August 16, 2024 • 42 mins
As the AI bubble collapses, it's time for the tech industry to repent, and to recognize that the future cannot be decided entirely by four or five trillion-dollar firms that are no longer capable of innovation, only copying other people's ideas. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how the generative AI boom shows how little big tech cares about actual innovation - and how this might eventually lead to their collapse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hello, Hi, welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed ze Trunk. For weeks now, I've been
(00:23):
writing and speaking about what I believe to be an
inevitable and possibly imminent collapse in generative AI. In the
last episode, I talked about the early signs of disquire,
particularly among investors, were growing increasingly uncomfortable about the many
billions being spent by Microsoft, Google and others to support
an industry that does not appear to make anyone much
money and costs so much more than it makes. And
(00:45):
I believe that this is a moment for the tech
industry to atone and to learn and to change in
the wake of what I think is an a one
hundred billion dollar group psychosis, a big, nasty waste that
I will now get to in agonizing detail. Generative AI
was always unsustainable, and it was always dependent on reams
(01:05):
of training data that necessitated stealing from millions of people.
With its utility vague and its ubiquity overstated, the media
and the markets have tolerated the technology that, while not
inherently bad, was implemented in a way so nefariously and
wastefully that it necessitated theft billions of dollars in cash
and the double digit percent increase in Hyperscaler's emissions. The
(01:28):
desperation for the tech industry to have something new has
led to such ruinous success, and if this bubble collapses,
it'll be a result of a shared myopia in both
big tech dimwitz like satch in Adela and sundarp Isshai
and Silicon Valley power players like Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman,
Bryan Chesky and of course Mark Hantreeson. The people propping
(01:48):
up this bubble no longer experience human problems, and thus
I don't think they can be trusted anymore to solve them. Ultimately,
this is a story of waste, ignorance and greed, of
wasted money and have wasted opportunity, because let's face it,
a fraction of the money spent by Microsoft alone chasing
the generative AI bullshit machine could have been spent in
many other profitable and societally useful ways. And it's a
(02:12):
story of tech executives that are so desperate to own
the future, but are so disconnected from actually building it.
And this arms race is a monument to the lack
of curiosity rife in the highest ranks of the tech industry.
They refuse to do the hard work to create, to
be curious, to be excited about the things they're building
and the people they're serving, And so they spent billions
(02:34):
of dollars to eliminate the risk they even might have
to do any of those things. Ever, again, they just
wanted the machine to do it for them. Had Sandhar
Pishai looked at Microsoft's investment in open Ai in twenty
nineteen and said, nah, no, thanks, which you did with
the metavers. By the way, it's likely that none of
this would have happened. But a combined hunger for growth
and a lack of any natural predators means that big
(02:55):
tech no longer knows how to make a competitive or
useful product, and thus they can only see what their
competitors are doing and say, ah, yeah, yeah, that's what
it is. That's what we're all doing now. Before the
AI hype boom, Mark Zuckerberg was once so disconnected from
Meta's work on AI that he literally had no idea
what breakthrough Sandar Peshai had complimented him on in a
(03:15):
meeting they had together mere months before. Meta's own obsession
with AI truly began, and none of these guys seem
to have any idea what's going on and why are
they having these chummy little meetings. These aren't competitors, they're
co conspirators. They're just people meeting to say, what's the
latest con we're all jumping on. What's the latest market
that we're all going to monopolize. I can't wait for
(03:36):
the monopoly episode. And these companies, they're too large, they
are too unwieldy, they're too disconnected, and they do too much.
They lack the focus that makes a truly competitive business,
and they lack any kind of cohesive culture, the kinds
that are built on solving real human problems or real
business problems that humans have. These are not companies built
for anything other than growth. And none of them, not
(03:59):
even Apple, have built something truly innovative and life changing
in the best part of a decade, with the exception
perhaps of maybe contactless mobile payments, which are actually really cool.
These companies are run by rot economists, and they have
these disconnected, chaotic cultures full of these little fiefdoms. We're
established technologists are rap fuck by management goons when they
try to make their products better instead of making them
(04:22):
more money, and the depressing thing is that they really
don't need to be that way. Seriously, there's a world
where these companies just make a billion dollars a quarter
and they don't even have to fire people every time
they do so. And there's one where these companies actually
solve real problems too, and then they still make incredibly
large amounts of money for doing so. The problem is
(04:43):
they're greedy. They run by greedy idiots, and they're addicted
to growth and are incapable of doing anything other than
following what the last guy did. And what's funny is
this is very Jack Welch from the Shareholder Supremacy. They
just see a market and like, what if we put
money in that? Can we take the money from the market.
That's all they can do. Now. Sundarpishi is a terrible executive,
(05:05):
but he's a really good Jack Welch clone. And by
the way, if you don't know who Jack Welch is,
please go back to the Shareholder Supremacy episode. It's important
because you really need to see who fucked all this up. Okay,
so where were we what happens next? Well, there's enough
money sloshing around right now that open ai probably can
(05:26):
be bankrolled a little further, and like I've mentioned in
the previous episode, it'll need to be is it needs
another five billion dollars, if not ten billion dollars to
make it to the end of twenty twenty five, That
very large amount of money's going to have to come
from somewhere, and I think that they're going to be
reduced to go into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or
soft bank, or probably taking on private debt, and that
(05:47):
last one, I'm just really not sure is going to happen.
And those suitors they're not going to be quite as
generous with their terms and they won't give them a
devil's deal like Microsoft did, which, as I previously argued
across multiple newsletters and podcasts, effectively owns all of open
AI's research and intellectual property. Someonlman is a terrible deal maker.
By the way, while the venture capital system theoretically could
(06:09):
afford to prop up open ai for another year or so,
they're limited partners. Who are the people funding the vcs.
They're probably still a little sore from twenty twenty one
and twenty twenty two, when massive amounts of money went
into nothing, not to mention the sudden and rapid rise
and interest rates, and they'll probably bulk at the amounts
they can need. We're talking multiple, probably ten one hundred
(06:30):
million dollar checks or two hundred million dollar checks. Open
ai needs so much more money than the VC system
is ready to give to one company, and it really
will only take one person blinking to create a panic
in both the public and the private markets. Open Ai
may still be able to raise money, but investors have
no real path to liquidity as open ai most assuredly
(06:51):
will not be able to go public, and in the
process of investing these vcs will likely find out exactly
how bad things are there. While there is a chance
we get one more round, kind of a dead cat
bounce situation, it's honestly a little tough to imagine how
it keeps going even if open ai raises another ten
billion dollars. But how does the collapse happen? Well, as
(07:13):
I said last time, there's the obvious one open ai
or Anthropic shuts down, but I think that them shutting
down is very unlikely based on the corporate structure open
AI or Anthropic collapsing will be more like the character
dot Ai deal an attempt to hide the ugly mess,
where a big tech firm absorbs them in and just
goes there. Now the AI division. You saw a version
of this, by the way, when Sam got fired from
(07:35):
open Ai and he was like the head of AI
at Microsoft for two minutes. But if I had to guess,
Anthropics most likely home would be with Amazon, which completed
its four billion dollar investment into the company earlier this
year and also has a profit share with them. In
any case where this happens, even if the entity Anthropical
or open Ai keeps going without the key people in
power such as Anthropic CEO Dario Omdey going in house
(07:57):
Amazon or Google again, it doesn't really matter. They will
eventually die and raising around for a generative AI company
in this market, it's likely going to be quite difficult,
if not impossible. The narrative shifted, and the people with
the money to invest don't really know what they're talking
about technologically speaking, so they're investing based on how everybody
(08:18):
else is feeling, what the vibes are in the air,
what they sniff each other's asses, and they say, oh, fuck,
is AI good or bad? Now? I don't really know,
And when we really strip away everything. We strip away
all of the lies and the marketing, and you just
get down to incentives and you think, well, they just
want money, right, If that's all they want, that really
(08:39):
is just the problem, because fundamentally this tech really isn't
that exciting. I'm sorry it isn't. Generative AI is not
the AI from Iron Man. It is not the magical
future computer. It's a generative AI. That picture of Garfield
with a gun or Scooby Doo sitting on top of
a rocket, those are aren't useful. That's not the future.
(09:04):
That's just image creation. I'm sure some very insufferable freak
is going to email me after this and be like, wow,
I'm set up generative AI in all of these ways. Mate.
I appreciate your time, Thank you for emailing me. I'm
sure you don't even sound like that. The point I'm
not making is that this is useless. The point I'm
making is it is not even in the same galaxy
(09:25):
of usefulness that it requires to go forward to be
worth all of this money. And on top of that,
it's boring. It's so goddamn boring. It's so I am
so bored. It doesn't even do my boring business stuff.
I have a pr business in my day job, but
I would love a dn ky AI to move my
shit around. It can't even do that. I want it
(09:46):
to help me, and it won't do it. And if
you say ed, you're a stupid idiot, You're a moron.
You have the brain of a bird or a dog
or a dog bird hybrid. You drool all the time
because your brain cannot keep your mouth closed. All of
these things are true, but it's not my job to
sell Generative AI to myself. It's the companies. And the
idea of a super smart friend that knows everything about
(10:08):
me is exciting, don't get me wrong. As is the
idea of making away drudgery all of my spreadsheets and documents,
for example. But Generative AI does not do these things,
putting aside any personal feelings I may have. It has
not changed my life or even like slightly improved it.
