I'm Mad As Hell, And I'm Not Gonna Take It Anymore

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Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 30 I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Speaker 31 Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Speaker 31 Now, this is the second part of a two-part series about how OpenAI's stupid bloody growth myth has conned the entire media ecosystem, forcing people who really should know better to repeat absolutely insane things as though they're actually perfectly reasonable.

Speaker 31 Now if you haven't already listened to the last episode and come back. Just go.
Just go.

Speaker 31 I'll need you to listen to it. Otherwise let's talk about why this bubble actually inflated.
And I realized I did a monologue about this, but it's so obvious that I needed to do a longer episode.

Speaker 31 But let's start simple. The term artificial intelligence is bastardized to the point it effectively means nothing and everything at the same time.

Speaker 31 When people hear AI, they think of an autonomous intelligence that can do things for them. And generative AI can do things for you, like generate an image or a text from a simple prompt.

Speaker 31 As a result, it's easy to manipulate people who don't know much about tech or even try it in the first place into believing that this will naturally progress from it can create a bunch of text for me that I have to write for my job just by me typing in a prompt to it can do my job for me just by typing in a prompt.

Speaker 31 Basically everything you've read about the future of AI extrapolates generative AI's ability to sort of generate something a human would make and turns it into a it can do whatever a human can do, or because some tech in the past has sometimes been bad at the beginning and linearly improved as time drags on.

Speaker 31 This illogical thinking underpins the entire generative AI boom because we found out exactly how many people do not know what the fuck they're talking about and are willing to believe the last semi-intelligent person that they talk to.

Speaker 31 Generative AI is kind of a remarkable con a just good enough version of human expression to get it past the gatekeepers in finance and the media, knowing that neither will apply a second gear of critical thinking beyond hook as we're doing AI now.

Speaker 31 The expectation that generative AI will transform into this much more powerful version requires you to first ignore its existing limitations, believing it to be more capable than it is, and also ignore the fact that these models have yet to show meaningful improvement over the past few years, unless you're looking at, of course, the benchmarks that they are built specifically to pass.

Speaker 31 They still hallucinate. They're still ungodly expensive to run.
They're still unreliable and they still don't really do that much.

Speaker 31 Worse still, ChatGPT's growth has galvanized these people into believing that this is a legitimate, meaningful movement, rather than the most successful public relation campaign of all time.

Speaker 31 Think of it like this. And some of you really don't like this argument.
You're like, something couldn't be this big just because of the media. It really could.

Speaker 31 If almost every single media outlet talked about one thing, this thing being generative AI, and that one thing was available from one company, OpenAI, wouldn't it look exactly how things look today?

Speaker 31 You've got OpenAI with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, and then a bunch of other companies, including big tech firms with multi-trillion dollar market caps with somewhere between 10 and 69 million monthly active users and I don't count Gemini because they're cheating.

Speaker 31 You can't slap it on Google Assistant. That's unfair.
What we're seeing here is one company taking most of the users and money available and doing so because the media fucking help them.

Speaker 31 People aren't amazed by ChatGPT. They're curious.
They're curious about why the media won't shut up about it.

Speaker 31 And we have to realize and recognize and accept that part of the reason this bubble was inflated was the failure of Google search.

Speaker 31 Everyone I talk to that uses ChatGPT regularly uses it as either a way to generate shitty limerick or as a replacement for Google search, a product that Google has deliberately made worse as a means of increasing profits.

Speaker 31 Listen to our award-winning episode, The Man That Destroyed Google Search. I'm going to say that forever.
And by the way, that's absolutely what you should listen to.

Speaker 31 It's Webby Award-winning, the best business episode. We won it, folks.
Anyway, I hate to say this. I really don't like saying this.

Speaker 31 I don't like to give it to them, but ChatGPT, if I'm honest, is better at processing search strings than Google Search, which is not so much a sign that ChatGPT is good at something as it is that Google has stopped innovating in any meaningful way.

Speaker 31 Over time, Google Search should have become something that was able to interpret searches into kind of like a perfect result, which would require the company to improve how it processes your requests.

Speaker 31 It should be how Google used to feel, magical.

Speaker 31 Instead, Google search has become dramatically worse, mostly because the company's incentives changed from help people find something on the web to funnel as much traffic and show as many ad impressions as possible on google.com.

Speaker 31 It does little annoying things like ignoring random words in the search string, even though those words were there for a reason. And Google doesn't know better than you what you want.

