Ryan Reynolds (12:14)

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Ed Zitron (14:17)

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Ed Zitron (14:47)

In fact, I think we have real reason to worry about whether OpenAI even makes its current projections. In my last multipart episode and in the newsletter, OpenAI is a systemic risk. For those of you who like to read while listening to my fucking podcast, I wrote that Bloomberg had estimated that OpenAI would triple revenue to $12.7 billion in 2025, and based on its current subscriber base, OpenAI would effectively have to double its current subscription revenue and massively increase its API revenue to hit these targets. These projections rely on one entity, SoftBank, spending $3 billion specifically on OpenAI services. Really shouldn't have said specifically because they keep changing what it means, meaning that they'd have to make enough on API calls so people plug in the models into their products to generate more revenue than OpenAI made in subscriptions in the entirety of 2024. And something else that I can only describe as an act of God, and that I Admit assumes that SoftBank's spending commitment is based on usage and not like a flat fee where SoftBank just hands them $3 billion and gets infinite levels of access. Assuming it's the former, I'd be stunned if SoftBank's consumption hits $3 billion in 2025, even with the massive cost of the reasoning models that Crystal Intelligence will maybe be based off of, again, we don't know. And SoftBank announced this deal with OpenAI in February. Crystal Intelligence, if it works, and that is possibly the most load be of all time, will be a massive, complicated and ambitious product. Details are vague, but from What I understand, SoftBank wants to create an AI that handles a bunch of varied tasks that knowledge workers do. I mean, it's just the same marketing bullshit. It's the same thing. It's the thing they've been lying about before. And to be clear, OpenAI's agents cannot consistently do, well, anything right now. What I believe is happening is that reporters are taking OpenAI's rapid growth in revenue from 2023 to 2024, when they went from like tens of millions of dollars a month in the beginning of the 2023 to 300 million in August 2024. Genuinely a big leap. They're taking this to mean that the company will always effectively double or triple revenue every single year, forever. With their evidence being. OpenAI has said that this will happen in projections. It's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's bullshit. It's bullshit. As I wrote before in a newsletter, it's called there's no AI revolution and the accompanying episodes at the time, OpenAI effectively is the generative AI industry. And nothing about the rest of the generative AI industry suggests that the revenue exists to sustain these ridiculous scenes and frankly, fucking stupid valuations and projections. What do I mean by that, by the way? Okay, let me get into it. ChatGPT is the only real generative AI product with any significant usage. Or rather, their nearest rivals are a fraction of said user base. Or maybe I need to be a little bit blunter. If anyone held a Google Gemini user conference, all the attendees could probably share a Cab. Believing the OpenAI growth myth, and yes, reporting it objectively is both endorsing and believing these numbers, is engaging in childlike logic where you. You take one event, which is OpenAI's revenue grew 1,700% from 2023 to 2024. Wow. To mean another will take place, which is that OpenAI will continue to double revenue literally every other year. Another insane thing to believe. And you're consciously ignoring difficult questions such as how will they do this? And what's the total addressable market of large language models and their associated subscriptions? Exactly. And how does this company even survive when it expects the costs of inference to triple this year to $6 billion alone? Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. I really need to be clear with that last one, because it's a direct quote from the information. The company also expects growth in inference costs, the costs of running AI products such as ChatGPT and their underlying models to moderate over the next half decade. These costs will triple this year, referring to 2025 to $6 billion and rise to nearly $47 billion in 2030. Still, the annual growth rate will fall to about 30% then. Okay, thanks also. Are you fucking kidding me? Six billion fucking dollars for fucking inference? Hey, Casey Newton. I thought those costs were coming down. Casey? Casey? Casey, you in my house? He's not here. He's not here. Anyway, that's not really great at all. That's actually really bad. The Information reports that OpenAI will make about $8 billion from subscriptions to ChatGPT in 2025, meaning that 75% of OpenAI's largest revenue source is eaten up by the price of providing it. This is meant to be the cheap part. This is the one fucking thing people say to me is meant to come down in price. I've had assholes saying to me for the last year, cost of inference is coming down. Is it? Are we living in different dimensions? Are there