Monologue: The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Summary

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Better Offline – "Monologue: The AI Industry Is Lying To You"

Host: Ed Zitron
Date: March 27, 2026
Duration Summarized: 00:43–11:15 (core content, skipping ads/intros/outros)

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Episode Overview

In this passionate monologue, Ed Zitron dissects the tech industry's misinformation surrounding artificial intelligence—specifically targeting the recent turbulence at OpenAI and the shutdown of Sora, its video-generation platform. Ed calls out mainstream media's complicity in amplifying hype without scrutiny, exposes flawed narratives about the future of AI and data centers, and underscores how the real beneficiaries are venture capitalists and tech grifters. This episode is a scathing indictment of industry dishonesty and journalistic laziness, delivered in Ed's irreverent, unfiltered style.

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Key Points & Insights

1. The Sora Debacle: Hype vs. Reality

• Disney & OpenAI’s “Mega Deal” Was Smoke and Mirrors

  • Ed recalls the media circus around Disney’s supposed billion-dollar investment and integration with OpenAI’s Sora.
  • Upon review, he found no financial disclosure in Disney's reports—raising questions about the deal's authenticity.
  • "I went and had a look and there wasn't a damn thing in any of the Disney's most recent quarterly or annual reports." (02:36)

• Sora’s Collapse and the Business Reality

  • Sora, hailed as a Hollywood disruptor, is now “dead” because it cost over $15M/day to operate and lacked a viable business model.
  • OpenAI pivoted to “business and enterprise” framing, which Ed translates as: “no real product-market fit, just burning millions daily and violating copyright.”

• Media’s Role in Spreading Fear and Hype

  • Ed lists media outlets (CNBC, Deadline, The Ankler, Puck, Slate, etc.) that breathlessly claimed Sora would upend Hollywood, despite its technical and financial instability.
  • “You all were wrong. Every single goddamn wrong, wrong, wrong... I’m so fucking tired of this.” (04:29)

• No Accountability

  • No media apology or correction has addressed the groundless panic inflicted on entertainment workers and the wider public.

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2. Wider Industry Hype: Data Centers and GPU Madness

• Announced Capacity vs. Reality

  • Despite "190–240 gigawatts" of supposed new data center capacity, Ed’s investigation found only 3 gigawatts of actual load built in the US in 2025.
  • Illustrates the disconnect between press releases and on-the-ground progress.

• Hardware Churn and Futility

  • Ed skewers AI companies “buying GPUs 2–4 years in advance” when installation lag means hardware is obsolete upon deployment.
  • “By the time you install your Blackwells, they’ll already have Vera Rubin. By the time they have Vera Rubin, they’ll have something else. I don’t know, Daphne from Scooby-Doo.” (07:29)

• Most Projects Are Vaporware

  • Major data center projects are “barely breaking ground,” haven’t acquired land, or are outright stalled (Fermi's Amarillo project laid off workers with no progress).
  • The infrastructure cited by companies is often mere "single steel beams" rather than operational facilities.

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3. The Financial Farce and ‘AI Industry’ Beneficiaries

• AI Startups: Loss-Leading, Hype-Driven

  • Revenue is piddly; spending is extravagant and subsidized.
  • Users suffer; only VCs, grifters, and lending banks truly profit.

• API Pricing Is a ‘Rip-Off’

  • The supposed profitability of AI inference is debunked. If inference was as cheap as touted, API costs to end-users would—per Casey Kagawa—be far lower.

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4. Media Critique and Lack of Scrutiny

• Amplification Without Verification

  • Big numbers and project announcements are reported uncritically, with only skeptics subjected to scrutiny.
  • Headlines echo talking points without analyzing underlying feasibility.

• On Being Right (and Insufferable About It)

  • Ed closes by vowing to continue “being insufferable” until media and industry are held accountable.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Sora’s Business Model:
  “Sora was never a business. Sora was never replacing anything. Sora was always unreliable because of the hallucination-prone Large Lang model bullshit it's built upon. It was never gonna work. Everyone who said otherwise is a goddamn rube.” (03:41)

• On Media Panic:
  “I cannot express the sheer amount of panic that spread through every single part of the entertainment industry as a result of the specious, poorly founded mythology spread by people that didn't give enough of a shit to understand what was actually going on.” (05:09)

• On Data Center Reality:
  “Despite somewhere between 190 and 240 gigawatts of supposed capacity being announced... only 3 gigawatts of it load... got built in America in 2025.” (06:18)

• On Hardware Obsolescence:
  “Jensen Huang is announcing a new GPU every year. By the time you install your Blackwells, they'll already have Vera Rubin. By the time they have Vera Rubin, they'll have something else. I don't know, Daphne from Scooby Doo.” (07:29)

• On Industry Waste:
  “This era will be remembered as the largest waste of capital in history. Most data centers aren't getting built and those that are won't be ready before 2027 at best.” (09:25)

