Hater Season: Corey Quinn

Summary

Better Offline – Hater Season: Corey Quinn

Podcast: Better Offline
Host: Ed Zitron (Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts)
Guest: Corey Quinn (Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill Group)
Release Date: March 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode kicks off "Hater Season" on Better Offline: host Ed Zitron is joined by cloud industry provocateur Corey Quinn for a no-holds-barred exploration of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech industry’s cloud boom, and the ongoing generative AI/capex gold rush. The conversation skewers AWS’s labyrinthine cost structure, questions tech’s AI megalomania, dissects Big Tech infrastructure spending, and challenges boosterish narratives around AI replacing jobs and revolutionizing software. The tone? Wry, irreverent, and very unafraid to call tech executives out.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AWS Pricing Complexity & Why the Bill Keeps Going Up

Timestamp: [02:31] – [06:36]

• Per-usage Billing Confusion: AWS bills just keep growing, not due to secret price increases, but because of the messy nature of usage-based billing and human behavior.
  • "The safe bias is: don’t turn things off... You’re not charged for the things you use in the cloud so much as you’re charged for the things you forget to turn off." (Corey Quinn, [06:14])
• Engineers Are Not Incentivized: Once infrastructure is spun up, there's little incentive to remove unused resources, leading to ‘cloud sprawl.’
• Is It a Conspiracy? Corey quips that AWS isn't competent enough to run such a scheme—“It is the nature of charging per usage. And honestly, assholes...” ([03:42])

2. Organizational Dysfunction at Amazon

Timestamp: [07:00] – [08:50]

• Too Many Services, Too Many Silos: Amazon is internally siloed with over 200 services; even employees can’t keep track.
  • “I can speak incredibly convincingly about AWS services that do not exist to Amazon employees and not get called out on it...” (Corey Quinn, [07:29])
• Choosing the Right Service Is a Crapshoot: With 700+ VM options, even experienced engineers are guessing.

3. Amazon Leadership & The Technical Pressures of AI

Timestamp: [09:16] – [11:40]

• Andy Jassy’s Shift: Once a technical, hands-on leader at AWS, Jassy became “just a figurehead” as Amazon’s CEO—“When he gave keynote talks... you could see the irrepressible humanity leaking out around the edges. He was a person. Now he is a figurehead.” ([09:24])
• Cynicism Toward AI Hype: Zitron and Quinn skewer Jassy for misusing “generative AI” as a shiny buzzword for basic predictive tasks.

4. The Generative AI/GPUs Boom — Is Anyone Thinking Straight?

Timestamp: [12:34] – [20:09]

• Real Investment in Real Infrastructure: “They are real when it comes to this stuff. There are a number of other things... But when you see Ready to go...” (Corey Quinn, [13:14])
• Capex Explosion: Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta pour over $650B into infrastructure annually. Question: Is there real demand, or is it speculative FOMO?
• Is AI Spend Overhyped? “The AI spend in most of these companies hovers... between 5 and 7% of their total infrastructure spend.” (Corey Quinn, [15:13])
• Sustainability of Spending: Ziton questions: “What like 7 to 8% of a 300 million contract?... That’s dogshit... that’s not going to pay back that capex.” ([19:19])

5. AWS Getting Stuck in the AI Hypecycle

Timestamp: [20:15] – [24:31]

• Potential Overbuild: What if the AI bubble pops? Are Amazon’s new AI-focused data centers repurposable?
  • “GPUs... we’re all going get really into online gaming in a few years. I don’t know.” (Corey Quinn, [20:12])
• Contract with OpenAI: Amazon's $38B deal with OpenAI is questioned—"Is OpenAI good for the money?" ([20:52])
• In-house Chips (Trainium/Inferentia): There's no visible real-world traction for Amazon’s custom AI chips.

6. ‘AI Psychosis’ & The Endgame of High-Stakes Cloud Building

Timestamp: [25:25] – [32:35]

• Are Cloud Providers Building for a Real Use Case?
  • “What use cases today are we looking at where wow, if we had 10 times as much inference as we do today, then X would be possible. Solve for X. I’m not hearing it.” (Corey Quinn, [29:12])
• The AGI Mirage: The only plan seems to be “maybe we’ll invent AGI in 2029”—not much of a business case.
• The Myth of AI Replacing Work: Even boosters can’t clearly articulate what all this AI compute will accomplish—“I genuinely can’t get that answer out of anyone. Even the boosters.” (Ed Zitron, [29:23])

7. Amazon’s Future If the AI Hype Fizzles

Timestamp: [39:33] – [41:47]

• Will a Bubble Pop Cripple AWS? AWS’s core—nuts and bolts cloud—remains, but if contracts prove bad, systemic risk could hit the whole sector.
  • “They have a banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is, what happens when there’s a giant hole in their balance sheet?” (Corey Quinn, [39:54])
• Government Bailouts? Both hosts mock the notion of a tech sector bailout.

8. Innovation Stagnation at AWS

Timestamp: [41:50] – [43:33]

• From Bold to Boring: AWS once shipped game-changing products (e.g. Lambda: serverless compute, [42:32]) but now just releases incremental, uninspired updates.
  • “Now it’s not just you now it’s an entire sales team... There’s so much filler here. Where’s anything actually worth writing about?” (Corey Quinn, [41:50])
• New in LLMs: Amazon’s attempts at large language models (e.g. Nova) are lackluster compared to competitors—"They're racing neck and neck with Ed's Taxidermy and Frontier AI Lab." ([43:33])

9. Generative AI: Real Impact or Just Hype?

Timestamp: [45:06] – [48:04]

• AI's True Use Cases:
  • Corey uses AI tools for curation and simple code generation in very narrow scenarios—point solutions, not revolution.
  • “Is this worth changing the entire world for? No, no, it is not. But I'll make hay while the sun shines.” (Corey Quinn, [45:58])
• Translators and Stock Photographers: Only a few fields (e.g., translation, stock art) are seriously disrupted at present.

10. AI Won’t Replace Enterprise Software (SaaS): The 'Build It Yourself' Fallacy

Timestamp: [49:20] – [52:16]

• Replacing SaaS With Claude/AI is Overhyped: No, companies can’t just “Claude up” their own business applications overnight and expect robustness, compliance, and auditability.
  • “You can easily generate a website that purports to do something. But what if they needed that thing to be correct?” (Corey Quinn, [49:47])
• Why Businesses Stick With SaaS: Not for code, but for support, compliance, audit trails, and reliability.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Ed Zitron ([01:58]):
"Now we're in hater season. Hater season is when I bring people on, allow them to get rude... which we've never referred to [tech execs] as fuckwits or morons or dumbasses or shitheads..."