Speaker 31 Ideally, though, they should when it comes to a search product. That's ideally what a...

Speaker 31 You get someone to search something for you. You want them to bring back the best thing.

Speaker 31 And by this point, Google search should have been far more magical, more capable of taking a dim-witted question and turning it into a great answer, with said answer being a result from the internet, right?

Speaker 31 Note that nothing I'm saying here is actually about generating a result. It's about processing a user's query and presenting an answer.

Speaker 31 The very foundation of computing and the thing that Google at one point was the best in the world at doing.

Speaker 31 Thanks to Probagar Raghavan, the former head of ads that led a coup to become the head of search, Google has pulled away from being the meaningful source of information on the internet.

Speaker 31 It really is actually quite sad when you think about it. And I'd argue that ChatGPT filled the void left by Google search by doing the thing that people wanted Google search to do.

Speaker 31 Answer a question, even if the user isn't really sure how to ask it.

Speaker 31 Google search has become clunky and messy, putting the burden of using the service on the user rather than helping fill the gap between a query and an answer in any meaningful way.

Speaker 31 Google's AI summaries don't even try to do what ChatGPT does. They just generate summaries based on search results and say, uh,

Speaker 31 mate, is this what you want? I don't fucking know.

Speaker 31 I only make like $10 billion a quarter. Give me a fucking break.
But one note on Google's AI summaries. They're designed to answer a question rather than provide a right answer.

Speaker 31 There's a distinction that needs to be made here because it speaks to the underlying utility of search itself.

Speaker 31 One good illustration came earlier this week when someone noticed that you could ask Google to explain the meaning of a completely made-up phrase, and it would dutifully obey you.

Speaker 31 Two dry frogs in the situation, Google said, referred to a group of people in an awkward or difficult social situation.

Speaker 31 Not every insect has a mortgage, Google claimed, is a humorous way of explaining that not everything is as it seems. But my favorite is

Speaker 31 sorry, I haven't read this back since I wrote. Big winky on the skillet bowl is apparently a slang term that refers to a piece of bread with an egg in the middle.

Speaker 31 Very funny, sure, but is it useful? No. And it's also really cool that this company just makes billions of dollars off of this.

Speaker 31 With all its data and all its talent, Google has put out the laziest version of an LLM on top of its questionably functional search product as a means of impressing shareholders.

Speaker 31 And I'd like to say the results speak for themselves. Now, I must be clear, none of this is to say that ChatGPT is good.

Speaker 31 Like, it really isn't. It's just better at understanding a user's request than Google search.

Speaker 31 Yes, I fundamentally believe, by the way, that 500 million people a week could be using ChatGPT as some sort of search replacement.

Speaker 31 And no, no, I do not believe that's a functional business model, in part because if it was ChatGPT, OpenAI, they'd have a functional business. And to be clear, that's a...

Speaker 31 Load-bearing cut because I know that 500 million people aren't using ChatGPT as a search replacement. It's hypothetical.
We actually don't know, and we cannot trust what comes out of them.

Speaker 31 Not that they share.

Speaker 31 It's not just that OpenAI is a shambles of a company.

Speaker 31 It appears that Google's ability to turn search into such a big business was because it held a monopoly on search, search advertising, and pretty much the entire online ads industry.

Speaker 31 And if it was a truly competitive market and Google wasn't allowed to be vertically integrated with the entire digital advertising apparatus of the web, it would likely be making much less revenue per user.

Speaker 31 And that's bad if your Google replacement costs many, many, many, many, many more times more money than Google to run.

Speaker 31 As an aside, by the way, if you're wondering, no, OpenAI cannot just create a Google search competitor.

Speaker 31 Search GPT will be a significantly more expensive product to run at Google scale than ChatGPT, both infrastructurally and then the cost of revenue itself, with OpenAI being forced to create this massive advertising arm that does not exist.

Speaker 31 And by the way, Another great critique I get is like, OpenAI can just hire a bunch of ads people. Why do you think there hasn't been another competitor to search?

Speaker 31 You realize that there are lots of other companies with lots of other money that could just do this, and indeed they've tried. Why do you think that hasn't worked? Is it because of the monopoly?

Speaker 31 It's because of the monopoly. It's because of the monopoly.
Look, people love the chat GPT interface.

Speaker 31 It's the box where you can type in one thing, get another thing out, because it resembles how everybody has always wanted Google search to work. Does it work well? Who knows?

