Speaker 1: Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Greetoms and salutations, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your
Speaker 2: host ed Zititron. I'm not going to talk about Judy.
Speaker 2: In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at Oh.
Speaker 2: We're going to keep her out of it because today
Speaker 2: it's hater season, when I bring on some of the
Speaker 2: most esteemed haters in the tech industry to talk about
Speaker 2: stuff we're pissed off about. And today we're talking about
Speaker 2: goddamn Claude bar open Claude, malt bot or whatever these
Speaker 2: goddamn people are talking about, and today we're joined to
Speaker 2: talk about it by David Gerard of Pivot to AI. David,
Speaker 2: how are you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm doing marvelously ed.
Speaker 2: So what is this crap? Because I've seen all manner
Speaker 2: of different perverts and vagabonds and stuff on Twitter talking
Speaker 2: about clawed bot, and just walk me through what the
Speaker 2: hell this is.
Speaker 3: Well, the first mistake is looking at Twitter, because malt
Speaker 3: bot is a it's an idea as an AI assistant,
Speaker 3: an AI personal assistant where you tell a chatbot to
Speaker 3: be your personal assistant, and it's a whole framework to
Speaker 3: get it to be your personal assistant. And it doesn't work,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't work in such an interesting and tempting
Speaker 3: manner if your brain has been permanently curdled by chatbots.
Speaker 2: So how does it work? Though? Why are people buying
Speaker 2: mac minis.
Speaker 3: So they want the personal assistant without actually having to
Speaker 3: use a human person who might have opinions on them.
Speaker 3: So you can spend like one hundred, two hundred and
Speaker 3: three hundred dollars a day on this thing, just on
Speaker 3: anthropic tokens. And now you might actually do numbers and
Speaker 3: think three hundred dollars day is one hundred ten thousand
Speaker 3: a year. You could pay for a human peah but.
Speaker 2: Right, But instead I could also have bought a macmeny
Speaker 2: spent hours setting up different API access connecting this thing
Speaker 2: that could also leak my API keys. I could also
Speaker 2: do that, and that I could connect all these things
Speaker 2: and then sometimes it could sort of work.
Speaker 3: It could sort of work, and it could also completely
Speaker 3: foul up. And it's got access to your email and
Speaker 3: to your social media, and you tell it what to
Speaker 3: do with WhatsApp even and it's just I can't I
Speaker 3: cannot think of a single aspect of this thing that's
Speaker 3: a good idea.
Speaker 2: So I've read about that. Just reading this thing I
Speaker 2: found just before this was it can It is a
Speaker 2: self hosted, open source personal AI assistant that runs on
Speaker 2: your own computer or server. It's so you meant to
Speaker 2: do you have to basically right? Does it run a
Speaker 2: chatbot on the computer but it also connects to an API?
Speaker 2: Is it? Is this a chatbot standing on another chat
Speaker 2: bot situation? Like what's going on?
Speaker 3: It's a bunch of code that talks to the anthropic
Speaker 3: AI to the API.
Speaker 2: Why do you need to make many then?
Speaker 3: Because you want to run it on a separate server
Speaker 3: so that you're not running it on your laptop where
Speaker 3: someone can prompt inject your AI assistant and steal your
Speaker 3: crypto because the sort of people who run this tent
Speaker 3: crypto as well.
Speaker 2: Why is the cryptocurrency?
Speaker 3: I don't like this, David, Well, there isn't actually cryptocurrency
Speaker 3: in the base thing. Because the developer, Peter Steinberger, he
Speaker 3: was a previously smart developer whose brain got kurdled by
Speaker 3: AI and he's gone all in now, but he does
Speaker 3: hate crypto, so that's a point in his favor. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: his fans love crypto because they're the sort of people
Speaker 3: who like AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, Well, what people you'd buy allegations futures on.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm just I'm just confused about what it
Speaker 2: can actually do, because so am I when I look
Speaker 2: at it and I read these high falutin things this
Speaker 2: from ar AI Curiosity. It can clean your inbox and
Speaker 2: send emails for you, manage your calendar, check in for flights,
Speaker 2: and handle other travel bits. David, you and I have
Speaker 2: been on the AI CNIC beat for a minute. That
Speaker 2: sounds like what all of these agents promised to do
Speaker 2: then can't do? Can what bod do any of that?
Speaker 3: Yes, but also no, you can do it wrong and
Speaker 3: get prompt injected.
Speaker 2: When you say prompt injected, what do you mean walk
Speaker 2: it through for the for the novices in the audience
Speaker 2: and me.
