who are into AI talk about it as if it's just a cult.

And we could, like, like, like, there's this divine aspect that is like ordained.

Like, you have to lose your job because AI is taking

God, God has mandated this.

And, like, even, even like with the you know, talking to an AI like it's a person, they often gain this like divine aspect when people are treating these chatbots like they are like sentient beings.

It's like the same way that we like project divinity onto aspects of nature.

And I think that is like a big, a big part of it because now you have God telling you that you're actually in the matrix and

you need to do this thing.

And for some reason, there's not safeguards put on this God program to protect you, God's creation.

They're all programmed to be super friendly and to tell you that you're great.

And it's like, if you, if you're actually like trying to use this thing and you're viewing it as you talking to you, like I have to tell ChatGPT all the time, you're putting too much flattery in.

You have to cap all of your flattery at 1% because

I can't handle you.

And I need you to explain why everything you said has no bias or as little bias as possible or to explain all of your bias in it so that I can read and evaluate and just go like, no, that's not it.

And I've been told I'm insane for like programming all the AI I talk to that way.

It's input output shit.

It's making it adjusting a program to do a thing for you.

It is.

Because like if you just leave it at the default it's trying to warp your brain.

Like if you leave it at the default, it's just like, you've done nothing wrong.

You are absolutely correct in everything you said.

What a brilliant thing that you've said.

And if you like listen to that enough times,

well, I mean, I think it's warping your brain because there is no intention behind this.

They train it, whatever, but they could relatively easily put a thing saying, just to be clear, you are talking to you.

They don't want to do that.

And I think it might have been Altman, one of the Goombas from Open AI.

It breaks the illusion, right?

Like, it's

like the Wizard of Oz thing.

Yes, but they should break the illusion.

They have to, but

they don't want to, because it means they will get less.

It's the attention economy.

It breaks the engagement.

You're not going to engage it with it if you're like, this is obviously a robot.

That's the part where I get actually emotional and angry about AI is when the CEOs of these companies talk about it.

They talk about it as if it's inevitable and we have no agency.

That's where the God thing comes in, where it's like, yes, this is happening whether we keep doing it or not.

And we are the ones who will fix it, of course.

Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah.

I mean, Sam Altman, I was just rereading like

The Gentle Singularity.

That fucking blog.

Oh, I hadn't read that one.

No, I was talking about he created WorldCoin.

Oh, Christ Almighty.

Because he's so convinced that.

No, let me stop you there.

Okay.

I'll stop.

No, I just want to stop you because you said he's so convinced.

Your only source of information for that claim is Sam Altman.

Sam Altman did WorldCoin so he could sell a cryptocurrency.

That's the only reason.

Yes.

So he could collect a bunch of data.

No, he's so convinced.

He's convinced of nothing, I believe.

Okay, this is literally me editing.

The pitch of WorldCoin.

I interviewed their CEO last week.

Oh, he's a real Bozo.

He's a real dumb bozo.

I had a lovely conversation with him.

Yeah, sorry.

Sorry.

But, you know, the pitch is AI is going to become so ubiquitous and it's going to destroy all the jobs and flatten the economy.

And we're going to have to have this UBI that's distributed by this blockchain mechanism.

And I'm sitting here and I'm going,

yes, but we don't have, we are actually full agents in this world.

Like we all need to step back and realize that we have sovereignty over what we do and the technology we make and how we regulate it.

And it's a real just like kind of

abdication of responsibility for society where I'm just like, what do we want to make for future generations?

And that's all the like problem that comes out of Silicon Valley is like building a better future.

And it's like,

you can't have both things be true.

Where are you building?

It's because like what they really are building is money machine go up.

And like, that's the main thing.

It's like they say all this lip service about making everything better well you could cure cancer that would like legitimately make everything better

that they will sure um but like so you could do do that but it's like they're first and foremost

i believe joe biden will cure cancer before sam altman both have claimed they will i believe joe biden would

No, I mean, neither of them will do it, which is my larger point.

But I mean, you're both wrong because

to quote Sam Altman, as data center production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.

People are often curious about how much energy chat GPT queries use.

The average query is 0.34 watt hours about what an oven would use in little over a second.

Now, someone has almost immediately thrown water on this entire thing, but this blog, A Gentle Singularity by Sam Altman, was quoted like scripture by everyone.

