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- [00:00]
Ed Zitron
This is an iheart podcast on fox one you can stream your favorite news sports and entertainment live all in one app it's raw and unfiltered this is the best thing ever watch breaking news as it breaks breaking tonight we're following two major stories and catch history in the making debate drama touchdown it's all here baby fox one we live for.
- [00:32]
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- [02:04]
Ed Zitron
Restrictions may apply mint is still fifteen.
- [02:06]
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- [02:34]
Ed Zitron
Mint mobile dot com call zone media hello i'm ed zitron and this is better offline better offline we finally reached the end of our three part how to argue with an ai booster series big strongman are standing outside of the better offline studio suspended two hundred feet above the las vegas strip with tears in their eyes and they're saying sir sir it's the most beautiful podcast i've ever heard please stop recording it everyone else will feel insufficient when they hear it no no i have to continue i'm afraid my listeners need me but okay seriously folks if there's anything i want you to take home so far is that the arguments that these people these ai sycophants make they they crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny and yet these arguments work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who don't understand the rotten economics of ai or because they force the opposite party to surrender their reason and to exit the planes of reality to which i say fuck that absolutely not this is a hill i'm prepared to die on and i'll hope that you'll all be standing with me side by side now in the first episode we shook away the claims that it's the early days for ai and we just need to give it more time then i took the idea that generative ai is like uber or fiber optic networking to industries that both earned a lot of money at the start but are otherwise nothing like generative ai and now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments these are the worst of the worst booster quips here we go ultra booster quip i thought about recording that with a bunch of reverb but it didn't really work out for me but i wanted to do it once but anyway their argument is.
- [04:19]
Kevin Roose
Ahem ai is just like amazon web services a massive investment that took a while to go profitable and everybody hated.
- [04:26]
Ed Zitron
Amazon for it now i actually covered this in depth in the haters guide to the ai bubble but the long and short of it is that amazon web services is a platform a necessity with an obvious choice and has burned about ten percent of what amazon and all of them have burned chasing generative ai and had also proven demand before building it also amazon web services was break even within three years and openai was founded in fucking twenty fifteen and even if you start from november twenty twenty two by amazon web services standards should be break even by now but now i'll quote myself amazon no wait sorry that's the boosters amazon web services was created out of necessity amazon's infrastructure needs were so great that it had effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything to theoretically everywhere handling both the traffic from customers delivering the software that runs amazon dot com quickly and reliably and well making sure things were stable it didn't need to come up with a reason for people to run web applications they were already doing so themselves but in ways that cost a lot more were inflexible and required specialist server skills amazon web services took something that people already did and what there was already a proven demand for and made it better and scaled it eventually google and microsoft would join the fray i editorialized a bit there but i can do that with my own work now a common booster quid by the way is for them to.
- [05:48]
Kevin Roose
Say well this ai company they've got.
- [05:50]
Ed Zitron
High annualized revenues and as i've discussed in the past this metric is basically month times twelve and while it's a fine measure for normal high gross margin businesses like software as a service companies it isn't for ai it doesn't account for churn which is when people leave it also is a number intentionally used to make a company sound more successful so you can say two hundred million dollars annualized revenue instead of sixteen point six million dollars a month and you're also meant to butcher you heard they said two hundred million annualized but you heard two hundred million your mind did that was a bad blinket reference but i'll continue they want you to think two hundred million they want you to think that's what they'll make more often than not if they mention an annualized number that number will not be how much they make that year also if they're using this number it's likely not consistent now if they bring this up you should just say to them hey how much profit is the company making and also how much are they burning at this point they will i think mace you i mean with the spray or an actual mace ai boosters are strange now they'll also say well ai this ai company's in growth mode and.
- [06:55]
Kevin Roose
They'Ll pull the profit lever when it's.
- [06:57]
Ed Zitron
Time and the answer to that is always going to be why have none of them done this none not one not one of them now a booster will burst through your door and go.
- [07:08]
Kevin Roose
Ai agi agi and then there's that.