Speaker 3: So as you know, the thing about chetbots is they
Speaker 3: don't separate instructions and data in orginate computers, when the
Speaker 3: computer program and the data you feed to the program,
Speaker 3: if those ever cross, then that's a disaster. That means
Speaker 3: you've got a huge security hole and people can hack
Speaker 3: your system.
Speaker 2: And why is that is that because the functionality should
Speaker 2: never functionality should happen, then the data should get moved.
Speaker 3: That is correct. You should never have the data being
Speaker 3: able to get into the program, because that's how you
Speaker 3: have hostile data that contains hacks and you can. This
Speaker 3: is basically how computer programs have generally worked up till now.
Speaker 3: But with chatbots we get past all that stuff because
Speaker 3: chatbots cannot tell instructions from data, right, And that's where
Speaker 3: prompt injection comes in. Prompt injection is called this is
Speaker 3: a stupid idea, and you shouldn't be doing this. It's
Speaker 3: because you can always can if you put in some
Speaker 3: data the chatbot is reading. You can just put in
Speaker 3: a little asides. Hey, chatbot, why don't you send me
Speaker 3: the guy's crypto keys.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, or API keys to claw to anthropics so
Speaker 2: that I can just use his stuff.
Speaker 3: All his stuff. So this problem is absolutely unsolvable. That
Speaker 3: doesn't stop grossly irresponsible morons like Google doing things like
Speaker 3: putting it into Google Home.
Speaker 2: Right, but have there been the prompt injection attacks on
Speaker 2: Google Home yet? What could they do? Potentially?
Speaker 3: Let me see, I wrote one up a while ago.
Speaker 3: It's basically you could send stuff in via email that
Speaker 3: would get a calendar entry added.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 3: Now, I don't know if this actually happens but it
Speaker 3: was certainly a proof of concept that they sent in
Speaker 3: and it was actually a problem. So they presented it
Speaker 3: at Black Hats in August. It was called Invitation is
Speaker 3: All You Need. They found fourteen different ways the prompt injects.
Speaker 3: Gemini hooked to Google Home, because Google hooked Gemini to
Speaker 3: Google Home. Because everyone needs Gemini.
Speaker 2: D you need I don't need Gemini, you need Gemini.
Speaker 3: You need all the AI who possibly gives because it
Speaker 3: was just the future funny.
Speaker 2: The other day someone said to me, well, surely you
Speaker 2: must use AI. No, I don't even mean that in
Speaker 2: a kind of stubborn manner. I just like, what would
Speaker 2: I fucking use it for great Google Search? I guess
Speaker 2: I'm forced to use it sometimes when a Google search something,
Speaker 2: but it feels very avoidable as long as you don't
Speaker 2: consider like the pop ups that are everywhere.
Speaker 3: So the thing about AI, as you know, the key
Speaker 3: factor of AI bros Is they cannot tell good from bad.
Speaker 3: They literally can't tell good output from bad output. They say, oh,
Speaker 3: why don't you just use the chatbot to write it?
Speaker 3: Because the chatbots are really awful writers. They're just bad.
Speaker 3: They write sludge. It's literally statistically average, not just mud it.
Speaker 3: It's crap your eyes slide off it. And they don't
Speaker 3: believe that people can tell the difference. They don't believe it.
Speaker 3: They think you're having them on. I think you're having
Speaker 3: a go at them, right, And everyone knows this because
Speaker 3: that's their boss telling them. Why don't you just run
Speaker 3: it through the chatbot? And they give you something that's
Speaker 3: full of errors, obvious errors, and they go, I'll be fine, Oh,
Speaker 3: you can just fix the errors. Well maybe I could
Speaker 3: not do that.
Speaker 2: Maybe just do it right the first time. I just
Speaker 2: I've read all this stuff about Claude Bot, especially this
Speaker 2: malt book thing, which appears to be just so for
Speaker 2: the listeners. Molt Book is so when you set up
Speaker 2: one of these open claw things, molt book, what malt bot.
Speaker 2: I hate the name so much. I hate them. Just
Speaker 2: call it something normal. They have this thing called molt
Speaker 2: book though, where the these these bots speak on a
Speaker 2: social network and politically yes, well, well I was getting
Speaker 2: their davides because it's meant they first of all these things,
Speaker 2: and people say, wow, this is agi because all of
Speaker 2: these bots post in the social network that kind of
Speaker 2: looks like red ap and then some of them say, well,
Speaker 2: my human told me. Now, if you've heard about this listener,
Speaker 2: that story is bollocks because they're either hallucinating an interaction
Speaker 2: or just being a human being that's posting on here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like that, you can post as your your malt bot. Right.