Speaker 31 But people feel like they're getting more out of it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 7 There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

Speaker 9 It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Speaker 11 Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

Speaker 12 I think we will see a Twitch stream or president, maybe within our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 You can find Close All tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 31 But before I go any further, I'd like to talk to you about AGI, artificial general intelligence.

Speaker 31 Artificial bloody general intelligence, the conscious computer that does not exist and is entirely fictional.

Speaker 31 And this two-part, by the way, has been a break from my usual onerous, tortured, punished, and analysis. And it's because I needed to have a little fun.

Speaker 31 And I think you've kind of heard that in the episode.

Speaker 31 I'm like a little flexible. I'm all like limber and excited.
And it also comes from a place of frustration.

Speaker 31 None of this AI stuff has ever felt substantive or real because the actual things that you can do with generative AI never seem to come close to the things that people like Sam Altman and Warry O'Amade seem to be promising.

Speaker 31 Nor do they come close to the bullshit like people Casey Newton and Kevin Roos are peddling. None of this ever resembled artificial general intelligence.

Speaker 31 And if I'm honest, very little of it seems to even suggest it's a functional industry.

Speaker 31 And when cynical plants like Kevin Roos of the Times bumble around asking theoretical questions such as, do you think that there's a 50% chance or higher that AGI defined as an AI system that outperforms human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks will be built before 2030?

Speaker 31 I think when we're reading people saying that, and that was Kevin Roos at like some little AI panel thing surrounded by just like venture capitalists and the senior officials of Anthropic, When you've got like the lead columnist of the Times saying this, we should all be terrified.

Speaker 31 We should be terrified, but not of AGI, but that the lead technical columnist that the New York Times appears to have an undiagnosed concussion.

Speaker 31 Roos's logic, as with KEC Newton's, is based on the idea that he's talked to a bunch of people that say, yeah, yeah, mate, AGI is right around the corner, rather than any kind of like tangible proof or evidence, just line going up.

Speaker 31 Do you see it? The line's going up. Which line is it? Get out of my house.
Look,

Speaker 31 I will say, I've been a little mean on Kevin Roos.

Speaker 31 I've been saying that he's written the worst shit about artificial intelligence, that he is a credulous buffoon or at worst a cynical plant, that he Kevin Roos at the New York Times is regularly pushing things like NFTs and crypto and getting basic things wrong like the Helium piece in which Helium lied about

Speaker 31 their customers.

Speaker 31 I've said that Kevin Roos regularly says things that don't make any sense and he has indeed written the worst tech criticism out there, criticism being the wrong word, tech analysis out there.

Speaker 31 And I want to just say that I've been wrong. I've been wrong the entire time.
What I should have said is that he's written the worst stuff yet.

Speaker 31 And I should have said that because he's recently published one of the dumbest fucking things I've read in my life, and I can't wait to tell you about it.

Speaker 31 His most egregious example of credulousness came in late April when he published this thinly veiled puff piece about what to do if AI models become conscious in the future.

Speaker 31 Now this piece, this piece is possibly the dumbest tech piece I've read in my life. I really mean this.
I've read some dog shit.

Speaker 31 I've gone on Telegram groups for the smallest ICOs you've seen in your life. I'm doing the Rutger Hauer speech from a Blade Runner right now.

Speaker 31 The things I've seen with your eyes, different speech, I realize. This piece from the New York Times is called, If AI Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

Speaker 31 And the subhead is, as artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one AI company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.

Speaker 31 I'm going to give you exactly one guess, what company he's talking about. And here's a clue.

Speaker 31 It's the company Casey Newton's boyfriend works at. That's right, it's Anthropic.

Speaker 31 Kevin Roos interviewed two people, both employed by Anthropic, with one holding the genuinely hilarious job description of AI welfare researcher, who said nakedly insane things like, there's only a small chance, maybe 15% or so, that Claude or another AI system is conscious.

Speaker 31 And it seems that if you find yourself in a situation of bringing some new class of being into existence, dot dot dot, then it seems quite prudent to at least be asking questions about whether that system might have its own kinds of experiences.

Speaker 31 Well, I'm experiencing brain damage reading this article out.

Speaker 31 And what makes this article so appalling is that Roos acknowledges that this shit is seen by most level-headed people as utterly fantastical.

Speaker 31 He describes the concept of AI consciousness as a taboo subject and that many critics will see this as crazy talk, but doesn't bother to speak to any actual critics.

Speaker 31 He does, however, speculate on the motives of said critics, saying that they might object to an AI company's studying consciousness in the first place, because it might create incentives to train their systems to act more sentient than they actually are.