Corey Quinn ([03:42]):
"I used to think it was a conspiracy, and then I realized Amazon is in no way, shape or form organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off."

Corey Quinn ([06:36]):
"You're not charged for the things you use in the cloud so much as you're charged for the things you forget to turn off."

Corey Quinn ([15:13]):
"The AI spend in most of these companies hovers... between 5 and 7% of their total infrastructure spend."

Ed Zitron ([29:38]):
"Are we going to summon God through JSON is step one and step two is we're going to ask God what to do."

Corey Quinn ([41:50]):
"It was first gradual, then all at once... there’s so much filler here. Where’s anything actually worth writing about?"

Corey Quinn ([45:58]):
"Is this worth changing the entire world for? No, no it is not. But I'll make hay while the sun shines."

Corey Quinn ([52:16]):
"This is not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one comment on Hacker News was, 'This is just rsync with some extra bells and whistles.' This isn't a product."

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Additional Highlights

• AWS’s ‘Compute Optimizer’ Tool: Corey is “thrilled” by Amazon’s AI-powered cost optimization tool, though he jokes its creators are probably “eyed for layoffs or PIPs” ([08:50]).
• AI as Executive Catnip: "AI psychosis" is discussed as a form of corporate leadership mania ([45:06]).
• Personal Use of AI: Corey’s favorite implementation of AI? An “AI-powered executive assistant” (Billy the Platypus) that sends tongue-in-cheek corporate rejections to spammy emails ([53:10]).

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sardonic yet deeply informed look at how AWS—and Big Tech at large—have become ensnared in the cloud/AI hype cycle, risking billions on bets whose business cases are fuzzy at best. Corey Quinn brings gritty insight and humor to demystifying cloud economics, while Ed Zitron punctures techie self-delusion and AI snake oil. Listeners gain a much clearer picture of why cloud bills skyrocket, what’s real (and not) in AI, and where the limits of technology truly lie.

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Suggested Segments:

• [02:31] – [06:36]: Why AWS bills never go down
• [15:13] – [20:09]: AI spending vs. actual business
• [29:12] – [32:35]: AI’s endgame and capex bubble
• [41:50] – [43:33]: AWS’s innovation slowdown
• [49:20] – [52:16]: Why AI can’t replace SaaS

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For more irreverent tech analysis:

• Corey Quinn’s newsletter
• Better Offline podcast archives

Transcript

[Corey Quinn]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

Segregation day, integration at night.

[Corey Quinn]

It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero?

[Corey Quinn]

Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

Charlie's place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Corey Quinn]

Saturday, May 2, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas at our 2026 I Hard Country Festival presented by Capital One. Tickets are on. Sal, get yours before they sell [e-mail] that's Ticketmaster.com

[Ed Zitron]

call Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am, of course, your host, Ed Zitron.

[Corey Quinn]

Better Offline.

[Ed Zitron]

Now we're in hater season. Hater season is when I bring people on, allow them to get rude. Because, you know, this podcast is usually so reserved and nice in the way we refer to people, especially tech executives, which we've never referred to as fuckwits or morons or dumbasses or shitheads or shitheels or ass wipes or fuck nuts or knob ends. We've never done any of that ever. Nevertheless, joining me today is chief cloud economist at Dougbill, Corey Quinn. Corey, how you doing?

[Corey Quinn]

I am delighted to be here because normally in all the other places I find myself, I have to be so reserved.

[Ed Zitron]

You have to pull your punches, Cory. Today's hater season. Tell me about your feelings on Amazon Web Services.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, dear Lord. It's. It's like. It's weird. I don't actually hate Amazon. People think I do because of the things I say and the things that I do. But if I hated them this time

[Ed Zitron]

because of your actions.

[Corey Quinn]

But 10 years in, I write a newsletter about it. If I actually hate the company and want nothing but ill things to happen to them, first off, that's a pathology and I need a restraining order. And secondly, it always bugs me when people think that I have an axe to grind against the company. Because 10 years in. Are you seriously suggesting this is the best I would be able to do if I actually wanted to hit them where it hurts? Come on. But yeah, they've been annoying the piss out of me lately.

[Ed Zitron]

So AWS is weird because. And maybe you can explain this to me. Over my entire tech career, I've heard this constant story that your AWS bill just. It just goes up. It just arbitrarily increases. It's not really clear whether they're doing price increases, though I know those exist

[Corey Quinn]

too rarely, but occasionally, increasingly these days.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, but why? What is it that makes the bill go up? Why? And why does this happen so often?

[Corey Quinn]

I used to think it was a conspiracy, and then I realized Amazon is in no way, shape or form organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off. It is the nature of charging per usage. And honestly, assholes, where, okay, we're gonna launch a service and we're gonna charge you for every gigabyte you put in it. That's all we're gonna do. Great. Straightforward humans can rationalize around that. Great.

[Ed Zitron]

Easy peasy.

[Corey Quinn]

They did that when they first launched S3 in beta back in 2003.

[Ed Zitron]

S3 storage, right?

[Corey Quinn]

It's a big object store. Picture it as an infinite sized disk and you're pretty close. But originally they only charged for the data you stored there. Great. So people stored a bunch of objects that were zero byte in size, so they just used the names of those objects and the ability to query whether an object existed or not and what its name was as a free database. This, at the time also according to legend, didn't just. It wasn't just about taking free services. It was also just crippling the performance of S3 at the time. So what they did is they started also charging. Every request you make would charge a small fee. I think it's something like a penny per thousand requests, if memory serves. Don't quote me on that. I look it up when it matter and that solves that problem. But then you have things like that that are patched on and tied to things, and tied to things and tied to more things. And in any complex organization, what happens is now suddenly you have this morass of $100 million a year in spend. Great. What's in there that's costing all the money? Well, everything. But if you look at anything individual and you don't think it's being used. Okay, am I going to turn it off? If I'm right, it's going to save me a bit of money. If I'm wrong, it's going to take down production. And now I have a serious problem trying to serve my customers. So the safe bias is don't turn things off. Also, you're an engineer. Hypothetically. I realize that can be an insult to your part of the world. Roll with it for a moment. Exactly. You're an engineer. You want something to spin up, and no one is letting you spin it up. You will take up residents, annoying the hell out of them every 10 minutes until you get the access that you need.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Corey Quinn]

You do your job, things are done. Two things now work against you. One, you had to ask and beg and plead them to spin that up. You want to hang on to it in case you need it again because you don't want to go through that.