• On the Scrutiny Machine:
  “Scrutiny appears by the way to only be reserved for haters or skeptics or those who say fuck too much on a podcast. Well, the scrutiny machine over here is just getting started.” (10:37)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:43–01:42: Ed’s intro, the Disney-OpenAI “deal,” myth-busting
• 01:43–03:44: Sora's collapse and the media’s “Hollywood panic” narrative
• 03:45–06:02: OpenAI’s pivot, media unaccountability, impact on entertainment workers
• 06:03–08:38: Data center announced capacity vs. real construction; hardware futility
• 08:39–09:58: Stalled data center projects, Amarillo/Fermi example, financial unsustainability
• 09:59–11:15: Startup losses, API pricing critique, scathing closing remarks

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Tone and Style

Ed Zitron’s delivery is biting, irreverent, and unsparing—heavy on expletives and contempt for hype merchants and uncritical media. He uses sarcastic humor, pop culture references, and a conversational, rapid-fire cadence to make complex tech industry problems vivid and enraging.

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Summary for the Uninitiated:
This episode is an impassioned reality check: the AI revolution is nowhere near as close—or as inevitable—as its loudest boosters claim. Most of what you read in the news is industry-fueled fantasy, and the only thing growing fast is a mountain of wasted capital. Ed Zitron, refusing to mince words, exposes the disconnect between hype and reality—demanding real scrutiny and accountability from both the tech world and the media covering it.

Transcript

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Media hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