And I'm a guy who loves using tech, and he
is willing to put hours hours into finding solutions to
(10:29):
automate or mitigate very small problems that I only really
deal with occasionally. I'm not lazy, I'm efficient, at least
that's what I tell my doctor, and I don't know
a single person that has meaningfully changed their workflow or
life as a result of generative AI, outside of being
able to integrate it to speed up some part of
their already existing system. I've literally never met or spoken
(10:52):
to someone other than one guy on Twitter who has
talked about using this every day in a way that
truly changes things, and I should. As an aside, I
do occasionally get someone on Twitter and it's always a
blue check and they always say, oh, yeah, well, it's
changed the way our code changy allows me to code
so much faster. They then get eighteen responses of someone saying,
(11:14):
I'm an engineer and this is very unstable, and it
really feels like generative AI is just catnip for the
truly incurious. I don't want to say lazy, because I
think everyone is kind of lazy on some level. We
all want things to be easier, we really do. And
there is, when it comes to creativity, a degree where
(11:36):
the problems you face making something are what makes it
what it is. The struggles I've had writing and reading
this script are what make me a better orator or
a better writer. That process is important, but it's hard,
and it's annoying, and you have to suck a few times,
you have to write crap, You have to retake things
three or four times, and your poor editor, Mattasowski sitting
(11:56):
there going, mate, you've reread that paragraph three times, you
messed the same word up. But it's fun. This is
what curiosity is. And I don't think these people have it.
These people don't want to solve software problems. They want
to type a thing into a computer, hit enter and
then the problem is solved, never understanding why they did it.
And this isn't the same thing as calculators, by the way,
(12:17):
I'd argue software development as are, but that's a separate thing.
And ultimately, this whole movement just doesn't even feel real.
Nothing about it really felt real. It's just a farce.
It costs so much money, and it's still costing so
much money today, and the promises of artificial intelligence will
not be kept through the pursuit of generative AI. As
(12:39):
generative AI is a dead end technology that has peaked,
and it costs too much both financially and socially to
keep it going or to justify its continued existence. There's
no heroic story here. There are a few people who
are sincerely cheering for these companies to win, those who,
of course don't have a tangible financial term banking on
the value of open AI or they have so one
(13:00):
of the one hundred different guys claiming the Heaven AI newsletter,
and let's be honest, nobody really loves this, do they.
Nobody really uses CHATGBT and has that oh shit moment
you got when you first use an iPhone, when you're
first sent a file with Dropbox, that those little times
when you really fell in love with technology again and again.
And there's no magic in it. There's no whimsy, there's
(13:22):
no joy in any of these larger language models, and
they're not really helping enough people to make it worthwhile.
I nearly said they're not helping anybody. But there are users,
there are people who actually care about this. How much
do they really care? And does any of that outweigh
the costs and the environmental damage. The answer is no,
(13:43):
by the way, and their peddlers always demand that we
just give them another minute as they burn billions of
dollars to get nowhere. And the general public has known
the problems and limitations of generative AI for months. I
constantly get emails from better offline listeners, artists, engineers, teachers, massionists,
poison makers, journalists, consultants, cleaners, and copy editors, all saying
(14:05):
the same thing. This all seems like a croc of shit,
and the outputs are terrible because people who actually make
things respect the output and the production itself, and they
can see how bad this stuff is. Generative AI was
also not peddled as a solution to any problem other
than tech's lack of a hypergrowth market, and it's the
kind of bet that only a tech industry devoid of
(14:27):
natural selection truly builds. None of these big tech firms,
and I'd argue venture capitalists really take risks anymore because
they don't want to end up looking stupid, and they
want to follow each other. And regular people know. They
know Google is worse, they know Facebook is bordering unusable,
They know that generative AI does not do anything obviously
useful at scale, and that these companies have never made
(14:49):
more money than they're making today as they fuck the
customer again and again. And I believe we're in the
beginnings of a true revolt against big tech and their
rotten little promises, their lucks run out, and these formless
private equity vehicles dressed up as software companies are no
longer bred to create new things. We're all sitting and
staring at innovation's corps, stabbed full of holes by McKinsey
(15:10):
veterans and slimy con artists, and it's time for men
like Sandar Pashai and Sachin Adela to atone because their
big bet looks like a gigantic waste, one so obviously
rotten from the beginning that they've never been able to
tell anyone that they never had a plan beyond throw
money at it and eventually it will do something, or
we will do this as long as the other guy
does it too. This is a big, ugly mess, a
(15:33):
monument to the excess that burned more than two hundred
billion dollars and allowed equally lazy and uncreative people to
replace real people with shitty facsimiles that are just good enough.
But do you want to be more than good enough?
Do you want to excel in all things as I
demand of all my listeners, then buy one of the
following products, which, as usual, will reflect my exact beliefs,
(15:54):
wants and needs and we're back, and now that I'm back,
I want to say something to my peers in the media.
It's time for a fundamental re evaluation of how we
treat big tech, and it's time to question the promises
(16:17):
of those who sought to peddle this generative nonsense. It's
no longer time to ask Mark Zuckerberg about his chain.
It's time to ask him how long he intends to
burn tens of billions of dollars on nothing, and why
the website that made him so many billions of dollars
is falling apart at the seams, pumped full of content
created by the big, stupid bullshit machine he's helped popularize.
It's no longer time to gingerly cool about Sundar pishe Oh,
(16:40):
he's looking at my smartphone. It's time to ask him
how Gemini is going to make a profit and what
it is that it will do, and press him again
and again and again and again and again until he
talks about why Google Search is so bad. Now, it's
no longer time to let Sach and Adela oscillate from
referendums on capitalism twenty twenty to laying off tens of
thousands of people in twenty twenty three. It's time to
(17:02):
ask him if he's prepared to bankroll open AI to
the tune of thirty billion dollars and refuse to leave
the conversation without committing to a number. These men have
burned hundreds of billions of dollars on a machine that
boils lakes to make the most mediocre version of the past.
These men are not supporting innovation. They're aggressive forces, too
scared to piss off the markets to actually change the world,
(17:23):
domesticated animals that fear no natural predators and thus have
no hunger for something new. They propped up generative AI
because their followers rather than leaders that have paid hundreds
of millions of dollars to empower a nihilistic kind of
growth capitalism that dresses up monopolies as disruption. They have
propped up generative AI because building the future is hard
and expensive and involves taking risks and making sure that
(17:45):
you have a culture that doesn't expect the answer to
a question in the fastest amount of time possible. Innovation
is an efficient. It's lossy. It has indeterminate time scales
and requires both capital investment and space required for great
people to think of actual solutions to problems that involve
them talking to and caring about the lives of real people.
Fire satch In the Dellar of Microsoft, Fire sund Arpishai
(18:08):
of Google, and work out a way to fire Mark
Zuckerberg of Meta. These men are unworthy. They do not
find any of this exciting or meaningful. They have no curiosity.
They're private equity guys dressed up as software guys. They
are con artists. They are running their products into the ground,
and they're making more money than ever. Big Tech has
(18:30):
been overcome with narcissism and nihilism, and it must change
its ways to not eventually face perdition. I am fucking serious.
Do you think these people have a backup plan? Do
you think they've burned all of this money on such
a mediocre and wasteful solution because they've got other better ideas? No,
they're all out. Big Tech does not have another thing.
(18:50):
Google doesn't have any ideas. Meta is so out of
ideas that they change their name to another worse idea,
one associated with Mark Zuckerberg burning forty five billion dollars
for no reason. In fact, there's a Yahoo Finance story
about the fact that all of that money that's allegedly
going into the metaverse is just organizational loss. It's a
horribly run place where the management constantly changes. These goddamn people.
(19:13):
And Amazon, they've never really been in the ideas business.
They're the founder of a cloud storage cartel with Microsoft,
Oracle and Google. They work together to set the prices.
Everyone wins except anyone who isn't them. And big tech
is lazy because they've all agreed to compete only a
little bit, never coloring too far out of the lines
because doing so might expose them to an actual risk,
(19:34):
like regulation or having to hire people that build new things,
versus finding increasingly more annoying ways to exploit their current customers.
And I really am sure that there's a societal shift
coming against big tech, the natural result of years of
excess and bullshit of the loudest people in tech trying
to convince people that a large language model that can
generate texts and images that kind of suck is basically
(19:57):
the same thing as an iPhone. I have no idea
how quickly the shift comes, but it's coming. It's inevitable.
This lack of big, profitable ideas will eventually lead to
some sort of reckoning or collapse. In big tech, healthy,
well run companies, they don't do things like this, let
alone several different trillion dollar companies all bumbling into each
(20:18):
other like the Three Stooges, billions of dollars of cash
falling out of their pockets. It's an absolute disgrace. I
will say, if the AI bubble really does pop, this
is a great time to point and laugh. Regular people
like yourself could see this was bullshit from the beginning.
Most people find generative AI either briefly interesting or somewhat disgusting,
(20:39):
and they're capable of seeing that. Stealing the entire Internet
so you could spend one hundred billion dollars making a
shitty version of the past is kind of a stupid idea.
The utility really hasn't been there from the beginning. Describing
what chat GBT is is actually kind of difficult, and
any technology that's going to be worth trillions of dollars
should not have the user saying, wait, what does this
(21:01):
do exactly? And I really feel like regular people notice this.
