How To Argue With An AI Booster, Part Three

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Speaker 13 Hello I'm Ed Zitron and this is Better Offline.

Speaker 13 We've finally reached the end of our three-part how to argue with an AI booster series.

Speaker 13 Big strong men are standing outside of the Better Offline studio, suspended 200 feet above the Las Vegas Strip with tears in their eyes and they're saying, sir, sir, it's the most beautiful podcast I've ever heard.

Speaker 13 Please stop recording it. Everyone else will feel insufficient when they hear it.
No, no, I have to continue. I'm afraid my listeners need me.

Speaker 13 But okay, seriously, folks. If there's anything I want you to take home so far, it's that the arguments that these people, these AI sycophants, make,

Speaker 13 they crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny, and yet these arguments work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who don't understand the rotten economics of AI, or because they force the opposite party to surrender their reason and to exit the planes of reality.

Speaker 13 To which I say, fuck that, absolutely not. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on, and I'll hope that you'll all be standing with me side by side.

Speaker 13 Now, in the first episode, we shook away the claims that it's the early days for AI and we just need to give it more time.

Speaker 13 Then I took the idea that generative AI is like Uber or fiber optic networking, two industries that both burned a lot of money at the start, but are otherwise nothing like generative AI.

Speaker 13 And now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments. These are the worst of the worst booster quips.
Here we go. Ultra booster quip.

Speaker 13 I thought about recording that with a bunch of reverb, but it didn't really work out for me, but I wanted to do it once.

Speaker 13 But anyway, their argument is, uh-huh, AI is just like Amazon Web Services, a massive investment that took a while to go profitable, and everybody hated Amazon for it.

Speaker 13 Now, I actually covered this in depth in the hater's guide to the AI bubble, but the long and short of it is that Amazon Web Services is a platform, a necessity with an obvious choice, and has burned about 10% of what Amazon and all of them have burned chasing generative AI, and had also proven demand before building it.

Speaker 13 Also, Amazon Web Services was break-even within three years, and OpenAI was founded in fucking 2015, and even if you start from November 2022, by Amazon Web Services standards, it should be break-even by now.

Speaker 13 But now I'll quote myself.

Speaker 13 Amazon web- no wait, sorry, that's the boosters. Amazon web services was created out of necessity.

Speaker 13 Amazon's infrastructure needs were so great that he had effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything to theoretically everywhere.

Speaker 13 Handling both the traffic from customers, delivering the software that runs Amazon.com quickly and reliably, and well, making sure things were stable.

Speaker 13 It didn't need to come up with a reason for people to run web applications.

Speaker 13 They were already doing so themselves, but in ways that cost a lot more, were inflexible and required specialist server skills.

Speaker 13 Amazon web services took something that people already did and what there was already a proven demand for and made it better and scaled it. Eventually, Google and Microsoft would join the fray.

Speaker 13 I editorialized a bit there, but I can do that with my own work.

Speaker 13 Now, a common booster query, by the way, is for them to say, well, this AI company, they've got high annualized revenues. And as I've discussed in the past, this metric is basically month times 12.

Speaker 13 And while it's a fine measure for normal, high-gross margin businesses like software as a service companies, it isn't for AI. It doesn't account for churn, which is when people leave.

Speaker 13 It also is a number intentionally used to make a company sound more successful. So you can say $200 million annualized revenue instead of $16.6 million a month.

Speaker 13 And you're also meant to, but you heard, they said 200 million annualized, but you heard 200 million. Your mind did.
That was a bad blinket reference, but I'll continue.

Speaker 13 They want you to think 200 million. They want you to think that's what they'll make.
More often than not, if they mention an annualized number, that number will not be how much they make that year.

Speaker 13 Also, if they're using this number, it's likely not consistent. And now, if they bring this up, you should just say to them, hey, how much profit is the company making?

Speaker 13 And also, how much are they burning? At this point, they will, I think, mace you. I mean, with the spray or an actual mace.
AI boosters are strange. Now, they'll also say, well,

Speaker 13 this AI company's in growth mode, and they'll pull the profit lever when it's time. And the answer to that is always going to be, why have none of them done this?

Speaker 13 Not one. Not one of them.
Now, a booster will burst through your door and go, AI, AGI, AGI, and then there's that wheel bullshit again. It's always about the wheel with these fuckers.

