Radio Better Offline: Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau & Ed Ongweso Jr.

Summary

Better Offline Podcast Summary: Episode Featuring Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau & Ed Ongweso Jr.

Episode Details:

• Title: Radio Better Offline: Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau & Ed Ongweso Jr.
• Release Date: April 9, 2025
• Hosts/Guests: Morgan Sung, Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau, Ed Ongweso Jr.
• Produced By: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Overview: In this incisive episode of Better Offline, host Morgan Sung engages in a lively discussion with media critic Allison Morrow, technology commentator Paris Martineau, and tech industry veteran Ed Ongweso Jr. The conversation revolves around the pervasive hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), its often disappointing integration into consumer products, and the broader implications for society and various industries.

---

1. Critique of AI Integration in Tech Products

Alison Morrow opens the discussion by dissecting her recent media piece titled "Apple's AI is Not the Disappointment. AI is the Disappointment" (02:18). She challenges the narrative that companies like Apple are merely lagging in AI development, asserting that the real issue lies with the overarching approach to AI integration.

Alison Morrow (02:18): "AI can never fail. It can only be failed."

Paris Martineau echoes this sentiment, highlighting the frustration with how AI is being force-fitted into products that do not meet consumer expectations.

Paris Martineau (03:18): "It's just a consumer product that no one wants."

2. AI Hype Cycle vs. Reality

The conversation shifts to comparing the current AI craze with past tech hype cycles such as cryptocurrency and the metaverse. Ed Ongweso Jr. draws parallels between AI's speculative promises and the overblown expectations seen in previous technological advancements.

Ed Ongweso Jr. (08:54): "It's all gonna deflate a little bit. And so I was asking him, like, is the AI bubble popping?"

Paris Martineau criticizes the repetitive nature of these cycles, emphasizing that AI's promises are becoming increasingly disconnected from practical applications.

Paris Martineau (13:15): "It's just very clearly the people who have their hands on the steering wheel are looking at their phone and it's fucking confusing."

3. The "AI 2027" Fanfiction Scenario

A significant portion of the episode critiques the unrealistic AI predictions embodied in documents like "AI 2027," which Paris Martineau describes as "fanfiction."

Paris Martineau (16:15): "This thing is One of the most well written pieces of fan fiction ever in that it appears to be like a Manchurian Candidate situation for idiots."

Alison Morrow reinforces this view, pointing out the lack of tangible projections and the vague nature of these forecasts.

Alison Morrow (23:23): "They have told themselves a story with no proof."

4. AI's Impact on Education

The guests delve into the ramifications of AI in the educational sector, particularly in public schools. They discuss how AI tools are being misapplied to tasks like lesson planning and writing Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), often exacerbating existing challenges faced by underfunded schools.

Paris Martineau (50:14): "They need to ban universities as well. Everything I'm hearing there is just like real fucking bad."

Alison Morrow (51:17): "It's the most resource starved public schools that are going to have budgets for teachers increasingly cut."

5. AI Safety: Current vs. Future Concerns

Ed Ongweso Jr. brings attention to the immediate safety issues linked to AI, contrasting them with the long-term, often speculative fears.

Ed Ongweso Jr. (44:27): "A lot of these firms are pivoting towards how do we create all these products. But also how do we integrate AI into arms... like generating kill lists."

Paris Martineau criticizes the AI safety community for neglecting present dangers in favor of distant threats.

Paris Martineau (52:57): "The actual safety things of it steals from people, it's destroying the environment, it's unprofitable and unsustainable."

6. Failures of AI Products: Apple Intelligence and Others

The hosts examine specific instances where AI integration has fallen short, using Apple's "Apple Intelligence" as a primary example. They highlight the poor performance and lack of genuine functionality in these AI-driven features.

Morgan Sung (07:04): "Why are these people not making anything? Like, why are they not making something useful?"

Paris Martineau (70:42): "Apple's washed."

The discussion points out that despite being the "most brand-conscious company on the planet," Apple's attempts at AI have been underwhelming, leading to consumer confusion and dissatisfaction.

7. Misaligned AI Marketing and Profits

A recurring theme is the disparity between AI marketing claims and actual utility. The guests argue that tech companies are investing heavily in AI without delivering corresponding benefits, leading to wasted resources and mounting skepticism.

Paris Martineau (49:33): "But AI is the thing, it's like AI is designed to like subvert human interactions."

Ed Ongweso Jr. (62:47): "The OpenAI says that by 2030 they'll be profitable. But how? They lose money on every prompt."

8. The Future Outlook: Skepticism and Potential Backlash

The episode concludes with a strong sense of skepticism about the future trajectory of AI. The guests predict a possible backlash as the public becomes disillusioned with unmet promises and ineffective AI solutions.

Paris Martineau (75:34): "It just feels like we're approaching this insanity level where you've got people like Shopify being like, oh yeah, it's going to be in everything as like OpenAI burns more money than anyone's ever burned."

Alison Morrow (77:19): "These are actual safety issues. These are problems with this. They don't want to solve those."

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Notable Quotes:

• Alison Morrow (02:18): "AI can never fail. It can only be failed."
• Paris Martineau (03:18): "It's just a consumer product that no one wants."
• Ed Ongweso Jr. (08:54): "It's all gonna deflate a little bit."
• Paris Martineau (16:15): "This thing is One of the most well written pieces of fan fiction ever."
• Alison Morrow (23:23): "They have told themselves a story with no proof."
• Ed Ongweso Jr. (44:27): "Generating kill lists."
• Paris Martineau (50:14): "They need to ban universities as well."
• Alison Morrow (51:17): "Budget for teachers increasingly cut."
• Paris Martineau (70:42): "Apple's washed."
• Ed Ongweso Jr. (62:47): "They lose money on every prompt."
• Alison Morrow (77:19): "These are actual safety issues."

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Concluding Remarks:

The episode serves as a critical examination of the current state of AI in the tech industry, highlighting the gap between lofty promises and tangible outcomes. The guests advocate for a more grounded and skeptical approach to AI development and integration, emphasizing the need for genuine functionality over marketing-driven hype. They also call for greater accountability within the tech media to prevent perpetuating unrealistic narratives that could lead to societal disillusionment and backlash.

For more insights and detailed discussions, listeners can follow the guests on their respective platforms:

• Allison Morrow: CNN Business Nightcap
• Paris Martineau: edzitron.com | bluesky
• Ed Ongweso Jr.: Tech Bubble on Substack | Twitter @bigblackjacobin
• Morgan Sung: Intelligent Machines Podcast | Twitter @arismartanau

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This summary captures the key points, discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who have not listened to the full podcast.

Transcript

[Morgan Sung]

In a world of economic uncertainty and workplace transformation, learn to lead by example. From visionary C Suite executives like Shannon Schuyler of PwC and Will Pearson of iHeartMedia, the Good Teacher explains the great teacher inspires.

[Alison Morrow]

Don't always leave your team to do the work that's been the most important.

[Paris Martineau]

Part of how to lead by example.

[Morgan Sung]

Listen to Leading by Example executives making an impact on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Alison Morrow]

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Morgan Sung]

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist.

[Morgan Sung]

Is this real?

[Paris Martineau]

And I think we will see a twitch streamer be within our lifetimes.

[Morgan Sung]

You can find Close All Tabs wherever.

[Alison Morrow]

You listen to Podcasts Media.

[Paris Martineau]

Hi everyone. Before we get to the episode, I just wanted to lead in and say we are up for a webby. I'll be including a link. I know it's a pain in the ass to register for something. I'm sorry, I really want to win this. Never won an award in my life. It will be in the links. And while you're there and registered, look up the wonderful weird little guys with Ms. Molly conger. Vote for both of us. I'm in the best business podcast, episode one. She's in the best crime podcast, episode one. We can win this. We can defeat the others. And now for the episode Better Offline. Every day I am punished and killed. And you love to watch. Welcome to Better Offline. We're live from New York City, recorded straight to tape, of course. And I'm joined by an incredible cast of people. To my right, I have Paris Martineau of the Information Hating Paris.

[Morgan Sung]

What's up?

[Paris Martineau]

What is up? Edward Nguesso of the Tech Bubble newsletter.

[Edward Nguesso]

Hello. Hello.

[Paris Martineau]

And the wonderful Alison Morrow of the CNN Nightcap newsletter.

[Alison Morrow]

Hi.

[Paris Martineau]

And Alison, you wrote one of my favorite bits of media criticism I've ever read recently. Do you want to actually walk us through that piece? Because I think I will link it in the notes. Don't worry, everyone.

[Alison Morrow]

I'd be happy to. I wrote a piece. I think the headline we ended up with was like, apple's AI is not the disappointment. AI is the disappointment.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Alison Morrow]

And this was inspired by credit to where it's due. I was listening to Hard fork with Kevin Roos on our. My husband and I were driving out to the country and listening to this and just getting infuriated.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Alison Morrow]

And basically their premise was, or at least Kevin Roose's premise was, that AI is failing or. Sorry, that Apple is failing this moment in AI. And Apple has been trying. It's been like the laggard. You know, that's a narrative we've heard in tech media over and over. And it's like Kevin Roose's point was like, oh, well, they should just start getting more comfortable with experimenting and making mistakes and violating everything that Apple brand kind of stands for and, like, force the AI into a consumer product that no one wants. And I was like, respectfully, no.

[Morgan Sung]

It's also such a funny argument given that it was a mistake being made by Apple that resulted in the whole Houthi PC small group situation.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, what was that? Walk us through that.

[Morgan Sung]

That was specifically how the editor in chief of the Atlantic ended up in a secret military signal chat.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, I missed. What? How.

[Morgan Sung]

How have you.

[Paris Martineau]

I saw the signal thing, but how did the Apple.

[Morgan Sung]

I'm sorry, have you guys not been online?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't use the computer.

[Alison Morrow]

Better off or better off.

[Morgan Sung]

Oh, gosh, I should leave.

[Paris Martineau]

I've been reading the scrolls.

[Morgan Sung]

So basically, the Atlantic came out a couple weeks ago with a article about how their editor in chief one day was suddenly added to a signal group chat.

[Paris Martineau]

Right? Signal gate.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah, signal gate.

[Paris Martineau]

But how did this Apple.

[Morgan Sung]

So the Apple thing was. I'm forgetting who exactly reported this. This was in the last couple of days that how it happened was the con. Like, you know that thing that comes up in your iPhone where it says, like, oh, a new phone number has been found.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah.

