Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: your host ed Zitron. What last episode I posited that
Speaker 1: everything weird and bad you're seeing in the tech industry
Speaker 1: right now can be attributed to the death of its
Speaker 1: hypergrowth era. You see, up until around twenty nineteen, take
Speaker 1: experience this epoch where there were these obvious, giant, multi
Speaker 1: trillion dollar markets to conquer, things like software as a service,
Speaker 1: cloud storage, streaming, audio and video, things like that, along
Speaker 1: with billions of people that were getting online every single year.
Speaker 1: Yet now they face another problem that only one hundred
Speaker 1: million new people got online between twenty twenty two and
Speaker 1: twenty thirty three, and the traffic that they're sending to
Speaker 1: the majority of the Internet's top one hundred Internet properties
Speaker 1: has entered this prolonged, agonizing period of declient and were
Speaker 1: still they don't appear to be any new multi trillion
Speaker 1: markets left to grow into. This led to a profound
Speaker 1: period of desperation in tech. The tech industry got high
Speaker 1: on the hog promising the world and then somehow actually
Speaker 1: managing to deliver it. You see Facebook, they actually connected
Speaker 1: billions of people. There are millions of electric cars, cloud
Speaker 1: products are both ubiquitous and useful. You can stream music anywhere.
Speaker 1: There are real things, real ideas, new things that they
Speaker 1: could just pump money into and then reap the benefits until,
Speaker 1: of course there weren't. Venture capital also got used to
Speaker 1: making easy, safe bets on new startups and seeing pretty
Speaker 1: much automated massive returns because there were still these massive
Speaker 1: markets to enter, and of course they were able to
Speaker 1: get very cheap money borrowed from limited partners and I
Speaker 1: at some point really do need to explain exactly how
Speaker 1: venture capital works, but that's a future episode. Yet, since
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, tech's biggest ideas of being a beer, it wank.
Speaker 1: These new ideas they've had, NFTs, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, generative AI,
Speaker 1: these movements, they seem to sell ideas and glimpses of
Speaker 1: the future rather than an actual product that would solve
Speaker 1: an actual problem for anyone, let alone the billions of
Speaker 1: people required to make a giant market. And the commonality
Speaker 1: between all of these products is that they're all trying
Speaker 1: to create one. They all need to make a new
Speaker 1: hypergrowth market, an industry that could be worth hundreds of
Speaker 1: billions or even trillions of dollars for investors to pile
Speaker 1: capital into or i should say, into startups that will
Speaker 1: then grow into these industries. But in all of their
Speaker 1: cases they kind of seem to fall short the moment
Speaker 1: they enter the real world. Had NFTs actually been a
Speaker 1: replacement for art or collectibles, they could have created an
Speaker 1: industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, except they lacked
Speaker 1: any compelling use case of reason to do so, other
Speaker 1: than the fact that venture capitalists really wanted them to
Speaker 1: do so. The same went for cryptocurrency, which draped itself
Speaker 1: in these horrible manipulative concepts like decentralized software, programmable money,
Speaker 1: democratized finance, ideas that could theoretically be trillion dollar concepts,
Speaker 1: except in practice cryptocurrency is horrible as a store of
Speaker 1: value and even worse as an operable piece of software.
Speaker 1: But the same does go for the metaverse and for
Speaker 1: generative AI. Their concepts sold on the idea of what
Speaker 1: if it could do this, rather than what it can
Speaker 1: actually do. And that's before if you got to the nasty,
Speaker 1: messy problem of whether actually people wanted them to do anything,
Speaker 1: whether people wanted to live in the metaverse or transact
Speaker 1: with digital money, you can do that using zell or
Speaker 1: Vemo today, you could do it years ago. I don't
Speaker 1: really get it. And yet the most obvious problem with
Speaker 1: these movements is that they're constantly having to explain why
Speaker 1: you should care, rather than showing you why you should care.
Speaker 1: The promises they've made they're not based on things that
Speaker 1: they're actually doing, but on showing you this kind of messy,
Speaker 1: childish drawing of a concept of something that one day
Speaker 1: might exist, and almost universally rely on this kind of
Speaker 1: pseudo religious belief system where one has faith in an
Speaker 1: industry and that doing so makes you smart. And you
Speaker 1: need to decry cynics as Luodites that hate progress, because well,
Speaker 1: one has to be first, right And what's crazy as
Speaker 1: well with all the AI people who are like, ah,
Speaker 1: you need to believe in AI. A lot of these
Speaker 1: people aren't invested in these companies. They just want to
Speaker 1: be part of a movement. It's so sad, but it's
Speaker 1: also so craven and manipulative. And the problem isn't so
Speaker 1: much that these concepts are bad, but that they're premature.
Speaker 1: The metaverse is a silly idea at the scale that
Speaker 1: Zuckerbo pitched it, but digital worlds that people spend thousands
Speaker 1: of hours of their lives and are not The take
Speaker 1: that he's talking about just isn't there and may not
Speaker 1: actually be, And without that tech, I just don't think
Speaker 1: they become ubiquitous concepts adopted by hundreds of millions or
Speaker 1: billions of people in the way that he said. To
Speaker 1: do the things that he demonstrated in the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one video he showed when he changed Facebook's name to
Speaker 1: Meta would require, as I mentioned last episode, all of
Speaker 1: this extrasensory tech that is nowhere near existing. But let's
Speaker 1: get a little bit into the present for a second
Speaker 1: and talk about generative AI, which has use cases and
Speaker 1: can do some cool things, but the desperation to make
Speaker 1: it the next big hypergrowth market has turned it into
Speaker 1: more of a marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign made
Speaker 1: up of these gratuitous, insane promises about artificial general intelligence
Speaker 1: or about how AI could run our lives, all kind
Speaker 1: of to hide the fact that most of these models
Speaker 1: are trained on a noxious form of public larceny, stealing
Speaker 1: from thousands or millions of creators to train models to
Speaker 1: do nothing. Training these models, by the way, will not
Speaker 1: give us agi it's not going to give us cognition
Speaker 1: in AI. They are lying about that. I really want
Speaker 1: to be clear, but also want to be clear that, uh, well,
Speaker 1: generative AI is probably not going to do much more
Speaker 1: than it's doing today. I'm making that call right now.
