Monologue: How Does This End?

In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron walks through how reckless members of the media continue to inflate the AI bubble - and the detailed notes he's been taking along the way.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to your weekly Better Offline Monologue. I,
of course amed Xytron. So, as you'll find out in
tomorrow's episode, the Future of jennetor of Ai, hinges heavily
on open Ai, raising tens of billions of dollars, the

(00:23):
majority of it from SoftBank, a huge Japanese investment firm
that has to take out billions of dollars of loans
to fund them, along with their contribution to the Stargate
data center project. And as I went into in yesterday's episode,
Microsoft is pulling back from over a gigawatt of data
center capacity, and it certainly looks like these moves are
an intentional move to distance themselves from open Ai, cutting

(00:45):
back on data center expansion just as America's worst company
needs more of them. Meanwhile, Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce,
he's sounded Neil arm saying a recent CNBC conference that
he believed hyperscalers were under hypnosis in their aggressive pursuit
of data center to expansion and training larger and larger
language models. Benioff believes that and I quote ish it,

(01:07):
referring to data center expansions and larger language models has
to be rethought. Exactly what are you doing and why
are you doing this? That's a bloody good question. Mark.
To be clear, Mark Benioff has been saying that Salesforce
was adding some sort of Einstein AI shit for the
best part of a decade as a means of boosting
his stock price. So why is Big tech's most effusive

(01:29):
bullshit as saying this. Do you think it's because things
are going well? Do you think it's because sales of
Agent Force and other associated products are doing really well? Look,
as I've repeatedly said, where is the money in this industry?
What have these companies actually built with generative AI? Where
are the products that matter and why do they matter?

(01:49):
Do you really think chat GPT is revolutionary? Do you
think any of this is revolutionary? We are two years
in and I'm still getting dms from people asking me
what would it take to make you believe that this
is all the future? And I'm so fucking tired of
being asked this. The arguments I make are grounded in
numbers and things that have happened, not just financial details

(02:11):
and statistics, but in objective evaluations the products in question.
There arefficacy at tasks and the people involved. Yet somehow,
I and other critics are continually made to justify themselves.
While Sam Altman of open ai and Dario Amadee of
Anthropic vaguely suggests that we'll have a conscious autonomous computer
by the year twenty twenty seven. When I ask how

(02:32):
open ai survives as it spends nine billion dollars to
lose five billion dollars, I'm obliquely threatened by Casey Newton
of Platformer and Hardfork that he's taking detailed notes about
anyone who believes that open ai might go bankrupt or
run out of money. When as Recline suggests that AGI
is about to arrive in a conversation with some sort
of former Biden administration aicon artist, I'm sent the link

(02:52):
thirty times with people saying does this mean you're wrong?
I realize I'm complaining, but I'm justified in doing so.
Why the fuck do I other critics have to make
rigorously founded in persuasive arguments while AI companies spout fantastical nonsense.
Why does Sam Mortman get headlines when he posts about
and this did just happen? By the way, making an
AI that can do creative writing, and I wish it

(03:14):
was just ignorance. People like casing you and a Nezrakline
aren't stupid, but they're also fully willing to back the
narratives of powerful people that they want to be friends with.
They want the rich and powerful to win, and they
want to be the people that write their narratives and
get their interviews. And yeah, I'm being petty. These are
people that ostensibly compete with my work. But people with
such a large audience have a responsibility two said audience

(03:36):
not what they wish would come true. And really, I've
got to ask, how does all of this end? Right now,
we've got Anthropic, a company allegedly makes one hundred and
fifty million dollars a month according to the Information, but
loses over five billion dollars a year or so, reported
by the Information, And they make a commoditized product one
very similar to open Aiyes, a company that will also

(03:58):
likely lose a shit ton of money eleven billion dollars
or more in twenty twenty five. These companies are dependent
on receiving billions or tens of billions of dollars a
year in funding for an indeterminately long period of time.
For an equally indeterminate goal. I'm being completely objective here.
There's nothing that these companies have made that suggests anything
will change. Every new version of claud sonnet or GPT

(04:21):
is iterative, and the products we see today are alarmingly
similar to the ones we saw in the last two years.
Despite everybody talking about agents, the actual agents that exist
don't really work, and those that are able to kind
of complete a task costs thousands of dollars and again
don't always work. This industry is unprofitable, unsustainable, and does
not appear to be able to create a product that

(04:42):
people want to pay for, let alone one that they
pay enough to put the company making it in the green.
We're two years in. How do we not have one
profitable generate AVII company other than Boy is it churing?
They're a consultancy? It does not count. I do want
to say, though I'm not cheering the apocalypse, what I've

(05:02):
been describing for the last year is a group delusion
where hundreds of billions of dollars got funneled into an
environmentally and financially destructive distraction from the real problems that
humanity faces. The longer this goes on means that it
will be worse for the tech industry because once this
bubble bursts, it will puncture everything, tens of thousands of
people laid off, brutal damage under tech valuations, and likely

(05:23):
a glut of tech talent that depresses wages across the valley.
What's important to know is that so much of this
could have been avoided. Microsoft could have chosen not to
continue sustaining open AI, as could Google and Amazon have
refused to back anthropic or just not do this nonsense
so called reporters that Casey Newton and Ezra Klein could
have made these companies justify themselves rather than operating as

(05:44):
so called cautious optimists that end up mostly just parroting
marketing materials. And the larger media could have covered generative
AI based on what it does, rather than what they're
told it might do by somebody who has the financial
incentive to lie. In any case, when this collapses, my words,
I have been taking very, very detailed notes. I've been
watching those who have sustained this bullshit narrative and other

(06:07):
bullshit narratives and cryptocurrency in the metaverse. People willfully misleading
the public in the process, and when the time is right,
I will coldly and clinically read you every single time
they've done so. Anyway, enjoy tomorrow's episode