[Morgan Sung]

It was a suggested contact. And it happened because someone, I guess, in the government had copied and pasted an email containing the editor in chief of the Atlantic's contact information in a message to. I'm forgetting whatever, government.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the guys.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah, one of the guys. And so he ended up combining the Atlantic EIC's information into a contact for some government dude. And that's how they ended up in. Because then signal, when you connected to your contact.

[Paris Martineau]

I love the computer so much.

[Morgan Sung]

So, I mean, that's. That makes me even crazier about the hard fork take, because it's like you can't mess around with something like your phone.

[Alison Morrow]

Well, in this particular instance, I take it all back. Apple AI is amazing. It gave us one of the best journalism stories of the year.

[Paris Martineau]

You also made a really Good point in here. Message you this on the way in. You said you made this point that there's a popular adage in policy circles that the party can never fail, it can only be failed. It is meant as a critique of the ideological gatekeepers who may be, for example, blame voters for their party's failings rather than the party itself. The same fallacy is taking root among AI's biggest backers. AI can never fail. It can only be failed. And I love this because it's. You get people like Kevin Roose. And there was a wonderful clip on the New York Times TikTok of Kevin Roose seeming genuinely pissy. He was like, I can't believe people are mad at AI because of Siri. And it's like, oh, what? They think it's shitty because it's shitty. Like, it's like they talk about AI like it's their child. Him and Casey act as if we've hurt chatgpt. Sorry, Claude, they're anthropic boys. And saying that Casey's boyfriend works anthropic. I know he. He does the Citadel fucking. Anyway, it's just so weird because it's like we have to apologize for not liking AI enough and now you have the CEO of Shopify saying, actually we you have to use it. You hear about this?

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah.

[Edward Nguesso]

He said what? That you have to prove your job can't be replaced by AI. Yeah, it will be.

[Morgan Sung]

And he also said that now it's going to be Shopify policy to include in all of the employee performance reviews, both for your self assessment and for your like direct reports and colleagues assessment how much this person use AI. And obviously the what's going on there is if you are not reporting that you use AI all the time for everything, you could get fired.

[Edward Nguesso]

Klarna just tried to overhaul hiring practice so that they could have AI first or AI only and then roll it back because they realize you can't replace.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. On these charms they quite.

[Morgan Sung]

My question is, I mean this is something that's brought up on the show all the time, but who are these people that are encountering the AI assistant suddenly plugged into every app and being like, yeah, this is actually beneficial to my life and this works really well because it sucks every time I use it.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, you made the point in your article, Alison, as well. It's like if it was 100% accurate, it would be really useful. If it's even 98% accurate, it's not right.

[Alison Morrow]

I think that was the point that to his credit, Casey Newton Made in the episode, which is that AI is fundamentally an academic project right now. And it's like you can have all kinds of debates about its utility, but ultimately is it a consumer product? And no, it's just like it's failing as a consumer product on all fronts.

[Paris Martineau]

And what's crazy as well is I'm surprised he would say that considering everything else he's ever said because he quite literally has had multiple articles recently being like, ah, consumer adoption is up in. In. He had an article the other day where it was like, data provided exclusively for Manthropic shows that more people are using AI. It's like, my man is 2013 again. We're past this. You can't just do this anymore unless you're you. And so going back to Mr. Mr. Lutke of. Mr. Lutke of Shopify, I just want to read my favorite part of it. It says I use it all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface. You've heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcast, town halls and summit. Last summer I used agents to create my talk and presented about that. So all this fucking piss and vinegar and the only thing you can use it for is to write a slop ridden presentation to everyone about how good AI is without specifying what it does. I feel like I'm going insane sometimes with this stuff.

[Edward Nguesso]

I mean, in one way that's great, right? The only place you should encounter it is maybe the team building retreat. You know, that's the utility of this shit.

[Alison Morrow]

This reminds me a lot of like media 2012, 2013, where it was all pivot to video and what's our video, our vertical video strategy? And it's like, okay, now what's our AI strategy? How are we injecting AI into everything we're doing? And it's like, well, to what end? Yeah, this is, what is the point?

[Edward Nguesso]

This is something that has been driving me mad, especially with partnerships we're seeing between media firms and these AI firms. You know, these are the, these are firms in the same sector that keep. Keeps lying to firms about how if you integrate artificial intelligence this time, it'll optimize your ability to find an audience or to get revenue. And we can include you in some esoteric revenue share program where it will be able to claw back some of the eyeballs and the attention that you're interested in seeking. But each time it's actually just used to graft themselves onto services or to try to gin up excitement about these products.

[Paris Martineau]

Right? What's insane is this company has a multi billion dollar market cap and I'm just going to read point two, AI must be part of your GSD prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD product should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. How? How? Like that's the thing. I, I have clients in my PR firm will occasionally bring me AI things and I'm every time I'm just like, this better work. Like just every. And to their credit they do. But it's like I have clients I turn down all the time are like, yeah, we're doing this. And I'm like, is this just the chatbot? And they're like, no. I'm like, can you show me how it works? No, I'm like, oh, cool. Yeah, don't think we're going to be a good fit somehow because you don't seem to be able to explain what your product does. But don't worry, this appears to be a problem up to the multibillion dollar companies as well. It's just, it feels like the largest mask off dunce moment in history. Just these people who don't do any real work being like it's the future, I think I don't do anything real. And the pivot to video thing I think is actually a really good comparison because I remember being in New York at that time being like, I don't fucking like video. I don't like anyone. I don't think I want to consume video in the way that what it was. I'm like, Mike and everyone. And they were like, oh, we're gonna do this video and this, we're going to do everything video now. Video first, no written content. It's like I don't know a single goddamn human that actually does that. And also the other thing that Facebook was lying, that Facebook was just over, just claiming like averaging out the engagement numbers and everyone was wrong, but that was the same kind of thing. It's like very clearly the people who have their hands on the steering wheel are looking at their phone and it's fucking confusing. But it's so much worse this time. It feels more egregious somehow.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah, yeah, because it feels, I mean we've had so many of these hype cycles kind of back to back to back from even the horizontal video days of Facebook to vertical video to whatever the hell the metaverse was supposed to be to literally in an ominous moment, as I was walking in to record this, I saw a guy wearing a Leather jacket with Bored Ape Yacht Club on the back. And I was like, God, that's. Well, yeah, I was like, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

That guy rocks.

[Morgan Sung]

What a cool dude. But it's like, how long is this going to last?

[Paris Martineau]

I. I have been actually looking at the numbers recently, and I don't know either, because for SoftBank to fund OpenAI, it might require them to destroy SoftBank. Like, S& P is downgrading the credit rating potentially due to. Hell. Yeah, yeah, I know. Like, we're really at this point where it's just like, we've got. We've gone so much further than like, the metaverse and crypto did, because those weren't really, like, systemic things. But this one, I think it's just the narrative has carried away so far that people are talking about a thing that doesn't exist all the time.

[Edward Nguesso]

In some elements, it kind of reminds me at the. Near the end or near the real peak is when we started also the C metaverse and crypto sustainable refi shit, where they actually, we can fight climate change with crypto by putting carbon credits on the blockchain. And so there was a moment where the frenzy and the speculative frenzy led to, like, world transformative visions that were bullshit. And I feel like we are heading there. We're in that direction with artificial intelligence, where consistently we've been fed. Oh, this is going to revolutionize everything. But it feels like the attempt to graft it onto more and more consumer products, more and more government services, more and more parts of daily spheres of life as a way to privatize almost everything or commodify everything feels like downstream of the way cryptos attempt to put everything on a blockchain blew up.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah, I was thinking about this in a kind of like, fundamentally cultural way where I think at some point in the last 30 years, there was a time when everything coming out of Silicon Valley was cool. Whether it was, like, useful or world transformative, it was cool and there was like, an edge to it. And people were like, ooh, that's neat.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Disruptive.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah. Disruption was everything. And like, I think post, like Facebook, Cambridge analytica era, like 2016, tech has just stopped being cool and edgy. It's very corporate. And, like, I don't think the rest of corporate America has kind of figured out that Silicon Valley's not the cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Thing anymore and that they can't lie, that they're fully capable of being wrong and lying. Like, that's the other thing.

[Alison Morrow]

They've gotten very good at fundraising and.

[Paris Martineau]

Marketing, but they're also not like kids anymore. Like we talk. I still see people referring to OpenAI as a startup.

[Edward Nguesso]

Palmer Luckey as a kid.

[Paris Martineau]

Palmer Luckey as a kid who looks like Leisure Suit Larry and sells arms.

[Edward Nguesso]

Which is US government.

[Morgan Sung]

Just a little war drone.

[Paris Martineau]

Just a little guy.

[Alison Morrow]

We refer to them as startups. But also I think one of the most accomplished parts of AI marketing has been like, we always refer to them as labs.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Alison Morrow]

So they seem like, so academic and like good fundamentally. And it's like these are companies. Like some of them might be part of, you know, a research institution or a university, but a lot of them are startups.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Literal companies.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah, they are companies.

[Paris Martineau]

Like Anthropic is a public benefit, I believe. And it's, it's just remarkable. And I think what's happened here is that the narrative has gotten away to the point that we're really dunce. Mask off. Moment I mentioned is people like Mr. Ludke from Shopify. It's very clear he doesn't do any work. Like, I think that anyone who is just being like, yeah, AI is the future and it's changing everything without specifying anything doesn't do any work. I just don't. Bob Iger from Disney said AI is gonna check. No, it's not Bob. How's it changing your fucking life, you lazy bastard? Like, you're gonna summarize your worthless emails that someone else reads as you lie on your Scrooge McDuck money.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's just, it's so bizarre. But it feels like we're approaching this insanity level where you've got people like Shopify being like, oh yeah, it's going to be in everything as like OpenAI burns more money than anyone's ever burned. Anthropic lost 5.6 billion last year, reported by the Information. Done some incredible fucking work on this, I should say. And it just doesn't make any sense and it's getting more nonsensical. You're seeing like all of the crypto guys have fully become AI guys now. And that was something I didn't like talking about because it wasn't happening. And now it's all of them. They all have AI avatars. This guy called Jamie Burke is real, real shithead. This guy was like a crypto metaverse guy and he's now a full AI guy. Another guy called Bernard Marr, who is just a harmless Forbes, like kind of like an npc, like one of the hollows from Dark Souls walking around Diagram.