- [07:11]
Ed Zitron
Whale bullshit again it's always about the will with these fuckers we do not know how thinking works in humans and thus cannot extrapolate it to a machine and at the very least human beings have the ability to re evaluate things and learn a thing that llms cannot do and will never do we do not know how to get to agi sam altman said in june that openai was now confident they knew how to build agi as they have traditionally understood it then in august altman said that agi was not a super useful term and that the point of all this is it doesn't really matter and it's just this continuing exponential of modern subtle capability that we'll rely on for more and more things i'm really tired of people quoting this guy he doesn't make any fucking sense read out read anything he says out loud and it's just really just total bullshit even meta's chief ai scientist leanne lecun says it isn't possible with transformer based models to make agi we don't know if agi is possible and anyone claiming they do is lying anyone who's talking about agi is talking about fan fiction again ask them how they feel about banjo and kazooie do you think they made love actually that's a if next time someone brings up agi to you seriously bring up banjo and kazooie and their romantic involvement i actually that i think that that's the only response you should give now stop humoring them it is fan fiction but putting banjo and kazooie aside there's also a really stupid booster thing they do which is i'm hearing from people.
- [08:40]
Kevin Roose
Deep within the ai industry that there's some sort of ult powerful models they're.
- [08:44]
Ed Zitron
Not talking about and this by the way is hogwash nothing different than your buddy's friend's uncle who works at nintendo that says mario is coming to the playstation ilya suitskever and mira murati raised billions of dollars for companies with no product let alone a product roadmap and they did so because they saw an opportunity for a grift and to throw a bunch of money at compute for no reason anyone who has secret shit is not talking about it because it doesn't exist also if someone from deep within the industry has told somebody big things are coming they're doing so to con them or make them think that they are privileged information ask for specifics and if they say i couldn't possibly tell you then they're full of shit they're full of crap they are full of doo doo and if they get vague get specific oh it's going to be able to automate all the things what things how how's it automate them oh i don't know then you don't know shit about fuck now talking about not knowing shit about fuck here's another.
- [09:37]
Kevin Roose
Booster quip chatgpt is so popular seven hundred million people use it weekly it's one of the most popular websites on the internet its popularity proves its utility.
- [09:46]
Ed Zitron
Look at all the pa paying customers now that paying customers part we'll get to in a second but this argument is poised as a comeback to my suggestion that ai is not particularly useful a proof point that this movement is not inherently wasteful or that there are in fact use cases for chatgpt that are lasting meaningful or important i fundamentally disagree in fact i believe chatgpt and llms in general have been marketed based on lies of inference which i realize is ironic i know it's pretty clever i had a whole blog written called the lie of inference that kind of became this it wasn't very good though this is this is good don't say it's bad i also have grander concerns and suspicions about what openai considers a user and how it counts revenue let me give you an example they claim to have five million business customers yet five hundred thousand of those are from a fifteen million dollars year deal year long daily with cal state university which works out to around two dollars fifty cents a user a month openai has also started doing dollar one a month trials of its dollar thirty a month team subscription and one has to wonder how many of those subs counted in the total and indeed for how long i do not know the scale of these offers nor how long openai has been offering them a redditor posted about this one dollar for a month deal a few months ago saying that openai was offering five seats at once so one buck for a month per se how many people cancel after that who knows maybe they just hope they don't in fact i found a few people talking about these deals and even one adding that they were offered an annual dollar ten a month chatgpt plus subscription that's like not like ten dollars a month for just one month that's for twelve months with one person saying a few weeks ago that they'd seen people offered that same deal for canceling their subscription and actually i got the same thing when i tried to cancel yes i pay for chatgpt i need to actually use the fucking thing to criticize it when i tried to cancel it was like hey do you want three months for ten bucks a piece i was like sure just to prove my point suspicious but there is a greater problem at play by the way and it goes beyond pricing and it's that chatgpt and openai has been marketed based on lies so chatgpt has seven hundred million weekly active users openai has yet to provide a definition yes i've asked them which means that an active user could be defined as somebody who has gone to chatgpt once in the space of a week this term is extreme extremely flimsy and doesn't really tell us much yes it's a lot of people but how active are they similar web says that in july twenty twenty five the chatgpt dot com had one point two eight seven billion total visits making it very popular what do these facts actually mean though as i said previously chatgpt has had probably the most sustained pr campaign for anything outside of a presidency or a pop star every single article about ai mentions openai or chatgpt every single feature launch no matter how small gets a slew of coverage every single time you hear ai you're made.
