Better Offline - Hater Season: Corey Quinn

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, about the realities of LLMs and the chaotic world of Amazon Web Services.Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen LastWeekinAWS.com DuckbillHQ.com https://bsky.app/profile/quinnypig.com YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses, calms me down. If anything,

I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different. So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This week on Crimless, Rory and I welcome a very special guest.

When I did a podcast, I wear my sleep masks. I like where this is going. So if you guys will indulge me. That's right. The incredibly talented and hilarious Will Ferrell on an episode dedicated to crimes committed by people named Will Ferrell. You're good for 300 crimes?

Yeah. We got two. I'm ready to go right up to present day. Listen to Crimless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media. Hello and welcome to bed or offline. I am of course your host, Ed Zittron.

Now, we're in Hater season. Hate A Season is when I bring people on, allow them to get rude, because you know this podcast is usually so reserved and nice in the way we refer to people, especially tech executives, which we've never referred to as fuckwits or morons, or dumbasses, or shitheads, or shitheels,

or ass wipes or fuck nuts or knob ends. We've never done any of that ever. Nevertheless, joining me today is Chief Cloud Economist at Doug Bill, Cory Quinn, Corey, how are you doing? I am delighted to be here because normally in all the other places I find myself, I have to be so reserved. You have to pull your punches. Corey, today's hater season, tell me about your feelings on Amazon Web Services.

Oh, dear Lord. It's like, it's weird. I don't actually hate Amazon. People think I do because of the things I say and the things that I do. But if I hated them this month. Because of your actions. But 10 years in, I'm like, it's weird. I write a newsletter about it. If I actually hate the company and want nothing but ill things to happen to them,

first off, that's a pathology and I need a restraining order. And secondly, it always bugs me when people think that I have an axe to grind against the company. Because 10 years in, are you seriously suggesting this is the best I would be able to do if I actually wanted to hit them where it hurts? Come on. But yeah, they've been annoying the piss out of me lately. So, AWS is weird because, and maybe you can explain this to me, over my entire tech career, I've heard this constant story that your AWS bill just, it just goes up. It just arbitrarily increases. It's not really clear whether they're doing price increases, though I know those exist too.

Very, but occasionally, increasingly, increasingly these days, yes. But what is it that makes the bill go up? Why and why does this happen so often? I used to think it was a conspiracy. And then I realized Amazon is in no way, shape, or form organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off. It is the nature of charging per usage. and honestly, assholes where, okay, we're going to launch a service and we're going to charge you for every gigabyte you put in it. That's all we're going to do. Great. Straightforward, humans can rationalize

around that. Great. Easy, pizzie. They did that when they first launched S3 in beta back in 2005. And S3 is storage, right? It's a big object store. Picture it as an infinite sized disk and you're pretty close. But they would, originally, they only charged for the data you stored there. Great. So people stored a bunch of object that were zero byte in size. So they just used the names of those objects and the ability to query whether that object existed or not in what its name was as a free database. This at the time also, according to legend, didn't just, it wasn't just about taking free services.

It was also just crippling the performance of S3 at the time. So what they did is they started also charging every to request you make would charge a small fee. I think it's something like a penny per thousand requests if memory serves. Don't quote me on that. I look it up when it matters. And that solves that problem. But then you have things like that that are patched on and tied to things and tied to things and tied to more things.

And in any complex organization, what happens is, is now suddenly you have this morass of $100 million a year and spent. Great. What's in there that's costing all the money? Well, everything. But if you look at anything individual and you don't think it's being used, okay, am I going to turn it off? If I'm right, it's going to save me a bit of money. If I'm wrong, it's going to take down production, and now I have a serious problem trying to serve my customers.

So the safe bias is, don't turn things off. Also, you're an engineer, hypothetically. I realize that can be an insult to your part of the world, but roll with it for a moment. Exactly. You're an engineer. You want something to spin up, and no one is letting you spin it up. You will take up residents annoying the hell out of them every 10 minutes until you get the access that you need.

Right. You do your job. Things are done. Two things now work against you. One, you had to ask and beg and plead them to spin that up. You want to hang on to it in case you need it again because you don't want to go through that. And this is internally an organization.

Exactly. Exactly. This is not Amazon's fault. This is human nature's fault. They haven't patched that yet, though I think they're trying with the latest iteration of Alexa Plus. Why not? I'm kidding.