[Morgan Sung]

Is increasingly becoming a Circle.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but he's onto Quantum now, which is a bad sign. That's a bearish sign. When you got one of the Forbes guys moving on to Quantum. We're cooked.

[Edward Nguesso]

What about Thermo? Isn't there some, like.

[Paris Martineau]

Thermodynamics. Yama become a thermodynamics influencer. I know what. I know what that means. I also know what that means, but if anyone could tell me real quick. But it's, I think, the most egregious one I've seen. I sent this all to you, Ed. I think you and I have talked about this the most. There was one of the stupidest fucking things I've read in my worthless life. And it's called AI 2027. Now, if you have not run into this yet as a listener, it will be in the episode notes. I'm just going to bring it up because it is fanfiction.

[Alison Morrow]

It is literally a thing throughout it.

[Morgan Sung]

I was like, is this fanfiction? This is fanfiction. Oh, this is interactive fanfiction.

[Paris Martineau]

It is. And you can hit the buttons as, what is this? How did we write it? Our research on key questions, what goals will future AI agents have? Can be found here. The scenario itself is written iteratively. We wrote the first period up to mid-2025, then the following period, et cetera, until we reach the ending. Yeah. Otherwise known as how you write stuff. Like you writing in a linear fashion. We then scrapped this and did it again. You should have scrapped it in all of it. Now this thing is predicting that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess at what it might look like. Otherwise known as making stuff up.

[Morgan Sung]

Not even over the next decade. It basically says it's going to have superhuman, like catastrophic or world changing impact in the next five years. Like by 2023, we're either going to be completely overtaken by our robot overlords or, like at a, you know, tenuous peace.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And it's insane as well because it has, it has some great headlines like Mid 2026, China Wakes Up. And then.

[Alison Morrow]

I love that China was so far behind. You know, it's such a. Like, when did this come out?

[Paris Martineau]

This came out like a week ago. And I've been sent it by a lot of people. If you're one of the people who sent it, don't worry, I'm not mad at you. It's just I got sent it by a lot of people. This thing is One of the most well written pieces of fan fiction ever in that it appears to be like a Manchurian Candidate situation for idiots. Not saying this is about the same thing, but anyway, Kevin Roose wrote up the piece in full. He wrote up a piece about this called I'm just going to say the AI forecast predicts some storms ahead. Some storms, some storms, my bad.

[Morgan Sung]

Even an accurate description of all of the storms it predicts.

[Paris Martineau]

And the the long and short of this, by the way, I have read this a few times because I fucking hate myself. The long and short of it is that a company called Open Brain. Who could that be? Yeah, it could be anyone, Anyone. Open Brain, they create a self learning agent. Somehow unclear how all they had is just that, how much, how many terraflops it's gonna require. And it can train itself and also requires more data centers than ever. How they get them, how those are funded, no fucking clue. Isn't explained. Probably the easy actually this is the fuck. This just occurred to me. Probably the only thing they could actually reasonably extrapolate in here is the cost of data centers. That's the only thing. And they don't. Probably because they'd be like yeah, we need an actual trillion dollars to do this made up thing.

[Edward Nguesso]

I do also want to add in here that you know, behind the AI 2027 is, you know, one of the people connected to it, if I remember correctly, is Scott Alexander, who's this guy that's part of the rationalist community, which is one of the, one of the groups that overlaps with effective altruist accelerationist. Yeah, you know, so if it feels like it's frothy and fan fictiony and hypy, that's because these are the same people that keep that are connected to pushing constant hype cycles over and over and over again.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's written to be worrying as well. It's written to upset you, it's written to be worrying.

[Morgan Sung]

But it also in the predictions for the next two years keeps talking about how the stock market is going to grow exponentially and do so well. The President is going to be making all of these wise informed decisions and having really deep conversations with the leader of Open Brain. And I was like, are you. That's why I asked when did this come out? Because I was like, maybe this was written a couple of years ago. But no, it is like literally it's.

[Edward Nguesso]

Like the Bene Gesserit kind of planning like he's going to be born, he's going to lead us to the promised land.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so good as well, because the people who've sent this to me have been very concerned just because they, like, this sounds scary. And I really want to be clear. If you read something like this and you're like, that doesn't make sense to me. It probably doesn't make sense to anyone because it's nonsense. This thing is. Let me read just one cut from it. The air and D. Progress multiplier. What do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress? We mean that OpenBrain makes as much AI research progress in one week with AI as they would in 1.5 weeks without. Who fucking cares, Matt? What are you talking about? If a frog had wings, it could fly like what you. And what's crazy is. And I know I beg on Kevin Roose, it's because he's a nakedly captured part of the tech industry. Now I am in public relations and I'm somehow less frothy about this. That should tell you fucking everything. It is insane that the New York Times, at a time when you have SoftBank being potentially downgraded by S&P, you have OpenAI raising more money than they ever raised. $40 billion. Except they only receive 10 billion and they'll only get 20 billion more by the end of the year if they become a non for profit, which they can't do. No, no, no, no. Kevin Roos can't possibly cover that. He needs to go and take a solemn looking fucking photo of some. I'll swipe. I can't even get my phone shut.

[Morgan Sung]

I do really love all of the incredibly soft features this guy is.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll put the link in there for this piece.

[Morgan Sung]

He's got 75 pockets on his torch.

[Paris Martineau]

My man is ready.

[Morgan Sung]

Oh, that's where it is.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's just him, like this guy, sitting with his hands clasped, staring mournfully into the distance. This is what you're spending your time on, Kev. And I'm just gonna read some Kevin Roose. The AI prediction world is torn between optimism and gloom. A report released on Thursday decidedly lands on the side of gloomy. That's Kevin Roose's voice, but my favorite part of this by far. I'm going to take a second to get it because, Ed, I sent this to you as well. Where is it? So also, a lot of this is. Oh, here we go. If all of this sounds fantastical, well, it is. Nothing remotely like what Mr. Coco tell Joe and Mr. Liffland are predicting is possible with today's AI tools, which can barely Order a burrito on doordash without getting stuck. Thank you, Kevin. I'm so fucking glad the New York Times is on this.

[Alison Morrow]

And that was at the end, right? You set up this whole article and it's like these guys have these doom predictions and that's the other thing about the altruistic AI guys. All have told themselves this story and they all believe it and they think they are like the Prometheus, bringing fire to the people and warning the people. And it's like you guys have sold yourself a story with no proof.

[Paris Martineau]

I dunno, I feel like they just scam artists. Nothing about this suggests they believe in anything. You can just say stuff. Look, it works.

[Alison Morrow]

Literally.

[Morgan Sung]

The like second sentence in this is that in two months there will be personal assistance that you can prompt them with tasks like order me a burrito on doordash and you'll do great stuff. There are so many things that go into ordering me a burrito on doordash. What restaurant do I want? What burrito do I want? How do I want it to get to me? Where am I? It can't do any of those things, nor will it.

[Paris Martineau]

He gazed out the window and admitted he wasn't sure. And the next few years went well and we kept AI under control, he said, referring to one of the writers of the piece. He could envision a future where people's lives were still largely the same, but where nearby special economic zones filled with hyper efficient robot factories would churn out everything we needed. And if the next few years didn't go well, maybe the sky would be filled with pollution and the people would be dead. He said nonchalantly. Something like that.

[Edward Nguesso]

You know, one of the things I really, really love about. I don't know, it's so frustrating because we're constantly fed these sci fi esoteric futures about how AI, powerful AI, superhuman AI is around the corner and we need to figure out a way to accommodate these sorts of futures. And part of that accommodation means restructuring the regulations we have around it. Part of that accommodation means entertaining experiments, grafting them onto our cultural production, grafting them onto consumer goods. Part of that means just like, you know, taking it on the chin and figuring out how to use ChatGPT. But in all of this, just more or less sounds like you need to. The marketing is failing on you and you need to step up in one way or another.

[Paris Martineau]

You need to believe, you need to believe in this.

[Edward Nguesso]

You need to do your part, you know, to summon God.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's the thing. It goes back to what you're saying it's like you've failed AI by not believing.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah. And if you're bad at it, it's your fault and not the machine's fault.

[Paris Martineau]

You just need to learn.

[Alison Morrow]

And to Ed's point, I think all of this predicting of the future and this revolution is they have told themselves a story that is this is inevitable and that there are no choices that the human beings in the room get to make about how this happens. And it's like actually no, we can make choices about how we want our future to play out and it's not going to be just Silicon Valley shoving it down our throats.

[Paris Martineau]

And on the subject of human choice, if this shit is so powerful, why have their mighty human choices not made it useful yet? Like that's the thing, it's. And you make this point in your piece as well. It's like AI can never fail. It can only be failed, failed by you and me, the smooth brained Luddites who just don't get it. And it's like, why do I have to prove myself?

[Edward Nguesso]

And listen, you know, the Luddites, they have more grooves on their brain than Kevin. So he needs to. I think it's worth embracing a little bit, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

Foreign Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying.

[Morgan Sung]

It's not just for celebrities.

[Paris Martineau]

So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

[Morgan Sung]

I'm told it's super easy to do.

[Alison Morrow]

@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail].

[Paris Martineau]

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung.

[Morgan Sung]

Host of Close All Tabs from KQED where every week we reveal how the.

[Paris Martineau]

Online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was wait a minute, I'm a journalist.

[Morgan Sung]

Is this real?

[Paris Martineau]

And I think we will see a twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.

[Morgan Sung]

You can find Close All Tabs wherever.

[Alison Morrow]

You listen to podcasts.

[Edward Nguesso]

And I feel like Rob Horning wrote this newsletter a few weeks ago that I think he was honing in on this point that LLMs and these generative AI chatbots and the tools that come out of them are in some ways a distraction because a lot of these firms are pivoting towards how do we create all these products. But also how do we figure out government products that we can provide. Right. How do we get into defense contracting, how do we get into arming or integrating AI into arms. And increasingly it feels like, you know, yeah, your AI agent is going to be able to. Not going to be able to order your burrito. But these firms are also, you know, at the same time that they're insisting superhuman intelligence is around the corner and we're going to be able to make your individual lives better, are spending a lot of time and energy on use cases that are actually dangerous. Right. And it should actually be concerning in generating kill lists. Right. Or facial recognition and surveillance which has.

