Monologue: AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak

Summary

Better Offline – Monologue: "AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak" (May 15, 2026)

Host: Ed Zitron
Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)

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Episode Overview

In this solo monologue, tech industry veteran Ed Zitron delivers an unsparing critique of the modern tech and AI hype cycle. He argues that the current AI gold rush—propped up by staggering fundraising rounds from OpenAI, Anthropic, and their backers—is creating a wasteful bubble, riddled with opacity, questionable accounting, and a tech industry that is weaker and less innovative for it. Drawing on recent reporting, financial documents, and his own experience, Zitron interrogates the promises and realities of artificial intelligence, with biting humor and a call for more skepticism from both media and industry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Data Center and Capacity Hype vs. Reality

• Data Center Delays: Zitron critiques the narrative that AI is driving an immense build-out of data center capacity. In fact, most centers announced in 2023 and 2024 aren't completed, and very little genuine new capacity is coming online.
  • “What you mean is that data centers are under construction. They are not, for the most part, being finished.” (04:36)
• Questionable Capacity Claims: Microsoft, he says, obfuscates operational vs. theoretical capacity; their reported figures don’t match up with reality.
  • “How much capacity do you have, Satya? Why don't we know? … Why are you still using Run rate? This is strange. What's going on.” (05:57)
• Corporate Evasiveness: Attempts to get straight answers from corporations about AI returns or real operational numbers are routinely ignored.
  • “I actually reached out to Microsoft to confirm these things and they said they'd get back to me last Monday and then just stopped replying. That's...what people do when they're hiding something.” (06:30)

2. Opaque Finances and Accounting Games

• AI Companies’ Fundraising: Both OpenAI and Anthropic are raising at an unprecedented scale, yet clear details about their use of funds, profitability, or even revenue are missing.
  • “If OpenAI closes this entire $122 billion round ... OpenAI will have, if they successfully do this, would have raised over $160 billion in the space of a year.” (08:23)
• Accounting Tricks & Run Rate Inflation: Zitron suggests companies like Anthropic may be inflating revenue via creative accounting—counting pre-sold API tokens as current revenue instead of spreading it over time.
  • “Pre-selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR is a way it makes sense and also is not the first time this has happened … some of them in the dot com bubble.” (10:32)
• Lack of Scrutiny: Zitron laments that mainstream media and even financial reporters fail to challenge AI unicorns' numbers or question their claims.
  • “It's ridiculous that I am somehow unique in the way I cover this … it's much easier to not scrutinize these companies and just applaud whenever you see a big number.” (11:06)
• CFOs’ Opacity: OpenAI’s own CFO admits the company isn’t ready for the scrutiny of going public, despite having billions in cash raised.
  • “According to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fisher, they are ... ‘not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being a public company.’ That's pretty worrying to me …” (08:54)

3. AI Product Hype vs. Reality

• Lack of Real Impact: Four years into the AI boom, Zitron asks: What has substantively changed for users or businesses?
  • “I'm just not sure what it is everybody's excited about. What are the big AI applications that are changing my life? … leading to someone's stock crashing based on the theoretical damage that Anthropic's product could cause without anybody actually trying it or verifying what it does or even explaining why it fucking matters.” (15:29)
• Flak and Obfuscation: He argues the constant drip of new AI “products” creates a fog of hype that replaces scrutiny or actual demonstrations of value.
  • “Anthropic's releasing so much stuff is its flak. It's meant to be an impossible to pass blob of different things that create the gestalt of an indomitable company that can do anything because the markets and the media don't bother to check.” (16:08)

4. Coding with LLMs: Weakening the Industry

• Artificially Boosted Output, Degraded Quality: AI code generation may let mediocre engineers simulate productivity, but results in buggier, less robust software.
  • “This allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality and security of software … engineer’s torpor—a state where your senses are dulled and you stop giving as much of a shit until your shit breaks …” (17:52)
• Anecdotal Breakdown: Zitron lists popular user software products (iPhones, video games, Google Docs, password managers) with endemic glitches, arguing AI tools have only made things worse.
  • “A lot of popular video games crash regularly. The Madden franchise has looked like total shit for years and is getting worse each time … Even the Apple Notes app I use constantly doesn't sync right at random for no reason … Everything's a fucking mess. Nothing is smooth or easy.” (20:12)
• Risks of AI “Agent” Overuse: The more companies rely on LLM-generated code and distributed “agents,” the more unpredictable—and expensive—systems become.
  • “The more agency you give a coding model, the less you understand what it is you’re building … the shit isn’t good enough, it’s not getting good enough and it cannot be trusted.” (18:45)
• Token Spending Madness: Massive token expenditures are failing to produce meaningful improvements.
  • “Any company that spends anything more than 5% on their head count on tokens is a mark … Your businesses are not getting better. Your CEOs have AI psychosis.” (21:56)