If this was as magical as it was, regular people
would be lining up to use it. And while it
has a lot of users. I don't know anyone who's
fanatical over it other than AI fanatics. It's just very sad.
But regular people aren't the only ones. And I have
criticized journalists for missing this, but I want to call
(21:24):
some people out in a good way. Economists, analysts and
journalists have been saying this isn't the future, like I said.
Shira a v Day in March twenty twenty three, mere
months after chat GPT's launch, said it wasn't magic. For example,
in the Washington Post, Shearer the Goat, Alex Kantrowitz and
Douglas Gorman reported in August fifteenth to twenty twenty three
that chat gpt isn't good enough to take jobs and
(21:44):
it's unlikely to cause mass layoffs. The hot takes have
run into reality a little bit early, but you're correct.
Paris Mark's called the chat GPT revolution another take fantasy
in July twenty twenty three, and Gary Marcus worried about
Generative AI being a dud in August twenty twenty three.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's
important to note that people have been saying this. People
(22:05):
with big platforms and the markets chose to ignore them
as an aside. A year later, when many outlets were
still tripping over themselves to say that generative AI was
the future. Sure A Viday of The Washington Post asked,
if these chatbots are supposed to be magical, why are
so many of them as dumb as rocks. It's important
to call out when a national newspaper actually does the
(22:25):
work that needs to be done to critique the powerful
good works here, Open invites come on the show. At
this point, it seems inevitable that the bubble will burst,
that the acceleration has stopped, that the funding won't be there,
and that the markets taste for the billions of dollars
it's going to take to make generative AI. Some indeterminate
level of better just really isn't there. By all means
(22:47):
tell me I'm wrong. You certainly do on Twitter, and
you certainly do on email. And I'd be genuinely intrigued
to see how open ai wriggles out of this jam,
especially because it would mean they made a meaningful product
that makes money when they don't have the chips to
train GPT five, a model that likely still wouldn't change
the game enough to matter. I mean, what if they
have a new architecture, I guess, but I refuse to
(23:07):
give them credit for something they haven't done yet. And
in the event that Open Ai or Anthropic is able
to raise again, we'll see the cycle continue another quarter.
I'm confident, at which point something crazy would need to
happen to make any of this worth it. If these
companies can actually raise, they'll keep the bubble inflated. But
it really is borrowed time. There's enough money to fund
(23:28):
them both maybe one more time, and after that, where
is the profit? Where's this going? And it's really worth
considering that the narrative is bad and that there is
very little that anyone can really do to change it
outside of something truly incredible. These companies can play for time.
Hope that satch In a Dele and sun A Peshai
stan pats say that they have great faith in the
(23:49):
promise of AI, but I really don't think they get
another series of earnings for big tech like this. In
many ways, though, this is sam Ortman's greatest gambit, and
so much lies and Open Eyes back as a result.
This is the moment we find out if Sam Altman
has really got it. Whether it's worth agonizing and wringing
(24:09):
our hands about how scary he is, or whether he's
just able to hoodwink enough credulous billionaires that have their
hands well did to eternal money printers. Impress me, Samuel,
Wake up, Sammy, mister alt men, bring me the technology.
Show me what you've got, Show me your great works,
Show me the works you have buried in that non
(24:30):
profit for profit monstrosity. You've used the trick other visionless
power brokers into giving you their entire futures for a
dead end friend best known for an absenteism that raankled
his peers and some of the startups he was supposed
to nurture. Show me what you've got, Sam, show us all.
You're so smart. You allegedly can solve problems in a
(24:50):
single phone call. Everyone talks about your big brain. What's
the big play, big guy? You've got maybe six months
and that's the most general estimate I've got. What is it?
What's the plan? Wait? What's that? Search? GPT? Search? GPT? Sam?
You're crazy, You're crazy, mister ortman. There's no way you
(25:11):
can build a Google Search competitor. Trust me. I know, no, really,
I worked it out. I spent a few hours looking
up Google's financial reports over the last decade or so,
trying to figure out how much the company spends and
operating costs and capital expenditures just related to search alone.
Due to the way Google structures it's financials, I had
to make some guesses, some more informed than others. But
I reckon it costs Google about thirty billion dollars a
(25:33):
year to run their search product, and that's not taken
into account the cost of the generative AI powered search summaries.
All right, Sam, here we are. So that's thirty billion
dollars a year to create something that can scale to
the size of Google Search. And that's just the start
you with me, Man, things do not get easier. You see,
you're not just building a Google Search competitor with search
gpt as. You also have to build the ad take
(25:55):
infrastructure to actually make money off of it, which you
are not good at. Okay, but you've got to copy
features from companies like double Click, which Google acquired in
two thousand and seven for three point one billion dollars
and pretty much underpins the whole operation. Or maybe you
have to build something like AdWords, which Google got when
it acquired Applied Semantics two thousand and three. You will
need something like both of these, and that's going to
(26:16):
cost you, in the best light, in the best day ever,
about three billion, or you're gonna have to outsource it,
which will make it worse and less profitable because outsourced
companies are going to take a cut of your revenue,
thus reducing your margins, which are already really bad. Then
you've got to hire experienced ad personnel and use that
ad tech infrastructure you built. You built that right to
enter a market. Google will use their entire cartel power
(26:39):
to kick you out of Wait what was that? Sam? Wait? What? Right? Right?
You've got to make money, and ideally more of it
than you spend something. As I've mentioned, you have some
issues with. Like I said, Google Search costs an absolute
shit toun to run thirty billion dollars easy, and that's
with decades of optimization, a coding language that they invented,
thousands of miles of underground cables, and decades experience in
(27:00):
doing a thing you're just learning to do, and they
have PhDs who specialize it. Wh've been at the company decades.
You did all that? Whoa? Okay? Sam? I'm impressed. You're
on a roll. You can do this. I believe in you,
mister Altman. Now just checking, how many AD salespeople do
you have? What's that? None? You don't have any ad
salespeople for your search engine, Sam, You're gonna need them.
(27:21):
Google had over thirty thousand AD salespeople before. It's the
last round of layoffs. You're not gonna make this thing
profitable without ads. In fact, I don't think Sam, you're
gonna make this search product profitable at all. But you
know what may or may not be profitable. One of
our advertisers who will soon invade your living room, car,
or other place you listen to podcasts filling your various
crevices with commerce. Behold, they're bounty. All right, right, we're back,
(27:57):
and I'll dispense with the sam Ormond ben so one
was looking up Google's financials, As I mentioned, I was
able to make a few educated guesses, and I've got
a hunch that Google has about a thirty five percent
profit margin, which is pretty good. But that's with over
two decades of infrastructure and a near monopoly on the
search market. Open Ai has none of those things. They
don't really own their infrastructure at all, as I mentioned,
(28:19):
and it's going to be relying entirely on GPT for
the most part, which is insanely power and compute intensive
and thus cost a lot more. And as I've said
a billion times already, GPT and other transformer based architecture
is deeply unprofitable, unsustainable. And that's before you even get
to the hallucinations, the hallucinations that underpin your search engine.
You need to be profitable, which isn't profitable. Oh boy,
(28:40):
this is really bad for them. Assuming the bulk of
the costs associated with running Google Search comes from the
vast number of service required to actually power it, it's
hard to imagine how anything open ai does could even
ever reach a profit, even if they had the monopoly
Google has. Now, I'm confident that open ai is trying
to raise cap or right now on the idea that
(29:01):
search GPT is able to create a meaningful competitor to
the most profitable software business ever made, one that Google
will likely protect with various monopolistic weapons like its treacher
trove of patents. While the Department of Justice did just
declare that Google had a monopoly over the search market,
and I'll get to that in an upcoming episode. It
will take years for things to move on that front,
and nothing about this situation fixes any of open AI's problems.
(29:26):
On top of that, Google spends, as I've previously mentioned,
billions of dollars on hardware and property. An open ai
would likely have to build infrastructure that dwarfs even the
outlays of Generative AI to scale a search engine that
could handle even hundreds of millions that loan the billions
of people that use Google Search. It could get Microsoft
to build it or lease it from the likes of Oracle,
and Microsoft could probably pay for it too, but that
(29:49):
would be another massive increase in capital expenditures at a
time when the markets are waiting for the stuff to
make money, rather than the companies to spend more money
on it. And I also should note that Microsoft reason
he described open ai as a competitor in the search business,
and it's unlikely to kill bing, which has been profitable
since twenty sixteen. Let's be honest, though this is all
fan fection. Open ai isn't competing with Google Search. It
(30:11):
would cost too much money, and the underlying technology is
neither good enough nor efficient enough to actually support a
search engine at scale, and even if it was, is
it better? Probably not. What about chat? GPT says that
it's going to be more reliable than Google Search, and God,
all of this is such a boring fucking face. We're
not watching startups mess around Silicon Valley experimenting in ways
(30:35):
to fix weird problems. We're watching big tech outsource their
research and development costs to one of a few hand
selected con artists that they'll drop the second that Wall
Street gets pissy. Why even pretend anymore? Anthropic is propped
up by Google and Amazon, who invested billions of dollars
in cloud credits. Microsoft props up open Ai to the
point that the Nvidia chips crisis affected here because Daddy
(30:56):
Microsoft was buying them for open Ai to use, and Google, Amazon,
and Microsoft are all making their own models, to the
point that Microsoft has already reported, like I said, that
they see open ai as a competitor. It's just it's
just also craven. Big tech funded a cloud dependent product
that costs so much more than anything else in the
market based on a spacious hype about what artificial intelligence
(31:19):
could or could not do. They do so as a
means of selling a new product, one that, while not
particularly useful, also means that they can charge a lot
for the cloud compute service it runs on, creating demand
for a product that pays them money just for existing,
allowing them to vastly expand their physical data center locations,
further enforcing their monopolies over the cloud storage industry. Microsoft, Google, Meta,
(31:41):
and Amazon created a new way to turn money into
more money investing in a tech that required you to
pay them all a lot of money for cloud computing
services to run on. Like I said, the problem, it seems,
was that none of them were willing to consider a
world where this stuff never really turned into anything remarkable
other than in its waste. And a lack of creativity
in the tallest towers of the valley in Redmond has
(32:02):
allowed the richest men in the industry to be conned
by a snake oil machine that loses billions of billions
of dollars. To be clear, there's nothing wrong on its
face inherently with generative AI. It does interesting things with documents,
and I fully believe there'll be some low five version
of generative AI that plugs around silently once the hyperscalers
piss off. My problem is that it's so horribly wasteful
(32:24):
to put all of this money into these large language models,
the ones that steal everything, that require so much energy
and create so little in return. Now there reason not
brought up previously. The whole calculation of open AI needing
five to ten billion dollars to survive is because I
wanted to make it clear how expensive them staying in places.
