The BS Bubble

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Speaker 15 Adam Brody, for instance, uses WhatsApp to pin messages, send events, and settle debates using polls with his friends, all in one group chat.

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Speaker 20 Hi, I'm EdZitron, and you're listening to Better Offline.

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Speaker 20 But if I'm honest, today I'm actually a little bit pissed off. And that's why we've got a two-part episode this week about how fucking stupid the AI boom has become.
I wrote farcical in the script.

Speaker 20 And I'm going to be honest, I need to be a little more pointed. Because I've written tens of thousands of words about this now.
I've recorded hours upon hours of podcasts.

Speaker 20 and still to this day, people are babbling about the AI revolution as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the fucking earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their moors.

Speaker 20 Things are astronomically fucked outside, yet the tech media continues to tell me to get my swimming trunks on and take a long, nice dip in the fucking pool.

Speaker 20 As you can tell, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual. I've just, I'm a little bit frustrated.

Speaker 20 I don't know why I'm the one saying this, and I frequently feel weird that I, a part-time blogger and podcaster, am writing the things that I'm writing.

Speaker 20 Since I put out the newsletter OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry, and actually it was a couple weeks back I did the two-parter about it too, I've heard nothing in response, as was the case with how does open AI survive and how OpenAI is bad business.

Speaker 20 There just seems to be little concern or belief that there's any kind of risk at the heart of AI and open AI in particular. And there are companies that spent $9 billion in 2024 to lose $5 billion.

Speaker 20 Well, I'd love to add a because here, if not because it's important to be intellectually honest and represent views that directly contrast my own, even if I do in a somewhat sarcastic and sardonic fashion, nobody seems to actually have a cogent response to how they write this ship, other than hard fork or Casey Newton, throwing a full-scale psycho-tante on a podcast and saying I'm wrong because inference costs are coming down.

Speaker 20 Inference, by the way, is when an AI takes an input and produces an output. It's the calculations that take place.

Speaker 20 place right before Google's generative AI assistant attributes a Voltaire quote to Michael Jackson or says that black tar heroin when enjoyed in moderation can help you lose weight.

Speaker 20 Newton is a nakedly captured booster that ran an infographic from Anthropic a few weeks ago, the likes of which I haven't seen since 2013.

Speaker 20 It was telling you all the ways that people use generative AI. It looks like some shit from, I don't know, early day Mashable.
No offense, Christina.

Speaker 20 And they essentially treat this company propaganda as gospel, but he's really far from the only one with a flimsy attachment to reality.

Speaker 20 The Information, a publication that genuinely does some great stuff, which makes it even more heartbreaking to say this, ran a piece in early April that made me even more furious than usual, claiming that OpenAI was forecasting revenue topping $125 billion in 2029 based on selling agents and monetizing free users as a driver to higher revenue.

Speaker 20 Agents, I should add, are AI systems that can interact with other systems and do stuff. So an AI that can order pizza from DoorDash for you, that's an example of an agent.

Speaker 20 And when I say it can order pizza for you, I am talking entirely theoretically, as they cannot do this right now and may never be able to do so.

Speaker 20 Indeed, the whole agent thing is just what we wish AI was, and it actually doesn't work.

Speaker 20 And the piece reported based on things, and I quote, told to some potential and current investors, takes great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says is perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no goddamn sense.

Speaker 20 So, according to the information's reporting, OpenAI expects agents and new products, and both of those are quotes, to contribute tens of billions of dollars of revenue, both in the near term, somehow contributing $3 billion in revenue this year, which I will get to in a little bit, and in the long term, with an egregious $25 billion in revenue in

Speaker 20 2029 even, projected to come from just new products.

Speaker 20 If you're wondering what those new products might be, I am too, because the information doesn't seem to know.

Speaker 20 And instead of saying OpenAI has no idea what the fuck they're talking about and is just saying stuff, the outlet continues to publish things with the kind of empty optimism that's indistinguishable from GPT-generated LinkedIn posts.

Speaker 20 Must be clear, the information isn't generated in their articles, they're writing them fresh.

Speaker 20 I want to be really, really clear about something. We are in nearly in May 2025 and indeed one of these will come out actually in May, the second part.