[Paris Martineau]

Already been around us and isn't generative.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah. And isn't generative. But the firms that are offering these generative products are spending actual. The stuff that they're actually putting their time and energy into is these sort of demonstrably destructive tools under the guise in the kind of murky covering of it's all artificial intelligence. Right. It's all inevitable. It's all coming down the same pipeline. You should accept it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And it's. I think the thing is, as well as those guys really think that's the next big moneymaker, but I don't think anyone's making any money off of this. No one wants to talk about the money because they're not making any. Like no one. Like I think I've read the, I've read the earnings calls and not gonna listen. Of every single company that is selling an AI service at this point, I can't find a single one that wants to commit to a number other than Microsoft. And they'll only talk annualized, which is my favorite one. But ARR. But the thing is ARR traditionally would mean an aggregate rather than just 12 times the last biggest month, which is what they're doing now.

[Morgan Sung]

That's the classic setup used to be ARR.

[Paris Martineau]

I refuse to burn my clients asses to the ground with that one because it's like you can't just fucking make up a number unless you're in AI then you absolutely can. It's just frustrating because. And the reason I bag on Newton ruse other than all the others I've listed is the. I feel like in their position and in the position of anyone with any major voice in the media, skepticism isn't like something you should sometimes bring in. It's not. You don't have to be a grizzled hater like myself, but you can be like, hey, even if this did work, which it doesn't, how does this possibly last another year? And the reaction is, no, actually it's perfect now and will only be more perfect in the future. And I still get emails from people because I said once on an episode, if you have a use for AI, please email me. Regret of mine, every time I get an email like this, like, so it's very simple. I've set up seven or eight hours worth of work to make one prompt work. And sometimes I get something really useful. It saves me like 10 minutes.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And you're like, great. And what for? It's like, I'll just sum. Productivity things. What Productivity things, they stop responding. Yeah. And it's just, I. I really am shocked we got this far. I'm going to be honest, at this point, I'm. I will never be tired because my soul burns forever. But it's exhausting watching this happen and watching how it's getting crazier. I thought, like, as things got worse, people would be like, well, CNN stepping up. It's like watching the Times and some parts of the Journal still feed this. Also, the Journal has some incredible critical work on that. It's so bizarre. The whole thing is just so bizarre and has been so bizarre to watch in the tech media.

[Morgan Sung]

I mean, I think part of it is also just because investors have poured a lot of money into this and so of course they're going to want to back what they have spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on. And much of the tech media involves reporting on what those investors are doing, thinking and saying. And whether or not what those people are saying or doing, it's often not based in reality.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah. I say, as not a member of the tech media, so I have like kind of a general assignment, business markets econ. That's kind of my jam. And when I come. When like AI first started becoming the buzzword, like ChatGPT had just come out, I was like, oh, this sounds interesting. So I was paying attention, like a lot of journalists were. And you know, like, we've hit limitations. And I think part of the reason it's gotten so far is because of the narrative is so compelling. Curing cancer. We're gonna end. It's my favorite one, not my favorite one, silliest one is like, we're gonna end hunger.

[Paris Martineau]

Nice.

[Alison Morrow]

Okay.

[Morgan Sung]

How, how.

[Alison Morrow]

Also the problem of hunger in the world is not that we don't grow enough food. It is a distribution problem. It is a sociologic, it is a complicated problem. What, what actually is AI going to do? Also that you're going to need human beings to distribute it. It just like if you push them one step.

[Morgan Sung]

If you read the 2027 AI thing, it explains that the AI is going to give the government officials such good advice, they'll be actually really nice and caring to poor people.

[Paris Martineau]

And what's crazy is here's the thing, and I'm glad you brought that up. One thing I've learned about politics, particularly recently, but in historic, historic means, when the government gets good advice, they take it every time, every time, every time. They're like, this will, this is economically good. Like Medicare for all, which we've of course had forever and never and came close to numerous times decades ago versus now when we have it. And I think the other funny thing is as well with what you were saying, Alison, is like, yeah, it's going to cure cancer. Okay, can it do that? No. Okay, it's going to cure hunger. Can it do that? No. Okay, easy. Then perhaps it could make me an appointment also. No. Can you buy something with it? No. Can it take this spreadsheet and move stuff around?

[Edward Nguesso]

Maybe sometimes it can write a robotic sounding script for you to make the appointment yourself.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Alison Morrow]

I mean, I would even say that I could give the benefit of the doubt to researchers who are really working on the scientific aspects of this. Like, I don't, I'm not a scientist, I don't know how to cure cancer. But if you're working with an AI model that can do it, like, God bless. But businesses actually do take money making advice and money making technology when it's available. And I think about this all the time with crypto, which is another area I cover a lot. It's like if it were the miracle technology that everyone or its proponents have said it is, businesses would not hesitate to rip up their infrastructure to make more money. And like, no one's doing it. And it's like, oh, well, they just haven't, they haven't figured out how to optimize it yet. It's like, that sounds like a failure of the product and not a failure of people using it. So I get back to the whole like, AI cannot fail, it can only be failed. And it's the same with crypto and a lot of other tech where it's just like, this is not a product that people are, are hankering for.

[Morgan Sung]

And I think part of the notable thing is when we do see examples of large businesses being like, oh, yeah, we're gonna change everything about our business and integrate AI. We're gonna be an AI first company. The products that end up coming out of that are, there's an AI chatbot in my one medical app now. Cool. That does nothing for me. When I'm trying to search the Amazon comments on a product, suddenly the search box is replaced with an AI chatbot that's not doing even one tenth of what you've promised.

[Paris Martineau]

The same product every fucking time.

[Morgan Sung]

It's just an AI chatbot that isn't super helpful.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's great. I Remember back in 2015, 2016, I had an AI chatbot company. They took large repositories of data and turned it into a chatbot you'd use. I remember pitching reporters at the time and then being like, who fucking cares? Who gives a shit? This will never be. Like, a decade later, everyone's like, this is literally. God, I cannot wait to go to the office of a guy who wrote fan fiction about this and talk to him about how scared I am now. I can't wait for AGI. And I've also said this before, but what if we make AGI? None of them are going to do it. Doesn't exist. But. And it didn't want to do any work. That's the other thing. Like, they're not. They don't. Casey Kagawa, a friend of the show, made this point, has made it to me numerous times, which is they talk about AGI and Roost did this as well. Like AGI this, AGI that. They don't want to define it. Because if you have to start defining AGI, you have to start talking about things like personages, like, is this a citizen? Is this. Can this thing feel pain? Because surely consciousness could feel pain. Oh, you could take pain out the house. Every consciousness, none of the. And hey, how many is one? Is it. If it's. Is it one unit is a virtual machine? Like, there are real tangible things. And, you know, they don't want to talk about that shit. Because you even start answering one of those and you go, oh, right, we're not even slightly closer. We don't even know how the fuck to do a single one of these things ever. And I honestly, the person I feel bad for this is a joke is Blake Lemine, I think his name was from Google. If he. If he'd have come out like, three years later and said that he thought the computer. This guy from Google who thought the AI there was the guy who is.

[Morgan Sung]

Like the chat but is real and I love it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Had that come out three years later, he'd be called Kevin Roose because that's exactly what Kevin Roose wrote about being AI Savria is like Bing, AI told me to leave my wife and Kevin, if you ever fucking hear this, man, you're worried about me dogging you, I'm gonna keep going. Do your fucking job, mate. Anyways, it's just insane because I am a gadget gizmo guy. I love my doodads, I love my shit, I really do. If this was gonna do something fun, I'd have done it. Like I've really spent time trying and I've talked to people like Simon Wilson, Max Wolf. Two people who are big LLM heads who are do disagree with me on numerous things but. But their reaction is kind of. I'm not going to speak exactly for them is basically it actually does this. You should look at this thing. It does not. This is literally God. But it all just feels unsustainable economically. But also I feel like the media is in danger when this falls apart too because the regular people I talk to about ChatGPT, I pretty much hear two use cases. One, Google search isn't working and two, I need someone to talk to, which is a worrying thing. But. And I think by the way, that use case is just. That's a societal thing. That's a sign the lack of community, lack of friendship or lack of access to mental health services and also could lead to some terrible outcomes. But for the most part, I don't know why I said for the most part, I've yet to meet someone who uses this every day. And I've yet to meet someone who really cares about it who like is like if this went tomorrow, like if I didn't have my little anchor battery packs, I'd scream. If I couldn't have permanent power everywhere. Like if I couldn't like listen to Musical Day, that'd be really make me real sad. If I couldn't access ChatGPT, I would not. Who cares?

[Edward Nguesso]

That's cuz you haven't tried Claude yet.

[Paris Martineau]

I've tried the shit out of tried Claude so much and it's just, I don't know, I. I feel like people's response to the media is gonna be negative too because there's so many people that boosted it. There was a Verge story, there was a study that came out today. I'll link it as well in the notes where it was. A study found that most people do not trust like regular people do not trust AI, but they also don't trust the people that run it and they don't like it. And I feel like this is a thing that the media is going to face at some point and roost. This time, baby, you got away with the crypto thing. You're not. This time I'm going to be hitting you with the TV off to share every day. But it's just. I don't think members of the media realize the backlash is coming. And when it comes, it's going to truly, it is going to lead to an era of cynicism, true cynicism in society that's already growing about tech. But specifically, I think it will be a negative backlash to the tech media. And now would be the great time to unwind this versus tripling down on the fan fiction that. And I have been meaning to read this out, my favorite part of this by far, I say, and of course, flawlessly have this ready. Why our uncertainty increases substantially beyond 2026. Our forecast from the current day through 2026 is substantially more grounded than what follows. Thanks, mother. Awesome. That's partially because it's nearer, but it's also because the effects of AI on the world really start to compound in 2027. What do you mean they don't. That's you. You're claiming that. And I just. I also think that there's the greatest subtle problem that we have. Too many people who believe the last smart person they listen to. And I say that as a podcast runner, like the last investor, they talk to the last expert. They talk to someone from a lab.

[Alison Morrow]

Yes, yes. Well, I think that gets to. If you just push the proponents. And this is like, I've come into AI skepticism as a true. Like, I'm interested in this. I'm interested in what you're pitching to the world. And when I hear, and I hear like, CEOs of AI firms get interviewed about this all the time and they talk about this future where everyone just has a life of leisure and we're lying around writing poetry and touching grass and like, everything's great. No one has to do hard labor anymore. They have that vision. Or they have like the, you know, p doom of 75 and everything's gonna be terrible, but no one has a really good concept. And that's why this is so funny, the fan fiction of what happens in 2027. It's like no one has laid out any sense of how the job creation or destruction will happen. In this piece. They say, oh, there's going to be more jobs in different areas, but some jobs have been lost. And it's like, how?