- [12:35]
Kevin Roose
To think of chatgpt by a tech.
- [12:37]
Ed Zitron
Media that's never stopped to think about their role in the hype or their responsibility to their readers and as the hype has grown the publicity compounds because the natural thing for a journalist to do when everybody is talking about something is to talk about it more chatgpt's immediate popularity may have been viral but the media took the ball and ran with it and then proceeded to tell people it did stuff it did not people were pressured to try this service under false pretenses something that continues to happen to this day and i'm going to give you a really fucking grisly example when i discovered this when i went and looked at this it filled me full of rage it's disgraceful what happened on march fifteenth twenty twenty three kevin roose of the new york times would say that openai's gpt four was.
- [13:18]
Kevin Roose
Exciting and scary and that it was.
- [13:20]
Ed Zitron
Exacerbating in his words the dizzy and.
- [13:23]
Kevin Roose
Vertiginous feeling i've been getting whenever i think about ai lately wondering if he.
- [13:28]
Ed Zitron
Was experiencing future shock then described how it was an indeterminate level of better and then said something that immediately sounded.
- [13:35]
Kevin Roose
Ridiculous in one test conducted by an ai safety research group that hooked gpt four up to a number of other systems gpt four was able to hire human taskrabbit worker to do a simple online task for it solving a capture test without alerting the person to the fact it was a robot the ai even lied to the robot about why it needed the capture done concocting a story about a vision impairment now this.
- [14:00]
Ed Zitron
Doesn'T sound even remotely real now but this was two years ago so i went and looked up the paper and pretty much everything that roose described was illustrative i e it doesn't really seem whether it happened now he's referring to the safety card which every model has that lists all the measures used to train it and such and this safety card led to the perpetration of one of the earliest falsehoods and most eagerly parroted lies about this fucking industry and that was that chatgpt and generative ai is capable of agentic actions outlet after outlet and some people who should definitely have known better led by kevin roose eagerly interpreted and entire series of events that took place that doesn't remotely make sense starting with the fact that i don't think you can hire a taskrabbit to solve a captcha or at the very least without a contrived situation where you create an empty task and ask them to complete it why not use mechanical turk or fiverr there are people right now offering that service there were actual real things but you know me i'm a curious little critter so i went further and followed this the citation from the safety card to the study and this is by metr and the research page it turns out that what actually happened was metr had a researcher copy and paste the generated responses from the model and otherwise handled the entire interaction with the taskrabbit and based on the plurality of taskrabbit contractors it appears to have taken multiple times on top of that it appears that openai and meta that's metr sorry were prompting the model on what to say which kind of defeats the point like we don't naturally know what they prompted it to do and when you look even says it does like chain of thought reasoning which didn't really exist back then and if it did it was extremely like chain of thought is reasoning and that came out end of twenty twenty four this whole thing is absolutely insane it's absurd that anyone wrote about it is real what happened just to be really blunt is that they if they even opened a taskrabbit it's really not obvious whether they actually did this they had to go to the model and say okay i'm opening a taskrabbit window and now the person has said this and now this is it just doesn't sound real at all but even if it did it's very obvious that they were telling the model what to say and then copy pasting the response and it took them multiple tries it took me five whole minutes to find this article partly because it was cited on the gpt four system card i then read it within that time then wrote this part of the script it didn't require any technical knowledge other than the ability to read it is transparently blatantly obvious that gpt four did not hire a taskrabbit or indeed make any of actions it was prompted to and they did not use show the prompts they used likely because they had to use so many of them if they even did it anyone falling for this is a mark and openai should have gone out of their way to correct people instead they sat back and let people publish outright misinformation.