[Ed Zitron]

But also, this is internally an organization.

[Corey Quinn]

Exactly. Exactly. This is not Amazon's fault. This is human nature's fault. They haven't patched that yet, though. They're. I think they're trying. They're working on this iteration of Alexa Plus. Why not? I'm kidding. That thing just sells ads. We're good.

[Ed Zitron]

But wait, so I'm an engineer and I've. I've advocated for my thing?

[Corey Quinn]

Yes. And now you're done using it. No one is going. There's no call to action to get you off your ass to go get one off or no one will come and badger you about. Tends to exist. It's why people cynically say you're not charged for the things you use in the cloud so much as you're charged for the things you forget to turn off.

[Ed Zitron]

And Amazon loves this. I'm guessing they love the fact that there's just this cloud anchor system.

[Corey Quinn]

I would say that on some level, contrary to popular belief, they don't love it as much as you'd think, because, all right, I'm trying to run my blog and I've spun up eight attempts at this blog, so it now costs eight times what it should. Great. And the narrative becomes, if they're not careful with all that wasted usage, that's doing nothing is.

[Ed Zitron]

Huh?

[Corey Quinn]

The cloud is pants shittingly expensive. We should go back to data centers. There's really no one on the other side of this issue. So why doesn't Amazon help people tune these things down and turn it off? They made some abortive attempts and part of the organization. But this is going to surprise you. Amazon is not the most organizationally competent company you're ever going to meet.

[Ed Zitron]

But what does that mean in practice? Is it just that they don't know their ass from their ear hole? They don't really know how things work? All of the above Silos.

[Corey Quinn]

It's all silos. There are over 200 services, and we long ago crossed the point where I can speak incredibly convincingly about AWS services that do not exist to Amazon employees and not get called out on it, because who in the world knows everything that Amazon does?

[Ed Zitron]

So there's just.

[Corey Quinn]

I'm a white guy. I sound as plausible as AI these days.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. So it's just a labyrinth, a leviathan of different SKUs and product categories that

[Corey Quinn]

may or may SKUs, if you want to be precise. Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus. And those are all just different kinds of virtual machines and the like.

[Corey Quinn]

Okay, we'll start there. Sure. Virtual machines. You want to spin up a virtual machine in Virginia? US East 1. Okay. Which one are you going to pick? Because There are approximately 700 different types you can spin up. Are you going to pick the right one? Of course you're fucking not.

[Ed Zitron]

Also, how do you pick the right one? This is the thing, because it seems that the people making these decisions of which virtual machines to get or whatever spin up on AWS are engineers, right? Usually software engineers. Software engineers aren't necessarily infrastructure experts, are they?

[Corey Quinn]

You've noticed. Yeah. Very often companies will standardize on one particular size of instance across the board. Why? Well, because in development, it's the one that the original founding engineer picked. And we'll come back and revisit this later. 10 years go by. No one has revisited.

[Ed Zitron]

Mm, Take that.

[Corey Quinn]

They do have a tool that I like. It's even free, which I'm sure someone loses sleep over, called Compute Optimizer that looks at your running workloads and says, hey, this one should be bigger, this one should be smaller. I was extraordinarily skeptical when it came out. It is better at figuring that out than I am with the tooling that I built internally. So once again, I'm thrilled to turn it off. It's one of the Amazon at its best things. I can only assume that the people responsible for that are being eyed for layoffs or pips, because that's.

[Ed Zitron]

These days, Andy Jassy and several NBA snipers are outside of their location right now. It's frustrating.

[Corey Quinn]

I like naws. Truly. Something changed. He got a job that no one in their right mind could possibly want, but also could not refuse. And sold his soul. Yes, absolutely. He was the CEO of aws. And he was. When he gave keynote talks, when he gave presentations, when I was fortunate enough to basically sneak my way into them, you could see the irrepressible humanity leaking out around the edges. He was a person. Now he is a figurehead. He doesn't.

[Ed Zitron]

Just to be clear, Congress this shift was when he became CEO of Amazon or CEO of aws.

[Corey Quinn]

CEO of Amazon. AWS was his own fiefdom and he could do whatever he wanted. To my understanding. Within that company it was the only people that mattered who had an opinion on this were Andy, Jassy and God. And God was sort of absent. So great, we're just gonna leave it to Andy. And Andy went deep and he understood every aspect of this stuff. A year ago he went to Re Invent in Las Vegas and gave a talk on stage I think. Cause he missed it. He missed being able to get up there and talk about computers with people. Cuz now he has to ship underpants all over the world instead.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. But is he technical? Cause he's an mba, is he not?

[Corey Quinn]

This is one of the dangerous things that I have found people underestimate Amazon leadership on is it is never the smart bet to assume that they don't understand the technical nuances of the things that they are working with. With. They go so sarcastically deep in so many different ways that it is never a smart move to say that they don't understand. It is unlike virtually any other tech company I've ever spoken with other than small scale ones with technical founders. He very clearly understands the technology and used it to build things himself.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, but here's the reason I question that.

[Corey Quinn]

Please.

[Ed Zitron]

He's talking about generative AI. I've just pulled up his notice.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, no one understands how that works under the hood. Let's be very clear on that. And yeah, he lost the fucking plot when it came to gen AI.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing. Because he's like, we're also using generative AI broadly across our internal operations in our fulfillment network. We're using AI to improve inventory placement. So not generative AI. Demand forecasting. Definitely not generative AI and the efficiency of our robots. Not generative AI. I don't know. Maybe he does know what he's talking about. He's just a fucking carnival barker now

[Corey Quinn]

he's Doing the same. It all seems to be. And the trick to disprove everything you just said, rather everything that he said that you relayed to us is very simple. Go out with an Amazon employee for several drinks and then ask them about their experience of using AI within the company. Oh, I have two different companies. There is no congruity between those two perspectives.

[Ed Zitron]

So Corey, maybe you can help me with this because you certainly without saying exactly what we're talking about, you knew about a contract that I knew about way before I knew and I knew about it months early. Yes, with a lot with a large company we discussed. So you're very well connected. It seems up until generative AI like AWS was at least a somewhat sensible operation, that it was something that we had if not focus, at least a focus on scale and useful cloud computing.

[Corey Quinn]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

What the fuck is it about GPUs that's driving everyone insane? Because it's.