5. The Decay of Software and User Experience

• Software Bloat and Instability: Rants about endless logins, instability, and tracking cookies, with no reliable “panacea” for users.
  • “I've seen it with my own fucking eyes. Same with Last password. Same with Bitwarden. The state of these fucking companies is dogshit.” (23:23)
• Industry Delusion: Zitron repeatedly calls out how many VCs, CEOs, and even engineers have become “gullible marks,” maintaining “AI psychosis.”
  • “I think it’s made a select few people genuinely mentally ill in a way that we’re yet to account for. And I don’t mean random people. I mean prominent VCs and CEOs and a lot of software engineers who are obsessed with this stuff, who have now been irredeemably proven to be insane, gullible marks.” (24:58)

6. AI’s Trillion Dollar Spend – For What?

• No Clear ROI: The biggest tech firms have spent over $800 billion on AI build-outs with little to show in terms of profitability or improved outcomes.
  • “A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses across the board to varying degrees for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain and impossible to expl clear terms like does it make more money than is bent? It's not profitable. The state of software is arguably worse.” (25:50)

7. Refuting Conspiratorial Explanations

• No Grand Conspiracy – Just Bungling: Zitron rejects popular conspiracy theories that AI investment is secretly driven by government or military purposes. Instead, the industry is directionless, dominated by “cowards and followers” burning capital for unclear reasons.
  • “Don’t give these people credit. Don’t give these people credit. Or a strategy that does not exist. In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. OpenAI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive and wasteful bubble in history. Zitron Out.” (26:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We're four years in and even the largest companies still describe their return on investment like they're the fucking riddler.” (05:42) — Ed Zitron
• “If OpenAI closes this entire $122 billion round ... OpenAI will have, if they successfully do this, would have raised over $160 billion in the space of a year. And even if it doesn't, it will have ... spent most of around $70 billion or more in the space of a year. That's so much money. Where has it gone?” (08:23)
• “Pre-selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR … is not the first time this has happened. Plenty of startups did this bullshit in the dot com bubble.” (10:32)
• “Every time they do, it's a weird dance involving someone saying, I now get a summary of some stuff from my openclaw or … some sort of multi agent coding fiasco that never actually ends with functional or impressive software ...” (16:44)
• “This allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality and security of software because people trust these people who cannot do their jobs, which has begun to decay … with the rise of AI coding tools.” (17:52)
• “CEOs have AI psychosis. The more they speak to the machine that tells them they're the smartest, sexiest boy in the room, the more they'll be convinced that you must join them.” (22:21)
• “A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses … for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain and impossible to expl clear terms like does it make more money than is bent?” (25:53)
• “In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. OpenAI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive and wasteful bubble in history. Zitron Out.” (26:59)

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Timestamps to Key Segments

• [01:36] — Monologue intro & state of data center construction
• [04:36] — The gap between projected and actual data center capacity
• [05:57] — Corporate evasion around AI economics
• [06:30] — Microsoft stonewalling requests for information
• [08:23] — Scale of AI fundraising and financial opacity
• [10:32] — On pre-selling tokens and dubious revenue accounting practices
• [11:06] — Lack of media scrutiny
• [15:29] — What is the value-add of current AI applications?
• [17:52] — Coding with LLMs: Impact on software quality
• [20:12] — Anecdotes: The endless stream of broken/unstable software
• [21:56] — The token-spend problem and “AI psychosis” in tech leadership
• [24:58] — On industry delusion and “gullible marks”
• [25:50] — $800 billion invested; doubtful returns
• [26:59] — Refuting conspiracy theories & closing call for accountability

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Tone and Delivery

Ed Zitron's style in this episode is irreverent, profane, and highly skeptical—a cathartic blend of humor and exasperation. He deploys sharp metaphors (“like the fucking riddler,” “praying to a soulless non existent God”), candid anecdotes from his own tech usage, and open frustration at the broader lack of media and industry accountability. Listeners receive both a scathing critique and a cautionary plea to ask obvious, hard questions in a world awash with “growth at all costs” hype.