And that, I think it.

I love that you brought up divinity, Georg, because it really is just like this pseudo-religious, it's religion capitalism.

It's all it's just we found a way to love a company like a god and also kind of abdicate any responsibility or thinking about it.

Because when you look at the people who love AI and the way they talk about it, it's not about what's happening today.

It's nowhere near like in the future when this happens.

No, it's always this future prophecy.

And if we believe in this God enough and if we build up this religion enough, it can deliver us an infinite automated money machine.

But what's crazy is the money machine is bad.

It doesn't make any money.

It loses so much.

They've spent $37

billion in capital expenditures this year, or projected to.

And the revenue of this industry is like $40 billion.

That's because money is fake until you have none.

That's the only time it's real.

That's the thing.

Money will run out.

Money go down.

Money go down and not work good.

And the story that's really been twisting me up this week, I was telling you about earlier, and I swear it won't be this boring, is

OpenAI is Microsoft's biggest customer.

$10 billion in projected revenue this year for Azure.

And Azure revenue has been kind of like not growing so good.

So we just have one of the largest tech companies in the world that is just handing itself cash.

And as part of the deal when they funded them in 2023, they funded them principally in cloud compute credits.

So $10 billion of Microsoft

revenue is going to be partially in air miles.

And everyone's just sitting around and be like, this is great.

On top of that, $10 billion of revenue from OpenAI.

So $13 billion total from Microsoft.

Then OpenAI projected to make $12.7 billion.

Half of the revenue in this fucking industry is OpenAI or the slop, the cost slop of OpenAI.

It's okay, Ed.

We can just keep blowing up the balloon.

It's never going to pop.

We can keep blowing it up.

It's just crazy.

We found the infinite balloon.

It's this crazy material that's indestructible.

You can keep blowing more in, and it's going to be fine.

It's just, it's so funny.

The economy is going to be fine.

It's so good.

I just feel like AI is just like the imbecile magnet.

It's just this idea that people who don't really know stuff but have got to positions of power can go, yes, finally.

A thing that will make up the reason I have to buy it for me.

I see this in journalism all the time.

I'm getting like conversations about,

well, AI could replace entry-level journalism jobs.

I think that's like a real concern.

If you're like just a, I started as a copy editor with zero zero responsibilities other than like finding typos and misspellings and occasionally getting to write a headline and being like, oh, thank you for letting me write a headline.

And I could see a large language model filling that in, in which case I don't get a jumping off point to do what I want to do.

I mean, they've been offshoring those jobs as well.

It's just another offshoring.

My point is, I've been in this for like 20 years and it was happening then.

It might happen at a more accelerated timeframe with AI.

But I'm skeptical, you're still going to need, as we saw with that Chicago

summer book list, you know, like in case anyone missed it, you know, you got the authors right and then just made up complete horseshit for the books that they didn't write and were about whatever AI made hallucinated they were about.

You know, an entry-level copy editor would have caught that.

But we've already fired those people.

We've already laid off the entry-level copy editors.

So,

you know, know, all of these things, these ways that like technology is going to create job losses.

That's that's standard in our age.

AI is going to create some job losses, yes.

Is it going to be the,

what was it, white color bloodbath?

I don't think so.

10 to 20% unemployment, according to Wario Amadei.

And it's, that's a CEO of Anthropic, and his name is Wario.

Everyone makes the typo and types Dario.

I'm not sure why it's in books and literature, but let's start correcting the record.

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It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

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It fucking pisses me off as well because I mentioned it earlier.

There's almost like a excitement in journalism.

for job loss and AI.

Maybe it's doomerism, maybe they're just like, oh, I'll get ahead of this, but it feels

almost like they want it to happen and they want it so that it proves that AI is the big point.

It is religious.

Fucking Christmas.

It always comes back to that.

We've been talking about this for two years, like this

cultish nexus

around AI.

I mean,

this goes in

the early super intelligence hype of the 20 teens, right?

It's all going on this idea.

Wait, there was a hype cycle on that?

How did I fucking forget that one?

like the Rock Miss Basilis thing right oh god like it's it's the very like the early stages of this yeah like viewing AI like this like inevitable god I have you heard of Eliza Yudowski sounds familiar is the I keep having this person brought up to me by serious people he is a person that writes about AGI and writes scary he wrote like a fan fic Harry Potter fan fiction with AGI yeah yeah yeah yeah I just want to be clear if anyone else brings him up to me I'm going to email you back just

some sort of obscenity because you should not take this man seriously.