[Corey Quinn]

I want to point something out that I think is being lost industry wide because I've talked to folks at AWS about this and folks who have left AWS who have. I used to dabble working in data centers, which means I know just enough to know what I don't know. And I've talked to these folks. When Amazon commits to being able to bring certain amounts of capacity online, it is real capacity. It is. Each data center they build out, each region they build out is a multi billion dollar investment and it takes years to go from signed contract to it's serving customer traffic. They are real when it comes to this stuff. There are a number of other things

[Ed Zitron]

they're real for building it.

[Corey Quinn]

Well yes. And they're really running it. They have operationalized how to run these things better than you or I would ever be able to do. That is their superpower. Other companies and they're spinning up a data center do not do this. They are. Well, we've rented a warehouse out, we wound up throwing some generators in the back and we gotta call Comcast and see what they can do to get it hooked up to the Internet next. But when you see Ready to go.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but you say other companies, you don't mean Google and Microsoft here.

[Corey Quinn]

No. Well I am talking Oracle, but yes, Microsoft kind of.

[Ed Zitron]

Oracle just agrees.

[Corey Quinn]

Microsoft is shitty at building data centers. Azure has been a disappointment across the board. Capacity shortfalls plagued them for a long time. During COVID they generally tend to view two racks in a data center somewhere as a region, which is weird and messed up. Google is real. But Google has made other interesting technical trade offs that I can see why they did it. But I would say when it comes to infrastructure, in my experience, AWS is number one. Google is a close second.

[Ed Zitron]

I have heard some crazy shit about Google that they're doing these things called stalks where they just create these pop up data centers in the long run.

[Corey Quinn]

Companies have been doing that for a long time. Every company does that for points of fascinating stuff. Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Anyway, but back to the major question, which is AWS seems like a sensible business that does real things. I'm not disputing that.

[Corey Quinn]

Yes, bomb it prints money. Let's be clear on this. Despite all remember I help companies negotiate cloud contracts and understand what they're spending and where the money is going. Which means that companies can say a lot. People say a lot of things. But one of my prime rules about this stuff is that customers lie mostly to themselves. They're not intentionally trying to mislead me when they tell me what's going on. But I find the bills are the ultimate source of truth. Because if you're not paying for it, does it really exist? And the AI spend in most of these companies hovers, in my experience with a few outliers between 5 and 7% of their total infrastructure spend.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Corey Quinn]

It is not three times companies that are doing a $300 million a year contract with AWS are not turning around saying better make it 400 because of all the gen AI that is not happening.

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[Amber Grimes]

It's the new me and it's the old them.

[Corey Quinn]

Everybody's on their journey and your journey is different to theirs.

[Amber Grimes]

This Women's History Month, the podcast if youf Knew Better with Amber Grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.

[Guest on If You Knew Better]

I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life and I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like you step back and you're like, whoa, We. I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like, built out of, like, survival to get to the next place. Like, my drive, my, like, tunnel vision of, like, I got to be better, I got to achieve this was off the strengths of, like, I want to make a better life for us.

[Corey Quinn]

Us.

[Amber Grimes]

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[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

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[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

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[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

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[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

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[Ed Zitron]

Segregation in the day, Integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Corey Quinn]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Ed Zitron]

You saw the kkk.

[Corey Quinn]

Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here.

[Ed Zitron]

Charlie was an example of power.

[Corey Quinn]

They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Zitron]

That's kind of my point, though. It's like Amazon Web Services doesn't seem like a business that chases fads or if it does it chase them in a more sustainable way.

[Corey Quinn]

Then to their credit, they docked. They docked blockchain almost entirely. And I was worried they were going to fall down that rabbit hole.

[Ed Zitron]

But I mean, they're doing $200 billion in capex this year. What is it they see in AI? Because to your point just now, what like 7 to 8% of a 300 million contract? That's dog shit. Like that's, that's not going to pay back that capex.

[Corey Quinn]

Andy, I believe, this is my belief here. I can't base it on anything other than what I've seen Amazon do. I and what I have seen from customers. Amazon is selling the capacity that they are spinning up. They are spinning up as fast as they can spin it. The question that I have is twofold. One, okay, you invest in all these AI data centers and the AI bubble pops, deflates, whatever. How repurposable are those facilities and that capital expenditure if it's data centers and networking? Yes, very repurposable, yeah. GPUs. Well, we're all going get really into online gaming in a few years. I don't know.

[Ed Zitron]

Except they don't have video out, they don't have DisplayPort.

[Corey Quinn]

Yes, we still call them graphics, which I love.

[Ed Zitron]

I think I like the people who. I've also heard people say general purpose units, which is the opposite of what a GPU is like. It is very much not general purpose.

[Corey Quinn]

It became public through a press release that they have signed a $38 billion contract with OpenAI.

[Ed Zitron]

With Insane.

[Corey Quinn]

There is zero doubt in my mind that because I did some digging on this, is there line of sight for AWS to bring online $38 billion of capacity to provide to OpenAI? Yes, yes, there is where my doubts come in. Is OpenAI good for the money?

[Ed Zitron]

No.

[Corey Quinn]

I have some questions here, mostly from reading your work.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing, it seems like something about GPUs and large language models have broken everyone. That's kind of the point I'm getting to because like everything I've read about AWS and I read, because I'm a dickhead, I went and I read all of the previous coverage of the lead up to AWS becoming profitable. Kevin Roose, by the way, literally a month before they did so, wrote an article saying it would be a while. What fucking three points in that ass wipe. Anyway, everything I read was everyone saying, oh, Amazon's being really spendy they're spending 6 to 7 billion in capex. A quarter. Oh no. And then the total capex was 69 billion. But everything from Amazon was like, we're building something sustainable. We see the revenue potential behind it. It was all very boring. Now with aws, everything they talk about with large language models, it sounds like they've all been huffing ayahuasca or something. They sound insane.

[Corey Quinn]

They do. Which tells me one of two things is true or honestly, this is the real world. Unlike on Twitter, two complex competing things can in fact be true at the same time. Interesting. One of them is they're still doing a lot of that boring stu. But the publicity all accrues to the things that are far flung. This is also $200 billion across the entirety of Amazon. That includes distribution centers, that includes low Earth orbit. Basically, Amazon Basic Starlink. I think they're calling it LEO now. It includes, yes, their AI nonsense, their factory boondoggles, their robotic stuff, office buildouts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't give clear breakdowns on how much of that is AI services, and frankly, I wouldn't trust them if they did. Since I saw a job ad a few years back on Amazon, jobs saying experience with other AI services like S3. S3 is a storage service that's not AI. You can use it to feed AI.

[Ed Zitron]

But I hear Anthropic is one of the largest S3 customers I've heard.