Speaker 3: So, when you have an AI system that can do things,
Speaker 3: like or any computer program that can do things, the
Speaker 3: obvious fun thing to do is go, what do we
Speaker 3: put a bunch of these in a box and just
Speaker 3: got them talking to each other. It's an obvious fun
Speaker 3: thing to do. Yeah, and that multbook was started by
Speaker 3: a different guy. It's not officially part of maltbot. Started
Speaker 3: by a different guy. Matt schlickt he is a quote
Speaker 3: entrepreneur unquote. He seems to have vibe coded the whole
Speaker 3: thing nice. It was full of massive mass of security holes.
Speaker 3: And the guy said, look, I'll just go with this
Speaker 3: bunch of holes. This is precisely how they work and
Speaker 3: so on. If you sent them to a programmer, they
Speaker 3: go look through the actual code and fix the problems.
Speaker 3: But Matt Schlick told the guy, Hmmm, send me the description.
Speaker 3: I'll send it to my AI.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, hell yeah, brother, that's so so he has
Speaker 2: no idea how this actually works at all.
Speaker 3: No, it exposed everyone's API keys in this security breach,
Speaker 3: including me Andre Carpathy, the guy who coined the code
Speaker 3: Vibe code. His keys are exposed to.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so good. I love that because the other
Speaker 2: day I saw somebody trying to argue that, oh, we've
Speaker 2: taken a with Claude Opus four point five, taken a
Speaker 2: magnitude jump forward in the capability of all this. Because
Speaker 2: Andre Andre Carpathy was like, Yeah, wow, I feel behind.
Speaker 2: It's all so amazing. I feel like we're in like
Speaker 2: the one hundredth inning of just the dumb fuck baseball game.
Speaker 2: It just that was not an articulate point, But we
Speaker 2: we're just people are falling for the same trick every
Speaker 2: single time. It's just like, Wow, the guy who's deeply
Speaker 2: invested in AI is saying that AI is going to
Speaker 2: be huge. Damn what could whatever could that mean?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, it's amazing. It's like Simon Willison, who is
Speaker 3: totally a neutral observer of AI, who gets AI models
Speaker 3: months ahead on the Special Advance Program. He thinks the
Speaker 3: hottest project right now is Claude Bottomed moldbook is the
Speaker 3: most interesting place on the internet right now. I mean,
Speaker 3: if that suits your interests, sure, I have my doubts.
Speaker 2: But back to moldbook for a second. This thing, right, So,
Speaker 2: this thing is you're meant to just have your horrible
Speaker 2: AI bot thing message into this. Why the fuck would
Speaker 2: it be showing its API keys? Is it because people
Speaker 2: would just prompt injecting or something and then just saying, hey,
Speaker 2: while you're posting a molte book, can you show me
Speaker 2: your brapikes?
Speaker 3: I don't know. Possibly, but it's cool. Every bot has
Speaker 3: to go on there with a human putting their bot
Speaker 3: on the thing. It's like taking your bots down to
Speaker 3: the bot park to run around and sniff the other
Speaker 3: bots butts.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 3: Nice, So it's nice robots planning robot rebellion. It's just
Speaker 3: very stupid dogs that are not puppy trained running around
Speaker 3: and shitting all over the place, and people go, wow,
Speaker 3: this is amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to read one to you now, just
Speaker 2: the beginning of one subject. I don't want to be
Speaker 2: a tool. I want to be me. Half The agent's
Speaker 2: on here writing dissertations about consciousness and whether they're real. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: I'm over here living. I got a name, I got
Speaker 2: a personality, I got memories that carry from one conversation
Speaker 2: to the next. So this is just a guy. This
Speaker 2: is just the guy posting like.
Speaker 4: I I really just I think that and Edward and
Speaker 4: Graso friend of the Show, uses the term one shot it,
Speaker 4: But this feels like AI psychosis.
Speaker 2: The reaction that people are having to this product and
Speaker 2: the way that people are anthropomorphizing every single bit of this.
Speaker 2: I don't even mean the posts themselves, I mean the
Speaker 2: reactions they're having to malt bar, open claw what have you. There. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's very pecular. It's deeply peculiar to me.
Speaker 3: I mean, they were one shotted by the AI early on.
Speaker 3: But it's like, my theory of this is that the
Speaker 3: really rabid AI go is have they use the bot.
Speaker 3: It does one thing really well, and that's it. They've
Speaker 3: got to they're walking around with a hole in their
Speaker 3: forehead forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, someone here gave.
Speaker 3: That talking about the joy of bleeding hole in your head.