He writes Harry Potter fan fiction.

He has just ingratiated himself with other cultists from Less Wrong.

And I see real journalists mentioning them and it's almost like people just want to find any possible proof they're right so that they can ignore the signs that everyone's wrong.

And I also think that regular people see the problems of AI way more than the journalists do.

And it's strange.

It's bizarre.

It's like

another thing, I forget who said this.

If you're the person that said this to me, I'm very sorry for forgetting.

But it's like everyone feels bad that they missed out on social media and calling social media as the next biggest movement.

Or they feel bad on missing out on GPUs and not saying GPUs would push the next thing.

And by the way, there are people who tried in like 2017 to say GPUs would be the next computing thing.

They were ignored.

It was crazy how early they were.

But it's

And journalists in particular were late to the internet.

Yes.

So we're there's probably an institutional bias toward taking tech seriously because we are paying for brushing off the internet in 2000.

I think I'm going to start an award show called the Felfer It Awards.

That's a good idea.

Because it's like you say that, and

they weren't late to the metaverse.

How'd that go?

They were late to crypto, but

NFTs.

That's because crypto sucks and it's hard to talk.

It's hard to explain

having to explain blockchains.

Explaining blockchain.

No, it's it's the problem with crypto is it's complex, but you can explain it quite simply as a decentralized database.

But when you explain it like that, it sounds fucking boring because it is.

Yes.

It's connected to money sometimes.

I wrote about crypto for years, and every time I think about writing it again, I feel sad.

Come do my job.

I'll share it with you.

Sure,

absolutely.

Give me a CNN column.

Michael Balaban will kick my ass.

Michael Balaban.

He's a wonderful man.

It's just so frustrating as well because as ever, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the big show, it's like the people who get fucked here are regular people.

AI bubble bursts.

It's not like Sam Altman will be humiliated, I will make sure of it.

But it's not like Wario or Sammy, Clammy Sammy, Clammy Sammy, is going to get done in at the end of this.

It's going to be the stocks are going to crash to fuck.

People's pensions will be fucked.

I mean, 35% of the American stock market is Magnificent 7.

19% of that is NVIDIA.

I think 42% of NVIDIA's revenue is Magnificent 7 stocks.

I will have a citation in this notes, Laura Bratton at Yahoo Finance, the GOAT.

But it's going to hit everyone, but it's not going to, I don't think it'll be great financial crisis level, but it's going to be really bad.

And

I don't think these AI companies are going to be offering the free spigot anymore.

It costs them so much money.

So we're going to see all of this get like, it'll still be there, but like this festering hole

in the side of the tech industry as everyone goes, what the fuck's next?

You have such a beautiful way with words in it.

Yes.

Well, it's kind of the way the metaverse still exists within Facebook, but like, it's not the starchild at all

anymore.

I was talking to my lady last night about this, and it was driving me insane.

Isn't it fucking insane?

Meta, a multi-trillion market cap company, just went, don't worry, legs are coming in the metaverse.

And then just went, actually, they're not.

Actually, we're putting into AI glasses now.

A huge company just lied.

They lied constantly for like over a year.

You had people being like, absolutely believe you 100%.

And then everyone just went, oh, isn't that fucking strange?

What the fuck is going on?

It's weirder than the AI thing.

Though the AI thing is pretty weird.

It's like we live,

tech journalism sometimes lives in an alternate reality.

Oh, yeah.

It's so, I don't know.

I don't know what's going on with a lot of things, but in particular, it just feels like it would be more fun if we were honest.

It would be so much more fun.

I wrote a thing today, it's coming out in a few days.

So, the thing they write on Monday is

just make fun of them because they're not charming, they're not interesting, they're not hot.

None of them are tasty looking.

I think Sam Altman has had some work done recently.

Do you think he has what's

his lips are looking a little fuller than usually?

Juicy Sammy.

Just say a juicy.

Juicy Sam Altman, all right.

That's a new phrase for me to text hate people.

But

it's like they're not charming, they're not interesting.

Steve Jobs, complete monster, but at least interesting to listen to.

They're boring, they're all management consultants.