That thing just sells ads. We're good. But wait. So I'm an engineer and I've advocated for my theme. Yes, and now you're done using it. No one is going, there's no, there's no call to action to get you off your ass to go and turn it off. No one will come and badger you about it. It just, it tends to exist.

It's why people cynically say you're not charged for the things you use in the cloud, so much as you're charged for the things you forget to turn off. And Amazon loves this, I'm guessing. They love the fact that there's just this cloud anchor system. I would say that on some level, contrary to popular belief, they don't love it as much as you'd think. because all right, I'm trying to run my blog, and I've spun up eight attempts at this blog,

so it now costs eight times what it should. Great. And the narrative becomes, if they're not careful with all that wasted usage, that's doing nothing, is, huh, the cloud is pants shittingly expensive. We should go back to data centers. There's really no one on the other side of this issue.

So why doesn't Amazon help people tune these things down and turn it off? They made some abortive attempts in part of the organization, but this is going to surprise you. Amazon is not the most organizationally competent company you're ever going to meet. But what does that mean in practice? Is it just that they don't know they're asked from their earhole? They don't really know how things work, all of the above. Silo's. It's all silos.

There are over 200 services, and we long ago across the point where I can speak incredibly convincingly about AWS services that do not exist to Amazon employees and not get called out on it. Because who in the world knows everything that Amazon does? And I'm a white guy. I sound as plausible as AI these days. Yeah. So it's just a labyrinth, a leviathan of different SKUs and product categories that may or may not. Over 2 million SKUs, if you want to be precise, yes.

Jesus. And those are all just different kinds of virtual machines and the like. Okay, we'll start there. Sure. Virtual machines. You want to spin up a virtual machine in Virginia, U.S. East 1. Okay, which one are you going to pick? Because there are approximately 700 different types you can spin up.

Are you going to pick the right one? Of course you're fucking not. Also, how do you pick the right one? This is the thing, because it seems that the people making these decisions of which virtual machines to get or whatever spin up on AWS are engineers, right? Usually. Software engineers aren't necessarily infrastructure experts, are they? You've noticed. Yeah, very often, companies will standardize on one particular size of instance across the board.

Why? Well, because in development, it's the one that the original founding engineer picked and we'll come back and revisit. visit this later. Ten years go by. No one is revisited. Take that. They do have a tool that I like. It's even free, which I'm sure someone loses sleepover, called compute optimizer that looks at your running workloads and says, hey, this one should be bigger, this one should be smaller. I was extraordinarily skeptical when it came out. It is better at figuring that out than I am with the tooling that I built internally. So once again, I'm thrilled to turn it off. It's one of the Amazon at its best

things. I can only assume that the people responsible for that are being eyed for layoffs or Pips because that's Amazon these days. Andy Jesse and several NBA snipers are outside of their location right now. It's frustrating. I like Andy Quentin. When he ran AWS, truly. Something changed. He got a job that no one in their right mind could possibly want but also could not refuse.

And I feel like he sold his soul. Yes, absolutely. He was the CEO of AWS. And he was. When he gave keynote talks, when he gave presentations, when I was fortunate enough to basically sneak my way into them. You could see the irrepressible humanity leaking out around the edges. He was a person.

Now he is a figurehead. He doesn't get to talk to customers. Just to be clear. This shift was when he became CEO of Amazon or CEO of AWS. CEO of Amazon. AWS was his own fiefdom. And he could do whatever he wanted, to my understanding, within that company. It was the only people that mattered where Garrett, who had an opinion on this were Andy Jassy and God.

And God was sort of absent. So great. We're just going to leave it to Amund. Andy. Andy went deep. Andy understood every aspect of this stuff. Was Andy technical? A year ago, he went to reinvented Las Vegas and gave a talk on stage. I think because he missed it. He missed being able to get up there and talk about computers with people because now he has to ship underpants all over the world instead.

Right. But is he technical? Because he's an MBA. Is he not? This is one of the dangerous things that I have found people underestimate Amazon leadership on is it is never the smart bet to assume that they don't understand the technical nuances of the things that they are working with. They go so sarcastically deep in so many different ways that it is never a smart move to say that they don't understand. It is unlike virtually any other tech company I've ever spoken with, other than small-scale ones with technical founders, he very clearly understands the technology and used it to build things himself. Right, but here's the reason I question that. He's talking about generative AI. I've just pulled up

his notice. Oh, no one understands. That works under the hood. Let's be very clear on that. And yeah, he lost the fucking plot when it came to Gen. A.I. That's the thing because he's like, we're also using generative AI broadly across our internal operations, in our fulfillment network. We're using AI to improve inventory replacement. So not generative AI. Demand forecasting, definitely not generative AI. And the efficiency of our robots, not generative AI. I don't know. Maybe he does know what he's talking about. He's just a fucking carnival market now. He's doing the same. It all seems to be. And the trick to disproven. everything you just said, about everything he said that you relayed to us. It's very simple.