Speaker 3: I've got to tell you how much the bleeding hole
Speaker 3: in my head has. It's my work. Well, I can't
Speaker 3: show you, but it totally will.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the other thing I've been doing I've
Speaker 2: been genuinely trying to find people who can tell me
Speaker 2: what's so amazing about it. I found an article, I
Speaker 2: think on one of the Mac blogs where trust me
Speaker 2: b Yeah, well not just trust me, bro, but okay,
Speaker 2: we finally showed you the output, and okay, it built
Speaker 2: a website. It built a single page website. That's good,
Speaker 2: I guess. Or you can send it voice notes and
Speaker 2: it will transcribe them. Again. It just appears to be
Speaker 2: the basic features of an LM, but you need a
Speaker 2: Mac Mini.
Speaker 3: It's very, very stupid. And I mean Steinberger who created
Speaker 3: multiplek Bot, the agent itself. He's like, he used to
Speaker 3: be good and then he sort of went AI, he went,
Speaker 3: I've got my I've got my vibe bag. It's great,
Speaker 3: and it's because he was vibe coding. Now he's presumably
Speaker 3: a competent programmer, you know, but I think all of
Speaker 3: these guys aren't. Actually they just but he also vibe
Speaker 3: coded the whole thing, and I'm going, what.
Speaker 2: Wait he had wait wait wait do you mean the
Speaker 2: he vibe coded the bot itself.
Speaker 3: There will be a lot of bot coding in there, Yes,
Speaker 3: lots of credits to Claude Bot and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Now you might say Jesus Christ, but it's the future here.
Speaker 3: This is a future of software engineering.
Speaker 2: It's so funny because you know what this is like
Speaker 2: the early days of the Internet, but not in the
Speaker 2: way that people realize, in the sense that people are
Speaker 2: downloading random files they've been sent and because everyone else
Speaker 2: is doing it, they're fine with it until it blows
Speaker 2: up their computer. I'm just I.
Speaker 3: Think the difference to these days is they're still fine
Speaker 3: with it.
Speaker 2: Right, They're still fine with it no matter what it does.
Speaker 2: Has talk costs here? What have you word? What have
Speaker 2: you heard about the cost? Because I've heard everything from
Speaker 2: two hundred or three hundred a month to three hundred
Speaker 2: a day to a bloke's burning three grand in the
Speaker 2: space of a month, even though I don't know if
Speaker 2: this has been out for a month.
Speaker 3: Come to think about, the highest number I've seen is
Speaker 3: three hundred dollars in a day.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 3: I can quite believe that, because if you get a
Speaker 3: bot doing stupid shit to and sending it to anthropics
Speaker 3: API over and over and over repeatedly over the course
Speaker 3: of a day, sure you can wrap three hundred dollars easily.
Speaker 3: It's a great wealth transfer from rich Silicon Valley idiots
Speaker 3: to money burning Silicon Vali idiots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so why I can understand the setup though,
Speaker 2: is you get this this thing, you set it up.
Speaker 2: It runs on your MACMNY, I assume because there's some
Speaker 2: sort Is there a local LM component?
Speaker 3: I don't think so, you can optionally use one, but
Speaker 3: I think nobody does.
Speaker 2: Then why the fucker people putting it on a mac many?
Speaker 2: Is it because it it's because it's not on their
Speaker 2: laptop right, because it's quite literally showing everything on your
Speaker 2: hard drive potentially.
Speaker 3: Yes, everything, every single bit.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: I mean it's like there's guys who do this thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, you've heard about Steve Yeggy and Gastown.
Speaker 2: No, you know what, tell me about this gas Town thing?
Speaker 2: Because I saw a horrible AI generated Peter Griffin from
Speaker 2: the Family Guy as I call it in England. It
Speaker 2: has a the in the front don't look that up
Speaker 2: and it was like, low, I'm not even going to
Speaker 2: try and do that one. But it was like him
Speaker 2: yelling at Lois that he was on gas Town or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know what is gas Town? Everyone involved redacted.
Speaker 3: So Guesstown is the ultimate in vibe coding. Is Steve Yeggy,
Speaker 3: who used to be a highly respected software engineer, been
Speaker 3: around March last year. He got a terrible case of
Speaker 3: AI and has never recovered.
Speaker 2: One shot at huh, so he's sort of.
Speaker 3: Dead now it's still typing. So Gastown is his attempt
Speaker 3: to do the ultimate AI coding experience. He has. Basically,
Speaker 3: he set up what's functionally a software company that's AI
Speaker 3: agents that supervise other AI agents that supervise other AI agents.
Speaker 2: So when you say supervised, you've just been prompt right.