Speaker 20 I see no evidence that OpenAI even has a marketable agent product they can sell, let alone one that it will make $3 billion goddamn dollars off of.

Speaker 20 And they definitely are not going to do so in the next six or seven months. Oh my.

Speaker 20 For context, that's triple the revenue of OpenAI that they made, reportedly, at least from selling access to their models via its APIs, essentially allowing third-party companies to use GPT in their apps in the entirety of 2024.

Speaker 20 And those APIs and models actually exist in a meaningful sense, as opposed to whatever the fuck OpenAI's half-baked arse agent stuff is. In fact, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to be mean.
I'm not.

Speaker 20 I'm going to be calm, be normal. I'm going to explain exactly what the information is reporting in an objective way because writing it out really shows how silly it all sounds.

Speaker 20 I'm going to write they believe a lot because I must be clear how stupid this is. Now,

Speaker 20 according to the information that's reporting, they believe that OpenAI will make $3 billion in 2025 from selling access to its agents.

Speaker 20 This appears to come from SoftBank, which has said it will buy $3 billion worth of OpenAI products annually.

Speaker 20 Earlier this year, we got a bit of extra information about how SoftBank will use these products. It plans to create a system called Crystal Intelligence, That's C-R-I-S-T-A-L.

Speaker 20 And it's one of the most generic names I've ever seen. And it will be a kind of general-purpose AI agent platform for big enterprises.

Speaker 20 The exact specifics of that will shock you, and that there are none, but SoftBank intends to use the technology internally across its various portfolio companies as, well, as market it to other large enterprise companies in Japan.

Speaker 20 I still do not know what the fuck this is. Crystal Intelligence, billions of dollars, billions of dollars, and they just don't, they can't even describe what it is.

Speaker 20 Just saying, yeah, it'll be an agent platform that does stuff with your business. Like, does that sound good? Can I have three billion? I need $40 billion.

Speaker 20 I need $40 billion. Give me.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 20 I also want to add that the information can't seem to keep its story straight on this issue.

Speaker 20 Back in February, they reported that OpenAI would make $3 billion in revenue only from agents with a big, beautiful chart that said $3 billion would come from it.

Speaker 20 Only to add that it would be SoftBank using OpenAI's products across its companies. Based on these numbers, it seems like SoftBank will be the only customer for OpenAI's agents.

Speaker 20 While this most likely won't be the case, and it isn't because it excludes anyone willing to pay a few bucks to test it out, it nonetheless doesn't signal good things for agents as a mass market product.

Speaker 20 Not that there were any good signals beforehand, though. Agents do not exist as a product that can be sold at scale.

Speaker 20 Yes, OpenAI teased Operator, its first agent, at the start of the year, but it doesn't seem to be able to do anything.

Speaker 20 The Information's own reporting from mid-April highlighted how OpenAI's operator agent struggled with comparison shopping on financial products, and that's a quote, and how operator and other agents are, and I quote again, tripped by pop-ups or logins as well as prompts asking for email addresses and phone numbers for marketing purposes, which I

Speaker 20 think accurately describes most websites. And just to summarize from everything I've said, the information is saying that the above product will make OpenAI $3 billion by the end of 2025.

Speaker 20 Sounds very real to me.

Speaker 20 Sounds extremely real. I love that the business media just prints this.
I love this. I love this so much.
I'm having so much fun.

Speaker 20 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 20 According to the information's reporting, they believe that OpenAI will basically double revenue every single year for the next four years and make $13 billion in revenue in 2025, more than doubling that to $29 billion in 2026, nearly doubling that to $54 billion in 2027, and nearly doubling that again to $86 billion in 2028 and eventually leveling out a ridiculous $125 billion of revenue in 2029.

Speaker 20 Said revenue estimates as of 2026 includes billions of dollars of new products that include free monetization, free user monetization even though. And if you're wondering what that means, I also am.

Speaker 20 The information does not explain. Jessica Lesson must have been busy being horrible to people that work for her.

Speaker 20 They do, however, say that OpenAI will start, and I'm quoting this, won't start generating much revenue from free users and other products until next year, that's 2026.