Go out with an Amazon employee for several drinks and then ask them about their experience of using AI within the company. Oh, I have. Two different companies. There is no, there is no congruity between those two perspectives. So, Corey, maybe you can help me with this because you, without saying exactly what we're talking about, you knew about a contract that I knew about way before I knew, and I knew about it months early, with a large company we discussed. So you're very well connected. It seems up until generative AI, like AWS was at least a somewhat sensible operation, that it was something that we had, if not focus, at least a focus on scale and useful cloud computing. Yes. What the fuck is it about GPUs that's driving everyone

insane? I want to point something out that I think is being lost industry-wide, because I've talk to folks at AWS about this, and folks who have left AWS, who, I used to dabble working in data centers, which means I know just enough to know what I don't know. And I've talked to these folks. When Amazon commits to being able to bring certain amounts of capacity online, it is real capacity. It is, each data center they build out, each region they build out, is a multi-billion dollar investment, and it takes years to go from signed contract to its serving customer traffic. They are real when it comes to this stuff. There are a number of Real for building it?

Well, yes. And they're really running it. They have operationalized how to run these things better than you or I would ever be able to do. That is their superpower. Other companies, and they're spinning up a data center, do not do this. They are, well, we've rented a warehouse out. We round up throwing some generators in the back. A powered shell.

And we're going to call Comcast and see what they can do to get it hooked up to the internet neck. Data center ready to go. Yeah, but you say other companies, you don't mean Google and Microsoft here. No, I'm talking. Well, I am talking Oracle, but yes. Microsoft, kind of. Microsoft is shitty at building data centers. Azure has been a disappointment across the board.

Capacity shortfalls plagued them for a long time during COVID. They generally tend to view two racks in a data center somewhere as a region, which is weird and messed up. Google is real, but Google has made other interesting technical tradeoffs that I can see why they did it. But I would say when it comes to infrastructure, in my experience, AWS is number one. Google is a close second. I have heard some crazy shit about Google that they're doing these things called stalks, where they just like create these pop-up data centers in the middle. Companies have been doing that for a long time.

Every company does that for a point of presence. Fascinating stuff. Anyway, but back to the major question, which is, AWS seems like a sensible business that does real things. I'm not disputing that. Yes. But it prints money. Let's be clear on this.

Remember, I help companies negotiate cloud contracts and understand. and what they're spending and where the money is going, which means that companies can say a lot. People say a lot of things, but one of my prime rules about this stuff is that customers lie mostly to themselves. They're not intentionally trying to mislead me when they tell me what's going on,

but I find the bills of the ultimate source of truth because if you're not paying for it, doesn't really exist. And the AI spend in most of these companies hovers, in my experience, with a few outliers, between 5% and 7% of their total infrastructure spent. Hmm. Right. It is not three times.

Companies that are doing a $300 million a year contract with AWS are not turning around saying, better make it $400 because of all the Gen A.I. That is not happening. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear you. your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-Eyheart to get started. That's 844-844-I-heart. Hey, I'm Jared Adano. You might know me as that loud guy who yells out, help on the internet. Help! Somebody! Please! But there's so much more to me than me. I'm an actor. I'm a comedian, and recently, I've become quite the helper. myself. And on my new podcast, hope from a hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with my sage advice and thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good

advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff rant and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man. If I'm calling you, even if you're on your phone, let it ring twice. One ring is too scary. Oh, cream of chicken suit. A cream. Cream and chicken soup. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite as part of the Mike Coultera podcast network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcasts presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the Hips since high school. Absolutely.

Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip, Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?

Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would.

Come on. I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's kind of my point though. It's like Amazon Web Services doesn't seem like a business that chases fads or if it does, it chase them in a more sustainable way. To their credit, they docked blockchain almost entirely, and I was worried they were going to fall down that rabbit hole. But I mean, they're doing $200 billion in CAPEX this year. What is it they see in AI? Because to your point, just now, what, like 7 to 8% of a 300 million contract, that's dog shit.