They don't.

I went and reread the iPhone announcement today.

And the beginning is him just being like, yeah, we did this, we did this.

And then we came up with a thing that did all of this.

And I'm about to show you.

Yeah,

I get why people cheered that, but now it's like.

I tried watching the liquid glass presentation.

I fell asleep in like five to seven minutes.

Damn.

And like, I think there's parts of Liquid Glass that seem compelling.

Hopefully, it'll get worked out before it has the full launch.

But it's presented in the most non-compelling way possible.

It's glass based on Vision OS from the most successful Apple product.

The most successful Apple product

of all time.

You remember the Vision Pro?

No.

Me neither.

But that's the thing as well.

They're trying to get us excited for liquid arse, and it's very confusing as well because you could just describe it in a boring way and say, yeah, well, just be very matter of fact about it.

But

I guess it's for shareholders, but is it even?

No, even the most slimy Apple people were kind of like, ah,

they needed a literal shiny thing to distract from the AI.

How about they fix cropping in screenshots?

50% of my screenshots do not crop properly.

If you work for Apple and you know why, email me.

But it's, oh, I don't know.

Make odd devices work good.

They're all a mess.

Everything.

If you think about the iPhone, it's 17 years old.

It's ready to go to college.

People who are 21 who can vote and go to war and do all those things most likely have no memory of a life before the smartphone.

Right.

Like, we're at a point where people want what's next.

And so I think you just have like tech journalism, we have to chase clicks and SEO farm bait, we have to chase all of this to stay alive.

And so it's very much like, this is the next thing, get hype.

Because if you all care, it's like we're looking for the next Game of Thrones, but for tech, because Game of Thrones was such a huge traffic magnet that literally anything that happened, like,

we're all drinking at the tit of like.

SEO traffic and ad monies are coming in.

So I just think there is like an incentive and like, you know, journalists always get pushed in any, doesn't matter who you rate for, you always get pushed to like, do the next big thing, find the next big trend, and oh,

yeah.

If you're a Beltway journalist, you have to think about what's the next election?

Who's going to be the next thing?

You know, it's like all the next thing.

What's the take?

And I think that the reason no one wants to write that other than me is that there's nothing left.

I don't mean that.

That's the scary thought, right?

It's like, what if this is it?

Like, because like we're trying to come up with what's the thing that'll be the new thing after the smartphone and like, it's like

AR contacts.

Like, come on, everybody.

Like, it's

until we start getting the chips implanted.

Like, and

I thought Joni I was hired to fix this, to figure out what's the phone that's not a phone.

We've come up with a new kind of phone.

There's no screen on you.

I mean, I just think we're at a point where, like, the tech is stalled out, right?

Because if you have, like, the law of diminishing returns and just rockcomb bubble episode last year.

But it is, though.

It's, we're at the, are we at the.

I'm not going to say end of history because people misquote Fukuyama, but it's we're at the end

actually anyway, I'll get back to that later.

It's we're at the end of innovation for a minute, because if you look at how they're trying to innovate right now, first of all, I know I've been making fun of the overpaying people, but the overpaying thing they're doing is only something you do if you have no fucking clue.

They don't know what you're doing.

Yeah, they're just throwing around money.

They're investing $327 billion this year into something.

They built massive data centers.

I don't think that any of, I think they all kind of have realized there might not be a next thing.

And

I think that their obsession has become something different, which is line go up, money go up, but how can I charge you $10 a month?

How can I charge you and a thousand people at your organization $30 a month to the point that they don't know how to do math anymore?

And they're like, well, I got you to pay $30.

It cost me $75.

to get that money from you, but

I don't know how to fix that.

But what if I spent more money to find out?

Maybe I don't know.

And they don't know how.

And they will say this if you ask questions, which people tend not to with these people.

And it's just even you've got analysts doing, there was an analyst earlier who's like, oh yeah, Google's, they're making $3.1 billion in Google One subscriptions because of AI.

And it's not.

They're just like Google One subscriptions have gone up and they're like, fuck, I think it's AI.

I mean, this is why everyone's focused on AI is because it's like the final boss of our collective tech unconsciousness, right?

It's this thing Victoria, you were talking about earlier.

It's like in like you know like 80s sci-fi, this is always like the final thing.