That is the money they will need to continue building
(32:46):
the thing they are doing today. They don't have anything
in reserve. I am confident about it. Maybe they can survive,
Maybe they can surprise me. Maybe that can happen, But
I just don't really see it happening. Greg Brockman's gone,
and I mean, he was just another non technical guy.
What's going to happen. You think Mirror Marat's is going
to come up with something, You think Sura is going
(33:07):
to do it. No, they don't have anything. And I
realize it's so strange to say this, especially if you're
a member of the media listening to this. I know
it's strange to accept this. But what if they're just
full of shit? What if this is the best they've got?
How do we deal with this? And I think we
start by accepting that all of this was completely and
(33:28):
utterly ridiculous. We live in incredible times. We're at a
boiling point in the tech industry's history where these sins
of excess and this total lack of vision of crippled
big tis ability to make new things. Things have been
too easy, too comfortable, and too frictionless for too long
for people like Sundhar Peshai and Sachinidella, and even people
(33:49):
like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are the only
two people who can fire Sandar from Google. Tech needs
to go back to creating interesting and cool things and
having companies run by people that actually care about build
holding them. Technology is capable of solving real problems, or
at least it has been in the past and proven
time and time again how profitable it can be to
do so, and I believe it can do just fine
(34:10):
without having four or five companies that do every single
thing that technology can do at the same time in
hopes that they can monopolize it. I don't think the
most powerful people in tech realize how frustrated people are,
how deeply affected by technology everyone is, even those who
don't identify as tech nerds or enthusiasts, and I think
(34:31):
men like Sandhar Peshai and Sachi Nadella are deeply unaware
of how ready people are for a change, how disgusted
they are by the crater in quality of the average
tech product at a time when executives have never been richer.
Regular consumers know that Google Search sucks. They know that
Facebook sucks. They know that websites are worse, that they
visit certain ones and there's eighteen pop ups and your
(34:51):
phone's really hot. They know that their iPhones are randomly
trying to make them buy Apple News, and they know
that there are people responsible. Tim Cook, EDDIQA Apple By
the way, welcome to come on the show, But guys,
stop trying to sell me Apple News. I don't want it.
I don't want any of this Apple shit. Don't make
me use it unless I have to other than I message.
(35:12):
But moving on, there are real targets here. There are
people that need to go to fix things. S Darpishai
and Sachinidella must go. They are no longer trustworthy stewards
of the future and have inspired hundreds of billions of
dollars of waste in the hearts of their equally myopic competitors.
These men do not care about their customers, they don't
(35:33):
fear competition, and the government should break every single hyperscala up, Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle,
all of them, and find ways to stop them ever
growing so large. In the future. Maybe we shouldn't have
such large tech companies. Maybe we don't need multiple trillion
dollar juggernauts that do everything in a shitty way. Maybe
(35:55):
we don't need companies that do online advertising and or
so provide a platform, because that kind of monopoly leads
to insane incentives like you're seeing with Google Search and Facebook,
and we all deserve better, and the way to get
there is to say the names of those responsible, to
document their disgraceful acts, and call for accountability again and
again and again and again until something actually happens and changes.
(36:19):
And it is changing. The narrative is changing, and soon
it will shift more aggressively and more violently against big tech.
And I think this is a great thing for the
world and ultimately to take industry at large. Now as
we see the bubble, the AI bubble collapse, and must
be clear, none of this is a victory lap for me.
This is not actually, how I wish this went. I
(36:40):
wish this bubble had burst earlier. It would have caused
less harm to the environment, to the markets, to the
freelancers who lose their jobs, to the artists who email
me every week. It would have wasted less money, taken
less attention away from the rest of the industry, and
allowed Sam Wortman to accumulate less money and power. Instead,
this bubble has been allowed to swell so long it
(37:00):
will only emphasize how bereft of ideas big tech has become,
and the consequences are a growing distent against tech from
the general public. And this era was ultimately the result
of a lack of fear in the hearts of big
tech and a deeply held belief that their positions were
permanent and their customers were trapped. My purpose in documenting
this in what feels at times like narrating the end
of the world. I'm not looking to be a pundit
(37:22):
or a talk in head, or a person who wants
to be given credit for calling out the bubble, as
none of these serve you, the customer, the listener, or
history itself. What I say may be imperfect, but it
exists to try and give you a clear understanding of
what's happening. And yes, it's a little emotionally charged and
very clear in its biases. I believe that the tech
industry has lost its love and curiosity, and I find
(37:43):
it disgusting, and the best way to fight back is
to studiously explain things as they happen from my perspective
at length, but with I hope a clarity that doesn't
require a ton of technical knowledge. As things have accelerated,
I've become a little more introspective about the role of
my podcas as, my newsletter and my posts. I don't
have a particularly profound conclusion other than that I believe
(38:06):
that I have a brevity and clarity about the tech
industry that many don't. And I also find that I'm
extremely fast at writing. And I also find this all
very interesting because I'm a horrible little goblin, and I
don't talk for nearly two hours or write thousands of
words because I desperately need the attention, which I do love.
I do it for the thrill I like covering this stuff,
and because if I don't say these things out loud,
(38:27):
the cats in my brain will eventually try and emerge.
But seriously, though I do these things as I need to.
This is important to me. Maybe I'm fighting back. Maybe
I just like creating. I don't really know. This is
me processing watching an industry I care deeply about get
ransecked again and again by people who don't seem to
actually care about technology. The Internet made me who I am,
(38:48):
connecting me and in many cases, introducing me to the
people I hold dearest to my heart. It let me
run a successful PR business despite having a learning disability dyspraxia,
or as it's called in America, developmental coordinational distort that
makes it difficult for me to write words with a
pen and thrive, despite being regularly told in secondary school
that I wouldn't amount to much any of you listen, then, guy,
fuck yourself. I believe that there are many, many, many
(39:11):
people that have been allowed to live better, full and
more meaningful lives as a result of technology, and I
believe that the people who built the tools that allowed
them to do so no longer control the future. And
that makes me really fucking annoyed. I refuse to watch
this bullshit happen in silence, and I encourage you, as
I have before, to fill social media and conversations with
(39:31):
the names of those responsible. Satch In a Dela of Microsoft,
Sundar Peshai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Andy Jesse
of Amazon, Sam Altman of Associated cons Mir Marati CTO
of Open Ai, and Read Hoffman, the venture capitalist who
seems to always benefit over the next bullshit machine, all
responsible for this echoing nihilism that's created the generative AI boom.
(39:55):
All of these people will be fine, by the way,
when this collapses. All of these people will just fine.
Multi billionaires, they will be just fine. But the people
that won't be are the people they will lay off,
the people that have invested and lost money in these things,
the people that may even come to rely on chat
GPT in some small way, who won't be able to
afford it when it goes tits up or gets jacked
(40:17):
up price wise, because that's the only way to make
it affordable for the company. Or maybe all of this
just disappears and these customers are left with nothing. But
sometimes I understand you might feel a little doomed, the
doomer in you. Someone recently called me a duma, which
really pissed me off, because I'm not I'm angry, and
(40:37):
I know some of you might be too. I won't
say you're angry, that isn't fair, but based on the
emails again, some of you seem pretty pissed. And I'm
not speaking for you here, but I'm angry because I
know that TED can be cooler and better and more interesting,
that there are real problems of poverty and climate change,
of the myriad systems that don't connect very well on
(40:58):
every laptop and phone, That things can be better, problems
that can be solved, but right now they need to
put tens of billions and dollars into generative AI. Come on, man,
we can do better than this. And while there might
be little you can do to them directly, I encourage
you to say these names to your friends on social media.