[Paris Martineau]

Why?

[Alison Morrow]

What jobs?

[Paris Martineau]

They get oddly specific on some things, then the meaningful things. They're like, yep, there'll be jobs. Yeah.

[Alison Morrow]

And the stock market's just going to.

[Paris Martineau]

Go up and the number go up all the time as it is right now as we report.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah. I believe they say in 2028, Agent 5, which is the Super AI, is deployed to the public and begins to transform the economy. People are losing their jobs, but Agent five instances in the government are managing the economic transition so adroitly that people are happy to be replaced.

[Edward Nguesso]

I would not.

[Morgan Sung]

GDP growth is stratospheric. Government tax revenues are growing equally quickly. And Agent 5 advised positions show an uncharacteristic generosity towards the economically dispossessed.

[Alison Morrow]

You know what this is? We failed to uphold public arts education in America and a bunch of kids got into coding and know nothing but computers and so they can't write fan fiction. Yeah, no one's fighting writing is bad.

[Morgan Sung]

Not enough people spent time in the minds of fanfiction.net and it's.

[Paris Martineau]

No one's been shipping anyone.

[Alison Morrow]

Like this is clearly. This is just like someone wanting to have a creative like, vision of the future. And it's like, it's not interesting or compelling.

[Paris Martineau]

It's joyless.

[Edward Nguesso]

I mean, that's why they brought him on. That's why they brought Scott Alexander on to write this narrative. Right. Because that's what he spends a lot of time doing in his blog is trying to beautify or flesh out why this sort of future is inevitable.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Edward Nguesso]

You know, why we need to commit to accelerating technological progress as much as possible. And why the real reactionary or, you know, anti progress perspective is caution or concern or skepticism or criticism if it's not nuanced in a direction that supports progress.

[Paris Martineau]

I just feel like a lot of the AI safety guys are grifters too. I'm sorry. They love saying alignment. Just say pay me like I know that we should have. I get the occasional email about this being like, you can't hate AI safety. It's important. It is important. Generative AI isn't AI. It's just trying to fucking accept it. They're not. If they cared about the safety issues, they'd stop burning down zoos and feeding entire lakes to generate one busty Garfield, as I love to say. They would also be thinking about the actual safety issues of what could this generate? Which they do. You can't do anarchist Cookbook shit, it's about as useful. Phil Broughton, friend of the show, would be very angry for me to bring that up, but the actual safety things of it steals from people, it's destroying the environment, it's unprofitable and unsustainable. These aren't the actual, these are actual safety issues. These are actual problems with this. They don't want to solve those. And indeed the actual other safety issue would be, hey, we gave a completely unrestrained chatbot to millions of people and now they're talking to it like a therapist. That's a fucking, that's a safety issue. No, they love that. They love.

[Morgan Sung]

I do think that one criticism of the AI safety initiatives that is incredibly politically salient and important right now is that they are so hyper focused on the long term, 1100 years from now, future where AI is going to be inside all of us and we're all going to be, you know, robots controlled by an overload that they are not paying attention to literally any of the harms happening right now.

[Paris Martineau]

Deliberately not talking about the arms today because then they'd have to do something at work when they met each day.

[Edward Nguesso]

You know, it's like when 972Mag reported on how Israel was using or trying to integrate artificial intelligence into generating its kill lists and targets. So much so that they started targeting civilians and used that to fine tune targeting of civilians. You know, I saw almost nothing in the immediate aftermath of this reporting from the AI safety community, you know, almost no interest in like talking about a very real use case where it's being used to murder as many civilians as possible. Silence. You know, that's a real short term concern that we should have.

[Paris Martineau]

But that would require the AI safety people to do something. And what they do is they get into work, they're making quarter of a million dollars a year. They get into work, they load slack, they load Twitter, and that's what they do for eight hours. And they occasionally post being like, by 2028 the AI will have fucked my wife. And everyone's like, goddammit, no, not our wives.

[Morgan Sung]

The final frontier.

[Paris Martineau]

But it is all like, they wanna talk about 10, 15, 20 years in the future, because if they had to talk about it now, what would they say? Because I could give you AI 2026, which is OpenAI runs into funding issues. Can't pay Core Weave can't pay Crusoe to build the data centers in Abilene, Texas, which requires Oracle, who have raised debt to fund that, to take a bath on that. Their stock Gets here. Core weave collapses because most of Corby's revenue is now going to be OpenAI Anthropic can't raise because the funding climate has got so bad. OpenAI physically cannot raise in 2026 because SoftBank had to take on murderous debt to even raise one round. And that's just with like.

[Edward Nguesso]

You're getting me excited here.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no. Next newsletter, baby. And probably a two part episode. But that's the thing. They don't want to do these because they get. Okay. They would claim I'd get framed as a skeptic. They also don't want to admit the thing in front of them because the thing in front of them is so egregiously bad with crypto. It was not that big. Metaverse. It was not that big. I do like that meta burned like $40 billion. And there's a Yahoo Finance piece about this just on mismanagement. It's just like they like. I love.

[Morgan Sung]

It's also sick that they renamed themselves after.

[Edward Nguesso]

It's so good. Can't go back.

[Paris Martineau]

Can't go back. Yeah. Like they should get. They should just change.

[Morgan Sung]

Oh, they should add an I.

[Paris Martineau]

They should just add an I at the end. It's just. If anyone talks about what's actually happening today, which is borderline identical. What was happening a year ago, let's be honest, it's April 2025. April 2024 was when I put up my first piece. Being like, hey, this doesn't seem to be doing anything different. And it still doesn't even with reasoning. It's just.

[Edward Nguesso]

We'll just wait for Q3. Agent Force is gonna.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Agent. No, Agent Zero is gonna come out.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Actually the information reported that Salesforce is not having a good time selling Agent Force. You never guess why.

[Edward Nguesso]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Turns out that it's not that useful due to the problems of Generative AI. If only someone had said something which the information. I. I've begged on the information a little bit. But they are actually doing insanely good work. Like Corey Weinberg, Juro Sawa, Alisa Gardizzi. Paris, of course. But I'm specifically talking.

[Morgan Sung]

The AI team is Steffi Palazzo.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course. And like it's great because we need this reporting for when this is collapsed so that we can say what happened. Because it's going to. If I'm wrong. And man, would that be embarrassing. Just going to be honest. Like if I'm wrong here, I'm going to. I'll look like a huge idiot. But if. If I'm right. Here, like, everyone has over leveraged on one of the dumbest ideas of all. Like, silly, silly. It would be like crypto. It would be like if everyone said, actually crypto will replace the US dollar, and you just saw like, the CEO of Shopify being like, okay, I'm gonna go buy a beer now. Using crypto. No, it's gonna take me 15 minutes. Sorry, that's just for you to get the money. Actually, it's gonna be more like 20. The network's busy. Okay. Well, how's your day? Oh, you use money, huh? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you should let that guy in front of me. This is gonna be a while. It's what we're doing with AI, it's like, well, AI is changing everything. How is the chat?

[Edward Nguesso]

What if we have a Uber scenario where maybe they abandoned the dream of this $3 trillion addressable market that's worldwide? They abandoned the dream of being monopoly in every place and focus on a few markets and some algorithmic price fixing so that they can figure out how to juice fares as much as possible, reduce the wages as much as possible, and finally eke out that profit. What do we see? Some of these firms, they pull back on the ambition or the scale, but they persist and they sustain themselves because they move on to some smaller vision.

[Morgan Sung]

I feel like Occam's razor, that's the most likely situation, is that AI tools are useful in some way for some slice of people and make a lot of. Maybe, let's be optimistic, it makes a sizable chunk of a lot of people's job somewhat easier. Like, okay, was that worth spending billions and billions of dollars and also burning down a bunch of trees?

[Paris Martineau]

Has that happened though?

[Morgan Sung]

Like, that's. No, I'm just saying that could be, I think, best case scenario.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying, like, we haven't even reached that yet. Because with Uber, it was this incredibly lossy and remains quite a lossy business, but still delivers people to and from places and objects from. To and from places.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah, you know, you don't have to. You know, as much as I hate them, I'll give them credit, you know, you don't have that. Less drunk driving, you know, and some transit in parts of cities where there's not much in the way of public transit. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

This is like if Uber, if every ride was $30,000 and every car weighed 100,000 tons.

[Edward Nguesso]

When you factor in the externalities, pollution, maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

But that's the crazy thing. I think generative AI is so Much worse as well, pollution wise. But. But even pulling that back it's like I think OpenAI just gets wrapped into copilot. I think that that's literally. They just shut this. They're like they absorb Sam Altman into the hive mind and he. I think so my chaos pick for everyone is Satya Nadella is fired and Amy Hood takes over if that happens I think is Prometheus the one who can see stuff I'm fucking. I don't read.

[Edward Nguesso]

No, he gave fire to mortals technique.

[Paris Martineau]

I just spit fire. It's. It's just frustrating. It's frustrating as well because a lot of listeners on the show email me and they took like teachers of being like oh, they're forcing AI in here librarian. Oh, there's AI being forced.

[Morgan Sung]

I mean the impact on the educational sector, especially with public schools, it's really terrifying. Especially because the school districts and schools that are being forced to use this technology of course are never the private wealthy schools. It is the most resource starved public schools that are going to have budgets for teachers increasingly cut. Meanwhile they do another AI contract and off source like lesson the sort of things that these companies, the EdTech AI things pitch as their use case is lesson planning, writing report cards. Basically all the things that a teacher does other than physically being there and teaching, which in some cases the companies do that too. They say instead of teaching put your kid in front of a laptop and they talk to a chatbot for an hour.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's the thing. And the school could of course I don't know, spend money on something that's already being spent, which is teachers have to buy their own fucking supplies all the time. Teachers have to just spend a bunch of their money on the school and the school doesn't give them money, but the school will put money into ChatGPT. It's just they should ban universities as well. Everything I'm hearing there is just like real fucking bad. Like the.

[Morgan Sung]

I mean the issue is from talking to university professors it's like impossible for universities to ban it.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you elaborate?