Speaker 20 In 2029, and I'm still quoting, however, it projects revenue from free users and other products will reach $25 billion, or one-fifth of all revenue, and then adds that shopping is another potential avenue.

Speaker 20 You still probably don't know what they're doing, and neither do I, and I have driven myself insane reading about this.

Speaker 20 I really cannot express my disgust about how willing publications are to blindly publish projections like these, especially when they're all so stupid let me just read this to you all right

Speaker 20 and i quote open ai has already begun experimenting with launching software features for shopping starting in january some users can access web browsing agent operator as part of their pro chat gpt subscription tier to order groceries from instacart and make restaurant reservations on open table

Speaker 20 Just want to be clear, this is a few episodes ago, I mentioned Casey Newton not even being able to like say this worked.

Speaker 20 I just want to be really clear as well what the information is saying.

Speaker 20 So they're saying that this experimental software launched to an indeterminate amount of people that barely works is going to make OpenAI $3 billion in 2025.

Speaker 20 And then somehow this is going to lead to OpenAI making $29 billion in 2026. And then they're going to eventually be up to $125 billion.
What the fuck? How? How?

Speaker 20 What fucking universe are we all living in? There's no proof that OpenAI can do this other than the fact it has a lot of users and a lot of venture capital.

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Speaker 20 In fact, I think we have real reason to worry about whether OpenAI even makes its current projections.

Speaker 20 In my last multi-part episode, and in the newsletter, OpenAI is a systemic risk, for those of you who like to read while listening to my fucking podcast, I wrote that Bloomberg had estimated that OpenAI would triple revenue to $12.7 billion in 2025 and based on its current subscriber base, OpenAI would effectively have to double its current subscription revenue and massively increase its API revenue to hit these targets.

Speaker 20 These projections rely on one entity, SoftBank, spending $3 billion specifically on OpenAI services. Really shouldn't have said specifically because they keep changing what it means.

Speaker 20 Meaning that they'd have to make enough on API cores, so people plug in the models into their products, to generate more revenue than OpenAI made in subscriptions in the entirety of 2024, and something else that I can only describe as an act of God.

Speaker 20 And that, I admit, assumes that SoftBank's spending commitment is based on usage and not like a flat fee where SoftBank just hands them $3 billion and gets infinite levels of access.

Speaker 20 Assuming it's the former, I'd be stunned if SoftBank's consumption hits $3 billion in 2025, even with the massive cost of the reasoning models that Crystal Intelligence will maybe be based off of.

Speaker 20 Again, we don't know. And SoftBank announced this deal with OpenAI in February.

Speaker 20 Crystal Intelligence, if it works, and that is possibly the most load-bearing if of all time, will be a massive, complicated and ambitious product.

Speaker 20 Details are vague, but from what I understand, SoftBank wants to create an AI that handles a bunch of varied tasks that knowledge workers do. I mean, it's just the same marketing bullshit.

Speaker 20 It's the same thing. It's the thing they've been lying about before.
And to be clear, OpenAI's agents cannot consistently do well anything right now.

Speaker 20 What I believe is happening is that reporters are taking OpenAI's rapid growth in revenue from 2023 to 2024, when they went from like tens of millions of dollars a month in the beginning of the 2023 to 300 million in August 2024.

Speaker 20 Genuinely a big leap.

Speaker 20 They're taking this to mean that the company will always effectively double or triple revenue every single year forever, with their evidence being OpenAI has said that this will happen in projections.

Speaker 20 It's bullshit. I'm sorry.
It's bullshit. It's bullshit.

Speaker 20 As I wrote before in a newsletter, It's called There's No AI Revolution and the accompanying episodes at the time, OpenAI effectively is the generative AI industry and nothing about the rest of the generative AI industry suggests that the revenue exists to sustain these ridiculous obscenes and frankly fucking stupid valuations and projections.

Speaker 20 What do I mean by that by the way? Okay, let me get into it.

Speaker 20 Chat GPT is the only real generative AI product with any significant usage, or rather, their nearest rivals are a fraction of said user base. Or maybe I need to be a little bit blunter.