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Bottom Line:
“AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak” is a passionate, incisive monologue confronting the unreality of today's AI and tech hype. Ed Zitron exposes questionable financial practices, the degradation of software quality, and the tech industry's collective delusions—challenging listeners and fellow media to cut through the hype and seek the answers that powerful firms keep avoiding.

Transcript

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Anyway, earlier in this week I ran a newsletter that I'll likely be turning into a few episodes about how few data centers are actually getting built, and found that the vast majority of those that broke ground in 2023 and 2024 are yet to be completed. My working theory is now that barely any capacity is coming online and that's why Anthropic had to buy up all 300 megawatts of Elon Musk's Colossus 1 data center cap. Because there are no other options out there other than the guy who said that Anthropic was misanthropic and evil. An embarrassing insult when you could just say that Dario Amadei sounds like he's doing Elizabeth Holmes. Steve Jobs voice In any case, I think we're in the good old fashioned bullshit phase of the bubble. I know some of you will say, but data centers are getting built. But what you mean is that data centers are under construction. They are not, for the most part, being finished. Across every Microsoft data center announced since 2023, I found two Fairwater, Wisconsin and Atlanta that were anything close to complete. And despite Microsoft saying that they're both operational, they're actually both stuck on the initial phases. I think there's some capacity online, but even then I'm not really sure. I saw an article in the local newspaper saying that Fairwater, Wisconsin wasn't even working. Now, Microsoft has also claimed that it brought on a gigawatt of capacity in each of the last two quarters. And I think it's using a different definition of capacity than OPER operational data centers. It's weird. It's fucking strange. I'm sorry, I know I'm meant to be articulate and talk about economics and some shite, but I'm just. I'm kind of tired of it. We're four years in and even the largest companies in the world still describe their return on investment like they're the fucking riddler. How much capacity do you have, Satya? Why don't we know? Why don't we know how much you actually made on AI? Why are you still using Run rate? This is strange. What's going on. About to fall into Tucker Carlson voice there. But nevertheless, for my article, I actually reached out to Microsoft to confirm these things and they said they get back to me last Monday and then they just stopped replying. That's. That's generally what people do when they're hiding something. And I'm tired of that too. I'm tired of the fact these companies won't just give me a straight answer or you a straight answer, or their investors a straight Answer. It's frustrating. And I know you're frustrated too, dear listener, and I know you keep asking when this shit ends. I truly don't know at this point, and I'll explain. The obfuscated finances of these firms are so thoroughly mangled that it's hard to tell if Anthropic has $30 billion in the bank or $30. It's fundamentally impossible to understand how much money OpenAI actually makes, because both I and the Information have now published very different numbers. Mine are much lower billions lower for 2025. I mean, I don't have the final quarter. And I will say that I can speak to mine with complete certainty, as these are the kind of financials that are borderline impossible to lie about, unlike investor documents, which usually, well, are full of them. Now, I want to be clear. I am not even accusing OpenAI of lying. I'm sure whatever it's handed over to investors has more asterisks on it than Qbert reading Mein Kampf. I'm sure it says that these are non GAAP numbers, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which means that they could be any number of different versions of Ebittenstein's Monster. It's hard to tell how much OpenAI is spending, which makes it harder to tell how much money it needs or when it might run out of it. If OpenAI closes this entire $122 billion round, Nvidia and SoftBank are paying in three monthly chunks, like a fucking Klarna plan, and Amazon has $35 billion contingent on either IPO or AGI. OpenAI will have, if they successfully do this, would have raised over $160 billion in the space of a year. And even if it doesn't, it will have raised, and I assume spent most of around $70 billion or more in the space of a year. That's so much money. Where has it gone? Wherever has it gone, Sammy? Do you think they know? Do you think any of these people know? Do you think