Speaker 13 We do not know how thinking works in humans and thus cannot extrapolate it to a machine.

Speaker 13 And at the very least, human beings have the ability to re-evaluate things and learn, a thing that LLMs cannot do and will never do. We do not know how to get to AGI.

Speaker 13 Sam Mortman said in June that OpenAI was now confident they knew how to build AGI as they have traditionally understood it.

Speaker 13 Then in August, Altman said that AGI was not a super useful term and that the point of all this is it doesn't really matter and it's just this continuing exponential of model capability that we'll rely on for more and more things.

Speaker 13 I'm really tired of people quoting this guy. He doesn't make any fucking sense.

Speaker 13 Read anything he says out loud and it's just

Speaker 13 really just total bullshit.

Speaker 13 Even meta's chief ai scientist the annlacun says it isn't possible with transformer based models to make a gi we don't know if a gi is possible and anyone claiming they do is lying anyone who's talking about a gi is talking about fan fiction again ask them how they feel about banjo and kazooie do you think they made love

Speaker 13 actually that's a real if next time someone brings up a gi to you seriously bring up banjo and kazooie and their romantic involvement i actually that i think that that's the only response you should give now stop humoring humoring them.

Speaker 13 It is fanfiction.

Speaker 13 But putting Banjo and Kazooie aside, there's also a really stupid booster thing they do, which is, I'm hearing from people deep within the AI industry that there's some sort of ultra-powerful models they're not talking about.

Speaker 13 And this, by the way, is hogwash. Nothing different than your buddy's friend's uncle who works at Nintendo that says Mario is coming to the PlayStation.

Speaker 13 Ilya Sutskeva and Miramarati raised billions of dollars for companies with no product, let alone a product roadmap.

Speaker 13 And they did so because they saw an opportunity for a grift and to throw a bunch of money at compute for no reason. Anyone who has secret shit is not talking about it because it doesn't exist.

Speaker 13 Also, if someone from deep within the industry has told somebody big things are coming, they're doing so to con them or make them think that they have privileged information. Ask for specifics.

Speaker 13 And if they say, I couldn't possibly tell you, then they're full of shit.

Speaker 13 They're full of crap. They are full of doo-doo.
And if they get vague, get specific. Oh, it's going to be able to automate all the things.
What things? How? How does it automate them?

Speaker 13 Oh, I don't know. Then you don't know shit about fuck.
Now talking about not knowing shit about fuck is another booster quip. Chat GPT is so popular.
700 million people use it weekly.

Speaker 13 It's one of the most popular websites on the internet. Its popularity proves its utility.
Look at all the paying customers.

Speaker 13 Now that paying customers part we'll get to in a second, but this argument is poised as a comeback to my suggestion that AI is not particularly useful.

Speaker 13 A proof point that this movement is not inherently wasteful or that there are in fact use cases for ChatGPT that are lasting, meaningful, or important. I fundamentally disagree.

Speaker 13 In fact, I believe ChatGPT and LLMs in general have been marketed based on lies of inference, which I realize is ironic. I know.
It's pretty clever.

Speaker 13 I had a whole blog written called The Lie of Inference that kind of became this. It wasn't very good, though.
This is. This is good.
Don't say it's bad.

Speaker 13 I also have grander concerns and suspicions about what OpenAI considers a user and how it counts revenue. Let me give you an example.

Speaker 13 They claim to have 5 million business customers, yet 500,000 of those are from a 15 million dollar year deal, year-long deal with Cal State University, which works out to around $2.50 a user a month.

Speaker 13 OpenAI has also started doing $1 a month trials of its $30 a month Team subscription, and one has to wonder how many of those subscribers are counted in the total, and indeed for how long.

Speaker 13 I do not know the scale of these offers nor how long OpenAI has been offering them.

Speaker 13 A Redditor posted about this $1 for a month deal a few months ago saying that open ai was offering five seats at once so one buck a month for a month per seat how many people cancel after that who knows maybe they just hope they don't in fact i found a few people talking about these deals and even one adding that they were offered an annual ten dollar a month chat gpt plus subscription that's like not like ten dollars a month for just one month that's for 12 months with one person saying a few weeks ago that they'd seen people offered that same deal for canceling their subscription and actually i got the same thing when i tried to cancel.

