Monologue: No, Something Big Isn't Coming

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zo Media, Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. This is
your monologue for the week, and I'm your host ed zeitron.
So you've probably seen, or heard about, or even read
the abominable, nonsensical hog slob essay called something Big is Coming,

(00:24):
perhaps seeing people that should know better, like Mehdi has
Sons who called it the most important thing you read today.
Despite it being both AI generated and complete fucking nonsense,
this essay has done the rounds because of its historyonic
tone and deliberate leaning upon the anxieties of those scared
of AI and the mythology of AI boosters, and across
forty seven hundred b shit ass words, says very little

(00:46):
new or interesting, along with multiple egregious lies. I will
be attaching an annotated version of this essay to this monologue,
but I want to give you a broad explanation of
what it really says and why it's full of shit.
But let's start with who wrote m that. Schumer is
a guy who makes an AI startup called other Side Ai,
which does this thing called hyperwrite, which is an AI
writing assistant with web search and citations, which translates to

(01:09):
mean it's a rapper for various large language models that
he's prompting appropriately. When I asked it to write a
critique of his piece, it's said that its weaknesses lied
in its lack of specifics, and that its alarmist framing
grabs attention, and it's heavy on the hype and light
on actual insight. And you know what, Matt, you fucking
You've got one innovation, and it's that even your shit

(01:30):
ast lm rapper doesn't like your bullshit. And I think
it's also being too kind. Schumer makes numerous egregious misstatements
about the current state of AI, using vague yet scary
statements like being able to walk away from the computer
for hours and find his work done again. His company
has done the same thing for years, although an unnamed
managing partner at a big law firm uses AI for

(01:50):
hours to do the work of a team of associates.
I choose these two statements because they're fairly typical of
his entire piece, entirely made up bullshit about how long
an AI can work for what it's capable of doing.
Schumer repeatedly talks about AI being able to write software
completely autonomously in a way that could not be further
from the truth. His most egregious one is when he

(02:10):
quotes open ai saying that GPT five point three codex
is the first model that was instrumental in creating itself
because it used early versions to debug its own training,
manage its own deployment, and diagnosed test results in evaluation.
These are actual quotes from open ai. He's not lying
they said them, he's just lying about what they mean.
To be clear, this is open ai saying that he

(02:31):
used an app it built to test and debug code,
and to test and debug the actual code and how
it went up.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
It's literally, it's what the product they used. They tested
the product by testing what the product did. It's not
the same as saying that software is designing itself, which
is something that Schumer heavily intimates is happening throughout the piece,
which it is not. He also suggests multiple times that
AI is learning from itself, which is not. Barely keeping
my cool on this one because it's so fucking frustrate

(03:00):
seeing how many people I saw Fortune repost this, I
saw Business Insider do a post fucking the Technology Brothers. Well, well, well,
if it isn't the technology Brothers, they had this fuck
not on it genuinely infuriates me, and most of the
scary stuff in there. That all software engineers will be
replace the fifty percent of entry level white collar jobs
be gone.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
In one to five years. Is Schumer directly copy pasting
stuff that CEO of Anthropic Warrio Amade said in one
of his many interviews where he makes shit up. I
am begging people to please God engage with basic critical thinking.
When reading things like this, Schumer says a lot of
vague marketing fluff. Each generation builds the next, which is smarter,

(03:40):
which builds the next faster, which is smarter. Still, this
is written specifically to make you believe that this is
actually happening when it is not. It isn't. The generation
is not building the next. There are still people doing this.
He doesn't cite anything, He doesn't even bother to choose
real life examples. He just says stuff like AI is
approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas of medicine

(04:01):
or without citation, Well, I've got a citation for you.
On September fifth, twenty twenty four, Matt Schumer released a
model called Reflection seventy B that he claimed had benchmarks
that made it and I quote, the world's top open
source AI model built with something called glave AI. Independent
researchers were unable to recreate the benchmarks, and it became
obvious that Schumer was a lying sack of shit and

(04:23):
the reflection seventy b was a rapper for anthropics claude
sonnet model, with one person posting that they had intentionally
made it so that it would not respond to being
called Claude or say that it was Claude. He also
didn't reveal that he was an investor in GLAVEI, the
platform that generated the synthetic data that allegedly trained this
shitass model that does not work, did not work, never updated,

(04:45):
never did anything it said, and everyone just memory hold it.
And what horrified me about this essay is how many
top tier media outlets and respectable journalists took it as
gospel because the statements he made vaguely lined up with
the empty high of scumbacks like Sam Altman and Dario
Amma Day. If you're a member of the media that
share to republish this, you are actively participating in an

(05:07):
act of disinformation and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
Fuck Matt Schumer and fuck anybody who takes them seriously.
Regular people got scared because of this because mainstream media
validated it. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. And
to the many haters that emailed me about this saying
this looks like bullshit, you were correct. These people are

(05:28):
deceiving you. They are misleading you so that they can
sell AI software that they know is not doing the
things it needs to to make any of this make sense.
And I am disgusted to see this keep happening. I
am disgusted to see people like this platformed. And I
think when all of this ends, people think that I
will forget. I will not forget any of this. I

(05:48):
am taking fucking detailed notes of everybody who pushes this
shit up hill. I am furious. I'm disgusted to see this.
Sixty million fucking views on this bullshit. And I know
there are some people who don't like when I get angry,
but I am furious about this. This is lies, This
is platforming lies. Anyone in the media who platform this,
you need to, I don't know, think about whether you're

(06:11):
capable of doing your jobs every day, because you seem
to lack the critical thinking to spot a scam artist. Yeah. Yeah,
I'm done. I'm done everyone. I'm sorry for flying off
the handle a little

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Ed Zitron

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