Speaker 1: What's happened in the last year. Nothing but these problems
Speaker 1: are created by the fact that they might be good ideas,
Speaker 1: but they're not trillion dollar ideas, but they're being given
Speaker 1: the funding and the marketing efforts to make them that way,
Speaker 1: even though they're so premature. It's ridiculous and it's just
Speaker 1: a it's a rotten kind of mindset. It is the
Speaker 1: rot economy, and it is the rot com bubble. This
Speaker 1: is the bubble being inflated, pushing concepts to the limelight
Speaker 1: before they're ready, pushing things through to show that companies
Speaker 1: can keep growing, that the tech industry can keep growing.
Speaker 1: And you can see miniature versions of this problem running
Speaker 1: through all of your favorite tech products right now. Google's
Speaker 1: forcing AI and to search, Facebook's constantly changing its algorithms
Speaker 1: and adding AI. Amazon's letting in basically anyone to sell
Speaker 1: anything on Amazon at any time, even if it's clogging
Speaker 1: the Kindle store with AI generated crap. They're all doing
Speaker 1: it because they're desperate to show that they're innovative and
Speaker 1: adding new things and able to express perpetual growth, even
Speaker 1: if doing so makes things worse. Even Apple, who I
Speaker 1: generally like the products of, is doing it too. iOS
Speaker 1: is a complete mess. Go into your settings, there's one
Speaker 1: hundred different things at the top. It will sometimes transsell
Speaker 1: you Apple News. Plus sometimes you get a notification about
Speaker 1: a baseball game that's a nail biter. I had one
Speaker 1: yesterday for the Angels Marlins, and if you're not a
Speaker 1: baseball fan, that's not that exciting a game. It's like
Speaker 1: watching two turds fight in a toilet. Sorry, if I've
Speaker 1: got any Marlins or Angels fans. Back to the tech stuff, though,
Speaker 1: I must be clear that there is a mindset behind this,
Speaker 1: and it is the rot economy and the rot economy's
Speaker 1: growth at all cost mindset. It drives these companies away
Speaker 1: from innovation. It flies in the face of what it
Speaker 1: takes to innovate, which means losing money on ideas that
Speaker 1: actually help people. And it's all happening because these markets
Speaker 1: they reward public companies and the startups that they try
Speaker 1: and acquire for making a number go up rather than
Speaker 1: any kind of consistent, profitable, sustainable, or useful business. And
Speaker 1: it frustrates me and fills me full of angry bio
Speaker 1: because they're all capable of making cool stuff. Amazon made aws,
Speaker 1: Amazon web Services, the foundational thing of all cloud computing.
Speaker 1: Facebook at one point was a very useful product that
Speaker 1: connected people that you loved and you liked and that
Speaker 1: you just met, except they had to make the number
Speaker 1: go up. And I think, by the way, Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: separate to a lot of these companies because he was
Speaker 1: always kind of evil listen to the Facebook episodes and
Speaker 1: not lying. But really, though all these companies had noble times,
Speaker 1: they had times when they were still doing value extraction,
Speaker 1: where they were still doing some form of conning, where
Speaker 1: they were still doing monopoly plays, but they were at
Speaker 1: least providing something useful. Now they're making things worse because
Speaker 1: they have no more useful ideas or at least you
Speaker 1: ustful and profitable ones. What makes the last few years
Speaker 1: worth of bullshit stupid tech movements different from the previous
Speaker 1: innovations is that when an industry is ready for hypergrowth,
Speaker 1: there's a product that actually exists that will truly change
Speaker 1: people's lives. The promises made by tech executives were at
Speaker 1: one point based on things that one can reasonably believe
Speaker 1: would happen, rather than this kind of weird, erotic fan
Speaker 1: fiction to send a stock number up. Using the first iPhone,
Speaker 1: you could kind of see that you might make video
Speaker 1: calls on it, or take video, or use distinct third
Speaker 1: party apps like you were already doing on a Mac.
Speaker 1: And while Steve Jobs and yes he was an awful person,
Speaker 1: I know, did talk about what's coming next, he did
Speaker 1: so by saying that the iPhone on the initial announcement
Speaker 1: would add three G and amazing things in the future.
Speaker 1: And he did so just before and this was in
Speaker 1: the original iPhone speech, showing the actual real features of
Speaker 1: the first iPhone, things that people actually wanted, like having
Speaker 1: your music on your phone, being able to see what
Speaker 1: voicemails you had versus just calling a number and then
Speaker 1: hitting buttons to skip to the ones you need to
Speaker 1: see or hear in this case. And these promises, they
Speaker 1: were believable, either because they felt like a logical next
Speaker 1: step or because they described features that could be found
Speaker 1: in other competing products. Apple's always been a company of
Speaker 1: iteration rather than forceful, explosive innovation. It doesn't really create
Speaker 1: new categories, but it does refine them. And this trait
Speaker 1: was even referenced in the classic Douglas Copeland novel Microserfs,
Speaker 1: first published in nineteen ninety five, before Tim Cook took over,
Speaker 1: or even the return of Steve Jobs. It didn't make
Speaker 1: the first smart watch, or the first table, or the
Speaker 1: first arm based PC, but Apple did make them good
Speaker 1: and made them practical and useful and sellable. You saw
Speaker 1: these new products and you said, oh, I could do that,
Speaker 1: I could take photos with that. Oh I don't need
Speaker 1: an iPod and phone. I have a phone that does
Speaker 1: two things. I'm not even trying to romanticize the iPhone.