Speaker 13 Yes, I pay for ChatGPT. I need to actually use the fucking thing to criticize it.
When I tried to cancel it was like, hey, do you want three months for 10 bucks a piece?

Speaker 13 And I was like, sure, just to prove my point. Suspicious.
But there is a greater problem at play, by the way, and it goes beyond pricing.

Speaker 13 And it's that ChatGPT and OpenAI has been marketed based on lies. So ChatGPT has 700 million weekly active users.
OpenAI has yet to provide a definition. Yes, I've asked them.

Speaker 13 Which means that an active user could be defined as somebody who has gone to ChatGPT once in the space of a week. This term is extremely flimsy and doesn't really tell us much.

Speaker 13 Yes, it's a lot of people, but how active are they?

Speaker 13 Similar web says that in July 2025, chatgpt.com had 1.287 billion total visits, making it very popular.

Speaker 13 What do these facts actually mean though? As I said previously, ChatGPT has had probably the most sustained PR campaign for anything outside of a presidency or a pop star.

Speaker 13 Every single article about AI mentions open AI or ChatGPT. Every single feature launch, no matter how small, gets a slew of coverage.

Speaker 13 Every single time you hit AI, you're made to think of ChatGPT by a tech media that's never stopped to think about their role in the hype or their responsibility to their readers.

Speaker 13 And as the hype has grown, the publicity compounds because the natural thing for a journalist to do when everybody is talking about something is to talk about it more.

Speaker 13 Chat GPT's immediate popularity may have been viral, but the media took the ball and ran with it and then proceeded to tell people it did stuff it did not.

Speaker 13 People were pressured to try this service under false pretenses, something that continues to happen to this day. And I'm going to give you a really fucking grisly example.

Speaker 13 When I discovered this, when I went and looked at this, it filled me full of rage. It's disgraceful what happened.

Speaker 13 On March 15th, 2023, Kevin Roos of the New York Times would say that OpenAI's GPT-4 was exciting and scary and that it was exacerbating, in his words, the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I've been getting whenever I think about AI lately, wondering if he was experiencing future shock, then described how it was an indeterminate level of better, and then said something that immediately sounded ridiculous.

Speaker 13 In one test conducted by an AI safety research group that hooked GPT-4 up to a number of other systems, GPT-4 was able to hire a human task rabbit worker to do a simple online task for it, solving a capture test without alerting the person to the fact it was a robot.

Speaker 13 The AI even lied to the robot about why it needed the capture done, concocting a story about a vision impairment.

Speaker 13 Now, this doesn't sound even remotely real now, but this was two years ago. So, I went and looked up the paper, and pretty much everything that Roos described was illustrative.

Speaker 13 I doesn't really seem whether it happened. Now, he's referring to the safety card, which every model has that lists all the measures used to train it and such.

Speaker 13 And this safety card led to the perpetration of one of the earliest falsehoods and most eagerly parroted lies about this fucking industry.

Speaker 13 And that was that chat GPT and generative AI is capable of agentic actions.

Speaker 13 Outlet after outlet and some people who should definitely have known better led by Kevin Roos eagerly interpreted an entire series of events that took place that doesn't remotely make sense starting with the fact that I don't think you can hire a task rabbit to solve a capture or at the very least without a contrived situation where you create an empty task and ask them to complete it.

Speaker 13 Why not use mechanical Turk or Fiverr? There are people right now offering that service. There were actual real things.
But you know me, I'm a curious little critter.

Speaker 13 So I went further and followed this the citation from the safety card to the study. And this is by METR and the research page.

Speaker 13 It turns out that what actually happened was METR had a researcher copy and paste the generated responses from the model and otherwise handled the entire interaction with the task wrapper.

Speaker 13 And based on the plurality of TaskGrabbit contractors, it appears to have taken multiple times.

Speaker 13 On top of that, it appears that OpenAI and Meta, that's METR, sorry, were prompting the model on what to say, which kind of defeats the point. Like,

Speaker 13 we don't actually know what they prompted it to do. And when you look, it even says it does like chain of thought reasoning, which didn't really exist back then.

Speaker 13 And if it did, it was extremely like chain of thought is reasoning, and that came out end of 2024.

Speaker 13 This whole thing is absolutely insane. It's absurd that anyone wrote about it as real.