large parts of the tech media that have fucking gas leaks? What am I missing? Tell me what I am missing now, Ed, you haven't taken people to bury these days. You don't know where they. Shut the fuck up. If you were one of these people. Who says, I need to? Casey, you're included, man. Fucking like. I'm so sick of this. Oh, you don't talk to people running these things. I am sick of people like Casey Newton and others too, saying, oh, you don't talk to enough AI people. You haven't listened to them. You mean I haven't listened to the pablum of the people that make money off of lying about this dog shit? Are you really think. You think that's what's missing from my analysis? Interviewing people who work at these companies and understanding how the technologies work. I know how the technologies work. I don't need to talk to these fucking people. There are people out there like Simon Wilson and Max Wolf who know how these things work, that I talk to fairly regularly. And both of them push back on me because they know how large language models work. Those people matter. What doesn't matter to me, what will never matter to me, is what Dario Amadei, Jack Clark, and all the other fucking people anthropic think. And I think it's detestable and actively, honestly malpractice in journalism to pretend that there's something ethical about speaking to these people and listening and taking in their marketing spiel. It's actually a little bit disgusting that this is even a critique leveled at anyone. But you're gonna have to forgive me. I'm gonna be a little rude And I know that seemed like it, but I'm not even getting started. In fact, you know what? I think it's time. Okay, everyone. I think it's time that I go through the most common critiques in AI. It's time for me to really sit down and I'm gonna do my Kevin Roose voice. And I know a lot of you like my Kevin Roos voice. And some of you, not a lot of you, I'm gonna say I'm being rude to these people and it weakens my analysis, to which I say, kiss my ass. I will turn you. I will cube you like a car in a garbage dump. But let's start, shall we? The cost of inference is coming down. That's one argument. Okay, source. Source. Where is your source? If you are someone saying to me that the costs of inference are coming down, I want your source. I want you to show me the costs. I want you to show me the costs at scale. Because it sure seems like they're increasing for OpenAI, and they're effectively the entire user base of the entire generative AI industry. But Ed, what about Deepseak? You sweet idiot child. Deepseek is not OpenAI. And OpenAI's latest models only seem to be getting more expensive as time drags on. GPT 4.5 costs $75 per million input tokens and $150 output tokens. And at the risk of repeating myself, OpenAI is effectively the entire generative AI industry, at least for the world outside of China. On top of that, we actually don't know whether Deepseek is even profitable to run at scale. It is definitely cheaper to run, but we don't know if it's actually profitable. Indeed, I don't know, even though how you'd calculate this, because running a deep SEQ model as just one person is one thing. The question is whether you could scale it up like OpenAI. We don't know. But let's get back to the other critiques. This is a company at its growth stage. They can just hit the button and it all be profitable. You have the mind of a child. If this was the case, why would both Anthropic and OpenAI be losing so much money? Why are none of the hyperscalers making profit on AI? Why does nobody want to talk about the underlying economics if they're at the growth stage and also little side point as well? Why have we been at the growth stage for years? And why are hyperscalers at the growth stage? They're not startups anyway. Onto another one, though. These are the early days of AI. It's just like the early days. Wrong. Wrong. We have all the king's horses and all the king's men, the entire tech industry and more money that has ever been invested into anything piled into generative AI, and the result has been utterly mediocre. Nobody's making money on AI other than Nvidia and maybe Turing, a consultancy. But Ed, they're already showing signs that the AI is going to be powerful. No, it's not. No, it's not like I'm. If anyone brings these critiques to you, just say no. No, they're not. Show me, show me, show me. Why is it the only people. I'm giving Simon Wilson credit here, he's one of the only people who will show you anything cool. And it's cloud compute stuff. It's like relatively boring enterprise stuff. It's exciting for the niche cases like software generally is, but it's really not showing any power. We talk about this powerful AI thing. Is it in the room? Like, where is this? Where, where is this powerful AI? But then I have actually had a few emails saying, ed, ed, look at OpenAI's O3 model. And I just want to be clear that this new and extremely expensive reasoning model also hallucinates more. Is that AGI, by the way? Is this AGI? Is the AGI in the room with us? Did the AGI tell you it loved you? Did it tell you to leave your wife? Did it? Did it offer you sex? I hope you're okay.