they really know how their finances are doing? Because according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fisher, they are, and I quote the Wall Street Journal here, not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being a public company. That's pretty worrying to me, considering how much money Mr. Altman is now on the hook for and how much money he's taken in. Similarly, his equally damp friend, Mr. Wario Amadeo of Anthropic is now raising at a scale unheard of other than when it just happened with OpenAI, by which I mean that if its rounds with Google and Amazon fully close. Anthropic will have raised over $100 billion in the space of a year. And again, it doesn't seem to want to go public. Why not, Mr. Amadei? What do you have to hide? What's going on? And now Mr. Amadei is out raising another $50 billion. That must close in 24 hours. Nope, wait, sorry, that was a few weeks ago now, I mean, it's 30 billion to $50 billion that might close by the end of the month. And yes, that is the order of the events. And again, no one, no one seems to think this is strange. No one in the media seems to seem to think this is strange. No one seems to be concerned about this at all. I'm actually kind of deeply worried about all of this because these companies may go public and if they go public, well, they're gonna lose everyone's money if they invest. But if they don't go public, there's still a bunch of money that's gone into them that's just potentially gone nowhere. Anyway, this is kind of exciting. I'll admit it's kind of exciting. I know that's a bizarre thing to say. I know it's strange to suggest that this might be an exciting thing because the stakes have been raised so much that eventually one or more of us is going to be proven correct. It's going to be me or the boosters. And if the boosters are right here, this is crazy. I don't think they're right at all. Gone to my head, I think Anthropic is doing some sort of very bizarre accounting, likely taking in API payments paid in advance. To explain, I think it's possible they are counting an organization paying its tokens upfront, say $50 million that's likely to last 12 months and acting as if that's a month of actual revenue versus accounting for it spread out over 12 months, artificially inflating the run rate by a factor of over 1000%. To explain, ARR is just month times 12. So if they say if $50 million is meant to be spread over 12 months, counting it in a single month and multiplying, that's kind of bullshit. I don't know for certain if this is what's happening, but pre selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR is a way it makes sense and also is not the first time this has happened. There are plenty of startups that have done this bullshit in the past, some of them in the dot com bubble. I find the alternative A little ridiculous. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said on March 6, 2026 that Anthropic had made $5 billion in lifetime revenue. He said exceeding. But if it was much higher than that, he would have said a different number. If that's the case, Anthropic suddenly grew its business from a few hundred million dollars in January to a few billion dollars a month in April. This is, on an accounting basis, a step change in complexity. It's a step change in customer scale. Anthropic must have had to hire and scale at a speed that defies all logic to keep up. They've been handling so much fucking cash and they're brand new at this. Also, Krishna Rao, the CFO got interviewed recently on one of the many booster podcasts where they just sit there and let you say what you want for an hour. And he said that the largest user of tokens in Anthropic is their tax person. That's the one person I would never let use an LLM. I would slap their hands if I saw them using Claude. I'd be very worried. But Krishna seems very excited about this. He's talking about how all of this is speeding up all of their accounting. And I must be clear, when you're handling billions of dollars very suddenly coming in, you don't want to rush the fucking accounting. Krishna, you need to calm your fucking jawts a little bit. Fucking. It just. It's so ridiculous. And it's ridiculous that I am somehow unique in the way I cover this, that I am unique in my scrutiny. I don't know why I am. I mean, I do. It's much easier to not scrutinize these companies and just applaud whenever you see a big number. But I think it's letting down listeners and readers across the board to not approach this and replace the scrutiny. Even if you think this will work out, even if you believe AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing ever, I think it's a detriment to your listeners and readers to not approach this with a high degree of skepticism and scrutiny because this is so much money.