Speaker 31 Yeah, Kevin, wouldn't wouldn't it be really bad if a generative AI company deliberately did something to convince someone that their systems were sentient?

Speaker 31 You know, someone really credulous who would accept whatever narratives said AI company was pushing, such as that they created a special job just in case AI was sentient. Genuine question, Kevin.

Speaker 31 When you walk past the mirror, do you start barking at it because you see another guy?

Speaker 31 Anyway, nothing about anything that OpenAI or Anthropic is building or shipping suggests that we are anywhere near any kind of autonomous computing.

Speaker 31 They've used the concept of AI safety and now AI welfare as a marketing term to convince people that their expensive, wasteful software will somehow become conscious because they're having discussions about what to do if it does so.

Speaker 31 And anyone, literally any reporter accepting this at face value is doing their readers a disservice and embarrassing themselves in the process.

Speaker 31 If AI safety advocates cared about, I don't know, safety or AI, they'd have cared about the environmental impact or the fact that these models train using stolen material or the fact that these models don't really deliver on their promises.

Speaker 31 And if they did, it would shock the labor market. And it would hurt millions, if not billions of people.

Speaker 31 And we don't have anywhere near the social safety network to support the ones we have right now, let alone in this completely fictional future.

Speaker 31 These companies do not care about your safety and they don't have any way to get to AGI.

Speaker 31 They're full of shit and it's time to start being honest that you don't have any proof that they do anything that they say they will. Also, by the way, I think the bubble might actually be bursting.

Speaker 31 Yeah, remember in August of last year, I was talking about the pale horses of the AI apocalypse.

Speaker 31 Well, one of the major warning signs that the bubble was bursting was big tech firms would be reducing their capital expenditures. And this is a call I've made quite a few times.

Speaker 31 And there was one in alarming clarity from April 4th, 2024. And I'm going to quote myself here.
Well, I hope I'm... Nope, that's the wrong voice.

Speaker 31 While I hope I'm wrong, the calamity I fear is one where the massive overinvestment in data centers is met with a lack of meaningful growth or profit, leading to the markets turning on the major cloud players that stake their future on unproven generative AI.

Speaker 31 If businesses don't adopt AI at scale, not experimentally, but at the core of their operations, the revenue is simply not there to sustain the hype.

Speaker 31 And once the market turns, it will turn hard, demanding efficiency and cutbacks that will lead to tens of thousands of job cuts. Well, we're about to find out if I'm right.

Speaker 31 On April 21st, Yahoo Finance reported that analyst Josh Schbeck said that Amazon's generative AI revenue for Amazon web services would be $5 billion.

Speaker 31 $5 billion this year. A remarkably small sum that is not profit, by the way, and also a drop in the bucket compared to Amazon's projected $105 billion in capital expenditures in 2025.

Speaker 31 It's $78.2 billion in expenditures in 2024, or it's $48.4 billion in 2023. And is that really fucking it? Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?

Speaker 31 I have had jackholes for years telling me this was the next big money driver. $5 billion?

Speaker 31 $5 billion goddamn dollar. Are you fucking kidding? You'd make more money auctioning dogs.
This is a disgrace. And if you're wondering, yes, all of this is for AI.
All of that capex.

Speaker 31 From the Yahoo Finance article, the wonderful Laura Bratton wrote, well, this is a quote, by the way, from the article.

Speaker 31 CEO Andy Jassy said in February that the vast majority of this year's $100 billion in capital investments from the tech giant will go towards building out artificial intelligence capacity for its cloud segment, Amazon Web Services, AWS.

Speaker 31 Well, shit, I bet investors are going to love this. Better save some money, Andy.
What's that?

Speaker 31 What's that, Andy?

Speaker 31 What?

Speaker 31 Oh, you're saving money already. How? Oh, shit.
Oh, uh-oh.

Speaker 31 A report from Wells Fargo analysts published at the end of April called Data Centers, AWS Goes on Pause, says that Amazon has paused the portion of its leasing discussions on the co-location side.

Speaker 31 And while it's not clear the magnitude of the pause, the positioning is similar to what analysts have heard recently from Microsoft, that they are digesting aggressive recent lease-up deals pulling back from a pipeline of LOIs or SQQs.

Speaker 31 Now, some arsehole is going to say LOIs and SQQs aren't a big deal, but they are. They are.
Go listen to the power cut episodes. Go listen.
Go back and listen to them right now.