Speaker 1: I'm just describing what basic utility sounds like in a product,
Speaker 1: something that has been lost in the tech industry. Just
Speaker 1: look at Samultman, Sondhar Pashai, and Sachin Adella of Open Ai,
Speaker 1: Google and Microsoft. They seem intent on discussing what AI
Speaker 1: will do, that it will have a monumental impact, that
Speaker 1: it will be a smart person in those everything about
Speaker 1: your life, and yet when they're actually asked about what
Speaker 1: it does today, they just seem to go kind of quiet.
Speaker 1: They start her, they're speechless. And when sach a and
Speaker 1: Adella was actually asked about how he uses AI in
Speaker 1: his day to day work, he said the Microsoft Copilot
Speaker 1: helps him compose emails better. Congratulations, Microsoft, you invented grammarly,
Speaker 1: a product that's existed for fifteen years. Jesus Christ Anyway.
Speaker 1: As an aside, sach In Adella of Microsoft said in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one that Microsoft was with the metaverse creating
Speaker 1: an I quote here, a new platform and a new
Speaker 1: application type that was similar to how it talked about
Speaker 1: the web and the websites in the early nineties, and
Speaker 1: that he could not overstate how much a breakthrough the
Speaker 1: metaverse was. He would then dump it entirely two years later.
Speaker 1: Two years before that, so in twenty nineteen, Nadella called
Speaker 1: HoloLens two, microsoft's augmented reality glasses, an absolute breakthrough, a
Speaker 1: few months after its demo failed live on stage at
Speaker 1: Microsoft's Bill twenty nineteen conference. And while Microsoft hasn't killed HoloLens,
Speaker 1: it's clear the company's appetite for mixed and virtual reality
Speaker 1: has kind of dampened with HoloLens work as partially impacted
Speaker 1: over the last year's sweeping layoffs at Microsoft and Microsoft
Speaker 1: discontinuing its VR social network, All Space VR and Windows
Speaker 1: Mixed Reality. Where's the breakthrough, Satcha, Satcha, you told me
Speaker 1: this shit was a breakthrough in twenty nineteen. Hey, the
Speaker 1: metaus was a breakthrough? Is everything a breakthrough? Satcha? Anyway,
Speaker 1: every single one of these questionable, weird, stupid products and
Speaker 1: the stupider decisions behind them, it's all an act of desperation,
Speaker 1: an attempt to keep the rot economy going, and the
Speaker 1: growth that all costs fire from going out, stripping crap
Speaker 1: off of the walls and throwing it in, selling shit
Speaker 1: so you can get more oil to throw on the fire.
Speaker 1: You can tell I have done a lot of fires. But seriously,
Speaker 1: this is all desperation to keep a party going that
Speaker 1: ended quite some time ago. There's a finite amount of
Speaker 1: people in the world right now, less of them getting online.
Speaker 1: And while more people are being born, they're going to
Speaker 1: be born into a very different tech industry than the
Speaker 1: one we see today. And there's an even more finite
Speaker 1: amount of those people that will go online at any
Speaker 1: given time, and in turn, even fewer of them that
Speaker 1: might actually want to use a particular service, especially one
Speaker 1: that isn't obvious in why you should bloody use it. Previously,
Speaker 1: these companies were able to anticipate and meet customers' needs
Speaker 1: on both the consumer and enterprise level, in part because
Speaker 1: they actually understood their customers and knew that making their
Speaker 1: customers happy actually made them successful. I believe that behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, many of these companies have been struggling for
Speaker 1: years to find the next big thing, knowing that while
Speaker 1: there might be needs to be made, you know, those horrible,
Speaker 1: nasty customers that always want problems solved. Ugh, those needs
Speaker 1: might not be things that will create double digit revenue
Speaker 1: growth or convince Wall Street that a stock will grow forever.