Speaker 20 If anyone held a Google Gemini user conference, all the attendees could probably share a cab.

Speaker 20 Believing the OpenAI growth myth, and yes, reporting it objectively is both endorsing and believing these numbers, is engaging in childlike logic where you take one event, which is OpenAI's revenue, grew 1700% from 2023 to 2024.

Speaker 20 Wow! To mean another will take place, which is that OpenAI will continue to double revenue literally every other year. Another insane thing to believe.

Speaker 20 And you're consciously ignoring difficult questions such as, How will they do this? And what's the total addressable market of large language models and their associated subscriptions exactly?

Speaker 20 And how does this company even survive when it expects the costs of inference to triple this year to six billion dollars alone? Wait, wait, wait. Sorry.
Sorry.

Speaker 20 I really need to be clear with that last one because it's a direct quote from the information. Hmm.

Speaker 20 The company also expects growth in inference costs, the costs of running AI products such as Chat GPT and their underlying models to moderate over the next half decade.

Speaker 20 These costs will triple this year, referring to 2025, to $6 billion and rise to nearly $47 billion in 2030. Still, the annual growth rate will fall to about 30% then.
Okay, thanks.

Speaker 20 Also, are you fucking kidding me? $6 billion fucking dollars for fucking inference. Hey, Casey Newton, I thought those costs were coming down.
Casey? Casey? Casey? You in my head?

Speaker 20 He's not here.

Speaker 20 He's not here. Anyway, that's not really great at all.
That's actually really bad.

Speaker 20 The information reports that OpenAI will make about $8 billion from subscriptions to ChatGPT in 2025, meaning that 75% of OpenAI's largest revenue source is eaten up by the price of providing it.

Speaker 20 This is meant to be the cheap part. This is the one fucking thing people say to me is meant to come down in price.
I've had assholes saying to me for the last year, cost of inference is coming down.

Speaker 20 Is it? Are we living in different dimensions? Are there large parts of the tech media that have fucking gas leaks? What am I missing? Tell me what I am missing.

Speaker 20 Now, Ed, you haven't talked to people the ability to stick. You don't know what they're...
Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 20 If you were one of these people who says, I need to, and Casey, you're included man fuck like I'm so sick of this Oh you don't talk to people running these things I am sick of people like Casey Newton and others too saying oh you don't talk to enough AI people you haven't listened to them you mean I haven't listened to the problem of the people that make money off of lying about this dog shit

Speaker 20 Are you really think you think that's what's missing from my analysis? Interviewing people who work at these companies and understanding how the technologies work. I know how the technologies work.

Speaker 20 I don't need to talk to these fucking people. There are people out there like Simon Wilson and Max Wolf who know how these things work that I talk to fairly regularly.

Speaker 20 And both of them push back on me because they know how large language models work. Those people matter.

Speaker 20 What doesn't matter to me, what will never matter to me, is what Dario Amade, Jack Clark, and all the other fucking people Anthropic think.

Speaker 20 And I think it's detestable and actively, honestly, malpractice in journalism to pretend that there's something ethical about speaking to these people and listening and taking in their marketing spiel.

Speaker 20 It's actually a little bit disgusting that this is even a critique leveled at anyone.

Speaker 20 But you're going to have to forgive me. I'm going to be a little rude.
And I know that seemed like it, but I'm not even getting started. In fact, you know what?

Speaker 20 I think it's time. Okay, everyone.
I think it's time that I go through the most common critiques in AI. It's time for me to really sit down.
And I'm going to do my Kevin Roos voice.

Speaker 20 And I know a lot of you like my Kevin Roost voice. And some of you, not a lot of you, are going to say I'm being rude to these people and it weakens my analysis, to which I say kiss my ass.

Speaker 20 I will turn you, I will cube you like a car in a garbage dump.

Speaker 20 But let's start, shall we? The costs of inference are coming down. That's one argument, okay? Source?

Speaker 20 Source. Where is your source? If you are someone saying to me that the costs of inference are coming down, I want your source.
I want you to show me the costs.

Speaker 20 I want you to show me the costs at scale. Because it sure seems like they're increasing increasing for OpenAI and they're effectively the entire user base of the entire generative AI industry.