Speaker 13 What happened, just to be really blunt, is that they, if they even opened a task rabbit, it's really not obvious whether they actually did this.

Speaker 13 They had to go to the model and say, okay, I'm opening a TaskRabbit window. And now the person has said this.
And now this is it. It just doesn't sound real at all.

Speaker 13 But even if it did, it's very obvious that they were telling the model what to say and then copy-pasting the response. And it took them multiple tries.

Speaker 13 It took me five whole minutes to find this article. Partly because it was cited on the GPT-4 system card.
I then read it within that time, then wrote this part of the script.

Speaker 13 It didn't require any technical knowledge other than the ability to read. It is transparently, blatantly blatantly obvious that GPT-4 did not hire a task rabbit or indeed make any of these actions.

Speaker 13 It was prompted to, and they did not show the prompts they used, likely because they had to use so many of them if they even did it.

Speaker 13 Anyone falling for this is a mark, and OpenAI should have gone out of their way to correct people. Instead, they sat back and let people publish outright misinformation.

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Speaker 13 Roos, along with his co-host Casey Newton, would go on to describe this example at length on a podcast that week, describing an entire narrative where the human actually gets suspicious and GPT-4 reasons out loud that it should not reveal that it is a robot.

Speaker 13 It's not a reasoning model. At which point, the task rabbit solves the capture.
During this conversation, Newton gasps and says, Oh my god, twice.

Speaker 13 And when he asks Roos, how does this model understand that in order to succeed at its task, it has to deceive the human, Roos responds, We don't know, that is the unsatisfying answer.

Speaker 13 And Newton laughs and states, We need to pull the plug. I mean, again, what?

Speaker 13 Disgraceful, embarrassing, reprehensible. All that and more on the Hard Fork podcast.
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Speaker 13 Credulousness aside, the GPT for marketing campaign was incredibly effective, creating an aura that allowed OpenAI to take advantage of the vagueness of its offering as people, including members of the media, willfully filled in the blanks for them.

Speaker 13 Altman has really never had to work to sell his product. Think about it.
Have you ever heard OpenAI tell you what ChatGPT can do or go to great great lengths to describe its actual abilities?

Speaker 13 Even on OpenAI's own page for ChatGPT, the text is extremely vague. You scroll down, you're told that ChatGPT can write, brainstorm, edit, and explore ideas with you.

Speaker 13 It can generate and debug code, automate repetitive tasks, not clear what the tasks are, and help you learn new APIs. Question mark.

Speaker 13 With ChatGPT, you can learn something new, dive into a hobby, answer complex questions, and analyze data and create charts. What repetitive tasks? Who knows? How am I learning? Unclear.

Speaker 13 It's got thinking built in. What that means is also unclear, unexplained, and thus allows a user to incorrectly believe that ChatGPT has a brain and thinks.

Speaker 13 To be clear, I know what reasoning means, but this website does not attempt to explain what thinking means.

Speaker 13 You can also offload complex tasks from start to finish with an agent, which can, according to OpenAI, think and act, proactively choosing from a toolbox of agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer.

Speaker 13 This is an egregious lie, employing the kind of weasel wording that would be used to torture IR Baboon for an eternity.

Speaker 13 Precise in its vagueness, OpenAI's copy is honed to make reporters willing to simply write down whatever they see and interpret it in the most positive light. And thus the lie of inference began.

Speaker 13 What ChatGPT meant was muddied from the beginning, and thus ChatGPT's actual outcomes have never been fully defined.

Speaker 13 What ChatGPT could do became a kind of folklore, a non-specific form of automation that could write code and generate copy and images, that can analyze data, all things that are true but one can infer much greater meaning and use from.

Speaker 13 One can infer that automation means the automation of anything related to text, or that write code means write the entirety of a computer program.

Speaker 13 OpenAI's chat GPT agent is not, by any extension of the word, and I quote, already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks, but it has not, in any meaningful sense, committed to any actual outcomes.

Speaker 13 As a result, potential users, subject to a 24-7 marketing campaign, have been pushed towards a website that can theoretically do anything or nothing and have otherwise been left to their own devices.

Speaker 13 The endless gaslighting, societal pressure, media pressure, and pressure from their bosses has pushed hundreds of millions of people to try a product that even its creators can't really describe or don't feel compelled to.