Speaker 1: Though I can't say for certain. I'd also say the
Speaker 1: ascent of management consultancy types in tech, people like Sheryl Samberg,
Speaker 1: Adam Useerri Sandar Pishai, and Sam Altman, who was adopted
Speaker 1: by the management consultant types. It's a testament to how
Speaker 1: obvious that they're desperate for the next big thing is,
Speaker 1: and how big their failure is to actually adapt to
Speaker 1: customer needs, or how incapable they are of building useful
Speaker 1: things management consultancy people and Sundar and share all by
Speaker 1: the way, they both came from McKinsey, one of the
Speaker 1: worst companies around. They're not built to innovate, they're built
Speaker 1: to grow. Oh, they're built to create business cancer. Now
Speaker 1: you might say that's horrible. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: do you think Facebook's useful? Do you think Google Search
Speaker 1: has got better? Or do you think that management consultancy
Speaker 1: people have seen it and gone number must go up,
Speaker 1: number must go up forever because if number go up,
Speaker 1: money go up, money go up. Good. I know I'm
Speaker 1: being somewhat facetious, but really, look at the tech industry
Speaker 1: right now. Look at it and tell me that this
Speaker 1: is an industry going well, that this is an industry
Speaker 1: building the future. No, right now, the tech industry feels
Speaker 1: like a management consultancy people trying to do PowerPoint presentations
Speaker 1: to customers to say this is going to change your
Speaker 1: life without actually showing them how it will in the product,
Speaker 1: and in the case of Microsoft lying in their Super
Speaker 1: Bowl commercial, or in the case of Samulman and Open
Speaker 1: Eye lying all the time. I mean tons of liars
Speaker 1: at the top of most of capitalism. But really, the
Speaker 1: tech industry is just full of them. But I think
Speaker 1: generative AI is quite special. And what makes it so
Speaker 1: special is it kind of has the hint of utility,
Speaker 1: the scent of a product, and as a result, it
Speaker 1: can be sold to the markets. Is the next big boom,
Speaker 1: the next big thing that justifies hundreds of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of investment and increased market caps, even if it
Speaker 1: doesn't really do something. Every single company chasing the generative
Speaker 1: AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services, which,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, is the ubiquitous cloud product that went
Speaker 1: from a side project of Amazon Store to actually something
Speaker 1: that makes more than it and today it underpins most
Speaker 1: of the Internet. And you want to know why AWS
Speaker 1: does that, It's because it's useful. It's because it actually
Speaker 1: does something. It's actually a thing that has utility. You
Speaker 1: don't need to explain why someone needs a website on
Speaker 1: the Internet, or why they need services to do the
Speaker 1: compute to run an application that runs in the cloud.
Speaker 1: That's pretty bloody obvious. And that's the problem with GENERATIFAI,
Speaker 1: and that's the problem with a lot of things you
Speaker 1: see in the tech industry. Nobody really seems to be
Speaker 1: able to explain why or how generative AI is the
Speaker 1: next big thing, just that it is Chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude,
Speaker 1: all of these large language models. They can do some
Speaker 1: things that are superficially cool. They can generate images, they
Speaker 1: can quickly query databases, albeit with no guarantee they won't
Speaker 1: hallucinate and make up something that isn't true and tell
Speaker 1: you it is. And they can craft poetry. But there's
Speaker 1: no real endearing reason to pick one of them up
Speaker 1: every day and use them. These use cases that they enable.
Speaker 1: They're not really exciting or ubiquitous or world changing. They're
Speaker 1: not anything like what the tech executives are actually selling us.
Speaker 1: And the problem might not be that they're useless, but
Speaker 1: that as a piece of technology, generative AI just isn't
Speaker 1: a hypergrowth market or much of an industry changer, no
Speaker 1: matter how much money you shove into it. Sam Lman
Speaker 1: is not asking Microsoft for a one hundred billion dollars
Speaker 1: supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better. He's
Speaker 1: doing it because what we have today is not a
Speaker 1: world changing product. It's not the boondoggle that the tech
Speaker 1: industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of
Speaker 1: fulfilling these promises is basically a tech industry equivalent of
Speaker 1: the Marshall Plan. Yet without generative AI, what do these
Speaker 1: companies have left? What is the next big thing? For
Speaker 1: the best part of fifteen years, we've assumed that the
Speaker 1: tech industry would always have something up their sleeves. But
Speaker 1: what's becoming apparent is that they might have actually run
Speaker 1: out of ideas. They don't have any big, sexy things
Speaker 1: to sell us. And the disruption that has become associated
Speaker 1: with tech was predicated on there being new markets for
Speaker 1: them to disrupt and ideas in their hands that they
Speaker 1: could actually use to do so. And a paper from
Speaker 1: last year from Nature that kind of worried me too
Speaker 1: positive that the pace of disruptive research is actually slowing,
Speaker 1: And I believe the same thing is actually happening in tech,
Speaker 1: except we're conflating innovation and finding new markets to add
Speaker 1: software and hard where to and we've been doing so
Speaker 1: for twenty years, and the net result of this is
Speaker 1: a kind of innovation stagnation and the rock economy and
Speaker 1: the rock com bubble. A tech industry laser focused on
Speaker 1: finding markets to disrupt rather than actually disrupting anything. Rather
Speaker 1: than actually meeting anyone's needs. Where the biggest venture capital
Speaker 1: investments go into companies that can sell for massive multiples
Speaker 1: rather than sustainable, stable businesses or things that might truly
Speaker 1: change the world. Venture capital is not investing in moonshots.
Speaker 1: They're not putting money into the future. They're putting money
Speaker 1: into the goddamn present. And there are exceptions. I like
Speaker 1: a lot of seed stage investors because they're actually taking
Speaker 1: risks on real companies that are doing new things. However,
Speaker 1: the largest VC firms need to get their heads out
Speaker 1: their asses and actually invest in the future. But really,
Speaker 1: what's so stupid about this is of all these big
Speaker 1: tech companies, before they really mess with their products, they
Speaker 1: were good, sustainable, insane, li profitable businesses. There's no reason
Speaker 1: that Google or Meta or Amazon couldn't build businesses that
Speaker 1: have flat, sustainable growth and really respectable, reliable profitability. They
Speaker 1: just choose not to impart because the markets will punish it,
Speaker 1: and partly because their DNA has been poisoned by the
Speaker 1: rot economy and the demands of the rot economy are
Speaker 1: very simple, more always more. I also think that the
Speaker 1: tech industry, both the venture capitalists funding it and those
Speaker 1: running big tech firms. They've been dominated by people who
Speaker 1: don't build things. The people running VC firms, the people
Speaker 1: running Google, Facebook, and all these Wow. Mark Zuckerberg, I
Speaker 1: guess was a code but he's not doing it anymore.