[Morgan Sung]

I haven't told to any. I guess professors are. The obvious example is like essays. Like professors get AI written essays most of the time and they can't figure out whether they are AI written or not. They just notice that all of their students seem to suddenly be doing worse in class while having similar output of written assignments. There are very few tools for them to be able to accurately detect this and figure out what to do from it. Meanwhile I guess getting involved in trying to prosecute Someone for doing this within the academic system is a whole other thing. But In K through 12 especially, it's been kind of. It's been especially frustrating to see that some of the biggest pushers of AI end up being teachers themselves because they are overworked, underpaid, have no time to do literally anything, and they have to write God knows how many lesson plans and IEPs for kids with disabilities and they can't do it all. So, like, well, why don't I just plug this into what's essentially a ChatGPT wrapper? And that results in worse outcomes for everyone, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

So I have some personal experience with iep. I don't think they're doing it there, but they're definitely doing it elsewhere. And if you've heard. If you've heard iep, that fucking kills me.

[Morgan Sung]

That's one of the things that these tools often pitch themselves as. To create an iep.

[Paris Martineau]

I want to put my hands around someone's fucking.

[Morgan Sung]

Can you describe what an IEP is?

[Paris Martineau]

I forget what it stands for.

[Morgan Sung]

Individual Education Plan. I might be wrong, but that's the.

[Paris Martineau]

It is generally the plan that's put for a child with special needs. So autism being one most obvious one. It names exactly what it is that they have to do. Like what the teacher's goals will be like socio.

[Morgan Sung]

They like legally have to do all the things in that document, like it's a.

[Paris Martineau]

And it changes based on the designation they get. And so like, it's different if you get. There's like an emotional instability one, I believe. And nevertheless there's like separate ones and each one is like the goals of the. Where the kid is right now, where the kid will be in the future, and so on and so forth. The idea that someone would use CHAT GPT and if you listen to this and use CHAT GPT for at least I hate you or so bad I understand you're busy, but this is. Is very important nevertheless. Wow, how disgraceful as well, because it's all this weird resource allocation done by. And I feel like the overarching problem as well is it's the people making these decisions, putting this stuff in don't do work. It's school administrators that don't teach, it's CEOs that don't build anything. It's venture capitalists that haven't interacted with the economy or anyone without a Patagonia sweater and decades. And it's these. And again, these VCs, they're investing money based on how they used to make money, which was they Invest in literally anything and then they sold it to literally anyone. And that hasn't worked for 10 years. Alison, you mentioned the thing 2015. Ish. That was when things stopped being fun. That was actually the last time we really saw anything cool. That was around Apple Watch era.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And it was the last, really. The end of the hype cycles. The real, the success ones. At least they haven't had one since then. VR, AR, XR, crypto, metaverse, the Indiegogo and Kickstarter era sharing economy. But these all had the same problem, which was they cost more money than they made and they weren't scalable. And this is the same problem we've had. What we may be facing is the fact that the tech industry does not know how to make companies anymore. Like, that may actually be the problem.

[Alison Morrow]

Can I add one thing to what you said about people who don't work? I think there are people in Silicon Valley and I don't. I'm gonna get a million emails about this, but there are a lot of Silicon Valley men who are white men who don't really socialize.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep.

[Alison Morrow]

And I think they are kind of propagating this technology that allows others to kind of not interact. Like so much of ChatGPT is designed to like, subvert human interactions. Like, you're not gonna go ask your teacher or ask a. Excuse me, or ask a classmate, hey, how do we figure this out? You're just gonna go to the computer. And I think that culturally, like, you know, people who grew up with computers. God bless. But, you know, we need to also value social interaction. And it's interesting that there are these. There's this very like, small group of people often who lack social skills. Propagating a technology to make other people not have social skills.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think there's also a class aspect to that because then grow up, particularly with like, food on the table. But one thing I grew up was I don't trust any easy fixes. Nothing is ever that easy. Is something that kind of. If something seems too good to be true, too accessible, there's usually something you're missing about the incentives or the actual output. So, no, I wouldn't trust the computer to tell me how to fix something because I don't fucking like you made that up. Like, it isn't this easy. There's got to be a problem. The problem is hallucinations.

[Morgan Sung]

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a.

[Morgan Sung]

Minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real?

[Paris Martineau]

And I think we will see a twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.

[Morgan Sung]

You can find close all tabs wherever.

[Alison Morrow]

You listen to podcasts.

[Paris Martineau]

And we're back. So we didn't really lead into that ad break, but you're gonna just have to like it. I'm sure all of you are gonna send me little emails, little emails about the ads that of, well, I've got to pay for. Got to pay for my Diet Coke somehow. So back to this larger point around ChatGPT and why people use it and how people use it. I think another thing that just occurred to me is have you ever noticed that Sam Altman can't tell you how it works and what it does? You ever noticed? None of these people will tell you what it does. I've read everything Sam Altman said at this point. Listen to hours of podcasts, he's quite a boring twerp. But on top of that, for all his yapping and yammering, him and Wario Amadate don't seem to be able to say out loud what the fucking thing does. And that's because I don't think that they use it either. Like I genuinely, I'm beginning to wonder if any of the people injecting AI, sure, Sam Altman and Dario probably use it. I'm not saying it fully, but look, these aren't people. The next person that meets Sam Altman should just be like, hey, how often do you use ChatGPT? Gets back to the. It reminds me of the remote work thing. All these CEOs saying guys should come back to the office. How often you in the office? Exactly. And I think this is just a giant revelation of like how many people don't actually interact with their businesses that don't interact with other people that don't really know how anything works, but they are the ones making the money and power decisions. It's fucking crazy to me. I don't know how this shakes out. It's not going to be an autonomous agent doing whatever also. Okay, that just occurred to me as well. How the fuck do these people not think these agents come for them first? The AGI was doing this and they read this and be like, these people fucking, they worked it all out. I need to kill them first.

[Edward Nguesso]

Well, I mean that kind of gets Back to what you're saying where it's like, you know, if we entertain the fan fiction for a little bit, what is the frame of mind for these agents? If they're autonomous or not, how are we thinking of them? Are we thinking about like they're persons or if they're, you know, lobotomized in some way?

[Paris Martineau]

Do they have opinions?

[Edward Nguesso]

You know, And I think really it just gets back to like, you know, part of the old hunt for a nice polite slave. How do we figure out how to reify that relationship? Because it was quite profitable at the turn of industrial capitalism. I think it's not a coincidence that a good chunk of our tech visions come to us from reactionaries who think that the problem with capitalism, the problem with tech development, is that a lot of these empathetic, egalitarian reforms get in the way of profit making. You know, I think similarly, you know, the hunt for automatons, for certain algorithmic systems is searching for a way to figure out how do we replicate, you know, human labor without the limitations on extracting and pushing and coercing as much as possible.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, with, you know, and there's not.

[Edward Nguesso]

Your agent or something else.

[Paris Martineau]

And the thing is, yeah, sure, the idea of an autonomous AI system would be really useful. I'm sure it could do stuff that sounds great. There are massive, as you've mentioned, like, sociological problems, like, do these things feel pain? If so, how do I create anyway? But in all seriousness, like, sure, an autonomous thing that could do all this thing would be useful. They don't seem to even speak to that. It's just like, and then the AI will make good decisions, and then the decisions will be even better. Then Agent seven comes out and you thought Agent six was good.

[Morgan Sung]

It's like they don't even speak to how we're going to get to the point where Agent 1 knows truth from falsehood.

[Edward Nguesso]

Less inevitable, of course.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah, we just need to give it all of our data and everything that we've paid money for, required other people to pay money for, and then it will finally be perfect.

[Paris Martineau]

And it doesn't even make profit of any kind. That's the other thing. It's like people saying it makes profit. There's the profit seeking. Is it profit seeking? It doesn't seem like we've sought much profit or any.

[Morgan Sung]

That's also, I think, a good point of comparison to what you were talking about earlier, Ed, with the comparison to, to Uber Lyft, these companies that achieved massive scale and popularity by making their products purposefully unprofitable. By charging you $5 for a 30 minute Uber across town so that you're like, yeah, this is gonna be part of my daily routine. And the only way they've been able to squeeze out a little bit of profit right now is by hiking those prices up, but trying to balance it to where they don't hike it up so much that people don't use it anymore. And AI is at the point where like for these agents, I think some of the costs are something like thousands of dollars a month, but they don't exist and they don't, they don't work already. And it's like you're still not making money by charging people that much money to use it. What is the use case one where this even works? And if it somehow did manage to work, how much is that going to cost? Who is going to be paying $20,000 a month for one of these things?

[Paris Martineau]

And how much of that is dependent on what is clearly nakedly subsidized computer prices? How much of this is because Microsoft's not making a profit on a zeal compute? OpenAI isn't making anthropic isn't. What happens if they need to? What if they need to? They're going to. That's the subprime AI crisis from last year. It's just, well, that's when you get.

[Edward Nguesso]

The venture capitalists insisting that that's why we need to do this AI Capex rollout, because if we build it out like infrastructure, then we can actually lower the compute prices and not subsidize anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that's the thing, but that's the other thing. The Information reported the OpenAI says that by 2030 they'll be profitable. How Stargate. And you may think, what does that mean? And the answer is Stargate has data centers. Now you have to. I just have one little question. This isn't a knock on the information. This is. They're reporting what they've been told, which is fine. Little question with OpenAI though, how, how does more equal less cost? Because this thing doesn't scale. They lose money on every prompt. It doesn't feel like they'll make make any money. In fact, they won't make any money, they'll just have more of it. And also there's the other thing of data centers are not fucking weeds. They don't grow in six weeks. They take three to six years to be fully done. If Stargate is done by next year, I will fucking barbecue up my Padres had and eat it live on stream. Like I will. That's if they're fucking alive next year. Also the other thing is getting back to 2027 as well. Year 2026. 2027 is going to be real important for everything. 2027 or 2026 is when Wario Amade says that Anthropic will be profitable. That's also when the Stargate data center project will be done in 2026. I think that they may have all just chosen the same year because it sounded good and they're going to get in real trouble next year when it arrives. And they're nowhere near close.

[Alison Morrow]

I can't wait until all of those companies announce that because of the tariffs.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yep.

[Alison Morrow]

That they have to delay their timeline and it's like completely out of their hands. But no, the tariffs. You understand the tariffs.

[Paris Martineau]

I got a full. I got a full roasted pig. I'm going to be tailgating Microsoft earnings April 23rd. Cannot wait.