(41:18):
Prabagar Ragavan, remember him from Google. Tell people all about
him too. I encourage you to let anybody and everybody
you know know who's responsible for this, because ultimately what
may pop the AI bubble is a narrative, and narratives shift,
and narratives are shifted by word of mouth, and they
(41:38):
shift because of people like you and like me who
never shut up. Thank you for listening to better Offline.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
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 dot com, M A T
T O S O W s ki dot com. You
can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
(42:13):
you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Hello, Hi, welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed ze Trunk. For weeks now, I've been
(00:23):
writing and speaking about what I believe to be an
inevitable and possibly imminent collapse in generative AI. In the
last episode, I talked about the early signs of disquire,
particularly among investors, were growing increasingly uncomfortable about the many
billions being spent by Microsoft, Google and others to support
an industry that does not appear to make anyone much
money and costs so much more than it makes. And
(00:45):
I believe that this is a moment for the tech
industry to atone and to learn and to change in
the wake of what I think is an a one
hundred billion dollar group psychosis, a big, nasty waste that
I will now get to in agonizing detail. Generative AI
was always unsustainable, and it was always dependent on reams
(01:05):
of training data that necessitated stealing from millions of people.
With its utility vague and its ubiquity overstated, the media
and the markets have tolerated the technology that, while not
inherently bad, was implemented in a way so nefariously and
wastefully that it necessitated theft billions of dollars in cash
and the double digit percent increase in Hyperscaler's emissions. The
(01:28):
desperation for the tech industry to have something new has
led to such ruinous success, and if this bubble collapses,
it'll be a result of a shared myopia in both
big tech dimwitz like satch in Adela and sundarp Isshai
and Silicon Valley power players like Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman,
Bryan Chesky and of course Mark Hantreeson. The people propping
(01:48):
up this bubble no longer experience human problems, and thus
I don't think they can be trusted anymore to solve them. Ultimately,
this is a story of waste, ignorance and greed, of
wasted money and have wasted opportunity, because let's face it,
a fraction of the money spent by Microsoft alone chasing
the generative AI bullshit machine could have been spent in
many other profitable and societally useful ways. And it's a
(02:12):
story of tech executives that are so desperate to own
the future, but are so disconnected from actually building it.
And this arms race is a monument to the lack
of curiosity rife in the highest ranks of the tech industry.
They refuse to do the hard work to create, to
be curious, to be excited about the things they're building
and the people they're serving, And so they spent billions
(02:34):
of dollars to eliminate the risk they even might have
to do any of those things. Ever, again, they just
wanted the machine to do it for them. Had Sandhar
Pishai looked at Microsoft's investment in open Ai in twenty
nineteen and said, nah, no, thanks, which you did with
the metavers. By the way, it's likely that none of
this would have happened. But a combined hunger for growth
and a lack of any natural predators means that big
(02:55):
tech no longer knows how to make a competitive or
useful product, and thus they can only see what their
competitors are doing and say, ah, yeah, yeah, that's what
it is. That's what we're all doing now. Before the
AI hype boom, Mark Zuckerberg was once so disconnected from
Meta's work on AI that he literally had no idea
what breakthrough Sandar Peshai had complimented him on in a
(03:15):
meeting they had together mere months before. Meta's own obsession
with AI truly began, and none of these guys seem
to have any idea what's going on and why are
they having these chummy little meetings. These aren't competitors, they're
co conspirators. They're just people meeting to say, what's the
latest con we're all jumping on. What's the latest market
that we're all going to monopolize. I can't wait for
(03:36):
the monopoly episode. And these companies, they're too large, they
are too unwieldy, they're too disconnected, and they do too much.
They lack the focus that makes a truly competitive business,
and they lack any kind of cohesive culture, the kinds
that are built on solving real human problems or real
business problems that humans have. These are not companies built
for anything other than growth. And none of them, not
(03:59):
even Apple, have built something truly innovative and life changing
in the best part of a decade, with the exception
perhaps of maybe contactless mobile payments, which are actually really cool.
These companies are run by rot economists, and they have
these disconnected, chaotic cultures full of these little fiefdoms. We're
established technologists are rap fuck by management goons when they
try to make their products better instead of making them
(04:22):
more money, and the depressing thing is that they really
don't need to be that way. Seriously, there's a world
where these companies just make a billion dollars a quarter
and they don't even have to fire people every time
they do so. And there's one where these companies actually
solve real problems too, and then they still make incredibly
large amounts of money for doing so. The problem is
(04:43):
they're greedy. They run by greedy idiots, and they're addicted
to growth and are incapable of doing anything other than
following what the last guy did. And what's funny is
this is very Jack Welch from the Shareholder Supremacy. They
just see a market and like, what if we put
money in that? Can we take the money from the market.
That's all they can do. Now. Sundarpishi is a terrible executive,
(05:05):
but he's a really good Jack Welch clone. And by
the way, if you don't know who Jack Welch is,
please go back to the Shareholder Supremacy episode. It's important
because you really need to see who fucked all this up. Okay,
so where were we what happens next? Well, there's enough
money sloshing around right now that open ai probably can
(05:26):
be bankrolled a little further, and like I've mentioned in
the previous episode, it'll need to be is it needs
another five billion dollars, if not ten billion dollars to
make it to the end of twenty twenty five, That
very large amount of money's going to have to come
from somewhere, and I think that they're going to be
reduced to go into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or
soft bank, or probably taking on private debt, and that
(05:47):
last one, I'm just really not sure is going to happen.
And those suitors they're not going to be quite as
generous with their terms and they won't give them a
devil's deal like Microsoft did, which, as I previously argued
across multiple newsletters and podcasts, effectively owns all of open
AI's research and intellectual property. Someonlman is a terrible deal maker.
By the way, while the venture capital system theoretically could
(06:09):
afford to prop up open ai for another year or so,
they're limited partners. Who are the people funding the vcs.
They're probably still a little sore from twenty twenty one
and twenty twenty two, when massive amounts of money went
into nothing, not to mention the sudden and rapid rise
and interest rates, and they'll probably bulk at the amounts
they can need. We're talking multiple, probably ten one hundred
(06:30):
million dollar checks or two hundred million dollar checks. Open
ai needs so much more money than the VC system
is ready to give to one company, and it really
will only take one person blinking to create a panic
in both the public and the private markets. Open Ai
may still be able to raise money, but investors have
no real path to liquidity as open ai most assuredly
(06:51):
will not be able to go public, and in the
process of investing these vcs will likely find out exactly
how bad things are there. While there is a chance
we get one more round, kind of a dead cat
bounce situation, it's honestly a little tough to imagine how
it keeps going even if open ai raises another ten
billion dollars. But how does the collapse happen? Well, as
(07:13):
I said last time, there's the obvious one open ai
or Anthropic shuts down, but I think that them shutting
down is very unlikely based on the corporate structure open
AI or Anthropic collapsing will be more like the character
dot Ai deal an attempt to hide the ugly mess,
where a big tech firm absorbs them in and just
goes there. Now the AI division. You saw a version
of this, by the way, when Sam got fired from
(07:35):
open Ai and he was like the head of AI
at Microsoft for two minutes. But if I had to guess,
Anthropics most likely home would be with Amazon, which completed
its four billion dollar investment into the company earlier this
year and also has a profit share with them. In
any case where this happens, even if the entity Anthropical
or open Ai keeps going without the key people in
power such as Anthropic CEO Dario Omdey going in house
(07:57):
Amazon or Google again, it doesn't really matter. They will
eventually die and raising around for a generative AI company
in this market, it's likely going to be quite difficult,
if not impossible. The narrative shifted, and the people with
the money to invest don't really know what they're talking
about technologically speaking, so they're investing based on how everybody
(08:18):
else is feeling, what the vibes are in the air,
what they sniff each other's asses, and they say, oh, fuck,
is AI good or bad? Now? I don't really know,
And when we really strip away everything. We strip away
all of the lies and the marketing, and you just
get down to incentives and you think, well, they just
want money, right, If that's all they want, that really
(08:39):
is just the problem, because fundamentally this tech really isn't
that exciting. I'm sorry it isn't. Generative AI is not
the AI from Iron Man. It is not the magical
future computer. It's a generative AI. That picture of Garfield
with a gun or Scooby Doo sitting on top of
a rocket, those are aren't useful. That's not the future.
(09:04):
That's just image creation. I'm sure some very insufferable freak
is going to email me after this and be like, wow,
I'm set up generative AI in all of these ways. Mate.
I appreciate your time, Thank you for emailing me. I'm
sure you don't even sound like that. The point I'm
not making is that this is useless. The point I'm
making is it is not even in the same galaxy
(09:25):
of usefulness that it requires to go forward to be
worth all of this money. And on top of that,
it's boring. It's so goddamn boring. It's so I am
so bored. It doesn't even do my boring business stuff.
I have a pr business in my day job, but
I would love a dn ky AI to move my
shit around. It can't even do that. I want it
(09:46):
to help me, and it won't do it. And if
you say ed, you're a stupid idiot, You're a moron.
You have the brain of a bird or a dog
or a dog bird hybrid. You drool all the time
because your brain cannot keep your mouth closed. All of
these things are true, but it's not my job to
sell Generative AI to myself. It's the companies. And the
idea of a super smart friend that knows everything about
(10:08):
me is exciting, don't get me wrong. As is the
idea of making away drudgery all of my spreadsheets and documents,
for example. But Generative AI does not do these things,
putting aside any personal feelings I may have. It has
not changed my life or even like slightly improved it.