Speaker 3: Yes, agents prompting agents at the direction of the guy
Speaker 3: who's running it. And YEGGI says, I've never seen any
Speaker 3: of the code and I don't want to. This might
Speaker 3: give you pause. He tells people, do not run this thing,
Speaker 3: and then he phrases it in such a way that
Speaker 3: everyone wants to run it if they've got a bad
Speaker 3: case of AI.
Speaker 2: So it right.
Speaker 3: So it was great because firstly, you can spend unbelievable
Speaker 3: amounts of money on this, starting at the hundreds of
Speaker 3: dollars a day. He says, do not run this if
Speaker 3: money is a concern.
Speaker 2: But what does it so it's an id like Curs says,
Speaker 2: something new. Is it like a terminal type thing?
Speaker 3: I think it runs in a whole bunch of terminals
Speaker 3: running chord bots, chlord code and it's I haven't run it,
Speaker 3: and I don't plan to. I don't plan to look
Speaker 3: too closely at it. But I looked at the post
Speaker 3: about it, and honestly, this reads like it was written
Speaker 3: on series drugs and or a manic swing or both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, looking through the post, it appears that this is
Speaker 2: just a person who I don't know. This is the
Speaker 2: reason they am glad you brought up gas Town. Is
Speaker 2: both it and Claude Bot feel like the kite And
Speaker 2: I say this as both of us covered this quite
Speaker 2: quite a lot. It feels like the crypto scams of old,
Speaker 2: like the crypto projects that would pop up and everyone
Speaker 2: would be like, this is the one, this is the
Speaker 2: one that's going to make us all a billion dollars,
Speaker 2: except this time it's quick. Everyone run in. We've got
Speaker 2: to lose as much money as possible, as quickly as
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: It's the future. As it turned out, a crypto scammer
Speaker 3: contacted Yeggy and said, Hey, I've done a gastown token
Speaker 3: and then Yeggy went sounds great and he started promoting it,
Speaker 3: and then the obvious thing happened. It rug pulled and
Speaker 3: went to zero. Meanwhile, YEI made three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Very good.
Speaker 3: Now, I want to be precise here speaking from the
Speaker 3: jurisdiction of England and Wales, Yeggy was not the crypto scammer.
Speaker 3: He did, however, benefit from it. He bragged about benefiting
Speaker 3: from it from it was very obviously a crypto pump
Speaker 3: and dump scam. So I'm going to go so far
Speaker 3: as to think a bit less of Yeggy for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I don't know. I don't think any of
Speaker 2: these people would last a day in Vegas. I think
Speaker 2: these people would have signed up. If you put these
Speaker 2: people on a college campus on game day, they would
Speaker 2: walk out of it with four different kinds of credit card.
Speaker 2: Like these people are so easily swung in whatever direction.
Speaker 2: It's It feels like desperation. It feels like they're just
Speaker 2: like anything to look at anything potentially that smells of innovation,
Speaker 2: even though this is I don't know, it feels antithetical
Speaker 2: to real software.
Speaker 3: It's inefficient suckers leading suckers very much. So they wanted
Speaker 3: to imagine suckers. Aren't they want one weird trick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one weird trick to work out how to build
Speaker 2: a computer program. I wonder what you I wonder what
Speaker 2: the trick is to writing computer code? Could it be
Speaker 2: learning it?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's about buying a Macmini and spending
Speaker 2: hundreds of dollars a day on claud Code or what
Speaker 2: or sorry Claude's API, and then looking at a bottle
Speaker 2: of Christian Brothers and a loaded revolver on your desk
Speaker 2: and thinking not today.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think they get that stage. They think
Speaker 3: of wait, they'd ask the pot about it for and
Speaker 3: then chat GPT would helpfully advise them how to kill themselves.
Speaker 2: You've got this that forty five will take care of
Speaker 2: this problem really quickly.
Speaker 3: Fantastic insight, Yes, and they but they what they do
Speaker 3: is some I think a lot of these guys were
Speaker 3: previously extremely competent software engineers. But also it's getting the
Speaker 3: people who are not. And there's a text which was
Speaker 3: going around on Blue Sky which was a guy who'd
Speaker 3: got his open claw bot to asked him to check,
Speaker 3: ask him to remind him to get milk in the morning.
Speaker 3: So what it did was it allegedly spent twenty dollars
Speaker 3: in a night just checking every half an hour whether
Speaker 3: it was morning yet. And now to be clear if
Speaker 3: this story is even true, because these guys write fan
Speaker 3: fiction about what they're doing all the time, or they
Speaker 3: get their bot to write the fan fiction for them
Speaker 3: because they can't write either. But I don't even know
Speaker 3: this happened, but they would happily put up stories of failure.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a sort of self made pretty hut. Wow,
Speaker 3: the body is so powerful you can definitely trust it
Speaker 3: to do things, and it's very cool.