- [16:58]
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- [17:59]
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- [19:04]
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- [19:35]
Ed Zitron
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from them very very soon keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince go to quince dot com beta for free shipping on your order and three hundred sixty five day returns that's q dash u dash i dash n dash c dash e dot com better free shipping and three hundred sixty five day returns quince dot com better roose along with his co host casey newton would go on to describe this example at length on a podcast that week describing an entire narrative where the human actually gets suspicious and gpt four reasons out loud that it should not reveal that it is a robot it's not a reasoning model at which point the taskrabbit solves the capture during this conversation newton gasps and says oh my god twice and when he asks roosevelt how does this model understand that in order to succeed at its task it has to deceive the human roose responds we don't know that is the unsatisfying answer and newton laughs and states we need to pull the plug i mean again what disgraceful embarrassing reprehensible all that and more on the hard fork podcast published weekly you can cut that that ads are free fellas credulousness aside the gpt four marketing campaign was incredibly effective creating an aura that allowed openai to take advantage of the v of its offering as people including members of the media willfully filled in the blanks for them altman has really never had to work to sell his product think about it have you ever heard openai tell you what chatgpt can do or go to great lengths to describe its actual abilities even on openai's own page for chatgpt the text is extremely vague you scroll down you're told that chatgpt can write brainstorm edit and explore ideas with you it can generate and debug code automatically repetitive tasks not clear what the tasks are and help you learn new apis with chatgpt you can learn something new dive into a hobby answer complex questions and analyze data and create charts what repetitive tasks who knows how am i learning unclear it's got thinking built in what that means is also unclear unexplained and thus allows a user to incorrectly believe that chatgpt has a brain and thinks to be clear i know what reasoning means but this website does not attempt to explain what thinking means you can also offload complex tasks from start to finish with an agent which can according to openai think and act proactively choosing from a toolbox of agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer this is an egregious lie employing the kind of weasel wording that would be used to torture ir baboon for an eternity precise in its vagueness openai's copy is honed to make reporters willing to simply write down whatever they see and interpret it in the most positive light and thus the lie of inference began what chatgpt meant was muddied from the beginning and thus chatgpt's actual outcomes have never been fully defined what chatgpt could do became a kind of folklore a non specific form of automation that could write code and generate copy and images that can analyze data all things that are true but one can infer much greater meaning and use from one can infer that automation means the automation of anything related text or that write code means write the entirety of a computer program openai's chatgpt agent is not by any extension of the word and i quote already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks but it has not in any meaningful sense committed to any actual outcomes as a result potential users subject to a twenty four seven marketing campaign have been pushed towards a website that can theoretically do anything or nothing and have otherwise been left to their own devices the endless gaslighting societal pressure media pressure and pressure from their bosses has pushed hundreds of millions of people to try a product that even its creators can't really describe or don't feel compelled to and if i was wrong we'd have real use cases by now and better metrics than weekly active users as i've said in the past openai is deliberately using these weekly active users so that it doesn't have to publish their monthly active users which i believe would be much higher now why wouldn't it do this well openai as i've mentioned has twenty million paying chatgpt subscribers and five million business customers with no explanation of what the difference might be really other than it involves teams and edu but not pro anyway this is already a mediocre three point five percent conversion rate yeah it's monthly active users which are likely eight hundred or nine hundred million but these are guesses would make that rate lower than three percent which is pretty terrible considering everyone says this shit is the future i'm also tired of having people claim that search or brainstorm or companions are a lasting meaningful business model i'm really tired of it i'm tired of being told this again and again and again that's not what chatgpt is going to actually survive on let's move on here's another booster grip though openai.
- [25:02]
Kevin Roose
Is making tons of money that's proof they're a successful company and you are.