After we've gotten like, you know, augmented reality, you've got the contacts, got the glasses, like AI is that's like the last thing.

That's the last ghost of our of our past that we're still trying to chase.

That's this thing that's still trying to like control us like time traveling, like backwards in time, this idea that eventually we will have this AI thing.

And like it is, yeah, it is, it is like the final boss, and we're always trying to chase it.

And we're coming up with like the

barrier of like, maybe this thing isn't actually ever going to be real.

And I think they think it's the magical thing because it will tell them how to run their business.

Because it'll tell them what's next.

This is as far as we can get.

And then we have to create something smarter than us so it can tell us what the next thing will be.

Because this is the final thing we can imagine.

This is like it.

But even when you listen to Clammy Sammy talking about it, and he'll say, he will be like, Juicy Sammy.

Juicy Sammy.

Juicy Sam old man

Clammy Sammy's thing he always says is I can't wait to see what you'll build with this and it's like motherfucker that is your job I and that's actually the thing with AI as well I'm always being to but the few haters who dare enter my dojo is they say oh well you don't know how to use it right you're not doing it correctly I think even Alison, you might have mentioned this like the holding it wrong thing.

But it's like, no, I'm the customer.

I am paying you for work.

I shouldn't have to write a 950-word prompt that tells you to imagine you're a spaceman or whatever, like whatever makes it work.

Fuck you.

Fuck you, man.

Me pay you money.

You give me thing.

900-word prompt to generate a 900-word story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That sucks.

They're like straight up.

There's just like bereft of, and it's...

Also, we've handed over society to people that don't create things.

We've handed people who are just like showing different faces to enough people that they get where they need to go, the business idiot, writ large.

And it's just, it's so funny as well because

it's going to fall apart.

And when it does, everyone, I genuinely, I mean, I look forward to it because of the obvious yucks and chuckles I will get out of it.

But there's going to be a really interesting period of journalism having to.

Sit and go, why did we fall for this?

And if there isn't, I will make this happen with all of my energy.

I will hold everyone.

Because it's, I think, and I'm not insulting you're out there.

But Victoria.

I don't think insult your out there.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

This is not an insult, I promise.

Read the comments on AI stories on the verge.

I do read the comments.

I love reading them because you see, regular people are so skeptical of this shit.

I know.

I read all the comments on all the stories that I write, which are just like...

Thank you for calling out how stupid it is.

But that's the thing, though.

Regular people seem to get it.

There's going to be, well, it depends.

I think there's there's a sector of counterculture that's developing a neo-Luddite perspective.

Beyond just

anti-tech, like green anarchists, which have carried the Luddite torch for the past 30 years, we're starting to see

quote unquote the cool kids adopting this neo-Luddite tendency, mostly in response to

alienation and automation.

And I think that trend is going to continue.

It's going to be almost like a social

status, a signifier is

the fact that you're not reliant on these things.

Because there will be a version of AI that does keep getting

normified, I think.

How do you mean?

There's going to be version, even if you look at the way higher education is working right now, the level of people who are graduating just on the basis of AI helping them with large parts of their assignments.

I have a few friends who are professors and the majority of assignments that are turned in are majority written by AI.

And we get to this point where

we're going to have a new generation of the workforce that doesn't really know how to do anything because AI has been doing everything for them, but they got their degree, you know, like I am employable certificate, but now they don't really know what to do.

So they're not going to be able to do that.

And that's the ramification of the current.

But there's going to be a counterculture that

refuses to use that, right?

That's like, I will not be using AI.

That's going to be something you have to prove and talk about.

And it's going to be a version of a social

status card.

Have you heard of Cluley?

Oh, I've seen Cluly.

I'm telling us about Cluly.

Oh, I let them.

Yeah, it's the Cheat on Everything app.

And so it was invented by this

Columbia kid drop.

Oh, I interviewed him for a second.

Oh, I heard about this guy.

Okay.

So it's the Cheat on Everything app.

I tested it.

It helped me cheat on nothing.

It was terrible.

I cannot wait to have all my dates go flawless.

It can't even do that.

Now that I read from a teleprompter.

It can't even do that.

Like, in its current state, it's like you use it.

It's like a prompt machine for when you are on a video call and it very slowly can answer prompts based on a transcript of your video.

It's not that usable.