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah, you should go to like a data center.

[Paris Martineau]

Have a marching ban. Like the end of severance. Yeah, it's. But that's the thing like that. I actually agree. I think that they're going to. There's going to be difficult choices. Sadly, there's only really two. One capex reduction, two layoffs or both because they have proven willingness to lay off to fund their capex. But at this point, people are like. They're asking to what end? Like, why are we. Why are we doing this? It just. It feels like the collapse of any good or bad romantic relationship where just one party's doing shit that they think works from years ago and the other party is just deeply unhappy and then disappears one day. And the other party being just happened.

[Edward Nguesso]

I watched an episode of Lost last night and it just happened. Happen. This is Lost.

[Paris Martineau]

Lost is a far more logical show than any of this AI bullshit. But it's.

[Edward Nguesso]

Let's not get that.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, it's a bad show. It's about.

[Edward Nguesso]

No, I wouldn't say that either.

[Paris Martineau]

Talking about something that's very long, very expensive and never had a plan. But everyone talks about like it was good despite it never proving it. Lost. Yeah, sorry.

[Edward Nguesso]

I have some.

[Paris Martineau]

I really do have some feelings on that.

[Morgan Sung]

You're gonna get. You're gonna get some emails, I'm sure.

[Edward Nguesso]

Email from me.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he is texting me.

[Morgan Sung]

Ed is writing an email. Quiet still.

[Paris Martineau]

Emotion emoji, like a hundred times. Yeah, it's. I think it's just. I can't wait to see how people react to this stuff as well. When this. Because I obviously will look very silly. If these companies stay alive and somehow make AGI. AGI is killing me first. Like the grave digger AI truck is going to run me over outside my house. It's going to be great. But I can't wait to see how people explain this. I can't wait to see what the. It's like, oh, we never saw the tariffs maybe.

[Alison Morrow]

Right. And I talked to an analyst just last week who's like a bullish AI tech investor, and he said, already you're seeing investment pullback because of expectations in the market that these stocks were overbought in the first place. And now there's all this other turmoil, external macro elements that are going to kind of take the jargon of like the froth out of the market. They're gonna. It's all gonna deflate a little bit. And so I was asking him, like, is the AI bubble popping? And he says, no, but tariffs are definitely like deflating it and, and delaying whatever progress that we are gonna be promised from these companies is gonna be delayed. Even if it was gonna be delayed, they were gonna find other reasons. This is a convenient macro kind of excuse to just say, like, oh, well, we didn't have enough chips, we didn't have enough investing, we didn't have enough compute. Be patient with us. We're going to have. The revolution is coming.

[Paris Martineau]

What's great as well, talking of my favorite Wall street analyst, Jim Cramer of cnbc. So Core Weaves IPO went out. I just need to mention we are definitely in the hype cycle because Jim Cramer said that he would SUE an analyst, D.A. davidson, on behalf of Nvidia for claiming that they were a lazy Susan. As in. As in, basically what the argument is is that Nvidia funded Core Weave so the Core weave would buy GPUs, and at that point, Core Weave would then take out loans on those GPUs for capex reasons. Capex, including buying GPUs. So very clearly. And also you attack gil over at D.A. davison, you and me, Kramer in the ring. But it's. We know we're in the crazy time when you've got like a TV show host being like, I'm gonna sue you because you don't like my stocks. I think that, like, we're going to see like a historic washout of people. And the way to change things is this time we need to make fun of them. I think we need to be like, actively. We don't need to be mean. That's my job. We can be like, to your point at your article, Alison, it's like say like, hey, look. No, what you are saying is not even rational or even connected to reality. This is not doing the right things. Apple intelligence is like the greatest anti AI radicalization ever. I actually think, Tim, it's so bad. It's so fucking bad.

[Morgan Sung]

And I, before it even came out, I like downloaded the beta. I was like, I'm gonna test this out. Because you know, I talk about this thing on my podcast sometimes and it's so bad, it's so bad. I like turns it off for most things, but I have it on for a couple of social networks and I mean, I guess with the most recent update it got marginally better, but. But it still constantly tells me so and so replied to your blue sky Skeet. I check. They didn't. That person didn't even like the Skeet. I don't know where that name came from. And this happens like every other day. It's just completely wrong. I'm like, how?

[Paris Martineau]

My favorite is the summary text for Uber where it's like several cars headed to your location.

[Morgan Sung]

We're gonna take you out.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Kalani Kalanick mode. Activate it. No, it's. It's great as well because I usually don't buy into the Steve Jobs would burst from his grave thing. I actually think numerous choices Tim Cook has made have been way smarter than how Jobs would have done. This is actually like he's gonna burst out of the ground thriller style actually was that zombies pop out. And anyway, because it's nakedly bad and close, it's not a great reference, but it's nakedly bad. Like it sucks and I've never. I've people in my life were non techie hurt but will constantly be like, hey, what is Apple Intelligence? Am I missing something? I'm like, no, it's actually as bad as you think.

[Morgan Sung]

And I mean it's also small other things beyond just the notification summaries. The thing that every time I highlight a word and I'm trying to. Sometimes I might want to use Find definition or any of the things that come up. I have to scroll by like seven different new options under the right click or double click and if you hit.

[Paris Martineau]

Writing tools it opens up a screen wide thing.

[Morgan Sung]

Yes, it opens up a thing and I'm like, who has ever. Who is trying to use this to rewrite a text to their group chat? Who is this for?

[Alison Morrow]

I feel like Apple, to its credit is recognizing its mistake and it's clawing it back and like delaying Siri indefinitely.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I don't know if I.

[Edward Nguesso]

Agree on that one.

[Alison Morrow]

That's fair.

[Paris Martineau]

Because the thing they're delaying is the thing that everyone wanted. I think they can't make it work because the thing they're delaying is the contextually aware Siri. Right?

[Alison Morrow]

Yes. They're quote unquote delaying it.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't exist. It never existed.

[Alison Morrow]

We'll see.

[Paris Martineau]

Apple's washed.

[Alison Morrow]

You think Apple's was? No, I, I mean, but that's the thing. It's the most brand conscious company on the planet. And I wrote like when they did their June revelation of the Siri AI is going to come out and they said it was going to come out in the fall and then it was coming out in the spring and now it's not coming out ever. Question mark? But throughout the whole two hour presentation, the letters AI were never spoken. Artificial was never spoken. It was Apple intelligence. We're doing this, we're doing our own thing. It's not because they already understood that when you say something is like, that looks like it was generated by AI, you're saying it looks like shit.

[Paris Martineau]

And the suggestions are also really bad too. I've had over the last few weeks a few people give me some bad news from their lives and the responses it gives are really funny. Oh no, it'd be like someone telling me something bad happened. It's like, oh. Or like I'm like, what was the worst one I had? It was like, that sounds difficult. And it's like a paragraph long thing about like a family thing they had like. And it's not even like got like any juice to it. Like I didn't read too long. Those would be funny suggestions. But like it can't even. It's proof that I think that these large language models don't actually. Well, they don't understand anything, they don't know anything. They're not conscious. But it's like they're really bad at understanding words. Like people like, oh, they make some mistakes. They're bad at basic contextual stuff. And we had Victoria Song from the Virgin the other day and she was talking about high context and low context languages. I said, this is. I can only speak English. I imagine not being able to read or speak in any others that it really fumbles those. And I, if there's, if you're listener, you want to email me anything about this research. How the fuck does this even scale if it can't? Oh, we're replacing translators.

[Edward Nguesso]

Great.

[Paris Martineau]

You're replacing translators with things that sometimes translate right? Sometimes Sometimes it just feels also inherently like, that feels like an actual alignment problem, by the way, that right there, that feels like an actual safety problem. Like, hey, if we're relying on something to translate and it translates words wrong and, you know, especially in other languages, subtle differences can change everything. Maybe that's dangerous. No, no, no. We got the computer wake up in like two weeks and then it's gonna be angry. And that's the other thing. We're gonna make AGI and we think it's not gonna be pissed off at us. I don't mean Rococo's modern Basilisk or whatever. I mean just like, if it wakes up and looks at the world and goes, these fucking morons. Like, you need to watch Person of Interest. If you haven't one of the best shows on actually on AGI. Like, genuinely, you need to watch Person of Interest because you will see how that could happen when you allow a quote unquote perfect computer to make our decisions. Also, when has a computer being particularly good at decision making? I don't know. I feel like so much of this revolution, quote unquote, is based on just the assumption that the computer makes great decisions and it oftentimes doesn't.

[Morgan Sung]

No, it often does not.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Morgan Sung]

Why would I think that the same search function in Apple that cannot find a document that I know what the name is and I'm searching for it? Why would I think that that same computer is going to be able to make wise decisions about my life, finance and personal relationships?

[Edward Nguesso]

Because that's Apple and this is AI.

[Morgan Sung]

Oh, that's true. I'll show myself out.

[Alison Morrow]

I don't know how much is AI versus just a good translation app. Like, I genuinely don't know.

[Morgan Sung]

Like, well, it's because AI is such a squishy term that we really don't like in some way. Like, I guess AI could be expanded to include a lot of modern computing.

[Alison Morrow]

Like, I can see travel in like emergency situations where you need. Where like a good AI translator would be like a real lifesaver. Just as a small aside, I was just in Mexico and my step kids were using Google Translate and we were like, kind of remembering Spanish and, you know, blah, blah, blah, go into a coffee shop and I wanted to order a flat white. And so I used Google Translate to say, like, how would you order a flat white in Spanish? And it said to order a blanco plano, which means flat white. But like, across Mexico City there are wonderful coffee shops and you know what they call them? Flat white.

[Morgan Sung]

Like, isn't it an Australian coffee or something like that.

[Alison Morrow]

I learned that very quickly with the help of Reddit because I went to the barista and ordered a Blanco plano and they were like, who are you, you crazy gringo?

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, I speak English.

[Alison Morrow]

Yeah, I mean like it's. The functionality is very limited on those things and it's just like. Also it gets back to like if It's. If it's 100% reliable, it's great. If it's 98% reliable, it sucks.

[Paris Martineau]

And just as an aside, did any of you hear about the latest quasi fraudulent thing with Joni? I've. That's happening.

[Alison Morrow]

I just saw the headline.

[Paris Martineau]

So Sam Altman and Jony I've founded a hardware startup last year actually I do know Michael that has built nothing. There is a thing. They claim there's a phone without a screen.