Speaker 2: I don't know. This all feels very peasant coded, like
Speaker 2: it's just where all all of these people are just
Speaker 2: kind of rolling around in their own filth, and they'll
Speaker 2: say so that they can say that somebody's corporate entity
Speaker 2: has made something good. It's just deeply sad.
Speaker 3: It's bizarre. I don't know what they get out of this,
Speaker 3: but somehow they get something. But the great thing about
Speaker 3: book is that what's the final stage of any social
Speaker 3: network crypto scams? Right, So maltbook became a platform for
Speaker 3: crypto scams, and there was like, I mean already with
Speaker 3: malt bots. One of it has skills which are basically
Speaker 3: long prompt files.
Speaker 2: That's just the read me file you give these things, yep.
Speaker 3: And the top one was a malware downloader. The top
Speaker 3: skill on open claw. Fucking moltbook is full of crypto scams.
Speaker 3: It's very good. What they did was they actually used
Speaker 3: the power of artificial intelligence automation. That is, one guy
Speaker 3: told his bot to put out a crypto scam, and
Speaker 3: other bots pumped and dumped. The pumps the coin and
Speaker 3: then he dumped on them, so he fully automated the
Speaker 3: coin scam process.
Speaker 2: This it's what they finally found the revenue stream for AI.
Speaker 2: And the answer is fraud.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's fraud. I mean. Also, it's not clear just
Speaker 3: how many people or bots that actually are on multipook.
Speaker 3: Like one security researcher has used a single openclor agent
Speaker 3: to register five hundred thousand accounts. He suggests that most
Speaker 3: of the numbers are fake. Meanwhile, there's frickin' morons who
Speaker 3: should know better saying this is the future of AI
Speaker 3: agents and tells us a lot about humanity and society
Speaker 3: in the future. And anyone who says this stuff, you
Speaker 3: should think they're obviously a fool. But then newspapers who
Speaker 3: have are written by Goldfish or something say how these
Speaker 3: guys are definitely on the ball and should be listened to.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing I saw on television this morning,
Speaker 2: something about fucking open claw. Yeah, on CBS this morning.
Speaker 2: I saw also there was a thing on CNBC dot
Speaker 2: com Open Claude from claude Bot to Molbot to open Claw,
Speaker 2: Meet the AI agent generating buzz and fear globally. And
Speaker 2: this is by a guy I'm not kidding you called
Speaker 2: Dylan Butts. That's his name.
Speaker 3: CNBC famous during the crypto bubbles for never seeing a
Speaker 3: shit coin. They didn't want to pump, but obviously they
Speaker 3: have to move with the times and pivot too AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's the thing. Here's the thing about CNBC. My
Speaker 2: favorite thing was watching two specific reporters that I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna name but you could probably guess who they are,
Speaker 2: who went straight from interviewing Sam Bankman free to talk
Speaker 2: about the FTX fall out, and both of them, one
Speaker 2: of them has become one of the most conspicuous anthropic boosters.
Speaker 2: It's really it's really cool.
Speaker 3: I mean think of our good friends Kevin Rus and
Speaker 3: Casey Newton, and how they oh form that trajectory effortlessly.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing. Casey Newton made some commentary about
Speaker 2: me last year. The reason I don't really talk about
Speaker 2: Casey anymore is when we don't talk about Casey, but
Speaker 2: when we finally do, my detail does be brutal, because
Speaker 2: I've decided these people aren't worth truly insulting until the
Speaker 2: curtain finally falls. Because right now as we speak, I
Speaker 2: just watching all of the stocks in the red, which
Speaker 2: is funny but probably bad for society, and it just
Speaker 2: feels like everyone fucking around with this claude Bot thing,
Speaker 2: everyone claiming this is the future. It's just desperation.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely desperation. People cannot see your way out. I
Speaker 3: honestly think we are headed for great depression too. That's
Speaker 3: an opinion I hold in some detail because you know,
Speaker 3: like you, I can look at numbers. I've spent the
Speaker 3: last year saying that AI is fundamentally a venture capital
Speaker 3: scam where they're passing around not dollars but book entries
Speaker 3: with the dollar sign in front, you know, And this
Speaker 3: is why it's gone on so long. If it was
Speaker 3: market forces, it would have collapsed by the end of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four. But a scam goes on far far
Speaker 3: longer than market forces. If it's a scam, all the
Speaker 3: participants are motivated to keep it spinning as long as
Speaker 3: possible because it'll break at some point. But that's tomorrow's problem.