Like, that's not going to pay back that CAPEX, Andy? I believe, this is my belief here. I can't base it on anything other than what I've seen Amazon do. And what I have seen from customers, Amazon is selling the capacity that they are spinning up, they are spinning up as fast as they can spin it. The question that I have is twofold.

One, okay, you invest in all these AI data centers and the AI bubble pops, deflates, whatever, how repurposeable are those facilities and that capital expenditure? If it's data centers and networking, yes, very repurposable. GPUs, well, we're all going to get really into online gaming in a few years.

I don't know. Except they don't have video, They don't have display port. Yes. We still call them graphics, which I love. I think it's... I like the people who... I've also heard people say general purpose units,

which is the opposite of what a GPU is. Like, it is very much not general purpose. It became public through a press release that they have signed a $38 billion contract with open AI. Yeah, with insane. There is zero doubt in my mind that, because I did some digging on this,

is there line of sight for AWS to bring online $38 billion of capacity to provide to OpenAI? Yes, yes there is. Where my doubts come in, is OpenAI good for the money? No. I have some questions here, mostly from reading your work. And that's the thing. It seems like something about GPUs and large language models have broken everyone. That's kind of the point of getting to because like everything I've read about AWS and I read, because I'm a

dickhead. I went and I read all of the previous coverage of the lead up to AWS becoming profitable. Kevin Roos, by the way, literally a month before they did so, wrote an article saying it would be a well, fucking three points in that ass way. Anyway, everything I read was everyone saying, oh, Amazon's being really spending. They're spending $6 to $7 billion in CAPEX a quarter. Oh no. And then the total CAPEX is $69 billion. But everything from Amazon was like, we're building something sustainable. We see the revenue potential behind it. It was all very boring. Now with AWS, everything they talk about with large language models, it sounds like they've all been huffing ayahuasca or something. They sound insane. They do. Which tells me one of two things is true.

Or honestly, this is the real world. Unlike on Twitter, two complex competing things can in fact be true at the same time. One of them is they're still doing a lot of that boring stuff, but the the publicity all accrues to the things that are far-flung. This is also $200 billion across the entirety of Amazon. That includes distribution centers. That includes low Earth orbit. Basically, Amazon Basic Starlink. I think they're calling it Leo now.

It includes, yes, their AI nonsense, their factory boondoggles, their robotic stuff, office buildouts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't give clear breakdowns on how much of that is AI services. And frankly, I wouldn't trust. them if they did. Not since I saw a job ad a few years back on Amazon. Jobs, saying experience with other AI services like S3. S3 is a storage service. That's not AI. You can use it to feed AI, but I hear Anthropics, one of the largest S3 customers I've heard. I've heard that,

I've heard from seven different companies so far that they are the largest customer. Oh, really? Yeah, it's funny how that tends to work out. God, I miss working in cloud software so much, Everyone is the, everyone's the exclusive partner. Everyone's the number one partner and everyone's the largest. And the qualifiers get to, like, we're the largest S3 customer in Australia. Great. In the northeast, in the northeast region, between the hours of 6am and 12 a.m. Exactly.

Okay. So here's the thing with the Cappex. I'm sure a lot of it is for, is for AI, just because if you look at their previous years of Cappex, it was like 40, 50, 60, yeah, 40, 61. 63, 52, 83, 131, 200 billion. Charles Fitzgerald over at Platforminomics has been tracking KAPX spend to the hyperscalers for a long time now. And he was one of the first people to call out the cloud pretenders, IBM and Oracle specifically, because they're making all the cloud noises,

but they're not spending anything on Kaffax, and you kind of have to build the data centers for this to work. Not to worry, Oracle's taking care of that. What I want to know, my question is, when you start, okay, we're going to spend, even assume it's all AI, whatever, fine. $200 billion on AI spent. How much of that is just in the form of a check written to Nvidia? And that's the question, because from my understanding, my understanding, the, I should bring up

the chart. I'm just going to do something. Live on air, I'm just bringing up an image and, of course, I can't find it. Nevertheless, there is an image I have that Amazon doesn't, well, Amazon builds its own, the trainium GPUs, and do they still use inferentia? Or is it just That sounds like something my grandpa got diagnosed with. Yeah, but do they? Like, Inferentia, I thought, was there. Oh, they talk about it a fair bit. They talk about Traneum.