Ryan Reynolds (24:22)

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Ed Zitron (25:17)

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Ed Zitron (26:20)

Ed, it really is the early days though it's just like this in the early days of the Internet. No, it was not. And you're a buffoon for suggesting otherwise, Jim Cavallo of Goldman Sachs wrote in a note from last year in the episode Pop Culture, you can listen to it, which the early days of the Internet were nothing like this. Nothing at all. Nothing. There were the 62,000, $64,000 some Microsystems servers, yes, but there were so, so many. Few of them. But Ed, smartphones, I've got you. I finally have me in my sets. People doubted those two. They didn't. I will drown you in a an icy lake if another person comes to me and says hey Ed, smartphones. People doubted smartphones. Nobody doubted smartphones. Why do people I've read this point so many times, but no one seems to have a fucking hyperlink because they're lying. They're goddamn lying. Covello of Goldman Sachs also noted and included an entire thing about how smartphones were fully telegraphed to analysts in advance, with hundreds of presentations that accurately fit how smartphones rolled out and that said that no roadmap exists for AI. It's just we're years into this and I'm still repeating the same points and I still don't have much in return other than the cost of inference going down. But here's another point of people like they go, ed, you're so boned. Check out this article. And some of you love to email me this fucking thing. Not many of you, I must be clear the listeners, you're wonderful. I Love you so much. But there's one or two of you out there, really, you're very attached to your generative AIs and I'm never going to like it, but some of you like to send me this article from Newsweek in 1995 from a guy who said that the web would not be a big business. Clifford stole. He said why the web won't be nirvana. And this piece, by the way, is quite detailed. You should read it. I'm going to have have it in the episode notes. But they think that sending me this, that one guy, one guy was wrong once. One guy, he said that the Internet wouldn't be big. And this proves that I. Ed Zitron. What's that, 99 like 20 years later? Because one guy said that the Internet wouldn't be big. That I am wrong somehow. Motherfucker. Have you read the piece? That's actually the thing. All of these are things that you can box up and use in people who use this half assed bullshit. Clifford Stoll basically says that the Internet at the time was pretty limited. And yes, he conflated that with the idea that he wouldn't be big in the future. However, Stoll's piece also, as Michael H. Piltzig wrote for the LA Times, was alarmingly accurate about misinformation and sleazy companies selling computerized replacements for education. In any case, one guy saying that the Internet won't be big doesn't mean a fucking thing about generative AI. And you were a simpleton if you think it does. One guy being wrong in some way is not a response to a criticism. I will crush you like a bug. If this is your logic, I will eat you. I will put you in my mouth like Kirby and I'll shit you out and I will have the powers of a dunce. Stoll's analysis also isn't based on hundreds of hours of research and endless reporting. Mine is. I will grab you from the ceiling like the wall master from Zelda. You will never be heard from again. Anyway, another argument, another argument that people like to give me is that OpenAI and Anthropic are research entities, not business, and that they are not focused on profit. Okay, so just so we're clear that if that's the case, they're just going to burn money forever. Is that the case? Or are they going to hit like the be profitable button sometime? Also, if OpenAI was a research entity, why does it need $40 billion from SoftBank or to change its weird corporate structure to become a Full for profit. Actually, wait, wait a second, wait a second. So it just occurred to me. OpenAI has as many as 800 million weekly active users. That's proof of adoption, right? That's going to be an argument that people have. There's some bloke on bluesky who's just been responding to me every few days with this kind of argument, saying, look, look at all the users. And look, I get the. You might be a bit horny about this number, but something don't make no sense about this number. On March 31, 2025, OpenAI said that it had 500 million people who use chat GPT every week. Two weeks later, Sam Altman claimed that something like 10 of the world uses their systems a lot. They're referring to chat GPTs. And the media took this to mean that chat GPT is 800 million weekly active users. I just want to be clear about something as well. Sam Altman didn't say that. That he said the weird vague thing about something like 10% of the world. Like, that's what he said. And everyone just went, oh, shit, we gotta help. Help Sam Altman out. Gotta push this bad boy over the edge. And there are three ways to interpret what he said. And you tell me which one sounds real. Number one, OpenAI's user base increased by 300 million weekly active users in two weeks. Number two, OpenAI understated its user base in the announcement of their funding announcement on OpenAI.com by 300 million users. Or three. Number three, how about this? Sam Altman fucking lied. I get that some members of the media have a weird attachment to this damp little man, but have any of you ever considered that he's just fucking saying things, knowing that you will print them with the kindest possible interpretation? Sam Altman is a liar. He's lied before and he'll lie again. I wrote an entire newsletter called Sam Altman is Full of Shit. You should read it. I'm gonna link to it. But wait, Ed. Google says it has 350 million monthly active users on Gemini. Eat shit, Zitron. No, you eat shit. Yes, Google Gemini has 350 million monthly active users. And that's because they started replacing Google Assistant with Google Gemini in early March. You are being had. You are being swindled. If Google replaced Google Search with Google Gemini, it would have billions of monthly active users. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ on a goddamn cracker. Even reading this script out, I get like some of you have suggested that this is at all manufactured. No. Reading this stuff makes me Very angry because I didn't grow up popular or intelligent in any way. I've had to pick this shit up as I go. And I don't think what I'm saying is crazy, but I am sometimes treated that way. And this episode I realize I'm doing myself no favors, but anyway, back to the critiques really quickly. OpenAI having hundreds of millions of free users each losing it money is proof that the free version of ChatGPT is popular, largely because the entirety of the media has written about AI non stop for two straight years and mentioned ChatGPT GPT every single fucking time. Yes, yes, there is a degree here of marketing, of partnerships, of word of mouth, of some degree of utility. But when you remove the non stop free media campaign, ChatGPT would have petered out by now along with this stupid fucking bubble. But edits proof somebody's doing something. Yeah, it's proof that something is broken in society. Generative AI has never ever had the kind of meaningful business returns or utility that actually underpins something meaningful. But it has had enough to make people give it a try. Do you not actually know? I know you listening? You're gonna get this. In some ways this episode has been, I mean, in all ways it's been pretty ranty. And the second one gonna be even more so. What I'm trying to do here is show you how farcical all this crap is, how ridiculous it is, how silly these posits are. These projections are the suggestion that what we have today will become something else when all we've had is proof that it won't. Do you see the obvious cracks in the wall here? No matter how strenuously people like professional credulous dipshits at the other big publications tried to pave over them. Does any of this make sense to you? Because I, even when I try and steel, man, my own arguments, can't wrap my head around how any of this survives, let alone becomes an industry where the biggest players annual revenues greater than some major industrialized countries. And I know some of you the emotions a lot and I know the aggression's a lot. I'm frustrated because I truly believe this stuff's falling apart. I truly believe that this was never really anything. While I'm saying this, Kevin Roose is in the New York Times going, I believe that AGI is my friend. I believe AGI will rise out of the ground and hug me in the way that no one ever has. I think that's disgusting on multiple levels. But I also think it's genuinely Irresponsible. I think all of this is. I think when this collapses, we're going to have to look back and take inventory of how we got here. And I need you to, in the next episode, listen to it through the kind of lens. Listen to it through the lens. That's how lenses work. I need you to just stick with it and realize that all of the what this is is trying to show you and hopefully other people that you talk to how silly this is, how ridiculous this is, and that we have a major problem in tech and business media. We have a problem where people can come out and just say whatever. The Charlie Brown had hoes of the tech media. And it's disgusting to me because there are startups that could use this money. There are better things to be done with this money. Perhaps they're not hyper growth markets, but there are things that actually exist that could be piled into instead. We've done this to make companies look like they can grow, to make Sam Altman able to buy another 5 million dollar Koenigsegg car. Is that the one he has? Either way, I'm not going to lower the temperature on the next episode. I'm going to be honest. It's going to be just the spicy. See. But I want you to know all of this frustration comes from a place of knowing that we can do better, knowing that the tech industry could do better. Perhaps it won't be as big as it is today in the future, I don't know. But for it to get better, this shit needs to end. Stick around for the next part where I talk about how we actually got here, how this bubble got inflated, and how nasty the result could be at the end. Thank you for listening. Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects@mattosowski.com m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.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. Better Offline is a production of coolzone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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Ed Zitron (37:32)

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Ryan Reynolds (37:58)

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