Speaker 1: They're not actually building products, and they're not coder's even
Speaker 1: Sam Morton's not an engineer. The future isn't being built
Speaker 1: by the people saying what the future is. The future
Speaker 1: is being built by people under the thumb of management
Speaker 1: consultant brains. And I know, oh, I know, I'm being
Speaker 1: a little facetious again, but really, these people aren't speaking
Speaker 1: to people with real products. They're not looking at the
Speaker 1: human condition and saying, let's make this better for money. Now,
Speaker 1: they're saying, how do we drain more blood from the
Speaker 1: consumer until they give up on our website? Well, guess what, asshole?
Speaker 1: They are giving up on it. But this problem, it's
Speaker 1: poisoning the startup industry as well, leaving big tech for
Speaker 1: a second. So, the Rabbit R one and the Humane Pin,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you've seen them. The rabbit r
Speaker 1: one is this two hundred dollar orange brick with a
Speaker 1: screen that claimed when you got it that you could
Speaker 1: talk to it and it'd run these apps and it
Speaker 1: cost two hundred dollars, by the way, and the Human
Speaker 1: Pin is this AI powered pin that costs seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars and it has a little infrared screen that goes
Speaker 1: in your hand except when you use it too much
Speaker 1: of heats anyway, Now that like giving you back. Kind
Speaker 1: of the backstory there. Both of these companies they raised
Speaker 1: incredible sums of capital based on these vague ideas. You know,
Speaker 1: that people felt overwhelmed by their smartphones, or that they
Speaker 1: don't not connected with the real world, things that sound
Speaker 1: nice to investors who don't experience speaking to people. And
Speaker 1: they raised all this money hunt over two hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars between my believe, to build products that range from
Speaker 1: extremely bad to potentially fraudulent, and they failed to build
Speaker 1: products that anybody actually needed. What they did build were
Speaker 1: very expensive things that answered questions nobody had and solve
Speaker 1: problems that nobody had very poorly. And I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if it was ignorance, ambivalence, or just pure evil, but anyway,
Speaker 1: if I'm honest, these startups, they're only a symptom of
Speaker 1: the rock on bubble. The investors are disconnected from the
Speaker 1: process of building things, and they're funding ideas that they
Speaker 1: don't understand in the hopes that the people building them
Speaker 1: aren't full of shit, and they're not even doing the
Speaker 1: necessary due diligence because clearly the people funding these companies
Speaker 1: don't know enough about tech to actually see whether these
Speaker 1: things are possible. Remember Saguoya, one of the largest venture
Speaker 1: capital firms, put a lot of money into FTX. Again,
Speaker 1: the crypto currency thing that was a big scam. There
Speaker 1: are ways of looking beyond the spreadsheet or the power point.
Speaker 1: You know, you can ask more questions and if they
Speaker 1: don't give you a give you an answer, that's good.
Speaker 1: I just feel a little crazy when I think about
Speaker 1: tech from the last few years. There's just been so
Speaker 1: much wasted money. There are people out there who were
Speaker 1: just raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to say something a little bit controversial,
Speaker 1: but who can blame them. I think they're scum. I
Speaker 1: think they're con artists. I think they should give back
Speaker 1: the money to their customers, and they should give back
Speaker 1: the money to investors. But really, what do you expect
Speaker 1: when the industry is engineered to capture what the next
Speaker 1: big thing is when it isn't defined by utility or necessity,
Speaker 1: but rather how big a market it can grow into.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you try and capture that demand. Why would
Speaker 1: you make a real company when venu money is going
Speaker 1: into fake companies again and again for years and years
Speaker 1: and years and years. Why do you think people don't
Speaker 1: want to make startups. People are making startups, by the way,
Speaker 1: it's still happening. But why would they be incentivized to
Speaker 1: try something new when they know that venture capitalists are
Speaker 1: funding stupid, bloody ideas that sound good on paper. It's
Speaker 1: so frustrating, and it frustrates me working with startups every
Speaker 1: day here in real ideas which actually exist, and they'll
Speaker 1: raise modest rounds, they won't raise one hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: because the people giving away one hundred million dollars are
Speaker 1: giving it to people who have the next big thing
Speaker 1: idea and then burning the money anyway. It's just it's
Speaker 1: so insane, Like look at the rabbit r one. So
Speaker 1: the rabbit are one is it's a little orange box.
Speaker 1: When you ask it to order uber it breaks most
Speaker 1: of the time. It does not work. It claims it
Speaker 1: as a large action model that controls your apps on
Speaker 1: a server. It doesn't really work. The whole thing feels
Speaker 1: like a sham. There's a Coffee Ziller video I really
Speaker 1: encourage you to watch. But the big thing is is
Speaker 1: that what Jesselu, the CEO of Rabbit, has done is
Speaker 1: he's over promised what this device could do. He said
Speaker 1: it can control your apps with your voice, and it
Speaker 1: can only kind of do that, and he's raised a
Speaker 1: bunch of money as a result of these I don't
Speaker 1: know if you call them live half truths, scams, I
Speaker 1: don't know. That's up to you to choose. But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: what Jesse Lou has done is as well as previously
Speaker 1: run an NFT company, which is the same entity that
Speaker 1: made the Rabbit. Jesse Lou has stated that AI can
Speaker 1: do more than it can, that his device is actually
Speaker 1: capable of doing things that might one day be possible
Speaker 1: but really might not be based on the existing technology.