- [25:05]
Ed Zitron
Wrong somehow so openai announced that it has hit its first one billion dollars month on august twentieth twenty twenty five on cnbc in fact weirdly enough by the way that quote was not in the tv interview but anyway this also brings it exactly in line with my estimated five point two six billion in revenue that i believe it has made at the end of july did that in a newsletter please pay me however remember what the mit study that i mentioned said enterprise adoption is high but transformation is low there are tons of companies throwing money at ai but they are not seeing actual returns openai's growth is the single most prominent company in a ai and if we're honest one of the most prominent in software writ large makes sense but at some point will slow because the actual returns of businesses are not there there if there were we'd have one article where we could point a chat gpt integration that helped scale a company or save a bunch of money make a bunch of money written in plain english and not in the gobbledygook of profit improvement also openai is projected to make twelve point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty five how exactly will it do that is it really making one point five billion dollars a month by the end of the year even if it does is the idea that it it keeps burning ten billion dollars or more a year every year into a tennis what actual revenue potential does openai have long term its products are about as good as everybody else's cost about the same and do the same things chatgpt is basically the same product as claude or grok maybe less mecca hitler or any number of different llms the only real advantages that openai has are infrastructure and brand recognition these models have clearly hit a wall in training hitting diminishing returns meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing service at scale nothing more it isn't making its business cheaper other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it other than the site in abilene texas where it's promised oracle thirty billion dollars a year in twenty twenty five i'm sorry i don't buy it i don't buy that this company will continue growing forever and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon when openai opens stargate abilene it will turn profitable how i hear this one a good amount how how how how how how's it gonna happen nobody ever answers no one ever answers actually how this company will become profitable it's fucking insane to me nobody ever answers the question efficiencies efficiencies they're gonna be efficient they're gonna be efficient if you're gonna say chat gpt five i wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient in fact it's less efficient and i'm sure one of you is gonna argue well you know they could do their custom silicon they have a ten billion dollar deal with broadcom how they fucking pay him for that also you realize that well actually no just no no you're right they're gonna get the chip from broadcom because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech right it always works and it's always great and it has no problems that's what i always that's that's why i've been with pretty much every first time they make anything in tech anyways move on you'll hear boosters also be like well my brother's friends dog uses chat gpt and i love it well i heard this happen or my mate as it in this or i heard this person or i use it in this way what before we go any further just to be clear though is when you hear a booster bring up ai and they'll say something make sure they're talking about generative ai are they actually talking about generative ai is this a large language model thing it's very very very common for people to conflate ai with generative ai there are many different kinds of ai make sure that the ai booster whatever they're claiming whatever they're telling you is actually about large language models there are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up up llms have nothing to do with folding at home autonomous cars or most disease research but okay let's do a speedrun using ai led researchers to discover forty four percent more materials no it didn't mit has now withdrawn this paper citing concerns about its integrity i've linked it in the show notes there's a huge rundown here's another quote ai is so profoundly powerful it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job while young people have been having trouble finding jobs there's no proof that ai is the reason every piece of coverage you're reading is citing an oxford economics report that amidst a bunch of numbers says and i quote there are signs that entry level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates a statement that it does not back up other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along the sheer employment declines in some roles since twenty twenty two suggested some displacement effect from ai and digging deeper the largest displacement seems to be entry level jobs normally filled by recent graduates there's otherwise no data anyone making this point is grasping at straws i go into this in more detail in a newsletter called sincerity wins the war which i've linked to but it's one of the worst reported stories in tech and now i'm actually going to ad lib for a second because i forgot while writing this script there was also this thing that came out of stanford that said there's been a thirteen percent drop in jobs affected by ai and this was used as proof that ai was taking them now curious little critter that i am i went and read the that what it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to ai and being affected by ai they saw they were going down they went oh it's ai that did that they've done they fart around with various statistics but that's long and short of it give you an example of one of the jobs accountancy now any accountants listening big up to my accountant listeners there's been a hiring crisis in accountancy for years people are not becoming cpas the reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them them it's nothing to do with ai they like are you imagine if anyone put half as much effort into writing up these