[Corey Quinn]

I've heard that. I've heard from seven different companies so far that they are the largest customer.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Corey Quinn]

It's funny how that tends to work out.

[Ed Zitron]

God, I miss. I miss working in cloud software so much, where everyone is the. Everyone's the exclusive partner, everyone's the number one partner, and everyone's the largest. It's so.

[Corey Quinn]

But qualifiers get there. Like, we're the largest S3 customer in Australia. Great.

[Ed Zitron]

In the northeast. In the northeast region, between the hours of 6am and 12am okay, so here's the thing with the CapEx. I'm sure a lot of it is for. Is for AI, just because if you look at their previous years of capex, it was like 40, 50, 60. Yeah, 40, 61, 63, 52, 83, 131, 200 billion.

[Corey Quinn]

Since Gerald over at Platform Economics has been tracking capex band to the hyperscalers for a long time now. And he was one of the first people to call out the cloud pretenders, IBM and Oracle, specifically because they're making all the cloud noises, but they're not Spending anything on Capex and you kind of have to build the data centers for this to work.

[Ed Zitron]

Not to worry, Oracle's taking care of that.

[Corey Quinn]

What I want to know, my question is when you start, okay, we're going to spend, even assume it's all AI, whatever. Fine, $200 billion on AI spent. How much of that is just in the form of a check written to in video?

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the question because from my understanding, my understanding the I should bring up the chart. I'm just going to do something live on air. I'm just bringing up an image and of course can't find it. Nevertheless, there is an image I have that Amazon doesn't. Well, Amazon builds its own the training GPUs. And do they still use inferentia or is it just.

[Corey Quinn]

That sounds like something my grandpa got diagnosed with.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but do they like inferentia I thought was there?

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, they talk about it a fair bit. They talk about Trainium and the thing is is what you don't see is people using it in the wild. I looked at a bunch of stuff with Ollama. There's the run your own stuff there. I searched about a year ago for the term inferentia. It showed up once in a pull request that had been closed after 60 days. Cause no one responded to it. No one is using this in the real world. A year ago, year and a month now they had with Cranium 2 I think it was. They had speakers from Anthropic on keynote stage talking about it, which. Yeah, okay. They invested how many tens of billions into Anthropic? Yeah, I'm sure there's a contract requirement around sending an exec to talk on stage. And the other one was Apple. Apple doesn't admit what they're doing to their own employees, to each other, let alone publicly. So yeah, that looked about as natural as an oral bowel movement.

[Ed Zitron]

Nice.

[Corey Quinn]

But those are the only two companies I've seen doing anything with it.

[Ed Zitron]

So based on this chart I've got which involves various stars and company names, it looks like Amazon gets their GPUs through Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Corporation Limited. I love Chinese and Taiwanese names by the way.

[Corey Quinn]

TSMC is almost certainly in there.

[Ed Zitron]

No, TSMC isn't because TSMC builds the chips.

[Corey Quinn]

These are the server manufacturers chips themselves because they have Annapurna, they bought and do the design but they don't do the fabric.

[Ed Zitron]

So they ship the. I assume that Annapurna, which is the internal place that Amazon Makes its chips, ships them. It looks like the Foxconn, Quanta Computing and Jabil and then they put them in the servers. So really it's them cutting the checks to them. I'm going to be watching the monthly earnings of those companies in Taiwan quite viciously. Because here's the thing. If it's all $200 billion of CapEx, if they really think they're going to get paid that much. But what happens? Has Amazon ever faced the situation where they did an overbuild? Has that ever happened to them? What did they do?

[Corey Quinn]

Yes, they made a bunch of noises about it during the pandemic. They overbuilt their distribution centers.

[Ed Zitron]

Ah, but that's. People buy stuff.

[Corey Quinn]

Exactly. That was my position on it. It feels like, okay, like they slowed it down and they didn't shut them down, but they waited for people to grow into it. The thing is, is a warehouse that you use to ship out underpants. Great. That has the same utility more or less five years from now as it does.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, exactly.

[Corey Quinn]

A lot of these chips are depreciating assets like, oh man, I can't wait to get that seven year old computer in here so I can do some real work. Says no one ever.

[Ed Zitron]

Well also Trainium especially, they've got what they're on generation two three now they're

[Corey Quinn]

now shipping three right at the time to pre announce four and then a desperate attempt to Osborne Computer themselves.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, explain that reference.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, Osborne Computer was a company back in the 80s there they launched the Osborne one and their CEO went out and did a whole press junk and he's like, yeah, this is great, but Osborne 2 is going to blow the crap out of it.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, like Nvidia.

[Corey Quinn]

And oh, everyone's like, great, we're not going to buy the Osborne one. Then the company went under and never shipped the Osborne two.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, okay, not like Nvidia then this is the thing. Surely that sets Amazon up for a big problem with those Trainium chips. Success. Like even if in some weird world that Trainium 4 or 5 was amazing, I don't think it will be. But just saying, doesn't that mean they're going to be sitting on a bunch of obsolete Trainium? It just feels very questionable.

[Corey Quinn]

You know, you can say a lot about OpenAI and you do, but that press release where they announced that $38 billion contract, they didn't mention Trainium.

[Ed Zitron]

They didn't, did they?

[Corey Quinn]

Which tells me that if it were half as good at this, at the model training as they say it is, OpenAI would be all about it. Yeah, I am not seeing that to be true.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, clammy Sam Altman, he's. He signed a thing with Cerebrus. You remember you're Cerebrus.

[Corey Quinn]

Is there anyone that Sam Altman has not signed deals with?

[Ed Zitron]

Let's think Grok. Haven't signed one with Grok yet.

[Corey Quinn]

Okay, good, good.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean actually, sorry, just to be clear, hasn't signed with either. Well, I guess it would. He wouldn't sign one with Grok as technically Grok is a competitor. I mean G R O Q the annoying fast inference. I don't know at this point my hated them and people are going to say this episode was too technical and the answer is calm down, this is my podcast. I'm just, I'm wondering at what point they. They say uncle because okay, $200 billion and let's say 125 billion of that is AI, right? AI chips. Takes four or five years probably to install all of that. To what end? What happens in four or five? Are they going to make what I mean it would be.