And I'm a guy who loves using tech, and he
is willing to put hours hours into finding solutions to
(10:29):
automate or mitigate very small problems that I only really
deal with occasionally. I'm not lazy, I'm efficient, at least
that's what I tell my doctor, and I don't know
a single person that has meaningfully changed their workflow or
life as a result of generative AI, outside of being
able to integrate it to speed up some part of
their already existing system. I've literally never met or spoken
(10:52):
to someone other than one guy on Twitter who has
talked about using this every day in a way that
truly changes things, and I should. As an aside, I
do occasionally get someone on Twitter and it's always a
blue check and they always say, oh, yeah, well, it's
changed the way our code changy allows me to code
so much faster. They then get eighteen responses of someone saying,
(11:14):
I'm an engineer and this is very unstable, and it
really feels like generative AI is just catnip for the
truly incurious. I don't want to say lazy, because I
think everyone is kind of lazy on some level. We
all want things to be easier, we really do. And
there is, when it comes to creativity, a degree where
(11:36):
the problems you face making something are what makes it
what it is. The struggles I've had writing and reading
this script are what make me a better orator or
a better writer. That process is important, but it's hard,
and it's annoying, and you have to suck a few times,
you have to write crap, You have to retake things
three or four times, and your poor editor, Mattasowski sitting
(11:56):
there going, mate, you've reread that paragraph three times, you
messed the same word up. But it's fun. This is
what curiosity is. And I don't think these people have it.
These people don't want to solve software problems. They want
to type a thing into a computer, hit enter and
then the problem is solved, never understanding why they did it.
And this isn't the same thing as calculators, by the way,
(12:17):
I'd argue software development as are, but that's a separate thing.
And ultimately, this whole movement just doesn't even feel real.
Nothing about it really felt real. It's just a farce.
It costs so much money, and it's still costing so
much money today, and the promises of artificial intelligence will
not be kept through the pursuit of generative AI. As
(12:39):
generative AI is a dead end technology that has peaked,
and it costs too much both financially and socially to
keep it going or to justify its continued existence. There's
no heroic story here. There are a few people who
are sincerely cheering for these companies to win, those who,
of course don't have a tangible financial term banking on
the value of open AI or they have so one
(13:00):
of the one hundred different guys claiming the Heaven AI newsletter,
and let's be honest, nobody really loves this, do they.
Nobody really uses CHATGBT and has that oh shit moment
you got when you first use an iPhone, when you're
first sent a file with Dropbox, that those little times
when you really fell in love with technology again and again.
And there's no magic in it. There's no whimsy, there's
(13:22):
no joy in any of these larger language models, and
they're not really helping enough people to make it worthwhile.
I nearly said they're not helping anybody. But there are users,
there are people who actually care about this. How much
do they really care? And does any of that outweigh
the costs and the environmental damage. The answer is no,
(13:43):
by the way, and their peddlers always demand that we
just give them another minute as they burn billions of
dollars to get nowhere. And the general public has known
the problems and limitations of generative AI for months. I
constantly get emails from better offline listeners, artists, engineers, teachers, massionists,
poison makers, journalists, consultants, cleaners, and copy editors, all saying
(14:05):
the same thing. This all seems like a croc of shit,
and the outputs are terrible because people who actually make
things respect the output and the production itself, and they
can see how bad this stuff is. Generative AI was
also not peddled as a solution to any problem other
than tech's lack of a hypergrowth market, and it's the
kind of bet that only a tech industry devoid of
(14:27):
natural selection truly builds. None of these big tech firms,
and I'd argue venture capitalists really take risks anymore because
they don't want to end up looking stupid, and they
want to follow each other. And regular people know. They
know Google is worse, they know Facebook is bordering unusable,
They know that generative AI does not do anything obviously
useful at scale, and that these companies have never made
(14:49):
more money than they're making today as they fuck the
customer again and again. And I believe we're in the
beginnings of a true revolt against big tech and their
rotten little promises, their lucks run out, and these formless
private equity vehicles dressed up as software companies are no
longer bred to create new things. We're all sitting and
staring at innovation's corps, stabbed full of holes by McKinsey
(15:10):
veterans and slimy con artists, and it's time for men
like Sandar Pashai and Sachin Adela to atone because their
big bet looks like a gigantic waste, one so obviously
rotten from the beginning that they've never been able to
tell anyone that they never had a plan beyond throw
money at it and eventually it will do something, or
we will do this as long as the other guy
does it too. This is a big, ugly mess, a
(15:33):
monument to the excess that burned more than two hundred
billion dollars and allowed equally lazy and uncreative people to
replace real people with shitty facsimiles that are just good enough.
But do you want to be more than good enough?
Do you want to excel in all things as I
demand of all my listeners, then buy one of the
following products, which, as usual, will reflect my exact beliefs,
(15:54):
wants and needs and we're back, and now that I'm back,
I want to say something to my peers in the media.
It's time for a fundamental re evaluation of how we
treat big tech, and it's time to question the promises
(16:17):
of those who sought to peddle this generative nonsense. It's
no longer time to ask Mark Zuckerberg about his chain.
It's time to ask him how long he intends to
burn tens of billions of dollars on nothing, and why
the website that made him so many billions of dollars
is falling apart at the seams, pumped full of content
created by the big, stupid bullshit machine he's helped popularize.
It's no longer time to gingerly cool about Sundar pishe Oh,
(16:40):
he's looking at my smartphone. It's time to ask him
how Gemini is going to make a profit and what
it is that it will do, and press him again
and again and again and again and again until he
talks about why Google Search is so bad. Now, it's
no longer time to let Sach and Adela oscillate from
referendums on capitalism twenty twenty to laying off tens of
thousands of people in twenty twenty three. It's time to
(17:02):
ask him if he's prepared to bankroll open AI to
the tune of thirty billion dollars and refuse to leave
the conversation without committing to a number. These men have
burned hundreds of billions of dollars on a machine that
boils lakes to make the most mediocre version of the past.
These men are not supporting innovation. They're aggressive forces, too
scared to piss off the markets to actually change the world,
(17:23):
domesticated animals that fear no natural predators and thus have
no hunger for something new. They propped up generative AI
because their followers rather than leaders that have paid hundreds
of millions of dollars to empower a nihilistic kind of
growth capitalism that dresses up monopolies as disruption. They have
propped up generative AI because building the future is hard
and expensive and involves taking risks and making sure that
(17:45):
you have a culture that doesn't expect the answer to
a question in the fastest amount of time possible. Innovation
is an efficient. It's lossy. It has indeterminate time scales
and requires both capital investment and space required for great
people to think of actual solutions to problems that involve
them talking to and caring about the lives of real people.
Fire satch In the Dellar of Microsoft, Fire sund Arpishai
(18:08):
of Google, and work out a way to fire Mark
Zuckerberg of Meta. These men are unworthy. They do not
find any of this exciting or meaningful. They have no curiosity.
They're private equity guys dressed up as software guys. They
are con artists. They are running their products into the ground,
and they're making more money than ever. Big Tech has
(18:30):
been overcome with narcissism and nihilism, and it must change
its ways to not eventually face perdition. I am fucking serious.
Do you think these people have a backup plan? Do
you think they've burned all of this money on such
a mediocre and wasteful solution because they've got other better ideas? No,
they're all out. Big Tech does not have another thing.
(18:50):
Google doesn't have any ideas. Meta is so out of
ideas that they change their name to another worse idea,
one associated with Mark Zuckerberg burning forty five billion dollars
for no reason. In fact, there's a Yahoo Finance story
about the fact that all of that money that's allegedly
going into the metaverse is just organizational loss. It's a
horribly run place where the management constantly changes. These goddamn people.
(19:13):
And Amazon, they've never really been in the ideas business.
They're the founder of a cloud storage cartel with Microsoft,
Oracle and Google. They work together to set the prices.
Everyone wins except anyone who isn't them. And big tech
is lazy because they've all agreed to compete only a
little bit, never coloring too far out of the lines
because doing so might expose them to an actual risk,
(19:34):
like regulation or having to hire people that build new things,
versus finding increasingly more annoying ways to exploit their current customers.
And I really am sure that there's a societal shift
coming against big tech, the natural result of years of
excess and bullshit of the loudest people in tech trying
to convince people that a large language model that can
generate texts and images that kind of suck is basically
(19:57):
the same thing as an iPhone. I have no idea
how quickly the shift comes, but it's coming. It's inevitable.
This lack of big, profitable ideas will eventually lead to
some sort of reckoning or collapse. In big tech, healthy,
well run companies, they don't do things like this, let
alone several different trillion dollar companies all bumbling into each
(20:18):
other like the Three Stooges, billions of dollars of cash
falling out of their pockets. It's an absolute disgrace. I
will say, if the AI bubble really does pop, this
is a great time to point and laugh. Regular people
like yourself could see this was bullshit from the beginning.
Most people find generative AI either briefly interesting or somewhat disgusting,
(20:39):
and they're capable of seeing that. Stealing the entire Internet
so you could spend one hundred billion dollars making a
shitty version of the past is kind of a stupid idea.
The utility really hasn't been there from the beginning. Describing
what chat GBT is is actually kind of difficult, and
any technology that's going to be worth trillions of dollars
should not have the user saying, wait, what does this
(21:01):
do exactly? And I really feel like regular people notice this.
If this was as magical as it was, regular people
would be lining up to use it. And while it
has a lot of users. I don't know anyone who's
fanatical over it other than AI fanatics. It's just very sad.