stories as i did writing up one of these booster quips but here's another one that ai is replacing young coders and it is not in fact amazon's cloud chief just said that replacing junior employees with ai is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard there is no actual real evidence that this is the case every single story you have read is anecdotal anyone peddling this has an agenda or is not reading every ceo mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that ai is replacing people because ai can't replace people i will add an aside there are people's jobs that have been replaced by ai translators transcribers brian over at blood is in the machine blood in the machine even sorry brian he's doing a great job on covering this there are people that have lost jobs these people are losing it because their bosses are fucking stupid because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work slopping it up that's not happening at the knowledge worker scale nor is it happening at the coder scale everyone telling you that has an agenda but boosters will also claim that ai is doing science research somehow or will do it and it won't i've included a write up about why foundation models can't do this someone's going to read it and say but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of llms and the reason he says this is because i shit you not the llms aren't incapable of doing scientific research he says they're insufficient which is the same thing they're insufficient anyway he claims they're also not dead weight for science then spends hundreds of words meandering around that thing to kiss up to ai boosters for some reason i assume because they've terrified him by being really annoying and these people need to go outside and touch grass now a lot of people think they're going to tell me that they use ai all the time and that will change my mind i cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use case is every use case i hear is one of the following i use it for brainstorming to which i say who cares not a business model it's commoditized i use it like search who cares it's not even good at search it's fine it's not even better than the low bar set by google search the results it gives aren't great and the links are deliberately made smaller which gets in the way of me clicking them so i can actually look at the content if you're using chatgpt for search you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at at if i'm wrong great you now have a functional search engine congratulations.
- [33:05]
Kevin Roose
Well i use it for research and.
- [33:07]
Ed Zitron
If you use it for research you do not respect natural research you want a quick answer it's that simple these reports are slop i've read many many many ai reports and they're not good.
- [33:16]
Kevin Roose
Sorry well i use it for coding.
- [33:19]
Ed Zitron
Or know someone who used it for coding and i'll get to that in a minute but all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about this stuff as if it was changing society none of these use cases come close to explaining why i should be impressed by generative it also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that ai did for you once we are so past the point when any of that matters ai is being sold as a transformational technology and i am yet to see it transform anything i am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me or even one thing that feels possible now that wasn't possible before this isn't even me being a cynic i'm ready to be impressed i just haven't been impressed in three fucking years and it's getting boring also tell me with a straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure remember ai boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful none of these use cases are powerful sounding but sir you're back great.
- [34:11]
Kevin Roose
Sir vibe coding is changing the world allowing people who can't code to make.
- [34:15]
Ed Zitron
Software now this is one of the most brain dead takes about ai encoding and it's that vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software and you'll never guess what kevin roose covered this she did this article while writing the script i hadn't even noticed need literally anyway while technically true in that one can just type build me a website into one of many coding environments this does not mean said website is functional secure or useful let's make this really clear ai cannot just handle coding go into the show notes and read this piece i've linked from colton vogie i have actually interviewed him now he's going to be coming out in the next few weeks the episode the interview it's fucking brilliant and then the other i've linked to by nick suresh if you contact me about ai encoding without reading these i will send them to you and nothing else or crush you like a car in a garbage dump into a cube one or the other i will choose at the time also show me a vibe coded company please not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features a fully functional secure and useful app that has made money and made by somebody who cannot read or write code you won't be able to because it is impossible vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals and our ai coding environments making people faster i don't think so in fact a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers nineteen percent slower the reason that nobody is vibe coding an entire company is because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go and oftentimes when you add something it breaks something else this is all well and good if you actually understand code it's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or claude code like a kid at an arcade machine turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo's going on vibe coders are also awful for the already negative margins of most ai coding environments as every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise burning tokens in pursuit of a goal they themselves don't really understand vibe coding doesn't work it will not work and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance and at worst supporting a campaign built on lies.