Speaker 20 But Ed, what about DeepSeek? You sweet idiot child. DeepSeek is not OpenAI and OpenAI's latest models only seem to be getting more expensive as time drags on.

Speaker 20 GPT 4.5 costs $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens.

Speaker 20 And at the risk of repeating myself, OpenAI is effectively the entire generative AI industry, at least for the world outside of China.

Speaker 20 On top of that, we actually don't know whether DeepSeek is even profitable to run at scale. It is definitely cheaper to run,

Speaker 20 but we don't know if it's actually profitable. Indeed, I don't even know how you'd calculate this, because running a DeepSeek model as just one person is one thing.

Speaker 20 The question is whether you could scale it up like OpenAI. We don't know.
But let's get back to the other critiques. This is a company at its growth stage.
They can just hit the button.

Speaker 20 It all be profitable. You have the mind of a child.
If this was the case, why would both Anthropic and OpenAI be losing so much money? Why are none of the hyperscalers making profit on AI?

Speaker 20 Why does nobody want to talk about the underlying economics if they're at the growth stage? And also, a little side point as well.

Speaker 20 Why have we been at the growth stage for years and why are hyperscalers at the growth stage? They're not startups. Anyway, on to another one though.
These are the early days of AI.

Speaker 20 It's just like the early days of... Wrong.

Speaker 20 Wrong.

Speaker 20 We have all the king's horses and all the king's men, the entire tech industry, and more money that has ever been invested into anything piled into generative AI, and the result has been utterly mediocre.

Speaker 20 Nobody's making money on AI other than NVIDIA, and maybe cheering a consultancy. But Ed, they're already showing signs that the AI is going to be powerful.
No, it's not.

Speaker 20 No, it's not. Like, if anyone brings these critiques to you, just say, no, no, they're not.
Show me. Show me.
Show me.

Speaker 20 Why is it the only people I'm giving Simon Wilson credit here? He's one of the only people who will show you anything cool. And it's cloud compute stuff.
It's like relatively boring enterprise stuff.

Speaker 20 It's exciting for the niche cases, like software generally is, but

Speaker 20 it's really not showing any power. We talk about this powerful AI thing.
Is it in the room? Like, where is this? Where is this powerful AI?

Speaker 20 But then I have actually had a few emails saying, Ed, Ed, look at OpenAI's O3 model. And I just want to be clear that this new and extremely expensive reasoning model also hallucinates more.

Speaker 20 Is that AGI, by the way? Is this AGI? Is the AGI in the room with us? Did the AGI tell you it loved you? Did it tell you to leave your wife?

Speaker 20 Did it offer you sex? I hope you're okay.

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Speaker 20 But Ed, Ed, it really is the early days though. It's just like this in the early days of the internet.
No, it was not.

Speaker 20 And you're a

Speaker 20 buffoon for suggesting otherwise. Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs wrote in a note from last year in the episode Pop Culture, you can listen to it, which

Speaker 20 the early days of the internet were nothing like this.

Speaker 20 nothing at all nothing there were the 62 000 64 000 some microsystems servers yes but there were so so many few of them but ed smartphones i've got you i finally have me in you in my size people doubted those two they didn't i will drown you in an icy lake if another person comes to me and says hey ed smartphones people doubted smartphones nobody doubted smartphones why do people keep i've read this point so many times but no one seems to have a fucking hyperlink because they're lying lying.

Speaker 20 They're goddamn lying.

Speaker 20 Covello of Goldman Sachs also noted and included an entire thing about how smartphones were fully telegraphed to analysts in advance with hundreds of presentations that accurately fit how smartphones rolled out and that said that no roadmap exists for AI.

Speaker 20 It's just,

Speaker 20 we're years into this and I'm still repeating the same points and I still don't have much in return other than the cost of inference going down. But here's another point to people like,

Speaker 20 they go, oh, Ed, you're so boned. Check out this article.
And some of you love to emailed me this fucking thing. Not many of you.
I must be clear, the listeners, you're wonderful. I love you so much.

Speaker 20 But there's one or two of you out there really, you're very attached to your generative AIs, and I'm never going to like it.