[Corey Quinn]

That's what no one is able to explain to me. What use cases today are we looking at where wow, if we had 10 times as much inference as we do today, then X would be possible. Solve for X. I'm not hearing it.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I'm not either. I'm not even being my usual Haiti self. Even though this is hater season, it's. I genuinely can't get that answer out of anyone. Even the boosters. It's like there's this insatiable demand for computer. I don't know if we're going to

[Corey Quinn]

summon God through JSON is step one and step two is we're going to ask God what to do.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean that's the thing. I do think that they, I think that have you seen the revenue projections for these companies? Have you ever seen like Oracle's cash flow? So if you see this one they

[Corey Quinn]

put out also known as There's a reason that every time Larry Ellison, co founder of Oracle goes and gives a keynote or talks somewhere, they preface it with a disclosure that is the lawyer version of everything you are about to hear is a fanciful imagining of reality.

[Ed Zitron]

Don't listen to him. He's, he's, he's. He's had a long day. He hasn't taken his nap. Fuck HR Geigers. Jerry Stiller, he. The thing is you look at these cash flow positive. These cash flow diagrams for anthropic OpenAI and Oracle they all follow the same thing, which is terrible cash flow, negative cash flow for years and years and years. And then in 2029 everything changes. Number go up. And I at this point genuinely think that they think they're going to invent AGI in 2029, that that's the only plan they have because they're not.

[Corey Quinn]

They're not doing the things that if they genuinely believe that they would not be doing these things. We think that we are three years away from launching AGI. That will change everything. So what are we going to do? We're going to find a way to put ads into ChatGPT. That is not the play when you think you're on the verge of the singularity.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, nobody. Demis Habib, I don't know. I don't like him to such an extent. I refuse to learn his name, the DeepMind Bloke.

[Corey Quinn]

I try not to anthropomorphize either AI or its creators.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, Deepus Membipus. He's the one that every few weeks does an interview and he's like. And then God is going to come out. I'm really scared of what the computer will do. He doesn't sound like that. He wishes. And it's just.

[Corey Quinn]

You make it sound exciting.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, exactly. It sounds fun and interesting and comical when these people are just boring, boring people. Boring motherfuckers. But it's just these massive over promises and these weird fucking like these weird things where I like looking. Let's look at this. There are $650 billion in capex being spent this year just by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Where is it going? Genuinely? Actually, simple question. I actually don't know where it's going anymore.

[Corey Quinn]

It's leading to a giant hole in their balance sheet. At some point you'll notice that all of the hyperscalers, all of them that have succeeded, even the pretenders have other businesses that finance this. There has never been a successful hyperscaler that launched as a hyperscaler. The closest story you've got to that, and I question whether you'd call them a hyperscaler is Cloudflare because they start as a CDN and then just added the rest of the cloud stuff and

[Ed Zitron]

let's see how big their stock is. Got a $59 billion market cap.

[Corey Quinn]

Well, they're a real company.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want to invest in a company that wasn't making egregious promises. But it's just. Jesus, it's just so Strange, because even if they think AI is going to be big, surely all the money they're spending today is not going to do that. Like, all of these chips aren't going to do it. The models they train today aren't going to do it.

[Corey Quinn]

It's like they're trying to bootstrap from thing to thing to thing. The story that concerns me is, okay, you take a look at these companies and their subscription plans. Top end of it is 200 bucks. Great. I pay it myself just so I can dispatch a winged monkey to build me a shitpost website, which is awesome. And sometimes it works and sometimes I have to prompt it to do different things. Great. It's better at shitty front end than I am at shitty front end. Terrific. I'm not gonna spend five grand on that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that's.

[Corey Quinn]

But the model for Zooms did not. And we're not just talking me here. We are talking effectively everyone. It's like the unspoken message of a lot of these folks is that your boss is gonna fire you and then take your salary and split it with the AI company.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. And also that you will be able to code everything with AI versus what People love that I quote the same thing Carl Brown saying, makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder.

[Corey Quinn]

We are building software at Duckbill. We are hiring engineers. Is this because we're stupid? I don't believe that to be true.

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[Amber Grimes]

It's the new me and it's the old them.

[Corey Quinn]

Everybody's on their journey, and your journey is different to theirs.

[Amber Grimes]

This woman's history month, the podcast, if you knew better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.

[Guest on If You Knew Better]

I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like, built out of, like, survival to get to the next place, like my drive, my, like, tunnel vision of, like, I got to be better, I got to achieve this was off the strengths of, like, I want to make a better life for us.

[Amber Grimes]

If you Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking, career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to if youf Knew Better with Amber grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

Usually on this podcast Will Kill youl, we talk about the diseases, infections, and biological threats that can make us really sick.

[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

But right now we're doing something a little different.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

We're stepping back and looking at what the human body needs to keep going.

[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out. We are predictably unpredictable sleepers.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

We're talking about why sleep works the way it does, why our bodies don't follow neat rules, and why modern life makes rest so hard to come by.

[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

The second half of our series takes us to the digestive system with a multi part series on what happens after we eat. Okay, I just have to say that all of my favorite words, apparently are digestive words.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

Sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum. It's fascinating, it's funny, and it matters so much more than you think.

[Will Kill You Podcast Co-host]

Episodes of our new series run from January 20 through February 17, with new episodes every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network.

[Will Kill You Podcast Host]

Listen to this podcast will kill you as part of the Exactly Right Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Ed Zitron]

Segregation in the day, Integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Corey Quinn]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Ed Zitron]

You saw the kkk.

[Corey Quinn]

Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here.

[Ed Zitron]

Charlie was an example of power.

[Corey Quinn]

They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Segment)]

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, and that's kind of the thing. It's like, I don't know, people still seem to be hiring software engineers. The engineers are getting fired and replaced with AI. Story doesn't seem to work. And also, every time I go and read someone who claims that Claude code changed their entire life, it mostly comes down to, yeah, it took something from a few hours to an hour and it's like, cool, great, okay. But it changed my life.

[Corey Quinn]

What did it do? It taught me to clearly explain what I wanted.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. But also, I still had to fix things. It's like if, if all of this money just went into creating slightly more efficient software engineers, and even then the data suggests they're less efficient. I don't know, was this worth it? And Amazon certainly isn't. Amazon certainly isn't. I guess they're getting the chunk out of Anthropic from this. Like that they can claim Anthropic. They can have them pay for Trainium in Project Cranium.

[Corey Quinn]

This is a platform company where when people build interesting things on top of you, how do you take credit for that without being obnoxious?

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, has that ever been a problem for Amazon?

[Corey Quinn]

Well, it's not that they're worried about being obnoxious, it's just they're bad at messaging.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I mean, I mentioned him earlier, Panos Panay. Panos Panay came over from Microsoft from the Surface team to lead Amazon's Alexa. I mean, now there's something obnoxious. Now there's some real generative AI bullshit. They've lost like billions on Alexa now as well. Ugh, God, what a strange company Amazon's become.