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I'm turning 40 in a month or so, and at 40 years young, I'm old enough to remember as far back as December 11, 2025, when Disney and OpenAI reached an agreement to bring beloved characters from across Disney's brands to Sora, OpenAI's video platform. As part of the deal, Disney would, and I quote, become a major customer of OpenAI, use its API to build new products, tools and experiences, as well as showing Sora videos in Disney and and deploy ChatGPT for its employees, as well as making a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. Except now Sora is dead, shot in the head by Clammy Sam Altman and OpenAI because it cost $15 million or more to run and had everybody making videos of Goofy saying gorsh, I'll fuck anything that moves, like Frank from Blue Velvet. To be clear, OpenAI is shutting down both Sora the app and access to the Sora video model through its API framing. The change is focusing the company on business and enterprise customers, which is a euphemism for a product that never had any real business model or product market fit other than burning millions of dollars of compute a day and violating copyright. I think it's also completely insane that nobody bothered to check whether Disney had ever invested or even talked about investing that billion dollars. I went and had a look and there wasn't a damn thing in any of the Disney's most recent quarterly or annual reports. I should have checked this myself, but it's wild that nobody else did either. There are business and tech reporters. There are people that do this full time. I but I also want to take this moment to say something from the bottom of my heart. I was right. I was fucking right. I said it back in October. I've said it. I said it back in 2024. Sora was never a business. Sora was never replacing anything. Sora was always unreliable because of the hallucination prone Large Lang model bullshit it's built upon. It was never gonna work. Everyone who said otherwise is a goddamn rube. And so many people were wrong. The app that CNBC said was challenging Hollywood and freaking out the movie industry and the Hollywood Reporter would suggest could somehow challenge Pixar and was Sam Altman successfully playing Hollywood and the fucking ankler who should be ashamed of themselves. SAID was OpenAI going to war with Hollywood as it shook the industry And Deadline said made Hollywood Soar and Boardroom said was in a standoff with Hollywood and said was deepening a battle between Hollywood and OpenAI and igniting a firestorm in Hollywood. And Puck said had Hollywood panicking and Techno Llama SAID was the end of copyright as we know it. And Slate said was a case of AI crushing Hollywood as it as we've known it. And I swear to God I wrote that right in the script, but I'm keeping going anyway. This thing is completely dead. A little more than five months after everybody claimed it was changing everything. You all were wrong. Every single goddamn wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong on the wrong. A sandwich of wrong that you're shoving up your asshole. I'm so fucking tired of this. I cannot express how angry I am because it's almost as if everybody making these proclamations was instinctually printing whatever marketing copy had been imagined by the AI labs to promote compute intensive vaporware. And absolutely nobody is going to apologize to the people working in the entertainment industry for scaring the fuck out of them with ghost stories for no apparent reason. Every single person who blindly repeated that SORA existed and was changing everything should be forced to apologize to their readers. I cannot express the sheer amount of panic that spread through every single part of the entertainment industry as a result of the specious, poorly founded mythology spread by people that didn't give enough of a shit to understand what was actually going on. Sora II was always an act of desperation, an attempt to create a marketing cycle to prop up a tool that was burning as much as $15 million a day that most of the mainstream media bought into because they believe everything OpenAI says and are willing to extrapolate the destruction of an entire industry from a fucking facade driven by a clammy man that lies for a living. I am tired of everybody scarfing down the slop from these companies. I'm tired of the majority of reporters not doing the hard work to actually understand what's going on. And good Lord, do I not have another example? Well, I do. Eh? You get what I mean? I spent the last week or so trying to work out how many actual data centers got built last year and found that despite somewhere between 190 and 240 gigawatts of supposed capacity being announced, based on my analysis, only 3 gigawatts of it load, which is the GPUs and the associated hardware that's being turned on, got built in America in 2025. To explain how bad this number 3 gigawatts of critical IT hardware is, about $90 billion per Jerome Darling of TD Cohen and Nvidia sold about $135 billion worth of GPUs and hardware to America in its last fiscal year. Based on the last quarter of sales, which is in the $62 billion range, 69% of that nice is America. It now takes about six months to install a single quarto's sales worth of GPUs and associated hardware. Even if you think AI is the biggest and most hugest and most special boy, what's the fucking point of buying these GPUs two to four years in advance? Because even if it takes six months to install a single quarter's worth of sales, from what I found, it's actually taking a lot longer in some cases. Jensen Huang is announcing a new GPU every year. By the time you install your Blackwells, they'll already have Vera Rubin. By the time they have Vera Rubin, they'll have something else. I don't know, Daphne from Scooby Doo. They can. No. These things are. The only cool thing that Nvidia does is choosing the names of people anyway. And with every new generation of these GPUs comes new power requirements and rack sizes. While the first generation of Vera Rubin, which is the next gen coming out very soon, will fit into the current Oberon Nvidia racks. Nvidia is already ready. Teasing. It's Kyber Rex, which will require even more power, even more liquid cooling, which will mean those. Ew. Ew. Ew. Those old stinky dirty Blackwells. You're gonna have to throw them right in the trash. No more Blackwell for me, thanks. They've got Vera Rubin in town. Ew. You're gonna make me use Blackwell. How gross. Ew. Jensen, put those stinky Blackwells in the toilet. Ew. You couldn't fit them. They're far too large. I've tried. Yet things only get worse when you look at the actual construction in process per sightline climate. Despite over 190 gigawatts of global capacity that's supposedly in process with 16 gigawatts that's meant to come online this year, only 5 gigawatts of it is actually under construction. And under construction can mean everything from a single steel beam to a nearly finished build out. Walk around London sometime. You should just just look at building projects in London or New York. Look at how quickly or not quickly those get built. Oh I don't know, go look around Stargate and all the data centers there. One of the the infrastructure people from OpenAI was boasting about the Wisconsin data center the other day and he just had a single steel beam. I'm not even with you, it's just a one beam and there were like four guys. There was three guys working on the beam and another guy walking up to it. I love builders. But anyway in my pre bullshit in my premium this week just hit my microphone, just gonna keep going. I also dug into most of the major data center projects that have been announced and in basically every case found that they had either barely broken ground, hadn't actually picked the land yet, or it's stalled entirely, as was the case with Fermi's supposed 11 gigawatt data center project in Amarillo, Texas which abruptly dismissed workers in February after moving forward without permitting or funding necessary to actually build the fucking thing. That's a public company by the way. Fermi, this is Rick Scott. God, it's like the Avengers of assholes. Despite the many many statements that AI is inevitable or unstoppable, the reality is that the things aren't getting built, billions of dollars aren't getting sent, industries are left undisrupted and the only people actually benefiting are grifters, venture capitalists and banks providing debt to non existent data center projects. Look, I believe by the end of this era, to quote Justario1, him and Kakashi the lone gunman, these guys are two of the best out there and their pseudonymous accounts. This era will be remembered as the largest waste of capital in history. Most data centers aren't getting built and those that are won't be ready before 2027 at best. Most AI startups make piddly amounts of revenue and burn hundreds of millions of dollars to make single digit millions of dollars of revenue and constantly piss off their users by changing rate limits because every single one is subsidized and every single one is spending a couple of dollars or more per dollar of revenue. And Nothing is changing and nothing is improving. Fuck off with your whole inference is profitable thing by the fucking way. To paraphrase my good friend Casey Kagawa who made this point to me over signal fairly recently. Either inference isn't profitable or API calls are just a big they're the biggest rip off ever that they could be charging even less than that. Indeed, if inference was so profitable, why are they charging couple of bucks for a million dollars worth of input tokens? They should be charging pennies. Why are they charging so much if it's so profitable? Take that aether tits. Anyway, and for the most part the media has failed to notice all this stuff. I really must be clear how shocking this is. I really have read all over the shop. I still see people making the Amazon web services lost a lot of money argument. That's about $38 billion in over a decade that was spent on Amazon web services. So walk that one back, will ya? I don't know, I still see the same talking points peddled and it's just ridiculous. Big numbers get quoted without a second thought. Unrealistic or fantastical timelines are published. Adverbatum. I'm Talking about that what, 10, $20 billion Nebbyous deal with Meta that just Data center doesn't exist. Haven't even raised the money and scrutiny appears by the way to only be reserved for haters or skeptics or those who say fuck too much on a podcast. Well, the scrutiny machine over here is just getting started. And you know, you just know that I will be absolutely insufferable when I'm finally proven right. Thank you all for listening. Should have some fun stuff next week. I'm still working on I love you

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