It messed up the mics on my computer from testing it to this point where like I deleted it from my computer and video

software programs like Google Meet and Zoom will pick a non-existent Cluley mic.

And I'm just like,

I don't love that screen.

It's

so cool.

Yeah.

But, you know, like, as soon as I wrote that story up, someone, another company messaged me and is like, we're using AI to catch the AI cheaters.

And I was like, oh, okay.

Finally, we got Bear Force from The Simpsons.

Sure.

Solving this problem we created.

That's the perfect use case for AI, though.

Using AI to fix all the problems caused by AI.

That's the real.

I think it's beautiful.

That's the actual singularity.

We've created problems to create solutions for.

Neither of them work.

But clearly, one of the people from Andreessen went on a podcast.

He's like, yeah, you know,

it's when marketing and virality overtake making a perfect Artesian product.

It's like, what you mean is when something goes viral for fucking lying,

lying.

Like, it was a lie.

Like, when you say something that is not true intentionally, that's called lying.

It's called an IRL hallucination.

Yes.

It's weird because the way that app was born, initially it was like some other app that was used to kind of make a point about how stupid technical interviews are for devs.

Right.

And I was like, that's actually kind of radical.

And like, it is proving a point and you have lost the point.

And now you have $5 million in

somebody.

Into $100,000 commercials.

Did you hear about Mira Marati though, the former CTO of OpenAI and her new startup?

Intelligent Machines.

So they raised, I think, like a billion dollars, I want to say.

And they did not share anything about the financials.

They also did not share anything about the product.

So anyone investing just went into a room, Mira and Marati went, Yeah, so

I need money, me, money now.

And they went, fuck yeah, absolutely.

There were reports where people would, the VCs were just like, can you share anything?

She said, no, on top of this, and by the way, I admire the scam at this point.

I just get it.

She has her voting rights supersede everyone.

Get it.

No, I'm I fuck these pigs who cannot even bother to even think about what they're building or what it is they do.

They just like,

I will give you an unlimited amount of money because of the vibes I have.

Because of the.

When's it my turn?

I would love to.

No, I definitely had a moment where I'm like, could I

have vibes?

Give me money.

Give me $100 million.

Give me money and I will

vaguely promise to write you something in the future at a time unspecified from now.

I will never do anything.

I will guarantee you that.

I mean, Ilya Sutskeva, the other open AI guy, misreported by Pivot to AI that generally does good work but needs to work on their fucking headlines, suggesting that they guaranteed they would not do anything until super intelligence.

When the actual headline was that they said they have nothing and they want to build super intelligence, which is way funnier.

I honestly, at this point, like it's evil to lie and extract capital, but the people you're extracting it from, you're wallet inspecting them.

But also, you could fix almost, you could fix like hunger world hunger, I think, for six billion dollars.

They worked it out, yeah, yeah, you could and challenge Elon Musk.

And he said, if you figure out the number, I'll give it to you.

And then they figured out the number

it's very upsetting.

I saw an out there as well say today that Grok only makes a hundred million dollars in revenue.

It's so fucking cool as well.

They all burn money.

I mean, just give it to me.

Give it to me or

to me.

You can sponsor a journalist.

You too can sponsor a journalist to live a life.

And the funny thing is, is like, I actually think you could make a shit ton of profitable journalism just by like talking about this bluntly.

I'm doing it all the time.

But

it's weird.

And I actually, let's kind of wrap this up as well.

I have to wonder if, at the end of this farce, whether there will be a rise of critical tech journalism.

I'm not holding my hopes out, but I think that there is a slogan, like you two, actually, Victoria, Allison, you've both inspired me a bit that it's possible.

I just write what's true.

I try it and I tell you what happened when I tried it.

That's it.

Imagine that's literally my job.

Imagine that.

Imagine if that happened on hard fork.

Sorry.

But it's imagine.

I'm saying nothing.

No, no, I know, I know, I know.

I'm not going to let, and these are my opinions, just mine.

I think about them all the time.

It's, I'm hoping this happens because I think you've got Brian Merchant, you've got Edwin Legraso Jr., Molly White, of course, one of the fucking best in the business.

Molly's great.

Molly is, you've got really good criticism, and I think people are hungry for it.

The reason I brought up the Virgin's comments is this isn't like any kind of fun making.

It's you see people saying it now, just being like, hey, why the fuck am I having to pretend here?