Speaker 13 And if I was wrong, we'd have real use cases by now and better metrics than weekly active users.

Speaker 13 As I've said in the past, OpenAI is deliberately using these weekly active users so that it doesn't have to publish their monthly active users, which I believe would be much higher.

Speaker 13 Now, why wouldn't it do this?

Speaker 13 Well, OpenAI, as I've mentioned, has 20 million paying ChatGPT subscribers and 5 million business customers, with no explanation of what the difference might be, really other than it involves Teams and Edgie, but not pro.

Speaker 13 Anyway, this is already a mediocre 3.5% conversion rate.

Speaker 13 Yeah, its monthly active users, which are likely 800 or 900 million, but these are guesses, would make that rate lower than 3%, which is pretty terrible considering everyone says this shit is the future.

Speaker 13 I'm also tired of having people claim that search or brainstorm or companions are a lasting, meaningful business model.

Speaker 13 I'm really tired of it. I'm tired of being told this again and again and again.
That's not what Chat GPT is going to actually survive on.

Speaker 13 Breathe. Okay.
Let's move on. Here's another boost to grip, though.
OpenAI is making tons of money. That's proof they're a successful company, and you are wrong somehow.

Speaker 13 So OpenAI announced that it has hit its first $1 billion month on August 20th, 2025, on CNBC, in fact. Weirdly enough, by the way, that quote was not in the TV interview.

Speaker 13 But anyway, this also brings it exactly in line with my estimated 5.26 billion in revenue that I believe it has made at the end of July. Did that in a premium newsletter? Please pay me.

Speaker 13 However, remember what the MIT study that I mentioned said. Enterprise adoption is high, but transformation is low.

Speaker 13 There are tons of companies throwing money at AI, but they are not seeing actual returns.

Speaker 13 Open AI's growth as the single most prominent company in AI, and if we're honest, one of the most prominent in software writ large, makes sense, but at some point will slow because the actual returns for businesses are not there.

Speaker 13 If there were, we'd have one article where we could point at a chat GPT integration that helped scale a company,

Speaker 13 save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money, written in plain English, and not in the gobbly gook of profit improvement. Also, OpenAI is projected to make $12.7 billion in 2025.

Speaker 13 How exactly will it do that? Is it really making $1.5 billion a month by the end of the year?

Speaker 13 Even if it does, is the idea that it keeps burning $10 billion or more a year, every year into a a 10 like what actual revenue potential does open ai have long term its products are about as good as everybody else's cost about the same and do the same things chat gpt is basically the same product as claude or grok maybe less mecha hitler or any number of different llms the only real advantages that open ai has are infrastructure and brand recognition These models have clearly hit a wall in training, hitting diminishing returns, meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing its service at scale, nothing more.

Speaker 13 It isn't making its business cheaper, other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it, other than the site in Abilene, Texas, where it's promised Oracle $30 billion a year in 2025.

Speaker 13 I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I don't buy that this company will continue growing forever, and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon.

Speaker 13 When OpenAI opens Stargate Abilene, it will turn profitable. How? I hear this one a good amount.
How? How? How? How? How? How's it going to happen? Nobody ever answers.

Speaker 13 No one ever answers actually how this company will become profitable. It's fucking insane to me.
Nobody ever answers the question. Efficiencies? Efficiencies.
They're going to be efficient? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 13 Mm-hmm. They're going to be efficient.
If you're going to say ChatGPT-5, I wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient. In fact, it's less efficient.

Speaker 13 And I'm sure one of you is going to argue, well, you know, they could do the custom silicon. They have a $10 billion deal with Broadcom.
How they fucking pay him for that? Also, you realize that...

Speaker 13 Well, actually, no, just, you you know, no, you're right. They're going to get the chip from Broadcom because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech, right?

Speaker 13 It always works and it's always great. And it has no problems.
That's what I always,

Speaker 13 that's what I happen with pretty much every first time they make anything in tech. Anyway, let's move on.

Speaker 13 You'll hear boosters also be like, well, my brother's friend's dog uses ChatGPT and they'll love it. Well, I heard this happen or my mate has it in this or I heard this person or I use it in this one.