[Corey Quinn]

They've always been peculiar. The problem is, is at some point of scale, like we're a little weird. No longer carries water. It's great. You're now one of the linchpins of the global economy. You have to explain what you're doing a bit more effectively.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I, I, what do you think? You've known, you've known Amazon for 100 years now. What do you think happens if the AI bubble bursts? What do you actually think they do? Like, what do you think? Are they the types to actually mothball this stuff? Would they just pretend like this never happened?

[Corey Quinn]

Aspects of it? But there are. Again, they're making money hand over fist on the actual nuts and bolts of cloud computing. That's not going. Their stock will tumble because they're not posting massive growth numbers. But they have a banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is, what happens when there's a giant hole in their balance sheet? Because, well, it turns out that hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts everyone signed, suddenly they don't got the money, what do we do? That's going to be a systemic problem. It's not going to just hit Amazon. It's going to hit a lot of folks. And I think that the answer everyone's sort of hoping for in that space is government bailout. No, but of Amazon though, I would be so irritated.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, also, what are they bailing out? Amazon's not going to go bankrupt. Even if Amazon had to take a massive impairment on Elda Trainium chips and it was like $30 billion where the

[Corey Quinn]

shareholders at the shareholders, they'll be mad,

[Ed Zitron]

don't get me wrong. But it's not going to destroy Amazon. Like it's not. I mean, it might destroy Andy Jassy's asshole. Like it might be. Might send Andy Jassy in an iron ball into the sun, but it doesn't feel like it will kill them. I just don't know what a bailout would be.

[Corey Quinn]

I am so annoyed that I had great hopes when Andy took over, but it seems like the company has just continued down the insidification curve. They're not doing surprising things. The reason I started the last week in aws newsletter in 2017 was that every week they were fixing massive customer facing problems. And it was hard to keep track because they were just as bad then as they are now. When did you start these things? 2017. Right now they don't do that anymore. It's basically inertia. I would not be able to start the newsletter and build our readership today the way that I did back then, just because people do not care nearly so much about the platform as they once did.

[Ed Zitron]

So when did you notice the shift happened?

[Corey Quinn]

It was first graduate, then all at once. I think is probably the way to frame it. When I realized that I went from every week having the problem of there's so much stuff here, which ones make the cut to there's so much filler here. Where's anything actually worth writing about?

[Ed Zitron]

And when you say filler, what do you mean?

[Corey Quinn]

They used to say. They used to talk about things like AWS Lambda, a transformative shift in how compute could be running. They put that out with the same enthusiasm corporate voice as there's now a third cloudfront edge location in Dallas, which even people in Dallas do not give a toss about.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. What does Lambda do?

[Corey Quinn]

It effectively. You give it its code. It runs the code when certain trigger events happen. Be it a web request, be it a time being hit, be it something some other event hitting and it only charges you for while it runs. Huh. And it massively scales up and you don't have to worry about any of the care and feeding of the infrastructure around it, which that's really cool. It is. It is cool. It was betaed in 2015, but now it's one of the last truly great things Amazon put out that changed the way I thought about how this could work.

[Ed Zitron]

Except now Amazon doesn't really put out fun new updates, it's just incremental updates.

[Corey Quinn]

We have a new thing. We've launched our own large language model called Nova. It's not as good as the ones you currently use, but it's less money. It's stage. They don't care.

[Ed Zitron]

What's great is if you look where Nova is, wow. It's in the top 25 below Catcoder Pro, Kimmy 2.5, Grock 4.1 Mimo Mini Max, Gwen thinking Kimmy K2. Basically every other model, right?

[Corey Quinn]

Exactly. It's like. Like they're. They're racing neck and neck with Ed's Taxidermy and Frontier AI Lab.

[Ed Zitron]

It really is that, though. It's like something called. Yeah, Ernie from Baidu. Like, every Chinese model appears to cry. That's so funny. What a horrible situation we found ourselves in.

[Corey Quinn]

Well, Amazon prides itself on being frugal. And it turns out that when I have to assume the reason the Titan models that were so bad, they never really saw broad release in light of day was that it's okay. It's going to cost us a billion dollars to train this model. What can you do for 20 million? Like, that is the Amazon ethos Fail is the answer.

[Ed Zitron]

Unless it comes to Capex, though. Like, that's the thing. It feels like what you say there goes directly against how they're dealing with AI. It feels like AI has just poisoned their brains.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, my God. Yes. I wound up doing a. So back when these stuff all started coming out, I had fun with it. I ran a bunch of custom questions against these things, like rank the US Presidents by absorbency and then see how long it's going to bully them into doing it. Or give me some criticisms of Corey Quinn. And one of the early chatgpt things made me question, like, aspects of my life and go home and drink heavily. Whereas I asked one of the early Amazon models that question. And it would have been like exhibit A in the defamation case, except I'd have to prove that anyone took anything Amazon said even slightly seriously.

[Ed Zitron]

Right? It's. It's just weird. There's something That I think that I don't know if AI psychosis is it, but I mentioned this with David Gerard. It's like people getting one shotted by this. It must one shot executives, I think.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, it absolutely does. I use it myself in the curation of my newsletter, for example, because this is a terrific use case and I think it encapsulates my philosophy on this. Where Amazon, I consume all their RSS feeds every week and There are roughly 150 items that come out. So what I do is I have a scoring thing that pops up two columns. Here's the good ones, here's the crap ones and I have a whole rubric that I have put into this. It saves me a tremendous amount of time. I go through and I put some from. I move some back and forth as I read down the list. And increasingly as it learns from my decisions, it's getting it mostly right. It speeds up my workflow. It is convenient. Is this worth changing the entire world for? No, no, it is not. But I'll make hay while the sun shines. Besides, if I'm going to make fun of something, I should be using it so I can understand it, to make fun of it more effectively.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. But would you pay the real rates for it? Because that's what I think is going to break this as well is when these companies start having to charge the real costs, when they have to start paying the margins.