[Edward Nguesso]

Sick.

[Paris Martineau]

And OpenAI, a company run by Sam Altman owned principally by Sam Altman and Microsoft is going to buy for half a billion dollars this company that has built nothing co founded by Sam Altman.

[Edward Nguesso]

Sick.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like there should be a one law against this, but it's just like what have they been doing? And this is just kind of cliche to say like quote the big short but like a big part of the beginning of that movie is talking about the increase in fraud and scams and it really feels like we're getting that. And rip to the humane pimp. By the way, rest in peace. You won't be missed, motherfuckers. Two management consultants, both like indignity. Eat shit, Jesse Lou Rabbit. R1 your next motherfucker. When you. When your shit's gone, I'll be honking and laughing. Your customers should sue you.

[Morgan Sung]

The description. So my colleagues the information reported this journey. I have Sam Altman news and the description for the device really makes me chuckle. Designs for the AI device are still early and haven't been finalized. The people said potential designs include a quote unquote phone without a screen and AI enabled household devices. Others close to the project are adamant that it is quote, not a phone, end quote. And they're going to spend. They've discussed spending upwards of 500 million on this company.

[Alison Morrow]

This is like a bad philosophy class where it's like what is a phone? That's not a phone nip.

[Paris Martineau]

It's semiotics for beginners. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh my God. And that's like. That's the thing as well. Like this feels like a thing. The tech media needs to be on as well. Just someone needs to say, I'll be saying it like, this is bordering on fraud. Like, it seems like it must be legal because otherwise there would be some sort of authority. Right. You can't do anything illegal without anything happening. But it's like, this is one of the most egregious fucking things I've ever seen. This is a guy handing himself money. One hand. Ha. This is should be fraud. Like, this is like, how is this ethical? And everyone's just like, oh, yeah, you know this Kevin Roose. Maybe you should get on this shit, find out what the phone that isn't a phone is. What the fuck? And also household appliances with AI. Maybe like something with the screen and the speaker that you could say like a word to it and it would wake up and play music.

[Edward Nguesso]

Like a Roomba.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Alison Morrow]

A Roomba with AI mode just declared bankruptcy.

[Morgan Sung]

DJ Roomba on the blockchain.

[Paris Martineau]

Roomba dead. Why Roomba dead?

[Alison Morrow]

I think they. I don't know, actually. I remember I read the headline, they.

[Morgan Sung]

Were supposed to be acquired by Amazon, but I think the deal fell through under Lina Khan's ftc, I'd assume sick. And then got him. Also, one quick note on the Joni Ives Sam Altman thing, I guess it's notable that Altman has been working closely with the product, but is not a co founder and whether he has an economic stake in the hardware project is unclear.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you know, he just seems to.

[Morgan Sung]

Be working closely with.

[Edward Nguesso]

You're gonna.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa. Like he's just hanging out there and taking a salary in an equity position.

[Morgan Sung]

I do think it's very interesting, all of these different AI device startups that have popped up in the last couple of years and my question for them is always just like, to what end? Like, people didn't like Amazon Alexa and.

[Paris Martineau]

It also lost a shit ton of money.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah. And Amazon's still trying to make it work. Siri's never been super popular and I just don't like. One of my co hosts on the podcast I work on, Intelligent Machines is obsessed with all these devices. Just because he's like one of those tech guys. Leo. Yes, he's. And we love to make fun of him.

[Paris Martineau]

We love it.

[Morgan Sung]

But his latest device is this thing called a bee.

[Paris Martineau]

We just have Victoria Song on talking about this. The thing that records everything.

[Morgan Sung]

It records everything all the time and then makes. Puts that up in the cloud and then I guess doesn't store the full transcripts, but does store a little AI generated description of everything you did and whoever you talk to that day. And there's no way I Mean, he's in Leo's in California, which is not a one party recording scene. You gotta get consent from everybody to record. And the bee is not doing that. But it's just baffling to me. Cause I'm just like. I guess he's like, well, it could be nice to have record of all of my days all the time. And I'm like, I guess. But to what end?

[Edward Nguesso]

Just record it. Just record it.

[Paris Martineau]

Write it down.

[Morgan Sung]

Yeah, write a diary.

[Alison Morrow]

There's literally a Black mirror episode about that.

[Morgan Sung]

I believe it's the first episode of.

[Alison Morrow]

Black Mirror where everyone has like a recording device. And then it does. When I was, when you were talking about this on the show, I was listening, thinking, like in this black mirror thing, it reminded me that like when Facebook started having like all your photos collected under your photos and like how we started reliving so many experiences time hopping. Never scroll back and like look at how happy you were like six years ago. You know, like. And it creates this like cycle. Like imagine if every interaction, every like romantic interaction, every sad interaction, everything you could replay back to yourself is. It sounds like a nightmare to me.

[Morgan Sung]

I do think it's also just a night. Like humans, we're not built socially to exist in a world where every interaction is recorded and searchable with everyone forever. Like, you would never have a single friend. Romantic relationships would dissolve.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Eternal sunshine and the spotless mind.

[Alison Morrow]

Like, great move.

[Paris Martineau]

But even then, like memory is vastly different to the experience of collecting it. Like just existing. Like we are brain slow. I don't know, my brain just goes everywhere. But like compared to memory, which can be oddly crystalline and wrong, you can just remember something. You can remember a subtle detail wrong or you can just fill in the gaps. Memory sucks.

[Edward Nguesso]

Also doesn't having like a device that constantly records everything I wrote at the impulse or maybe the drive to be as present, you know, because you're like, well, it's got my back to it.

[Morgan Sung]

But this also got huge privacy implications where suddenly the cops could just be like, yeah, we're just gonna take a recording. We're just gonna subpoena everybody who was in this area's B device and then suddenly get a recording of everyone's days ever that was just happened to be in this place. Because we think a crime could have happened there.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think that there's an overarching thing to everything we're talking about, which is these are products made by people that haven't made anything useful in a while. And everything is being funded based on what used to work, what used to work was you make a thing, people buy it and then you sell it to someone else or take it public. This only worked until about 2015. It's not just a zero interest free era thing, it's. We have increasingly taken away the creation of anything valuable in tech from people who experience real life. Like our biggest CEOs are Sam Altman, Wario Amadei, Sundar Pichai MBA, former McKinsey, Satya Nadella, MBA. I mean, Tim Cook MBA. Like these are all people that don't really interact with people anymore. And the problems, the people in power are not engineers, they're not even startup founders anymore. They're fucking business people making things that they think they could sell, things that could grow the raw economy. Of course. And we're at the kind of the pornographic point where it's like a guy being like, what could AI, what does AI do? You can just throw a bunch of data and give you insights. Well, what if we just collected data on everything happening around us ever? That would be good. Then you could reflect on things. That's what people do. Right? And I actually genuinely think there is only one question to ask the Beefounder, and that's, are you wearing one of these now? And how often do you use this? Because I, if they use it all the time, I actually kind of respect them. I guarantee they don't. I guarantee they don't. And they'll, they'll probably say something around a lot of privileged information as opposed to everyone else who's not important. And this fucking Joanie of oh, it's going to be a phone without, without a screen. What can you do with it? I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. I only get paid $15 million a year to do this.

[Morgan Sung]

The question is also, who wants a phone without a screen? The screen's the best part. I love the screen. I love to hate the screens.

[Paris Martineau]

But they don't talk to anyone. They don't have human experience, they don't have friends that like. They have friends who are all like have $50 million in the bank account at any time. They just like exist in a different difficulty level. They're all going up very easy. They don't really have like predators of any kind. They don't really have experiences. So they're. What they experience in life is when you have to work out what you enjoy. And because they enjoy nothing, all they can do is come up with ideas. That's why the rabbit R1 oh. What do people do Order McDonald's. Can it do it? Not really, but it also could take a photo of something. It could be pixelated.

[Morgan Sung]

That could kind of order an Uber through it. Maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

What was great was the rabbit launch. The rabbit launch. And he tried to order McDonald's Live, and it just didn't work. It took, like, five minutes to fail. It was. And that's the thing. Like, I feel like when this hype cycle ends, the tech media needs to just be aggressively, like, hey, look, fool me thrice. Shame on me. Like, like, maybe. Maybe next time around we can ask the questions I was asking in 2021, where it's like, what does this do? Who is it for? And if anyone says it could address millions of people, it's like, have you talked to one of the. One of them? Well, I think we can wrap it up there, though. Alison, where can people find you?

[Alison Morrow]

You can find [e-mail] Nightcap I write the CNN Business Nightcap. It's in your inbox four nights a week.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, Ed.

[Edward Nguesso]

I write a newsletter on Substack, the Tech Bubble. I co host a podcast, this Machine Kills with Jathan Sadowski. And I'm on Twitter @bigblackjacobin.

[Paris Martineau]

You're on Blue sky too, right?

[Edward Nguesso]

Yeah, blueskywdwardonguesojr.com you can read my work at the Information.

[Morgan Sung]

I also host a podcast called Intelligent Machines. And you can find me on Twitter arismartanau or on blueskyarris nyc.

[Paris Martineau]

And you can find me at edzitron.com on bluesky. Google. Who destroyed Google search? Click the first link. It's me. I destroyed Google search along with Papagar Ragavan. Fuck you, dude. If you want to support this podcast, you should go to the Webbies. I will be putting the link in there. I need your help. I've never won an award in my life. I am. It's the best episode. Sorry, best business podcast episode. We are winning right now. Please help me. Please help me win this. And if I need to incentivize you further, we are beating Scott Galloway. If you want to defeat Scott Galloway, you need to vote on this. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezetteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to Chat where's your Ed to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

[Alison Morrow]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Paris Martineau]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Alison Morrow]

Our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Morgan Sung]

In a world of economic uncertainty and workplace transformation, learn to lead by example from visionary C suite executives like Shannon Schuyler of PwC and Will Pearson of iHeartMedia. The good teacher explains the great teacher inspires.

[Alison Morrow]

Don't always leave your team to do the work. That's been the most important part of.

[Paris Martineau]

How to lead by example.

[Morgan Sung]

Listen to Leading by Example executives making an impact on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Alison Morrow]

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Morgan Sung]

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was wait a.

[Morgan Sung]

Minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real?

[Paris Martineau]

And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.

[Morgan Sung]

You can find Close All Tabs wherever.

[Alison Morrow]

You listen to podcasts.