Speaker 31 Get off my, how'd you get in my house? Anyway, digesting in this case refers to when hyperscalers sit with their current capacity for a minute.

Speaker 31 And Wells Fargo adds that these periods typically last six to twelve months, though they can be much shorter.

Speaker 31 It's not obvious how much capacity Amazon is walking away from, but they're walking away from capacity. It's happening.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 7 There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

Speaker 8 It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Speaker 11 Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

Speaker 12 I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president maybe within our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 31 But what if it wasn't just Amazon?

Speaker 31 Another report from a friend of the podcast, Read People I email occasionally asking for a PDF, of course, referring to analyst T.D.

Speaker 31 Cohen, put out a report last week that, while titled in a way that suggested there wasn't a pullback at all, actually said that there was. It was called like hyperscaler demand is up.

Speaker 31 Let's take a look at one damning quote.

Speaker 31 Relative to the hyperscaler demand backdrop at PCC, which is a conference, hyperscalar demand has moderated a bit, driven by the Microsoft pullback and to a lesser extent Amazon discussed later, particularly in Europe, there has been a broader moderation in the urgency and speed with which the hyperscalers are looking to take down capacity.

Speaker 31 And the number of large deals, i.e., 400 megawatt deals in the market, appears to have moderated.

Speaker 31 In plain English, this means demand has come down, there's less urgency to build stuff, and the market is also slowing down.

Speaker 31 Cohen also added that it observed a moderation in the exuberance around the outlook for hyperscaler demand, which characterized the market this time last year.

Speaker 31 Brother, my brother in Christ, isn't this meant to be the next big thing? We need more exuberance, not less.

Speaker 31 Worse still, Microsoft appears to have pulled back even further with TD Cohen noting that there has been a slow in demand, slow down in demand, and that it saw very little third-party leasing from Microsoft this quarter.

Speaker 31 And most damningly, and I'll book, and I'll be kind of, I really want you to like take this, let it ring through you.

Speaker 31 These deals in totality suggest that Microsoft's run rate demand has decelerated materially. For those of you wondering, it means that they're not getting any fucking revenue demand for generative AI.

Speaker 31 Well, at least Meta and Oracle aren't slowing down, right?

Speaker 31 Well,

Speaker 31 TD Cohen also reported that it received reverse inquiries from industry participants around a potential slowdown in demand from Oracle, leading to the analysts to ask around and find that there had been a near-term slowdown in decision-making and organizational changes at Oracle.

Speaker 31 That adds that this might not mean this is changing its needs or the speed at which it secures capacity.

Speaker 31 And if you're wondering what else this could mean, you are correct in doing so because slowing down traditionally refers to a change in speed.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 31 even the analysts are kind of like trying to dance around this. It's kind of sad.

Speaker 31 TD Cohen also adds that Meta is continued demand, which means that they're buying more stuff, albeit with less volume of megawatt signings quarter over quarter.

Speaker 31 Then adding that Meta's data center activity has historically been characterized by short periods of strong activity followed by digestion.

Speaker 31 In essence, Meta is signing less megawatts of compute and has in the past followed these kind of aggressive build outs with

Speaker 31 fewer buildouts.

Speaker 31 outs it doesn't sound good does it it doesn't sound like we're cooking and now we're going to get to and the whole thing's been kind of defensive i don't care i mean not i've yet to receive an email that meaningfully changes my opinion on any of this stuff but a little bit of defensiveness in this it's not because i feel self-conscious it's because i'm tired of hearing the same fucking questions but i'll ask you if you're a critic or a a hater or one of the many people who would like to see me punished, put me on the cross, set me on fire.

Speaker 31 It's what you would love, wouldn't it? But you'd love it if I was dead. Putting that joke aside, I will ask my haters a question.
If I'm wrong, how exactly am I wrong?

Speaker 31 I don't know, man. All of this seems...

Speaker 31 all this stuff sure seems like the hyperscalers are reducing their capital expenditures at a time when tariffs and economic uncertainty are making investors far more critical of revenues it sure seems that nobody outside of open ai is making any real revenue on generative ai and they're certainly not making a profit it also seems at this point it's pretty obvious that generative ai isn't going to do much more than it does today If Amazon is only making $5 billion in revenue from the literal only shiny new thing it has sold on the world's premier cloud platform at a time when businesses are hungry and desperate to integrate AI, then there's little chance this suddenly turns into a remarkable revenue driver.