Speaker 13 Before we go any further, just to be clear though,

Speaker 13 is when you hear a booster bring up AI and they'll say something, make sure they're talking about generative AI. Are they actually talking about generative AI? Is this a large language model thing?

Speaker 13 It's very, very, very common for people to conflate AI with generative AI. There are many different kinds of AI.

Speaker 13 Make sure that the AI booster, whatever they're claiming, whatever they're telling you, is actually about large language models.

Speaker 13 There are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up. LLMs have nothing to do with folding at home, autonomous cars, or most disease research.

Speaker 13 But okay, let's do a speed run.

Speaker 13 Using AI led researchers to discover 44% more materials. No, it didn't.
MIT has now withdrawn this paper, citing concerns about its integrity. I've linked it in the show notes.
There's a huge rundown.

Speaker 13 Here's another quote. AI is so profoundly powerful, it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job.

Speaker 13 While young people have been having trouble finding jobs, there's no proof that AI is the reason.

Speaker 13 Every piece of coverage or reading is citing an Oxford economics report that, amidst a bunch of numbers, says, and I quote, there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.

Speaker 13 A statement that it does not back up, other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along the sheer employment declines in some roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from AI.

Speaker 13 And digging deeper, the largest displacement seems to be entry-level jobs normally filled by recent graduates. There's otherwise new data.
Anyone making this point is grasping at straws.

Speaker 13 I go into this in more detail in a a newsletter called Sincerity Wins the War, which I've linked to, but it's one of the worst reported stories in tech.

Speaker 13 And now I'm actually going to Adlip for a second because I forgot while writing this script, there was also this thing that came out of Stanford that said there's been a 13% drop in jobs affected by AI.

Speaker 13 And this was used as proof that AI was taking them. Now, curious little critic that I am, I went and read that.

Speaker 13 What it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to AI and being affected by AI. They saw they were going down.
They went, oh, it's AI that did that.

Speaker 13 They fart around with various statistics, but that's the long and short of it. I'll give you an example of one of the jobs, accountancy.

Speaker 13 Now, any accountants listening, big up to my accountant listeners. There's been a hiring crisis in accountancy for years.
People are not becoming CPAs.

Speaker 13 The reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them. It's nothing to do with AI.

Speaker 13 Imagine if anyone put half as much effort into writing up these stories as I did writing up one of these booster quibs. But here's another one, that AI is replacing young coders, and it is not.

Speaker 13 In fact, Amazon's cloud chief just said that replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard. There is no actual real evidence that this is the case.

Speaker 13 Every single story you have read is anecdotal. Anyone peddling this has an agenda or is not reading.

Speaker 13 Every CEO mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that AI is replacing people because AI can't replace people.

Speaker 13 I will add an aside, There are people's jobs that have been replaced by AI, translators, transcribers. Brian over at Blood is in the Machine, Blood in the Machine even.
Sorry, Brian.

Speaker 13 He's doing a great job on covering this. There are people that have lost jobs.

Speaker 13 These people are losing it because their bosses are fucking stupid, because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work and slopping it up.

Speaker 13 That's not happening at the knowledge worker scale, nor is it happening at the coder scale. Everyone telling you that has an agenda.

Speaker 13 But boost this will also claim that AI is doing science research somehow or will do it. And it won't.

Speaker 13 I've included a write-up about why foundation models can't do this someone's going to read it and say but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of llms and the reason he says this is because i shit you not that llms aren't incapable of doing scientific research he says they're insufficient

Speaker 13 which is which is the the same thing they're in they're insufficient at the anyway he claims they're also not dead weight for science, then spends hundreds of words meandering around that thing to kiss up to a eye boosters for some reason, I assume, because they've terrified him by being really annoying.

Speaker 13 And these people need to go outside and touch grass. Now, a lot of people think they're going to tell me that they use AI all the time, and that will change my mind.

Speaker 13 I cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use case. Every use case I hear is one of the following.
I use it for brainstorming, to which I say, who cares?

Speaker 13 Not a business model, it's commoditized. I use it like search.
Who cares? It's not even good at search. It's fine.
It's not even better than the low bar set by Google search.

Speaker 13 The results it gives aren't great and and the links are deliberately made smaller, which gets in the way of me clicking them so I can actually look at the content.

Speaker 13 If you're using Chat GPT for search, you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at. If I'm wrong, great.
You now have a functional search engine. Congratulations.