Speaker 1: If we're honest, what's the difference between Rabbit CEO Jesse
Speaker 1: Lou and open Ai CEO sam Orltman. They both went
Speaker 1: through y Combinator, which is a tech incubator in the Bay,
Speaker 1: and both of them have sold products that don't do
Speaker 1: what they say based on what it might do in
Speaker 1: the future. I can't work out the difference other than
Speaker 1: the amount of money they've raised. Both of them lied,
Speaker 1: both of them haven't delivered the products they say. I
Speaker 1: think the only difference, as far as I can see,
Speaker 1: is that Sam Ortman was better at playing the game.
Speaker 1: I'm no, no, really though, Really sit with me for
Speaker 1: a second. Jesse Lou absolutely misled his customers about the capabilities,
Speaker 1: what the R one could do, and the company's previous operations.
Speaker 1: But Sam Altman as shamelessly over hyped generative AI almost
Speaker 1: every day for years. Senior members of Sam Moltman's first
Speaker 1: startup Looped tried to get him fired twice for what
Speaker 1: they described as a deceptive and chaotic behavior pattern. He
Speaker 1: was fired from y Combinator for an absenteeism that rankled
Speaker 1: his peers and some of the startups he was supposed
Speaker 1: to nurture, and former Open Ai board member Helen Toner
Speaker 1: told the ted Ai Show that Altman was so deceitful
Speaker 1: that the board found out about the launch of chat GPT,
Speaker 1: which by the way, is the definitional generative AI product,
Speaker 1: when they saw it was posted on Twitter. Toner also
Speaker 1: admitted that Sam Moortmon was caught outright lying on multiple occasions,
Speaker 1: and the two executives provided evidence of psychological abuse and
Speaker 1: lying and manipulative behavior on multiple occasions. If anything, Sam
Speaker 1: Altman's much worse than jesselew All while lacking much of
Speaker 1: a technical background at all. He is the archetypal rockcom CEO,
Speaker 1: an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be a technologist and abusing
Speaker 1: anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth. Sam
Speaker 1: Moltman is the opposite of what the tech industry needs.
Speaker 1: He is not building real things. He is selling you
Speaker 1: a dream that doesn't exist. And when this bubble bursts,
Speaker 1: people like him will escape. They'll be fine because he's
Speaker 1: already rich. Nothing I'm saying is meant to suggest that
Speaker 1: they can't be successful tech companies. Although there won't be
Speaker 1: any more innovation, I just think there's going to be
Speaker 1: less of it, and on a much smaller scale, and
Speaker 1: I don't think we should fear it. The tech industry
Speaker 1: can no longer rely on the idea that every year
Speaker 1: or every couple of years, somebody will find an idea
Speaker 1: that will create two thousand more startups or trillions of
Speaker 1: dollars in market cap. Tech must reconfigure both venture capital
Speaker 1: investment and public tech companies to a sustainable, profitable, and
Speaker 1: useful model where get this, existing products are made better
Speaker 1: and more profitable with the understanding that we're approaching the
Speaker 1: maximum amount of people who are going to be online,
Speaker 1: and that these products cannot be built with the assumption
Speaker 1: that more and more users will always exist. I'm sure
Speaker 1: some of you might say I'm wrong and that text
Speaker 1: hypergrowth era isn't over, and that GENERATIVEAI it's going to
Speaker 1: usher in this glorious new future of powerful assistance. But seriously,
Speaker 1: what does that look like? What happens next? Where does
Speaker 1: GENERATIVEAI go from here? Do they fix the problems? How
Speaker 1: do they make it cheaper or more efficient? How do
Speaker 1: they eliminate hallucinations? When Google themselves can't, when Facebook can't,
Speaker 1: When none of these big companies can fix the biggest
Speaker 1: problem that all of them know about. How will open
Speaker 1: AI train GPT five their next model. They need four
Speaker 1: to five times the amount of data that they have
Speaker 1: right now, which already require them to do masses of
Speaker 1: plagiarism to make GPT five happen. How are they going
Speaker 1: to do that? Hey, another question, just why have you
Speaker 1: has Google, Meta or Microsoft? If any of these companies
Speaker 1: found a way to make generative AI profitable? Yeah, when
Speaker 1: will they do so? How long do they have? How
Speaker 1: long until the market sours? Salesforce just had their first
Speaker 1: revenue miss since two thousand and six, partially based on
Speaker 1: the fact that Mark Bennioff, the bullshitter in chief who
Speaker 1: constantly talks about AI and has done so for years,
Speaker 1: it turns out he didn't make any money from it,
Speaker 1: and people are kind of upset and seriously though, putting
Speaker 1: all that aside, when does generative AI prove itself useful?
Speaker 1: Where's the big moment? Where's the iPhone moment? Is it
Speaker 1: this autocorrect thing? Is it this thing that can write
Speaker 1: poetry or generate pictures of the Joker as president? Where
Speaker 1: is this big moment? I'm afraid the answer is kind
Speaker 1: of simple. It isn't coming. Generative AI is not going
Speaker 1: to change the world. And while AI itself kind of
Speaker 1: already has and it definitely will do so more in
Speaker 1: the future, it isn't going to with generative AI, and
Speaker 1: it isn't going to do so in the hands of
Speaker 1: Sam Altman in Open AI. I don't even think Anthropic
Speaker 1: is going to do it either. When the bubble bursts
Speaker 1: these firms, they're probably going to be absorbed into the
Speaker 1: massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into
Speaker 1: them already in exactly the same way that Microsoft just
Speaker 1: absorbed Inflection, And they'll do this to quietly hide the
Speaker 1: shameful failure. And they'll be able to, by the way,
Speaker 1: repurpose all of the cloud compute investments they've made. There
Speaker 1: are other places for that compute to go. They have,
Speaker 1: they make billions off of cloud. They'll work it out.