Speaker 31 Amazon made $187.79 billion in their last quarterly earnings, and if only $5 billion of that is coming from AI at the height of the bubble, it heavily suggests that there may not actually be that much money to make, either because it's too expensive to run these services or or because, well, these services don't have the kind of addressable market that AWS generally has.

Speaker 31 Microsoft has reported that it was making a paltry $13 billion a year in annualized revenue, so the equivalent of $3.25 billion a quarter, selling generative AI services and model access.

Speaker 31 The information reported that Salesforce's agent force bullshit isn't even going to boost sales growth in 2025, in part because it's pitching it as a digital labor that can essentially replace humans for tasks.

Speaker 31 And it turns out that it doesn't do that very well at all, costs $2 dollars a conversation and requires paying Salesforce to use its data cloud product what if anything suggests that I'm wrong here that things have worked out in the past with things like the internet and smartphones and that surely that's gonna happen with generative AI and by extension open AI that companies like uber lost money and eventually worked it out and I've actually written a thing I'll link to about that you can get it in the episode notes is it that open ai is growing fast and that somehow discounts the fact that it burns billions of dollars and does not appear to have any path path to profitability.

Speaker 31 Do you think that agents will suddenly start working and everything will be fine? It's a fucking joke. I'm tired of it.

Speaker 31 I'm really, I'm just,

Speaker 31 I've tried to be like intellectual. I've tried to explain it nicely and I'll probably still continue, but I'm just kind of fucking tired of it.
I'm not going to stop doing this, by the way.

Speaker 31 If anything, I'm more galvanized by my rage. My aura ring is going to claim I did a workout these episodes.
It's great. I'm burning calories in real time.

Speaker 31 But large language models and their associated businesses, in my opinion, are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar solution for a tech industry that's lost the fucking plant.

Speaker 31 Silicon Valley is dominated by management consultants that no longer know what innovation looks like, and they've been tricked by Sam Altman, who's kind of a savvy con artist that took advantage of their desperation for growth.

Speaker 31 Generative AI is the perfect nihilistic form of tech bubbles, a way for people to spend a lot of money on power on cloud compute because they don't have anything else to do.

Speaker 31 Large language models are boring, unprofitable cloud software stretched to the limits, both ethically and technologically speaking, as a means of kind of keeping tech's collapsing growth era going.

Speaker 31 And OpenAI's non-profit mission has been fattened up to make foie gras for SaaS companies to upsell their clients and cloud compute companies to sell GPUs at an hourly rate.

Speaker 31 The rot economy has consumed the tech industry.

Speaker 31 Every American tech firm has been corrupted by the growth at all cost mindset, and thus they no longer know how to make sustainable businesses that solve real problems, largely because the people that run them haven't experienced them for decades.

Speaker 31 As a result, none of them were ready for when Sam Altman tricked them into believing he was their savior.

Speaker 31 Generative AI isn't about helping you or me to do things or even about replacing workers.

Speaker 31 It's about making new SKUs, new monthly subscription costs for consumers and enterprises, new ways to convince people to pay more for the things they already have used in slightly different ways that oftentimes end up being worse.

Speaker 31 Only an industry out of options would choose this bubble, and the punishment for them doing so will be grim. I don't know if you think I'm right or not.

Speaker 31 I don't know if you think I'm insane for the way I communicate about this industry.

Speaker 31 Even if you think I am, think long and hard about why it is you disagree with me and the consequences of me being wrong or right.

Speaker 31 There's nothing else left after generative AI. There are no hypergrowth markets left in tech.
SaaS companies are out of things to upsell.

Speaker 31 Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta do not have any other ways to continue showing growth. And when the market works that out, there will be hell to pay.

Speaker 31 Hell that will reverberate through the valuations of, at the very least, every public software company and many of the hardware ones too.

Speaker 31 I have no idea how this ends and I can't see how any of it works out well for anyone. In any case I'll be here to tell you whether it does or not and

Speaker 31 I must say I love doing the show so much and thank you for humoring me when I experience brain madness every week. I'm not going to stop.

Speaker 31 I really enjoy doing this and the emails I got around the Webby were genuinely wonderful. The people on the Reddit, people over email messages, just you're all so wonderful.

Speaker 31 I'm going to keep doing this. I mean, I'm contractually agreed to as well, but I love doing this, and I genuinely feel very lucky to be able to.

Speaker 33 Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 30 The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski.

Speaker 36 You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 30 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 37 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 7 There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

Speaker 10 It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Speaker 11 Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

Speaker 12 I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president maybe within our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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