Speaker 13 Well, I use it for research. And if you use it for research, you do not respect actual research.
You want a quick answer. It's that simple.
These reports are slop.

Speaker 13 I've read many, many, many AI reports and they're not good. Sorry.
Well, I use it for coding or know someone who used it for coding. And I'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker 13 But all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about this stuff as if it was changing society.

Speaker 13 None of these use cases come close to explaining why I should be impressed by generative AI. It also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that AI did for you once.

Speaker 13 We are so past the point when any of that matters. AI is being sold as a transformational technology and I am yet to see it transform anything.

Speaker 13 I am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me or even one thing that feels possible now that wasn't possible before. This isn't even me being a cynic.
I'm ready to be impressed.

Speaker 13 I just haven't been impressed in three fucking years, and it's getting boring. Also, tell me with a straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure.

Speaker 13 Remember, AI boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful. None of these use cases are powerful sounding.

Speaker 13 But sir,

Speaker 13 sir, vibe coding is changing the world, allowing people who can't code to make software.

Speaker 13 Now, this is one of the most brain-dead takes about AI and coding. And it's that that vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software.
And you'll never guess what Kevin Roos covered this.

Speaker 13 He actually did this article.

Speaker 13 While writing the script, I hadn't even noticed the literature.

Speaker 13 Anyway, while technically true in that one can just type build me a website into one of many coding environments, this does not mean said website is functional, secure, or useful.

Speaker 13 Let's make this really clear. AI cannot just handle coding.
Go into the show notes and read this piece I've linked from Colton Vogie. I have actually interviewed him now.

Speaker 13 He's going to be be coming out in the next few weeks. The episode, the interview is fucking brilliant.
And then the other I've linked to by Nick Suresh.

Speaker 13 If you contact me about AI and coding without reading these, I will send them to you and nothing else or crush you like a car in a garbage dump into a cube. One or the other I will choose at the time.

Speaker 13 Also, show me a vibe-coded company, please. Not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features.
A fully functional, secure, and useful app that has made money

Speaker 13 and made by somebody who cannot read or write code. You won't be able to because it is impossible.

Speaker 13 Vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals. And are AI coding environments making people faster? I don't think so.

Speaker 13 In fact, a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers 19% slower.

Speaker 13 The reason that nobody is vibe coding in entire companies because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go.

Speaker 13 And oftentimes when you add something, it breaks something else. This is all well and good if you actually understand code.

Speaker 13 It's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or clawed code, like a kid at an arcade machine, turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo is going on.

Speaker 13 Vibe coders are also awful for the already negative margins of most AI coding environments, as every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise, burning tokens in pursuit of a goal they themselves don't really understand.

Speaker 13 Vibe coding doesn't work, it will not work, and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance and at worst supporting a campaign built on lies.

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Speaker 13 And this is all built up to one final point.

Speaker 13 I'm no longer accepting half-baked arguments. If you're an AI booster, please come up with better arguments.
And if you truly believe in this stuff, you should have a firmer grasp on why you do so.

Speaker 13 It's been three years, and the best some of you have is it's really popular. Uber also burned money.

Speaker 13 Your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true and it's deeply embarrassing.

Speaker 13 Then again there are many well-intentioned people who aren't necessarily AI boosters who repeat these arguments regardless of how thinly framed they are.

Speaker 13 In part because we live in a high information, low processing society where people tend to put great faith in people who are confident in what they say and sound smart to Jason.

Speaker 13 I also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out or seeming stupid is being used against them.

Speaker 13 If you don't understand something, it's likely because the people you're reading or hearing it from don't either.

Speaker 13 If a company takes a promise and you don't understand how they'll deliver on it, it's their job to explain how and your job to suggest it isn't plausible in clear and defined language.

Speaker 13 This has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an outright failure of journalism.

Speaker 13 I have never seen more and misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career, and it's largely peddled by reporters who either don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible, in part because all their peers are doing the same thing and saying the same nonsense.

Speaker 13 As things begin to collapse, and they sure look like they're collapsing, but I'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet, it will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say.

Speaker 13 Never have I seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than Sam Altman saying that GPT-5 was actually bad and that GPT-6 will be even better. Members of the media.