[Corey Quinn]

Right now this is costing me 7 cents a month. I am glad to pay that. I would probably pay as high for that as, I don't know, 20 bucks a month, which again, that's a significant increase there. Sure. But too much beyond that. No. I spent seven years going and doing this by hand. I don't feel the need to stop. I did use Claude code for several weeks to rebuild the entire interface because I had this janky horrible newsletter publication thing that I kept meaning to replace. I looked into what it would take to have an engineer do it between 20 to $50,000. This was just three weeks over the holiday break of prompting the thing and it finally got it dialed in and correct. Now, in practice, if neither one of those two things is a viable option, there's a bunch of stuff off the shelf these days that didn't exist back then that I could have worked with and had a much better base. But this was fun. This was. I could use some software in this small place. The cost of generating this software now from my time perspective is minimal and it fills in a gap. And these things are good at building Tools to solve one very specific problem where these things fall down. Software has always fallen down on this is as soon as the requirements change. I set out a linked list every Monday. I built software myself to handle this. When I started sending out blog posts with it as well, I had to go back to the drawing board and redo an awful lot of lot because, oh, it's a different model. The entire flow changes when I introduce a requirement downstream. When software becomes free and is no longer the bottleneck, more or less, you can build custom tools for any given situation far more effectively. I started writing a bash script to give someone access to. Just run this one command in your term. It'll give you access to this thing. And I started writing it myself, threw it into one of these things. It came out with a much better script as a one off that I don't need again. Could I have done it myself? Yeah, in about four hours. But would I have? No.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing.

[Corey Quinn]

It solves those small problems. They're point solutions. But I'm not firing people for this. I'm not replacing segments of the economy with this. My brother is one of the few people I have heard about being definitely impacted by the rise of AI. Until last year, he was a freelance translator. I'd believe that that feels like it's something that is easily prone to disruption. I buy less stock photography when I can have shitpost images of giraffes on fire in data centers. Now.

[Ed Zitron]

They're not gonna love that.

[Corey Quinn]

They're not.

[Ed Zitron]

They're not gonna love that. The listener's not gonna love that. Oh, no, I don't even. I think AI art is just genuinely ugly. That it would suck the life out of the. Out of the shitpost.

[Corey Quinn]

And I pay for artists to do things correctly.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, good.

[Corey Quinn]

I have stickers that I gave out at Re invent for shitposting AI. And it was bad AI art in a 1950s style. Like a dog with an extra leg, people with extra hands and whatnot. That we hired an illustrator as a human to draw in the style of bad AI. I thought that was a lot of fun for something like this. Yeah. I am paying artists and I'm making it work. I'm building a shitpost meme to throw on Twitter and never think about again. That's the thing, though.

[Ed Zitron]

Posting is an art. Posting is an art.

[Corey Quinn]

And you're. It is.

[Ed Zitron]

You're bringing. There is no Bushido in generating images. But let's move on from this subject because I have one final question.

[Corey Quinn]

Please hit me with it.

[Ed Zitron]

So you've seen this thing about how everyone's freaking out about. And I know you're going to love this. Everyone's like, oh, Claude, code is replacing software that everybody. How funny is it? How ridiculous is it to you? Leading question. I realized the idea that instead of buying on a per seat basis, people are going to just replace SaaS with their own internal shit. I think it's one of the funniest and stupidest things I've ever heard.

[Corey Quinn]

Oh, I think it's a terrific thing that is totally happening because obviously again, I am building software for enterprises. Well, they can just write this code overnight to do it. Yes. They can easily generate a website that purports to do something. But what if they needed that thing to be correct? What if they're, oh, I don't know, signing a billion dollar contract on the result of what that software spins?

[Ed Zitron]

Exactly.

[Corey Quinn]

Maybe yolo slamming it isn't the right answer. We're gonna just replace all the software with custom bespoke stuff. Great. A terrific example I saw is that for payroll anthropic, the company uses adp. Well, why would they do that? They can clearly build their own payroll internally. Because you're not buying the software, you're buying the compliance, the keeping up with all the different jurisdictions in which you operate. You're someone who is going to certify with their reputation that this is going to solve a problem. There are a bunch of things out there, like there's some software that will be disrupted by this picture a bunch of the obnoxious stuff. Like I just want to convert this from one video type to a different video type and you'll find some like random thing for 10 bucks. Yeah, well now Claude code or whatnot is going to fix that because I don't know how FFMPEG command line flags are supposed to work. It does. Great. It's easier than looking it up. Am I going to go and replace actual line of business sort of line? It is a software. I wish, but no.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing as well. People think that people pay for like Salesforce or what have you because they're like, oh, because I have to pay for it. And also just because it's a simple piece of software. No, they're these intricate API rat king things that roll around in their own filth and then you, they get, they maintain them on the back end. Even if even the shittiest cloud software you use has some weird backend stuff they have to constantly maintain because things break and the Bigger the company, the more things that break. And it's just.

[Corey Quinn]

I mean, the Gen1 of all of Salesforce is just an Excel spreadsheet. It is who am I contacting? What is the last thing I did? And the rest. And it gets complex quickly. And where the leap happens is okay. Now it's not just you now it's an entire sales team now you're going to like have some turnover in that sales team over the course of doing business. How do you wind up having a provable chain of issue on this? Someone pops up for three years from now. They said they talked to someone here. We have no record of that because Claude rebuilt it five times this week. Where is that going to live? How is that going to exist?

[Ed Zitron]

And even then it's like audibility, auditability, even. Jesus Christ.

[Corey Quinn]

But this is not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one comment on Hacker News was, this is just rsync with some extra bells and whistles. This isn't a product.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's. Yeah. I mean, even then Dropbox is like. It's not just storage, it is the support services around it. I don't know.

[Corey Quinn]

Well, even Dropbox doesn't want to do what Dropbox does anymore. Every time I use a folder that syncs everywhere is what I loved about Dropbox. Now it's trying to basically compete with Zoom and Google Docs and all the other stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello, files. Well, Corey, let's wrap it up there. We've done some good hating. We can find. I'll have some good links for you. We'll link to Duck Bill. Link to last week in Amazon, was it last weekend?

[Corey Quinn]

Aws.com with an obnoxious sarcastic platypus.

[Ed Zitron]

That's right.

[Corey Quinn]

One more use of AI before we go. That I think you'll appreciate if people email me. Corey quinnuckbillhq.com and I don't like what you're doing and you're trying to sell me something. I now have an AI powered executive assistant in the form of Billy the Platypus, who will tell you in corporate appropriate ways to go fuck yourself. Which is just chef's kiss, because I can't say that to people. I have a reputation. The obnoxious platypus responding to salespeople does not have this constraint. This is the one liability shift I have found that actually works. And you can blame AI for things you personally approved.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I don't endorse the AI Platypus. You should get a real one. You should get a real one.

[Corey Quinn]

The customs officials had many questions I did not wish to answer.

[Ed Zitron]

Train the Platypus, Corey all right, you've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. You'll have a monologue this week, I guess. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osawski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at easyteroffline or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed.app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Corey Quinn]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit

[Ed Zitron]

our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out

[Corey Quinn]

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.