Speaker 20 But some of you like to send me this article from Newsweek in 1995 from a guy who said that the web would not be a big business. Clifford stole.
He said, why the web won't be Nirvana?

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 this piece, by the way, is quite detailed. You should read it.
I'm going to have it in the episode notes. But they think that sending me this, that one guy,

Speaker 20 one guy was wrong once.

Speaker 20 One guy, he said that the internet wouldn't be big. And this proves that I, Ed Zittron,

Speaker 20 what's that? 99, like 20 years later, because one guy said

Speaker 20 that the internet wouldn't be big. That I am wrong somehow.
Motherfucker, have you read the piece? That's actually the thing.

Speaker 20 All of these are things that you can box up and use on people who use this half-assed bullshit.

Speaker 20 Clifford Stoll basically says that the internet at the time was pretty limited, and yes, he conflated that with the idea that it wouldn't be big in the future.

Speaker 20 However, Stoll's piece also, as Michael Hiltzig wrote for the LA Times, was alarmingly accurate about misinformation and sleazy companies selling computerized replacements for education.

Speaker 20 In any case, one guy saying that the internet won't be big doesn't mean a fucking thing about generative AI, and you are a simpleton if you think it does.

Speaker 20 One guy being wrong in some way is not a response to a criticism. I will crush you like a bug if this is your logic.
I will eat you.

Speaker 20 I will put you in my mouth like Kirby and I'll shit you out and I will have the powers of a dunce. Stoll's analysis also isn't based on hundreds of hours of research and endless reporting.

Speaker 20 Mine is I will grab you from the ceiling like the wall master from Zelda and you will never be heard from again.

Speaker 20 Anyway, another argument. Another argument that people like to give me is that OpenAI and Anthropic are research entities not business and that they are not focused on profit.

Speaker 20 Okay, so just so we're clear that if that's the case, they're just going to burn money forever. Is that the case?

Speaker 20 Or are they going to hit like the be profitable button sometime?

Speaker 20 Also, if OpenAI was a research entity, why does it need $40 billion from SoftBank or to change its weird corporate structure to become a full-for profit? Actually, wait, wait a second, wait a second.

Speaker 20 So it just occurred to me.

Speaker 20 Open AI has as many as 800 million weekly active users. That's proof of adoption, right? That's going to be an argument that people have.
There's some bloke on Blue Sky.

Speaker 20 who's just been responding to me every few days with this kind of argument saying, look, look at all the users.

Speaker 20 And look, I get the look, you might be a bit horny about this number, but something don't make no sense about this number.

Speaker 20 On March 31st, 2025, OpenAI said that it had 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week. Two weeks later, Sam Altman claimed that something like 10% of the world uses their systems a lot.

Speaker 20 They're referring to chat GPTs. And the media took this to mean that ChatGPT is 800 million weekly active users.
I just want to be clear about something as well. Sam Altman didn't say that.

Speaker 20 He said the weird, vague thing about something like 10% of the world. Like, that's what he said.
And everyone just went, oh shit, we've got to help Sam Altman out.

Speaker 20 Got to push this bad boy over the edge. And there are three ways to interpret what he said.
And you tell me which one sounds real.

Speaker 20 Number one, OpenAI's user base increased by 300 million weekly active users in two weeks. Number two,

Speaker 20 OpenAI understated its user base in the announcement of their funding announcement on openai.com by 300 million users. Or three, number three.

Speaker 20 How about this? Sam Altman fucking lied.

Speaker 20 I get that some members of the media have a weird attachment to this damp little man, but have any of you ever considered that he's just fucking saying things knowing that you will print them with the kindest possible interpretation?

Speaker 20 Sam Altman is a liar. He's lied before and he'll lie again.
I wrote an entire newsletter called Sam Altman is full of shit. You should read it.
I'm going to link to it.

Speaker 20 But wait, Ed, Google says it has 350 million monthly active users on Gemini. Eat shit, Zitron.
No, you eat shit.

Speaker 20 Yes, Google Gemini has 350 million monthly active users, and that's because they started replacing Google Assistant with Google Gemini in early March. You are being had.
You are being swindled.