But regular people aren't the only ones. And I have
criticized journalists for missing this, but I want to call
(21:24):
some people out in a good way. Economists, analysts and
journalists have been saying this isn't the future, like I said.
Shira a v Day in March twenty twenty three, mere
months after chat GPT's launch, said it wasn't magic. For example,
in the Washington Post, Shearer the Goat, Alex Kantrowitz and
Douglas Gorman reported in August fifteenth to twenty twenty three
that chat gpt isn't good enough to take jobs and
(21:44):
it's unlikely to cause mass layoffs. The hot takes have
run into reality a little bit early, but you're correct.
Paris Mark's called the chat GPT revolution another take fantasy
in July twenty twenty three, and Gary Marcus worried about
Generative AI being a dud in August twenty twenty three.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's
important to note that people have been saying this. People
(22:05):
with big platforms and the markets chose to ignore them
as an aside. A year later, when many outlets were
still tripping over themselves to say that generative AI was
the future. Sure A Viday of The Washington Post asked,
if these chatbots are supposed to be magical, why are
so many of them as dumb as rocks. It's important
to call out when a national newspaper actually does the
(22:25):
work that needs to be done to critique the powerful
good works here, Open invites come on the show. At
this point, it seems inevitable that the bubble will burst,
that the acceleration has stopped, that the funding won't be there,
and that the markets taste for the billions of dollars
it's going to take to make generative AI. Some indeterminate
level of better just really isn't there. By all means
(22:47):
tell me I'm wrong. You certainly do on Twitter, and
you certainly do on email. And I'd be genuinely intrigued
to see how open ai wriggles out of this jam,
especially because it would mean they made a meaningful product
that makes money when they don't have the chips to
train GPT five, a model that likely still wouldn't change
the game enough to matter. I mean, what if they
have a new architecture, I guess, but I refuse to
(23:07):
give them credit for something they haven't done yet. And
in the event that Open Ai or Anthropic is able
to raise again, we'll see the cycle continue another quarter.
I'm confident, at which point something crazy would need to
happen to make any of this worth it. If these
companies can actually raise, they'll keep the bubble inflated. But
it really is borrowed time. There's enough money to fund
(23:28):
them both maybe one more time, and after that, where
is the profit? Where's this going? And it's really worth
considering that the narrative is bad and that there is
very little that anyone can really do to change it
outside of something truly incredible. These companies can play for time.
Hope that satch In a Dele and sun A Peshai
stan pats say that they have great faith in the
(23:49):
promise of AI, but I really don't think they get
another series of earnings for big tech like this. In
many ways, though, this is sam Ortman's greatest gambit, and
so much lies and Open Eyes back as a result.
This is the moment we find out if Sam Altman
has really got it. Whether it's worth agonizing and wringing
(24:09):
our hands about how scary he is, or whether he's
just able to hoodwink enough credulous billionaires that have their
hands well did to eternal money printers. Impress me, Samuel,
Wake up, Sammy, mister alt men, bring me the technology.
Show me what you've got, Show me your great works,
Show me the works you have buried in that non
(24:30):
profit for profit monstrosity. You've used the trick other visionless
power brokers into giving you their entire futures for a
dead end friend best known for an absenteism that raankled
his peers and some of the startups he was supposed
to nurture. Show me what you've got, Sam, show us all.
You're so smart. You allegedly can solve problems in a
(24:50):
single phone call. Everyone talks about your big brain. What's
the big play, big guy? You've got maybe six months
and that's the most general estimate I've got. What is it?
What's the plan? Wait? What's that? Search? GPT? Search? GPT? Sam?
You're crazy, You're crazy, mister ortman. There's no way you
(25:11):
can build a Google Search competitor. Trust me. I know, no, really,
I worked it out. I spent a few hours looking
up Google's financial reports over the last decade or so,
trying to figure out how much the company spends and
operating costs and capital expenditures just related to search alone.
Due to the way Google structures it's financials, I had
to make some guesses, some more informed than others. But
I reckon it costs Google about thirty billion dollars a
(25:33):
year to run their search product, and that's not taken
into account the cost of the generative AI powered search summaries.
All right, Sam, here we are. So that's thirty billion
dollars a year to create something that can scale to
the size of Google Search. And that's just the start
you with me, Man, things do not get easier. You see,
you're not just building a Google Search competitor with search
gpt as. You also have to build the ad take
(25:55):
infrastructure to actually make money off of it, which you
are not good at. Okay, but you've got to copy
features from companies like double Click, which Google acquired in
two thousand and seven for three point one billion dollars
and pretty much underpins the whole operation. Or maybe you
have to build something like AdWords, which Google got when
it acquired Applied Semantics two thousand and three. You will
need something like both of these, and that's going to
(26:16):
cost you, in the best light, in the best day ever,
about three billion, or you're gonna have to outsource it,
which will make it worse and less profitable because outsourced
companies are going to take a cut of your revenue,
thus reducing your margins, which are already really bad. Then
you've got to hire experienced ad personnel and use that
ad tech infrastructure you built. You built that right to
enter a market. Google will use their entire cartel power
(26:39):
to kick you out of Wait what was that? Sam? Wait? What? Right? Right?
You've got to make money, and ideally more of it
than you spend something. As I've mentioned, you have some
issues with. Like I said, Google Search costs an absolute
shit toun to run thirty billion dollars easy, and that's
with decades of optimization, a coding language that they invented,
thousands of miles of underground cables, and decades experience in
(27:00):
doing a thing you're just learning to do, and they
have PhDs who specialize it. Wh've been at the company decades.
You did all that? Whoa? Okay? Sam? I'm impressed. You're
on a roll. You can do this. I believe in you,
mister Altman. Now just checking, how many AD salespeople do
you have? What's that? None? You don't have any ad
salespeople for your search engine, Sam, You're gonna need them.
(27:21):
Google had over thirty thousand AD salespeople before. It's the
last round of layoffs. You're not gonna make this thing
profitable without ads. In fact, I don't think Sam, you're
gonna make this search product profitable at all. But you
know what may or may not be profitable. One of
our advertisers who will soon invade your living room, car,
or other place you listen to podcasts filling your various
crevices with commerce. Behold, they're bounty. All right, right, we're back,
(27:57):
and I'll dispense with the sam Ormond ben so one
was looking up Google's financials, As I mentioned, I was
able to make a few educated guesses, and I've got
a hunch that Google has about a thirty five percent
profit margin, which is pretty good. But that's with over
two decades of infrastructure and a near monopoly on the
search market. Open Ai has none of those things. They
don't really own their infrastructure at all, as I mentioned,
(28:19):
and it's going to be relying entirely on GPT for
the most part, which is insanely power and compute intensive
and thus cost a lot more. And as I've said
a billion times already, GPT and other transformer based architecture
is deeply unprofitable, unsustainable. And that's before you even get
to the hallucinations, the hallucinations that underpin your search engine.
You need to be profitable, which isn't profitable. Oh boy,
(28:40):
this is really bad for them. Assuming the bulk of
the costs associated with running Google Search comes from the
vast number of service required to actually power it, it's
hard to imagine how anything open ai does could even
ever reach a profit, even if they had the monopoly
Google has. Now, I'm confident that open ai is trying
to raise cap or right now on the idea that
(29:01):
search GPT is able to create a meaningful competitor to
the most profitable software business ever made, one that Google
will likely protect with various monopolistic weapons like its treacher
trove of patents. While the Department of Justice did just
declare that Google had a monopoly over the search market,
and I'll get to that in an upcoming episode. It
will take years for things to move on that front,
and nothing about this situation fixes any of open AI's problems.
(29:26):
On top of that, Google spends, as I've previously mentioned,
billions of dollars on hardware and property. An open ai
would likely have to build infrastructure that dwarfs even the
outlays of Generative AI to scale a search engine that
could handle even hundreds of millions that loan the billions
of people that use Google Search. It could get Microsoft
to build it or lease it from the likes of Oracle,
and Microsoft could probably pay for it too, but that
(29:49):
would be another massive increase in capital expenditures at a
time when the markets are waiting for the stuff to
make money, rather than the companies to spend more money
on it. And I also should note that Microsoft reason
he described open ai as a competitor in the search business,
and it's unlikely to kill bing, which has been profitable
since twenty sixteen. Let's be honest, though this is all
fan fection. Open ai isn't competing with Google Search. It
(30:11):
would cost too much money, and the underlying technology is
neither good enough nor efficient enough to actually support a
search engine at scale, and even if it was, is
it better? Probably not. What about chat? GPT says that
it's going to be more reliable than Google Search, and God,
all of this is such a boring fucking face. We're
not watching startups mess around Silicon Valley experimenting in ways
(30:35):
to fix weird problems. We're watching big tech outsource their
research and development costs to one of a few hand
selected con artists that they'll drop the second that Wall
Street gets pissy. Why even pretend anymore? Anthropic is propped
up by Google and Amazon, who invested billions of dollars
in cloud credits. Microsoft props up open Ai to the
point that the Nvidia chips crisis affected here because Daddy
(30:56):
Microsoft was buying them for open Ai to use, and Google, Amazon,
and Microsoft are all making their own models, to the
point that Microsoft has already reported, like I said, that
they see open ai as a competitor. It's just it's
just also craven. Big tech funded a cloud dependent product
that costs so much more than anything else in the
market based on a spacious hype about what artificial intelligence
(31:19):
could or could not do. They do so as a
means of selling a new product, one that, while not
particularly useful, also means that they can charge a lot
for the cloud compute service it runs on, creating demand
for a product that pays them money just for existing,
allowing them to vastly expand their physical data center locations,
further enforcing their monopolies over the cloud storage industry. Microsoft, Google, Meta,
(31:41):
and Amazon created a new way to turn money into
more money investing in a tech that required you to
pay them all a lot of money for cloud computing
services to run on. Like I said, the problem, it seems,
was that none of them were willing to consider a
world where this stuff never really turned into anything remarkable
other than in its waste. And a lack of creativity
in the tallest towers of the valley in Redmond has
(32:02):
allowed the richest men in the industry to be conned
by a snake oil machine that loses billions of billions
of dollars. To be clear, there's nothing wrong on its
face inherently with generative AI. It does interesting things with documents,
and I fully believe there'll be some low five version
of generative AI that plugs around silently once the hyperscalers
piss off. My problem is that it's so horribly wasteful
(32:24):
to put all of this money into these large language models,
the ones that steal everything, that require so much energy
and create so little in return. Now there reason not
brought up previously. The whole calculation of open AI needing
five to ten billion dollars to survive is because I
wanted to make it clear how expensive them staying in places.