Speaker 1: But in the end, if all of this falls apart,
Speaker 1: if the rock com bubble bursts, if the hypergrowth period
Speaker 1: is over, I actually think it's better for the tech
Speaker 1: industry to have a better world, one with more interesting
Speaker 1: things and where society doesn't constantly feel at odds with
Speaker 1: the tech industry. Tech companies need to share this growth addiction.
Speaker 1: They need to get off the horse, and I believe
Speaker 1: that we forced to do so. Whether they like it
Speaker 1: or not. There's still going to be many, many, many
Speaker 1: hundred million or even billion dollar companies. There's just not
Speaker 1: going to be that many hundred billion or trillion dollar ones.
Speaker 1: I realize I come off as negative as at times
Speaker 1: I know I do. And as I've said multiple times
Speaker 1: and I'll say again, I'm a broken hearted romantic. I
Speaker 1: want a better tech industry. I love the companies I
Speaker 1: work with. I love the companies I've worked with. I
Speaker 1: love the tech I use. I think that tonal that
Speaker 1: it's a workout machine, one of the best pieces of tech. Ever,
Speaker 1: It's changed my life, as iPhones have, as computers have,
Speaker 1: as many things have. I want there to be these exciting, interesting,
Speaker 1: actually innovative and useful products that change my life and
Speaker 1: your life and other people's lives are the better. Any
Speaker 1: anger or frustration you hear in my voice is directed
Speaker 1: toward the people that have diverted the massive sources of
Speaker 1: innovation that come from having masses of money and talent
Speaker 1: away from building useful things towards finding new vessels for hypergrowth.
Speaker 1: And the same goes for the venture capitalists that seem
Speaker 1: incapable of backing actually new or interesting things. They just
Speaker 1: double down on new trends that everybody else is following,
Speaker 1: rather than putting money into young, hungry founders that are
Speaker 1: trying to build real things. A better tech industry is
Speaker 1: one that puts more money into earlier stage companies doing
Speaker 1: new things in better ways or completely new ways, rather
Speaker 1: than all following the same trends and doubling or tripling
Speaker 1: down on the same guys doing the same things. It's
Speaker 1: also goddamn boring and useless and wasteful. I love tech.
Speaker 1: I find tech amazingly useful. I'm using it right now.
Speaker 1: I would be a liar if I said I didn't
Speaker 1: love the tech industry and I didn't love the tech
Speaker 1: that I use. And I feel like many of you
Speaker 1: might feel the same way. Maybe you don't, not putting
Speaker 1: words in your mouth, but the problem is that it's
Speaker 1: getting less useful, it's getting less magical. It isn't magical anymore. Generally,
Speaker 1: if AI isn't magical, we're being told it is, and
Speaker 1: it isn't. I wish that I was doing all these
Speaker 1: crazy things. I wish it didn't have to steal from everyone,
Speaker 1: and I wish that, quite frankly, any of the people
Speaker 1: building these big AI companies seem to want to build
Speaker 1: cool or interesting things, and I just feel that if
Speaker 1: they actually built useful things, things could change things would
Speaker 1: be better, and tech can be both an incredibly profitable
Speaker 1: industry and a vessel for building better, more interesting things
Speaker 1: and a better, more interesting future. What's holding it back
Speaker 1: are people with management consultancy brain and all they can
Speaker 1: do is find and dominate new markets at all costs,
Speaker 1: and they fly in the face of innovation and invention
Speaker 1: and creativity when they do so. People like Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: Sam Moltman, Sundar Pishai and Satchina Dalla and Mark Andrews
Speaker 1: and too are not interested in any future other than
Speaker 1: the one that they own, and have turned their companies
Speaker 1: and the companies they invest in into management consultancy firms
Speaker 1: that happen to sell technology. The solution is a more
Speaker 1: decentralized and I do not mean crypto tech industry. A
Speaker 1: decentralized tech industry, one where VC dollars flow into smaller,
Speaker 1: earlier stage companies, where the source of what's next isn't
Speaker 1: three or four large companies, but a thousand little ones
Speaker 1: that have actually taken a risk to build something. New
Speaker 1: tech companies will be funded that don't succeed. It's happening already,
Speaker 1: It's been happening forever, but those failures should at least
Speaker 1: be trying to build something new and interesting. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be world changing. It can change the lives
Speaker 1: of people that run servers. It can be something that
Speaker 1: changes the lives of people trying to get fit. There
Speaker 1: are many industries that can be fixed or improved or grown.
Speaker 1: But they might not be worth one hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 1: That still makes them valuable. It still makes them worthwhile,
Speaker 1: just not to the arseholes in charge. Silicon Valley can
Speaker 1: be better by giving the keys back to the people
Speaker 1: who actually build things and actually solving problems that real
Speaker 1: human beings face. And I also believe that the tech industry,
Speaker 1: and especially Silicon Valley needs to start talking to regular
Speaker 1: goddamn people again. Bubble and I know I've mentioned multiples.
Speaker 1: The rock com bubble itself is a problem, but also
Speaker 1: the bubble of Silicon Valley, of the venture capitalists and
Speaker 1: a lot of the big tech companies is one that
Speaker 1: is never penetrated by regular people with regular problems. That
Speaker 1: needs to change. Talk to some regular bloody people fix
Speaker 1: their problems. Focus on fixing the problems of the billions
Speaker 1: of people before you assume that those billions of people
Speaker 1: will become your goddamn users. The tech industry needs to
Speaker 1: realign around sustainability, profitability, and building useful things for real people.