Speaker 13 Sam Altman does not respect you. He is not your friend.
Clammy Sam Altman is not secretly confiding in you.

Speaker 13 Clammy will thinks you are stupid and easily manipulated and will print anything he says, largely in part because many members of the media will print exactly what he says whenever he says it.

Speaker 13 And to be clear, if you wrote about GPT-6 and made fun of it, that's great.

Speaker 13 But let's close by discussing the very nature of AI skepticism and the so-called void between those who hate AI and those who love AI from the perspective of one of the most prominent people in the skeptic camp.

Speaker 13 Critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace, patience, or in many cases, hospitality when it comes to their position.

Speaker 13 While they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side, it's always framed as the work of a firebrand, an outlier, or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify.

Speaker 13 Skeptics are demonized, their points under constant scrutiny, their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or intellectual weakness.

Speaker 13 Skeptic and critic are words said with a sneer of trepidation, that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that AI is the most powerful special thing ever.

Speaker 13 To not immediately fall in love with something that everybody is talking about is to be framed as a hater, to have oneself introduced with the words, not everyone agrees, or on 40% of your appearances.

Speaker 13 By comparison, AI boosters are the first to get TV appearances and offers to be on panels.

Speaker 13 Their coverage featured prominently on Tech Meme, selling slop-like books called shit like The Future of Intelligence, Masters of the Brain, featuring 18 interviews with different CEOs that all say the same thing.

Speaker 13 They don't have to justify justify their love.

Speaker 13 They simply have to remember all the right terms, chirping out test time compute, and the cost of inference is going down enough times to Simon Wario Amade to give them an hour-long interview where he says, the models they are in years going to be the most powerful school teacher ever built.

Speaker 13 And by the way, yeah, I did sell a book because my shit fucking bangs. My shit rocks.

Speaker 13 I'm not going to be too smug, but like, I put a lot of effort into this and I research it very well. Others should try harder.

Speaker 13 I have consistent, deeply sourced arguments that I've built over the the course of years. I didn't become a hater because I'm a contrarian.

Speaker 13 I became a hater because the shit that these fucking oaths have done to the computer pisses me off. I did the man that destroyed Google search because I wanted to know why Google search sucked.

Speaker 13 I wrote Sam Altman Free because at the time I didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath.

Speaker 13 Everything I do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology.

Speaker 13 I started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with 300 subscribers and 60 views and have written it as an exploration of subjects that grows as I write.

Speaker 13 I do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what I am and if that's strange to you, well I'm a strange man, but at least I'm an honest one.

Speaker 13 I do have a chip on my shoulder in that I really do not like it when people try to make other people feel stupid, especially when they do so as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good.

Speaker 13 I write this stuff out because I have an intellectual interest.

Speaker 13 I like writing, and by writing, I'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology, and talking it out actually feels good.

Speaker 13 It's a intellectual exercise that i really enjoy i happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month and i'm not specifying where those people go and if you think that i've grown this by being a hater you are doing yourself the disservice of underestimating me which i will use to my advantage by writing deeper more meaningful and more insightful things than you and then i'll sell say them with lots of curse words on this podcast I've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again and make billions doing so and all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like Google, Facebook, and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth.

Speaker 13 I can't manufacture my disgust, nor is it hard to, nor can I manufacture whatever it is inside me that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things.

Speaker 13 I don't know if I take this too seriously, whether I don't take it seriously enough, because I keep saying fucking shit, but I'm honored that I'm able to do so, and I really appreciate everyone who listens, reads, or engages with me in any way.

Speaker 13 I really do love you all for listening. I know that this was a long three-parter.
I've enjoyed recording it. I've done lots of retakes.
Mattasowski, love you, man. Sorry for all of this.

Speaker 13 I'll catch you next episode.

Speaker 16 Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 6 The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattasowski.com.
M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 16 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 17 Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 15 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 8 Be honest, how many tabs do you have open right now? Too many? Sounds like you need close all tabs from KQED, where I, Morgan Sung, Doom Scroll so you don't have to.

Speaker 8 Every week, we scour the internet to bring you deep dives that explain how the digital world connects and divides us all.

Speaker 9 Everyone's cooped up in their house. I will talk to this robot.

Speaker 10 If you're a truly engaged activist, the government already has data on you.

Speaker 11 Driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

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