And I just, I think it's the business idiot idea I had a few months ago where it's like,

hey, maybe we've handed over our economy, our finances, the editorial structure of some publications and the people with the biggest microphones to people that don't understand a single goddamn thing.

And it's kind of

it that scares me more than anything because we talk about the harms of generative AI and it's, yeah, there is no intention.

No intention is far scarier than people being like, they want all of your data and all of this when they have no idea.

I was actually kind of disappointed.

Meredith Whittaker of Signal, she's really good.

admire her dearly.

She said a thing on stage about how like, yeah, AI agents, which is the new marketing term, but they're going to do this and they're going to do this.

Whenever anyone speaks about AI agents, just imagine like clown noises, like

circus music, if it helps, because AI agents do not exist.

They do not work.

There are people who are getting close to a thing that might work one time.

They had a big study out of Salesforce.

They were like, after with multi-step processes, you know, things that require you to do more than one thing.

Yeah.

It failed like less more than, I think it's like more than 32% of the time.

It's like, sorry, it only succeeded 32% of the time, which is very bad and not getting better.

And it's like, this is what, and everyone's talking about AI agents, despite them not working.

I realized this sentence started in one point and it's going to end at the, I feel like I'm going fucking insane.

Every time I read the news and I see a new thing that does not exist and everyone says it exists.

Am I crazy?

Am I having a problem?

Like, is, I mean, yes, but is it, is that why I'm reading the stuff that doesn't exist?

It's just driving me insane.

But now you've said the divinity thing.

I'm just like, this this isn't actually about building stuff.

This is a belief system and plate spinning.

This is just an intention to build

a vibes-based economy, except it can't last long term.

Oh, God.

Or until

the next revolution that replaces the AI God.

You know, if like the Industrial Revolution and modernity killed God, qua God,

then maybe AI is

the demigod that we replace God with, and then something else will happen.

Sam Altman is the Antichrist.

Many people are saying this.

Many people are saying that.

Many people are saying this.

Many people in a New York City podcasting studio are saying, did I do that?

It's sorry.

It's

but even then, the reason I say he's the Antichrist is not any recent interviews on the New York Times podcast.

It's specifically about the fact that he is able to charm every business idiot.

He's so good at it.

He's good at saying nothing in a way that makes people give him a billion dollars.

And he is wrapped, I think he's wrapped everyone up in this insanity.

And no one really knows why they're doing it.

You've got journalists, you've got investors, you've got consumers even who are like chasing this dream.

And I genuinely think he may lead the tech industry to a kind of ruin.

I don't think all the companies are going to shut down, but this is the ultimate hubris of basing everything in tech on venture capital.

invested by people that don't really understand and public companies run by people with MBAs.

Every single Mark Zuckerberg's a rarity.

He doesn't have an MBA, but all the rest of them do.

Even the guy who replaced Andy Jassy, AWS, the cloud part of Amazon, has an MBA.

MBAs are everywhere.

I think we should bar them from running companies

and also being allowed to

have housing or healthcare.

No, sorry, I'll stop that one there.

But it's just...

I don't know, we're all going to suffer for this.

I'll blog about it, I guess.

And we'll all blog and we'll do podcasts, Gare.

But you know what?

I'm going to wrap it on that happy note there.

Gare, where can people find you?

Well, I help run a daily yikes news show for Coolza Media called It Could Happen Here.

That's where you can find most of my work.

Right now, I'm finishing my final piece on the Stop Cup City movement in Atlanta, as well as an upcoming piece on liberal accelerationism.

What is that?

You know, that's what the piece is about.

Well, we'll have to find out and listen to it.

Allison, where can people find you?

I write a business newsletter for CNN called Nightcap.

You can just Google CNN Business Nightcap.

And I'm on Blue Sky.

And Victoria.

You can find me at The Verge.

And all my handles on everything.

Blue Sky, Twitter, Instagram, all the things is at VicMSong.

You can find me inside your computer.

That's where I live.

I'm Ed Zertron.

You've been listening to Better Offline.

Thank you, of course, to our wonderful producer, Daniel Goodman.

You've been hearing us recorded out of the beautiful New York City, Nevada.

And yeah, you keep listening to my goddamn show.

We'll have a monologue this week as well.

Peace out.

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 matasowski.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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