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and here's the thing. Maybe Krishna's being honest. Maybe. Maybe there are 30 billion, 50 billion. Whoever knows? ARR. And it's just this amazing business. Or maybe it just isn't that big or the business isn't that good. Maybe that's what it is. Do you think. Do you think that that's. I I would be very shocked if Anthropic grew from making a couple hundred million dollars in what, November last year to $4 billion in April. I'd be really fucking shocked. And I think that there is a if if that has happened, it's because of the largest PayPal AI psychosis in the world, which we'll get to in a bit. But I've had some people recently say that I am not talking about the tech enough and I want to explain why. And it's the fact that four years into this, I'm just not sure what it is everybody's excited about. What are the big AI applications that are changing my life? Every two days, Anthropic releases some sort of new harness product for finance or law or medicine or accountancy, leading to someone's stock crashing based on the theoretical damage that Anthropic's product could cause without anybody actually trying it or verifying what it does or even explaining why it fucking matters. What is it that I am meant to be excited about? What is it that I'm meant to be impressed by? But ultimately, the reason that Anthropic's releasing so much stuff is its flak. It's meant to be an impossible to pass blob of different things that create the gestalt of an indomitable company that can do anything because the markets and the media don't bother to check. We hear about everybody using this shit day in, day out. Why has nothing changed? What are businesses doing differently? How are they different? What is different? What is it that LLMs are actually doing? These should not be difficult or complex questions to answer, but nobody seems to be able to give me an answer with any real clarity or specificity. Every time they do, it's a weird dance involving someone saying, I now get a summary of some stuff from my openclaw or of course some sort of multi agent coding fiasco that never actually ends with functional or impressive software or anything being shipped faster. And look on the coding stuff. I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed. I speak regularly with very talented software engineers and their reaction is it's kind of cool. I guess it's not anywhere near as good as people say or this allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality and security of software because people trust these people who cannot do their jobs, which has begun to decay across the board, across the entire tech industry with the rise of AI coding tools. It sounds like LLM coding is a very inefficient way to sometimes speed up some things in a way that also creates a culture of overwork and either constant bullshit detection or something I call the engineer's torpor. A state where your senses are dulled and you stop giving as much of a shit until your shit breaks and you realize your eight concurrent agents are burning $300 a day of tokens and have written two and a half million lines of functional yet brittle software designed with no intent or pur. Like an apartment where the rooms vary in size and the number of bedrooms and the toilets are different with varying finishings and the plumbing's different room to room. I guess people could live there, but it would be a pain in the ass to run and get worse. The more people that moved in, the more agency you give a coding model, the less you understand what it is you're building. No matter how intently you prompt it or how many agents you throw it in, how many weird little tweaks you make to your Claude MD file, the more that you don't build, the less that it makes sense. To make matters worse, the more you hand over, the more rusty you're going to be at writing code. The shit isn't good enough, it's not getting good enough and it cannot be trusted. And my evidence is that a lot of software is just kind of fucking broken all over the shop in ways that's so common that we're entirely numb to it. We are tolerant of our shit being broken or terribly designed. It was a problem before LLMs and it's got worse since. Let me give you some examples. Sometimes my iPhone will randomly show a black screen with a pinwheel. It just resets. It's fine. It'll even keep playing my music. It's happened every iPhone for years. Sometimes it doesn't happen for months, sometimes it happens multiple times a week. Sometimes apps just arbitrarily slow down. My phone isn't hot or anything, they just slow to a crawl on Chrome. When I load certain websites like TechCrunch for some reason my 2 year old MacBook Pro 16 inch with Ultra M3 core or what have you and has have a look actually while we're live on air. See, I have 64 gigabytes of RAM and this shit slows down because some ad cookies it doesn't like. Insane. A lot of popular video games crash regularly. The Madden franchise has looked like total shit for years and is getting worse each time. The menus are incredibly slow. The Google Docs, iPhone and iPad apps are so unstable I want to take away their car keys. On top of having some of the most vexing design decisions across the board. Almost as if they don't know how to make things right anymore. And let's talk about all those organizations burning what, 10, 20, 30% or more of their headcount on tokens. This is a sickness. It is a psychosis. The amounts of money being spent are genuinely disgusting. Any company that spends anything more than 5% on their head count on tokens is a mark. Your businesses are not getting better. Your CEOs have AI psychosis. The more they speak to the machine that tells them they're the smartest, sexiest boy in the room, the more they'll be convinced that you must join them. They do not see this as annihilating money for effectively no reason. They see it as praying to a soulless non existent God, a non spiritual God made up of more annoying math requiring the largest amount of infrastructure spent on anything ever. It fucking sick. It just fucking sucks. I'm not correcting that bit. You'll just have to deal with that. Okay? This is what happens when every boss is a fucking business idiot who doesn't actually do any work. What do you think Mark Zuckerberg does all day? But he walks into, walks up to the mirror sometimes, just looks down at Willie and goes what are you? What do you do? What are you for? What is your concept? Or he walks into rooms and bumbles in there and he says we need to do more on the exponential. And then some wretched worm tongue like figure like Boz or Adam