Speaker 1: Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to your weekly Better Offline Monologue. I,
Speaker 1: of course amed Xytron. So, as you'll find out in
Speaker 1: tomorrow's episode, the Future of jennetor of Ai, hinges heavily
Speaker 1: on open Ai, raising tens of billions of dollars, the
Speaker 1: majority of it from SoftBank, a huge Japanese investment firm
Speaker 1: that has to take out billions of dollars of loans
Speaker 1: to fund them, along with their contribution to the Stargate
Speaker 1: data center project. And as I went into in yesterday's episode,
Speaker 1: Microsoft is pulling back from over a gigawatt of data
Speaker 1: center capacity, and it certainly looks like these moves are
Speaker 1: an intentional move to distance themselves from open Ai, cutting
Speaker 1: back on data center expansion just as America's worst company
Speaker 1: needs more of them. Meanwhile, Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce,
Speaker 1: he's sounded Neil arm saying a recent CNBC conference that
Speaker 1: he believed hyperscalers were under hypnosis in their aggressive pursuit
Speaker 1: of data center to expansion and training larger and larger
Speaker 1: language models. Benioff believes that and I quote ish it,
Speaker 1: referring to data center expansions and larger language models has
Speaker 1: to be rethought. Exactly what are you doing and why
Speaker 1: are you doing this? That's a bloody good question. Mark.
Speaker 1: To be clear, Mark Benioff has been saying that Salesforce
Speaker 1: was adding some sort of Einstein AI shit for the
Speaker 1: best part of a decade as a means of boosting
Speaker 1: his stock price. So why is Big tech's most effusive
Speaker 1: bullshit as saying this. Do you think it's because things
Speaker 1: are going well? Do you think it's because sales of
Speaker 1: Agent Force and other associated products are doing really well? Look,
Speaker 1: as I've repeatedly said, where is the money in this industry?
Speaker 1: What have these companies actually built with generative AI? Where
Speaker 1: are the products that matter and why do they matter?
Speaker 1: Do you really think chat GPT is revolutionary? Do you
Speaker 1: think any of this is revolutionary? We are two years
Speaker 1: in and I'm still getting dms from people asking me
Speaker 1: what would it take to make you believe that this
Speaker 1: is all the future? And I'm so fucking tired of
Speaker 1: being asked this. The arguments I make are grounded in
Speaker 1: numbers and things that have happened, not just financial details
Speaker 1: and statistics, but in objective evaluations the products in question.
Speaker 1: There arefficacy at tasks and the people involved. Yet somehow,
Speaker 1: I and other critics are continually made to justify themselves.
Speaker 1: While Sam Altman of open ai and Dario Amadee of
Speaker 1: Anthropic vaguely suggests that we'll have a conscious autonomous computer
Speaker 1: by the year twenty twenty seven. When I ask how
Speaker 1: open ai survives as it spends nine billion dollars to
Speaker 1: lose five billion dollars, I'm obliquely threatened by Casey Newton
Speaker 1: of Platformer and Hardfork that he's taking detailed notes about
Speaker 1: anyone who believes that open ai might go bankrupt or
Speaker 1: run out of money. When as Recline suggests that AGI
Speaker 1: is about to arrive in a conversation with some sort
Speaker 1: of former Biden administration aicon artist, I'm sent the link
Speaker 1: thirty times with people saying does this mean you're wrong?
Speaker 1: I realize I'm complaining, but I'm justified in doing so.
Speaker 1: Why the fuck do I other critics have to make
Speaker 1: rigorously founded in persuasive arguments while AI companies spout fantastical nonsense.
Speaker 1: Why does Sam Mortman get headlines when he posts about
Speaker 1: and this did just happen? By the way, making an
Speaker 1: AI that can do creative writing, and I wish it
Speaker 1: was just ignorance. People like casing you and a Nezrakline
Speaker 1: aren't stupid, but they're also fully willing to back the
Speaker 1: narratives of powerful people that they want to be friends with.
Speaker 1: They want the rich and powerful to win, and they
Speaker 1: want to be the people that write their narratives and
Speaker 1: get their interviews. And yeah, I'm being petty. These are
Speaker 1: people that ostensibly compete with my work. But people with
Speaker 1: such a large audience have a responsibility two said audience
Speaker 1: not what they wish would come true. And really, I've
Speaker 1: got to ask, how does all of this end? Right now,
Speaker 1: we've got Anthropic, a company allegedly makes one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars a month according to the Information, but
Speaker 1: loses over five billion dollars a year or so, reported
Speaker 1: by the Information, And they make a commoditized product one
Speaker 1: very similar to open Aiyes, a company that will also
Speaker 1: likely lose a shit ton of money eleven billion dollars
Speaker 1: or more in twenty twenty five. These companies are dependent
Speaker 1: on receiving billions or tens of billions of dollars a
Speaker 1: year in funding for an indeterminately long period of time.
Speaker 1: For an equally indeterminate goal. I'm being completely objective here.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that these companies have made that suggests anything
Speaker 1: will change. Every new version of claud sonnet or GPT
Speaker 1: is iterative, and the products we see today are alarmingly
Speaker 1: similar to the ones we saw in the last two years.
Speaker 1: Despite everybody talking about agents, the actual agents that exist
Speaker 1: don't really work, and those that are able to kind
Speaker 1: of complete a task costs thousands of dollars and again
Speaker 1: don't always work. This industry is unprofitable, unsustainable, and does
Speaker 1: not appear to be able to create a product that
Speaker 1: people want to pay for, let alone one that they
Speaker 1: pay enough to put the company making it in the green.
Speaker 1: We're two years in. How do we not have one
Speaker 1: profitable generate AVII company other than Boy is it churing?
Speaker 1: They're a consultancy? It does not count. I do want
Speaker 1: to say, though I'm not cheering the apocalypse, what I've
Speaker 1: been describing for the last year is a group delusion
Speaker 1: where hundreds of billions of dollars got funneled into an
Speaker 1: environmentally and financially destructive distraction from the real problems that
Speaker 1: humanity faces. The longer this goes on means that it
Speaker 1: will be worse for the tech industry because once this
Speaker 1: bubble bursts, it will puncture everything, tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people laid off, brutal damage under tech valuations, and likely
Speaker 1: a glut of tech talent that depresses wages across the valley.
Speaker 1: What's important to know is that so much of this
Speaker 1: could have been avoided. Microsoft could have chosen not to
Speaker 1: continue sustaining open AI, as could Google and Amazon have
Speaker 1: refused to back anthropic or just not do this nonsense
Speaker 1: so called reporters that Casey Newton and Ezra Klein could
Speaker 1: have made these companies justify themselves rather than operating as
Speaker 1: so called cautious optimists that end up mostly just parroting
Speaker 1: marketing materials. And the larger media could have covered generative
Speaker 1: AI based on what it does, rather than what they're
Speaker 1: told it might do by somebody who has the financial
Speaker 1: incentive to lie. In any case, when this collapses, my words,
Speaker 1: I have been taking very, very detailed notes. I've been
Speaker 1: watching those who have sustained this bullshit narrative and other
Speaker 1: bullshit narratives and cryptocurrency in the metaverse. People willfully misleading
Speaker 1: the public in the process, and when the time is right,
Speaker 1: I will coldly and clinically read you every single time
Speaker 1: they've done so. Anyway, enjoy tomorrow's episode