That is the money they will need to continue building
(32:46):
the thing they are doing today. They don't have anything
in reserve. I am confident about it. Maybe they can survive,
Maybe they can surprise me. Maybe that can happen, But
I just don't really see it happening. Greg Brockman's gone,
and I mean, he was just another non technical guy.
What's going to happen. You think Mirror Marat's is going
to come up with something, You think Sura is going
(33:07):
to do it. No, they don't have anything. And I
realize it's so strange to say this, especially if you're
a member of the media listening to this. I know
it's strange to accept this. But what if they're just
full of shit? What if this is the best they've got?
How do we deal with this? And I think we
start by accepting that all of this was completely and
(33:28):
utterly ridiculous. We live in incredible times. We're at a
boiling point in the tech industry's history where these sins
of excess and this total lack of vision of crippled
big tis ability to make new things. Things have been
too easy, too comfortable, and too frictionless for too long
for people like Sundhar Peshai and Sachinidella, and even people
(33:49):
like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are the only
two people who can fire Sandar from Google. Tech needs
to go back to creating interesting and cool things and
having companies run by people that actually care about build
holding them. Technology is capable of solving real problems, or
at least it has been in the past and proven
time and time again how profitable it can be to
do so, and I believe it can do just fine
(34:10):
without having four or five companies that do every single
thing that technology can do at the same time in
hopes that they can monopolize it. I don't think the
most powerful people in tech realize how frustrated people are,
how deeply affected by technology everyone is, even those who
don't identify as tech nerds or enthusiasts, and I think
(34:31):
men like Sandhar Peshai and Sachi Nadella are deeply unaware
of how ready people are for a change, how disgusted
they are by the crater in quality of the average
tech product at a time when executives have never been richer.
Regular consumers know that Google Search sucks. They know that
Facebook sucks. They know that websites are worse, that they
visit certain ones and there's eighteen pop ups and your
(34:51):
phone's really hot. They know that their iPhones are randomly
trying to make them buy Apple News, and they know
that there are people responsible. Tim Cook, EDDIQA Apple By
the way, welcome to come on the show, But guys,
stop trying to sell me Apple News. I don't want it.
I don't want any of this Apple shit. Don't make
me use it unless I have to other than I message.
(35:12):
But moving on, there are real targets here. There are
people that need to go to fix things. S Darpishai
and Sachinidella must go. They are no longer trustworthy stewards
of the future and have inspired hundreds of billions of
dollars of waste in the hearts of their equally myopic competitors.
These men do not care about their customers, they don't
(35:33):
fear competition, and the government should break every single hyperscala up, Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle,
all of them, and find ways to stop them ever
growing so large. In the future. Maybe we shouldn't have
such large tech companies. Maybe we don't need multiple trillion
dollar juggernauts that do everything in a shitty way. Maybe
(35:55):
we don't need companies that do online advertising and or
so provide a platform, because that kind of monopoly leads
to insane incentives like you're seeing with Google Search and Facebook,
and we all deserve better, and the way to get
there is to say the names of those responsible, to
document their disgraceful acts, and call for accountability again and
again and again and again until something actually happens and changes.
(36:19):
And it is changing. The narrative is changing, and soon
it will shift more aggressively and more violently against big tech.
And I think this is a great thing for the
world and ultimately to take industry at large. Now as
we see the bubble, the AI bubble collapse, and must
be clear, none of this is a victory lap for me.
This is not actually, how I wish this went. I
(36:40):
wish this bubble had burst earlier. It would have caused
less harm to the environment, to the markets, to the
freelancers who lose their jobs, to the artists who email
me every week. It would have wasted less money, taken
less attention away from the rest of the industry, and
allowed Sam Wortman to accumulate less money and power. Instead,
this bubble has been allowed to swell so long it
(37:00):
will only emphasize how bereft of ideas big tech has become,
and the consequences are a growing distent against tech from
the general public. And this era was ultimately the result
of a lack of fear in the hearts of big
tech and a deeply held belief that their positions were
permanent and their customers were trapped. My purpose in documenting
this in what feels at times like narrating the end
of the world. I'm not looking to be a pundit
(37:22):
or a talk in head, or a person who wants
to be given credit for calling out the bubble, as
none of these serve you, the customer, the listener, or
history itself. What I say may be imperfect, but it
exists to try and give you a clear understanding of
what's happening. And yes, it's a little emotionally charged and
very clear in its biases. I believe that the tech
industry has lost its love and curiosity, and I find
(37:43):
it disgusting, and the best way to fight back is
to studiously explain things as they happen from my perspective
at length, but with I hope a clarity that doesn't
require a ton of technical knowledge. As things have accelerated,
I've become a little more introspective about the role of
my podcas as, my newsletter and my posts. I don't
have a particularly profound conclusion other than that I believe
(38:06):
that I have a brevity and clarity about the tech
industry that many don't. And I also find that I'm
extremely fast at writing. And I also find this all
very interesting because I'm a horrible little goblin, and I
don't talk for nearly two hours or write thousands of
words because I desperately need the attention, which I do love.
I do it for the thrill I like covering this stuff,
and because if I don't say these things out loud,
(38:27):
the cats in my brain will eventually try and emerge.
But seriously, though I do these things as I need to.
This is important to me. Maybe I'm fighting back. Maybe
I just like creating. I don't really know. This is
me processing watching an industry I care deeply about get
ransecked again and again by people who don't seem to
actually care about technology. The Internet made me who I am,
(38:48):
connecting me and in many cases, introducing me to the
people I hold dearest to my heart. It let me
run a successful PR business despite having a learning disability dyspraxia,
or as it's called in America, developmental coordinational distort that
makes it difficult for me to write words with a
pen and thrive, despite being regularly told in secondary school
that I wouldn't amount to much any of you listen, then, guy,
fuck yourself. I believe that there are many, many, many
(39:11):
people that have been allowed to live better, full and
more meaningful lives as a result of technology, and I
believe that the people who built the tools that allowed
them to do so no longer control the future. And
that makes me really fucking annoyed. I refuse to watch
this bullshit happen in silence, and I encourage you, as
I have before, to fill social media and conversations with
(39:31):
the names of those responsible. Satch In a Dela of Microsoft,
Sundar Peshai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Andy Jesse
of Amazon, Sam Altman of Associated cons Mir Marati CTO
of Open Ai, and Read Hoffman, the venture capitalist who
seems to always benefit over the next bullshit machine, all
responsible for this echoing nihilism that's created the generative AI boom.
(39:55):
All of these people will be fine, by the way,
when this collapses. All of these people will just fine.
Multi billionaires, they will be just fine. But the people
that won't be are the people they will lay off,
the people that have invested and lost money in these things,
the people that may even come to rely on chat
GPT in some small way, who won't be able to
afford it when it goes tits up or gets jacked
(40:17):
up price wise, because that's the only way to make
it affordable for the company. Or maybe all of this
just disappears and these customers are left with nothing. But
sometimes I understand you might feel a little doomed, the
doomer in you. Someone recently called me a duma, which
really pissed me off, because I'm not I'm angry, and
(40:37):
I know some of you might be too. I won't
say you're angry, that isn't fair, but based on the
emails again, some of you seem pretty pissed. And I'm
not speaking for you here, but I'm angry because I
know that TED can be cooler and better and more interesting,
that there are real problems of poverty and climate change,
of the myriad systems that don't connect very well on
(40:58):
every laptop and phone, That things can be better, problems
that can be solved, but right now they need to
put tens of billions and dollars into generative AI. Come on, man,
we can do better than this. And while there might
be little you can do to them directly, I encourage
you to say these names to your friends on social media.
(41:18):
Prabagar Ragavan, remember him from Google. Tell people all about
him too. I encourage you to let anybody and everybody
you know know who's responsible for this, because ultimately what
may pop the AI bubble is a narrative, and narratives shift,
and narratives are shifted by word of mouth, and they
(41:38):
shift because of people like you and like me who
never shut up. Thank you for listening to better Offline.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
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 dot com, M A T
T O S O W s ki dot com. You
can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
(42:13):
you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Better Offline to check out our reddit.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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