Mirsky oinks and squawks at one of 2,000 different vice presidents to spread his nasty vague ideas, whatever they might Actually be. If you're lucky, you might even get to deal with one of five different dysfunctional AI divisions with different ultra oaths that you have to placate as Mark Zuckerberg does something with AI that seems to change every fucking week. Not to worry. The Wall Street Journal will cover it anyway. And I think that this is how a lot of Silicon Valley and a lot of businesses are being run. I think that's how Jack Dorsey acts. I bet it's how Uber's run. Think of an app you're using right now that's anything other than okay. Do you love any app? Does anything work great for you? I like Flighty. Flighty is a good app. That's one. Even the Apple Notes app I use constantly doesn't sync right at random for no reason and has a bunch of random shit come up whenever I choose a menu. Everything's a fucking mess. Nothing is smooth or easy. I have to log into something every four minutes. I have to give somebody a 2fa token every six minutes. Sometimes Google just logs me out of shit for no reason. Sometimes my email client loses its access to Outlook or Gmail. And sometimes my password system hasn't saved a password and I have to reset my password. I have to go to my email and there's three fucking emails from a pizza place I visited in New Jersey 15 years ago. And by the way, if you fucking email me and tell me get one password, get Bitwarden, get Fuck you. Fuck off. It's so sickening that everyone thinks that there is some panacea. Oh, my app works for me. Apps do not work consistently across the board. That is a unilateral truth. One password works well for 100 people and doesn't work well for 50 others. I've seen it with my own fucking eyes. Same with Last password. Same with Bitwarden. The state of these fucking companies is dogshit. And I know I'm going to get emails from people saying, Bitwarden works. I pay for Bitwarden. Don't like it. Barely fucking works. It's a bit better than 1Password. But it's like, which of these do I trust now? Which is big? What's being saved? Where? I'm sick of it. I'm absolutely sick of it. Apologies for getting heated. I know it's atypical of this show for me to rant now. I want to speak to if any LLM coding people, the real code jockeys. If you use it a bit of work, I don't care. But the people who think that this is truly the most amazing thing. Do any of you LLM coding folks actually use software? It stinks, it's bloated, it's counterintuitive, it's slow, it's inefficient. The 10 or more tracking cookies and 100 APIs you connect to every two seconds for some reason have created the sludge that is making every single experience on the computer worse. Doing varying degrees of kayfabe to impress another dickhead with $2 million in RSUs doesn't make up for the fact that the current state of software is fucking sad and ugly across the board. Do you think the modern state of software is good? And do you think the insecure, bug ridden slopfest of openclaw is a good representative of your industry's future? You should be burning it to the ground. You should be killing Openclaw. It's destroying the fabric of software. LLMs make shitty code. I don't care how it makes you feel. And I think it's made a select few people genuinely mentally ill in a way that we're yet to account for. And I don't mean random people. I mean prominent VCs and CEOs and a lot of software engineers who are obsessed with this stuff, who have now been irredeemably proven to be insane, gullible marks. And we do not talk enough about how insane this all is. $800 billion more than that spent by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta on AI so far. And for what? A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses across the board to varying degrees for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain and impossible to expl clear terms like does it make more money than is bent? It's not profitable. The state of software is arguably worse. Most products try and make you use an AI feature with questionable utility or efficacy, and some organizations actively ostracize you if you fail to use it. Because their CEOs have AI psychosis, because their models told them they were brilliant. Every time somebody explains AI's economic value, they sound like they just got caught committing a crime and they're trying to lie their way out of it. Why does OpenAI need all this money? Why does Anthropic need all this money? What justification is there for any of this expenditure? I know some people want to come up with a conspiratorial reason that all of this is, oh, it's a super secret government military thing and Trump's going to bail it out. It's all a secret Government. It's all built for government. Government, government, government. It's all a secret Trump conspiracy. No, stop it. Stop. That's not what this is. That is a comfortable way to feel smart or in control of a situation you have no control over. It is a doom saying philosophy that allows you to avoid the hard intellectual work of actually thinking of what happens when bad things happen. And it also avoids the intellectual exercise of accepting that these are a bunch of men who do not really know how to do business and are self involved cowards that only know how to follow each other. I realize it's easier to look at the world as dark and scary and say, wow, it's all a big secret plan and this is all government spying already happening way before LLMs. Oh, it's all a big data gathering. It's all a big surveillance thing already happening way before LLMs. LLMs aren't even particularly useful for it. I'm sure there's some uses, but come on. Doing that makes you feel like you're smart. It makes you feel like you're ahead of the game. When in reality the world is dark. It is scary, but it's also directionless and full of followers and cowards and people that don't know what they're doing that will spend over a trillion dollars on data centers for an alien, an AI industry that does not have a future. It's a dark and scary world we live in when the mainstream media has moved away from reality. But it's a reality I live in. It's a reality you live in. But don't give these people credit. Don't give these people credit. Or a strategy that does not exist. In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. OpenAI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive and wasteful bubble in history. Zitron Out.

[A]

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[C]

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[A]

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