Speaker 20 If Google replaced Google search with Google Gemini, it would have billions of monthly active users. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 20 Jesus Christ on a goddamn cracker. Even reading this script out, I get like, some of you have suggested that this is...

Speaker 20 at all manufactured. No, reading this stuff makes me very angry because I didn't grow up popular or intelligent in any way.
I've had to pick this shit up as I go.

Speaker 20 And I don't think what I'm saying is crazy, but I am sometimes treated that way. And this episode, I realize I'm doing myself no favors.
But anyway, back to the critiques really quickly.

Speaker 20 OpenAI having hundreds of millions of free users, each losing it money, is proof that the free version of ChatGPT is popular, largely because the entirety of the media has written about AI non-stop for two straight years and mentioned ChatGPT every single fucking time.

Speaker 20 Yes, yes, there is a degree here of marketing, of partnerships, of word of mouth, mouth, of some degree of utility.

Speaker 20 But when you remove the non-stop free media campaign, Chat GPT would have peetered out by now, along with this stupid fucking bubble. But Ed, it's proof somebody's doing something.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's proved that something is broken in society. Generative AI has never, ever had the kind of meaningful business returns or utility that actually underpins something meaningful.

Speaker 20 But it has had enough to make people give it a try.

Speaker 20 Do you not actually, no, I know you listening, you're going to get this. In some ways, this episode has been, I mean, in all ways, it's been pretty ranty, and the second one, gonna be even more so.

Speaker 20 What I'm trying to do here is show you how farcical all this crap is, how ridiculous it is, how silly these posits are, these projections are, the suggestion that what we have today will become something else when all we've had is proof that it won't.

Speaker 20 Do you see the obvious cracks in the wall here? No matter how strenuously people like professional credulous dipshits at the other big publications tried to pay over them.

Speaker 20 Does any of this make sense to you?

Speaker 20 Because I, even when I try and steel man my own arguments, can't wrap my head around how any of this survives, let alone becomes an industry where the biggest player has annual revenues greater than some major industrialized countries.

Speaker 20 And I know some of you,

Speaker 20 the emotions a lot, and I know the aggressions a lot. I'm frustrated because I truly believe this stuff's falling apart.
I truly believe that this was never really anything.

Speaker 20 While I'm saying this, Kevin Roos is in the New York Times going, I believe that AGI is my friend. I believe AGI will rise out of the ground and hug me in the way that no one ever has.

Speaker 20 I think that's disgusting on multiple levels, but I also think it's genuinely irresponsible. I think all of this is.

Speaker 20 I think when this collapses, we're going to have to look back and take inventory of how we got here.

Speaker 20 And I need you to, in the next episode, listen to it through the kind of length, listen to it through the lens. That's how lenses work.

Speaker 20 I need you to just stick with it and realize that all of what this is is trying to show you and hopefully other people that you talk to how silly this is, how ridiculous this is, and that we have a major problem in tech and business media.

Speaker 20 We have a problem where people can come out and just say whatever.

Speaker 20 The Charlie Brown had hose of the tech media.

Speaker 20 And it's disgusting to me because there are startups that could use this money. There are better things to be done with this money.

Speaker 20 Perhaps they're not hyper-growth markets, but there are things that actually exist that could be piled into.

Speaker 20 Instead, we've done this to make companies look like they can grow, to make Sam Altman able to buy another $5 million Koenasig car. Is that the one he has?

Speaker 22 Either way, I'm not going to lower the temperature on the next episode.

Speaker 20 I'm going to be honest, it's going to be just as spicy.

Speaker 20 But I want you to know all of this frustration comes from a place of knowing that we can do better, of knowing that the tech industry could do better.

Speaker 20 Perhaps it won't be as big as it is today in the future. I don't know.
But for it to get better, this shit needs to end.

Speaker 20 Stick around for the next part where I'll talk about how we actually got here, how this bubble got inflated, and how nasty the result could be at the end.

Speaker 17 Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 21 The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. 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 W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 18 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

Speaker 18 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 4 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 4 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 6 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 8 There was this 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.

Speaker 14 Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

Speaker 7 I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president maybe within our lifetimes.

Speaker 4 You can find Close All tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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