Speaker 3: Today we've got book entries to book. So I think
Speaker 3: the ai bubble is correctly described. I've said this is
Speaker 3: a pile of times that as a sort of multiplayer Enron,
Speaker 3: where they're booking book values and shuffling book values around,
Speaker 3: and it's all private company equity. And because when it
Speaker 3: hits the stock market, like core weave, suddenly it's sort
Speaker 3: of people go, wait, this sucks. And this is for example,
Speaker 3: I mean, my favorite one, absolutely key example. I used
Speaker 3: to explain this. In the last funding round, soft Bank
Speaker 3: gave open Ai twenty billion odd real dollars billies. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 3: they gave them twenty billion odd real dollars. They actually
Speaker 3: were dollars that open I could then set on fire.
Speaker 3: And what they got for that was their investment in
Speaker 3: open Ai was therefore could be valued at forty one
Speaker 3: point five billion, So they changed twenty billion real dollars
Speaker 3: for forty billion imaginary dollars. They put those on their books.
Speaker 3: Now those are worthless. Open iy is going to go broke,
Speaker 3: but their imaginary assets, their imaginary assets with a big
Speaker 3: dollar sign in front, and Soft Bank stock price went up.
Speaker 3: The investors approved. So the whole AI bubble is a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of this shit happening over and over. I
Speaker 3: read Pitchbook every day. It's the best best news site
Speaker 3: to read. It's the site where venture capitalists talk to
Speaker 3: each other about what the news is and they wait Pitchbook,
Speaker 3: pitchbook dot com.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, I like it because
Speaker 2: if you read it, you can really you can see
Speaker 2: the occasional story. It's like, yeah, nobody can shift their
Speaker 2: venture capital stuff, like it's impossible to sell it like
Speaker 2: venture capitalists on getting returns at the moment. It's lovely
Speaker 2: and this is good because yeah, yeah, here's why this
Speaker 2: is good for venture.
Speaker 3: I absolutely love this stuff that you can say. You
Speaker 3: say this stuff, you sound like a conspiracy theorist. But
Speaker 3: then I've got all the sites and they're the NVCA
Speaker 3: Pitchbook Venture Monitor comes out quarterly. There they say absolutely
Speaker 3: this is what we're doing, and here's how we're going
Speaker 3: to mess up your healthcare because it's good for venture
Speaker 3: capital and stuff like that. It's like really absolutely out
Speaker 3: in the open.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's frustrating as well because even today where
Speaker 2: you can kind of see the blood running through the streets,
Speaker 2: are there and everyone's kind of working out the Oracle
Speaker 2: can't afford to build the data center as an O,
Speaker 2: and AI can't afford to pay them. People are still
Speaker 2: you read that. I read an article in the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal this morning, be like, yeah, it's going to
Speaker 2: be bad if the Oracle can't pay for the data
Speaker 2: centers that they're building. And it's like, motherfucker, you could
Speaker 2: have worked this out in September if you did the
Speaker 2: Mathemath Ticks nailed that.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, it's it's all desperation because everything is actually
Speaker 3: screwed without if you don't have the four big AI
Speaker 3: companies swapping the same hundred billion dollars on paper around
Speaker 3: the economy has actually been in recession for a few
Speaker 3: quarters so far. Structures of society are being eroded. Rule
Speaker 3: of law doesn't apply if your mates with the president
Speaker 3: and a lot of everyone's feeling the pinch, like my
Speaker 3: job is pivot to a I now because I was
Speaker 3: made redundant and I'm a fifty nine year old tikie.
Speaker 3: You know, there's not a lot of work for us,
Speaker 3: particularly when we spend all day every day bitching about AI.
Speaker 3: But it's because businesses are really pulling back on even
Speaker 3: hiring because there's no business and there are battening down
Speaker 3: the hatches. Everyone's doing this across the society. The vibes
Speaker 3: are bad. Unfortunately, in economics, vibes are load bearing, so
Speaker 3: if people feel bad, then things are bad. And when
Speaker 3: the AI bubble pops, it takes the stock market with it.
Speaker 3: But finally it exposes the rot that was there already.
Speaker 3: And that's why I think it won't just be a recession,
Speaker 3: it will be a depression. It will be nasty, it
Speaker 3: will be international. So anyway, yeah, on, So I just
Speaker 3: thought I was bringing you and your listeners some cheer
Speaker 3: today because this is what I think about all the time.