Speaker 1: And until that happens, billions of dollars will be plowed
Speaker 1: into building hardware and software to inflate the rock com bubble,
Speaker 1: to keep the rock economy going, and the hopes that
Speaker 1: the growth of all cost party will never end. And
Speaker 1: I really do not think that anyone in tech is
Speaker 1: ready for it to end. I think when this bubble pops,
Speaker 1: it's going to take out maybe slowly, maybe it's a
Speaker 1: slow bleed one of the big tech firms. What's happening
Speaker 1: with Google today with AIS search is a travesty. It
Speaker 1: is a goddamn disgrace. Sondhar Pashai and Liz Read should
Speaker 1: be ashamed of themselves. They should tender their resignations. To
Speaker 1: turn Google Search into an AI powered slot machine that
Speaker 1: may or may not give you useful information. That is disgusting.
Speaker 1: It's a societal loss. What's been done to Facebook is
Speaker 1: a disgrace. As I said in the two Facebook episodes,
Speaker 1: Facebook is barely functional. It's spreading pornography and misinformation. It's
Speaker 1: hurting people, it's helping people get scammed. It's not connecting anyone.
Speaker 1: These are tangibly worse products. Amazon's so full of nonsense
Speaker 1: the reviews. Almost every review seems fake. And now it's
Speaker 1: got generative AI summaries that don't make any sense. Every
Speaker 1: product's getting worse. And what I want to say, And
Speaker 1: it's kind of big headed to assume that Sandhar Pashai
Speaker 1: or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg would ever hear this.
Speaker 1: But if they do, your party will end one day.
Speaker 1: And when it does, you won't have any talent or
Speaker 1: innovation to lay back on you. I've demonized your customers
Speaker 1: and treated them with contempt. Also that you can please
Speaker 1: faceless people in Wall Street. When the rot com bubble bursts,
Speaker 1: you will be humiliated. You will still be so rich,
Speaker 1: but your legacy will be one of failure. All that
Speaker 1: money that you extracted, all that value you took, will
Speaker 1: be just for you. You will have ruined products that
Speaker 1: were formative for people's lives. You will be known for that,
Speaker 1: not for innovation, not for being a genius, not for
Speaker 1: being remarkable, but for being remarkable in the amount of
Speaker 1: damage you did to the tech industry. Sheryl Samberg, Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: Sam Altman, You're all the same management consultancy brain, unable
Speaker 1: to create real value for real people, and it's perhaps
Speaker 1: because you don't talk to them. I realize I've kind
Speaker 1: of diverted from the podcast. I'm yelling at people who
Speaker 1: may never hear. But this frustration in my voice has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with engineered rage. This is nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the podcast or even getting more downloads or
Speaker 1: anything like that. This is because tech change my life.
Speaker 1: It changed so many people's lives. It's the reason that
Speaker 1: I'm able to keep talking to my family in England,
Speaker 1: that I not having many friends in Las Vegas, can
Speaker 1: have rich, meaningful friendships throughout the world. The reason that
Speaker 1: I'm able to is because people were able to find
Speaker 1: a balance between profit and actual innovation and actually creating things.
Speaker 1: But the people in charge in tech have lost their way.
Speaker 1: They have lost their way from creating meaningful things, from
Speaker 1: making meaningful decisions that help people. Now, all they want
Speaker 1: to do is make changes that make their companies look
Speaker 1: like they can grow forever. And when that bubble pomps,
Speaker 1: I hope they're humiliated, and I hope they're kicked out,
Speaker 1: but they probably won't be Mark Zuckerberg can't even be fired.
Speaker 1: This is the injustice of tech right now. This is
Speaker 1: the disgraceful state of the rock com boom. My anger
Speaker 1: inside me is that things can be better, that tech
Speaker 1: can do great things. But the people with the money,
Speaker 1: the people directing the money and the compute, the people
Speaker 1: making the hires, the people that have hired the greatest
Speaker 1: minds in tech who should get paid well by directing
Speaker 1: them toward making stuff for Wall Street. And until that changes,
Speaker 1: I'm still going to feel like this. I'm not here
Speaker 1: to tell you how to feel. I'm just telling you
Speaker 1: how I feel, and I promise you every episode of
Speaker 1: this show is about trying to give you transparency into
Speaker 1: the system and the things it creates, to try and
Speaker 1: answer why so much of the stuff we see today
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be for us, and doesn't even seem
Speaker 1: to be for a use case. It's frustrating, nauseating. I
Speaker 1: don't like it being like this. I wish I had
Speaker 1: more good news. I wish there was something cool I
Speaker 1: could talk about from one of these companies. Sit Gmail
Speaker 1: changed my life. Gmail was fantastic. These companies are fully
Speaker 1: capable of making great things and even a deadbeat piece
Speaker 1: of shit. Steve Jobs is still beloved by history because
Speaker 1: he actually ushered in good things, even though it was
Speaker 1: mostly him getting other people to do it. But no
Speaker 1: tech doesn't seem to care at least big tech. I
Speaker 1: want to see change. I want to see things being better.
Speaker 1: I just I want tech to be fun and exciting
Speaker 1: and interesting and innovative. Again, I think you do too.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline
Speaker 1: theme song is Metasowski. You can check out more of
Speaker 1: his music and audio projects Selski dot com, M A
Speaker 1: T T O s O W s Ki dot com.
Speaker 1: You can email me at easy at Better offline dot
Speaker 1: com or visit Better offline dot com to find more
Speaker 1: podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
Speaker 1: recommend you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at
Speaker 1: to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Speaker 1: Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.