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- [40:05]
Ed Zitron
And this is all built up to one final point i'm no longer accepting half baked arguments if you're an ai booster please come up with better arguments and if you truly believe in this stuff you should have a firmer grasp on why you do so it's been three years and the best some of you have is it's really popular or uber also burned money your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true and it's deeply embarrassing then again there are many well intentioned people who aren't necessarily ai boosters who repeat these arguments regardless of how thinly framed they are in part because we live in a high information low processing society where people tend to put great faith in people who are confident in what they say and sound smarter jason i also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out or seeming stupid is being used against them if you don't understand something it's likely because the people you're reading or hearing it from don't either if a company takes a promise and you you don't understand how they'll deliver on it it's their job to explain how and your job to suggest it is implausible in clear and defined language this has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an outright failure of journalism i have never seen more misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career and it's largely peddled by reporters who either don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible in part because all their peers are doing the same thing and saying the same nonsense as things begin to collapse and they sure look like they're collapsing but i'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet it will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say never have i seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than sam altman saying that gpt five was actually bad and that gpt six will be even better members of the media sam altman does not respect you he is not your friend clammy sam altman is not secretly confiding in you clammy will thinks you are stupid and easily manipulated and will print anything he says says largely in part because many members of the media will print exactly what he says whenever he says it and to be clear if you wrote about gpt six and made fun of it that's great but let's close by discussing the very nature of ai skepticism and the so called void between those who hate ai and those who love ai and from the perspective of one of the most prominent people in the skeptic camp critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace patience or in many cases hospitality when it comes to their position while they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side it's always framed as the work of a firebrand an outlier or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify skeptics are demonized their points under constant scrutiny their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or intellectual weakness skeptic and critic are words said with a sneer of trepidation that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that ai is the most powerful special thing ever to not immediately fall in love with something that everybody is talking about is to be framed as a hater to have oneself introduced with the words not everyone agrees or on forty percent of your appearances by comparison ai boosters are the first to get tv appearances and offers to be on panels their coverage featured prominently on tech meme selling slop like books called shit like the future of intelligence masters of the brain featuring eighteen interviews with different ceo's that all say the same thing they don't have to justify their love they simply have to remember all the right terms chirping out test time compute and the cost of inference is going down enough times to simon wario amade to give them an hour long interview where he says the models they are in years going to be the most powerful schoolteacher ever built and by the way yeah i did sell a book because my shit fucking bangs my shit rocks i'm not i'm i'm not gonna be too smug but like i put a lot of effort into this and i research it very well others should try harder i have consistent deeply sourced arguments that i've built over the course of years i didn't become a hater because i'm a contrarian i became a hater because the shit that these fucking oafs have done to the computer pisses me off i did the man that destroyed google search because i wanted to know why google search sucked i wrote sam altman free because at the time i didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath everything i do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology i started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with three hundred subscribers and sixty views and have written it as an exploration of subjects that grows as i write i do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what i am and if that's strange to you well i'm a strange man but at least i'm an honest one i do have a chip on my shoulder and that i really do not like it when people try to make other people feel stupid especially when they do so as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good i write this stuff out because i have an intellectual interest i like writing and by writing i'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology and talking it out actually feels good it's an intellectual exercise that i really enjoy i happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month and i'm not specifying where those people go and if you think that i've grown this by being a hater you are doing yourself the disservice of underestimating me which i will use to my advantage by writing deeper more meaningful and more insightful things than you and then i'll say them with lots of curse words on this podcast disgust i've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again and make billions doing so and all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like google facebook and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth i can't manufacture my disgust nor is it hard to nor can i manufacture whatever it is inside me that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things i don't know if i take this too seriously whether i don't take it seriously enough because i keep saying fuck and shoot but i'm honored that i'm able to do so and i really appreciate everyone who listens reads or engages with me in any way i really do love you all for listening i know that this was a long three parter i've enjoyed recording it i've done lots of retakes matt osowski love you man sorry for all of this i'll catch you next episode thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattossowski dot com m a t t o s o w dash k dash i dot com you can email me at ezetteroffline dot com or visit betteroffline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter i also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed at 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 for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media dot com or check us out on the iheartradio app apple podcasts or wherever.
- [46:50]
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- [49:46]
Ed Zitron
Is an iheart podcast.