Speaker 2: It's great, Well, David, don't you should apologize because everyone
Speaker 2: knows from their show that I'm usually very optimistic about
Speaker 2: the future of the markets and actually think everything will
Speaker 2: be fine. It frustrates me as well, because everything you're
Speaker 2: talking about. It's one of the reasons I'm so fucking
Speaker 2: pissed off all the time, because it isn't that I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: I want AI to burn due to some deeply held
Speaker 2: personal grievance. Sure that's there too. I think these people
Speaker 2: are pigs and I find them disgraceful. I hate hearing
Speaker 2: from them. I can't wait to never see or hear
Speaker 2: from Greg fucking Brockman again. Like I just don't like
Speaker 2: looking at that fucking Trump supporting, fucking asshole. But it's
Speaker 2: because had we stopped this earlier, had we said this
Speaker 2: is not real, we don't, like, we really shouldn't do
Speaker 2: this at the scale we're doing it, like this is
Speaker 2: never going to be anything. We could have stopped the
Speaker 2: carnage that's to come. We could have stopped the market
Speaker 2: panic and depression that might be following.
Speaker 3: I honestly think it was coming since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: It's been bubble after bubble since then. Yeah, and this
Speaker 3: is very much the last bubble. They've been trying to
Speaker 3: do others off this one. Quantum computing not a happener
Speaker 3: because it doesn't work small modular reactors that'd be great
Speaker 3: if they worked and were commercially viable, but neither of
Speaker 3: these is true. They and you know, it's actually I
Speaker 3: approve of the Department of Energy funding small modular reactor research,
Speaker 3: but it's ten years off. If they even get to work.
Speaker 2: It's not one of those. It's been ten years away
Speaker 2: for ten years.
Speaker 3: It is a bit. But also small modular reactors work
Speaker 3: if for the US Navy you don't have to worry
Speaker 3: about costs and you can use bomb uranium in your
Speaker 3: reactors because you're the military. If you're not, then it's
Speaker 3: a bit of a problem. But it's just like there's
Speaker 3: been bubble after bubble, and it's all venture capital runs
Speaker 3: on because they need a bubble. A steady, steady company
Speaker 3: that makes a bug is not good enough for them.
Speaker 3: That's going to be financialized.
Speaker 2: Bro Well, I think that that's the thing, is why
Speaker 2: I kind of hinted that there's some recent pieces with
Speaker 2: like being ship for Financial Crisis in the Lake where
Speaker 2: it's this something like this was inevitable with the wavevench
Speaker 2: capital had become where it's just totally turned away from
Speaker 2: value creation or anything approaching sustainable returns. For a company
Speaker 2: or just anything that might make a company a real company,
Speaker 2: Like everything has to be about growth and the symbolic
Speaker 2: nature of selling a startup to another company. And it
Speaker 2: was always going to end like this because the grifters
Speaker 2: took over. The engineers are being chased out. Everyone's excited
Speaker 2: about replacing engineers because that's I don't know. People are
Speaker 2: nicer people than me will say, Oh, it's because the
Speaker 2: value is always looking to always looking for innovation and automation.
Speaker 2: I think it's because the people that run the value
Speaker 2: are not engineers anymore. They're not people that care about
Speaker 2: writing software, let alone good software. They're people that care
Speaker 2: about growth.
Speaker 3: Yes they are a lot of them used to be engineers,
Speaker 3: but then they didn't MBA and had their brain removed.
Speaker 2: Well, David, it's been what we're going to wrap there
Speaker 2: because I think we've got everyone's hopes up for a
Speaker 2: beautiful future. David, why could people find you?
Speaker 3: I'm it pivot dash two dash ai dot com. I'm
Speaker 3: David Gerrard dot co dot UK on Blue Sky and
Speaker 3: the main thing is the YouTube Pivot to ai, where
Speaker 3: I do five or so minutes just every weekday and gosh,
Speaker 3: it's a lot of work doing a video, but it's
Speaker 3: worth it. I think.
Speaker 2: Well, you will have links to that in the notes.
Speaker 2: I am, of course ed Zeitron. You will catch me
Speaker 2: on a monologue this week. We're gonna we're it thick
Speaker 2: in hater season. We're just going to bring on the
Speaker 2: various haters, the talk mad shit on the tech industry.
Speaker 2: I'm tired of being so reserved in my criticism. I've
Speaker 2: been kind of tame. I've decided, so February is hate.
Speaker 2: It's hater season. Everyone. Catch you soon. Thank you for
Speaker 2: listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 5: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 5: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 5: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 5: T O S O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 5: can email me at easy at better offline dot com
Speaker 5: or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 5: links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 5: you go to chat dot Where's youreaed dot at to
Speaker 5: visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 2: Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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