And the thing is, is what you don't see is people using it in the wild. I looked at a bunch of stuff with O-Lama, that's the run-your-own stuff there. I searched about a year ago for the term inferentia. It showed up once in a pull request that had been closed after 60 days because no one responded to it. No one is using this in the real world. A year ago, year in the month now, they had, with Tranium 2. I think it was. They had speakers from Anthropic on keynote stage talking about it, which, yeah,

okay, they invested how many tens of billions into Anthropic? Yeah, I'm sure there's a contract requirement around sending an exactive talk on stage. And the other one was Apple. Apple doesn't admit what they're doing to their own employees to each other, let alone publicly. So, yeah, that looked about as natural as an oral bowel movement. Nice. But those are the only two companies I've seen doing anything with it. So based on this chart, I've got, which involves various stars and company names. It looks like Amazon gets their GPUs through Foxcon, also known as Honai Precision Corporation Limited. I love Chinese and Taiwanese names, by the way. TSM is almost certainly in there. No, TSM isn't, because TSM builds the chips.

No, these are the server manufacturers. I wonder who makes the train ships themselves, because they have Annapurna, they bought and do the design, but they don't do the fad. So they ship the, I assume that Anapurna, which is the internal place that Amazon makes its chips. Ships them it looks like to Foxcon, quantum computing, and Jabill. And then they put them in the servers. So really it's them cutting the checks to them. I'm going to be watching the monthly earnings of those companies in Taiwan quite viciously. Because here's the thing.

If it's all $200 billion of capex, if they really think they're going to get paid that much, but what happens, has Amazon ever faced the situation where they did an overbuild? Has that ever happened to them? What did they do? Yes. they made a bunch of noises about it during the pandemic they overbuilt their distribution centers

Ah, but that's People buy stuff Exactly, that was my position on it And it feels like, okay, like they slowed it down And they didn't shut them down But they waited for people to grow into it The thing is is a warehouse That you use to ship out

Underpants Great, that has the same utility More or less five years from now As it does today A lot of these chips are depreciating assets Like, oh man, I can't wait to get that seven-year-old computer in here so I can do some real work, says no one ever. Well, also, Trainingham especially, they've got what they're on Generation 2, 3 now.

They're now shipping 3 right at the time to pre-announce 4 and the desperate attempt to Osborne Computer themselves. Yeah, explain that reference. Oh, Osborne Computer was a company back in the 80s. They launched the Osborne 1 and their CEO went out and did a whole press junk and he's like, yeah, this is great, but Osborne 2 is going to blow the crap out of it. Oh, like, and everyone's like, great, we're not

going to buy the Osborne one then. The company went under and never shipped the Osborne two. Wow, okay, not like Nvidia then. This is the thing. Surely that sets Amazon up for a big problem with those Traneum chips success, like even if, in some weird world that Traneum 4 or 5 was

amazing, I don't think it will be, but just saying, doesn't that mean they're going to be sitting on a bunch of obsolete tranium? It just feels very questionable. You know, you can say a lot about Open AI, and you do. But that press release, where they announced that $38 billion contract, they didn't mention Traneum. They didn't, did they? Which tells me that if it were half as good at the model training as they say it is, Open AI would be all about it. I am not seeing that

to be true. Well, Clammy Sam Altman, he signed a thing with Cerebrus. You remember you, Cerebrus? Is there anyone that Sam Altman has not signed deals with? Uh, let's think. I haven't signed one with grok yet. Okay, good, good. I mean, actually, sorry, just to be clear, hasn't signed with either. Well, I guess he wouldn't sign one with grok, as technically Grok is a competitor. I mean, GROQ, the annoying fast inference. I don't know.

At this point, my hate a dumb and people are going to say this episode was too technical. And the answer is, calm down. This is my podcast. I'm just, I'm wondering at what point they say, uncle. because, okay, $200 billion, and let's say $125 billion of that is AI, right? AI chips. Takes four or five years probably to install all of that. To what end?

What happens in four or five, are they going to make? Well, I mean, it would be like four. That's what no one is able to explain to me. What use cases today do, are we looking at where, wow, if we had 10 times as much inference as we do today, then X would be possible. Solve for X. I'm not hearing it. No, I'm not either.

I'm not even being my usual hatey self, even though this is hater season. It's, I genuinely can't get that answer out of anyone, even the boosters. It's like there's this insatiable demand for compute. I don't know if that's true. We're going to summon God through JSON is step one. And step two is we're going to ask God what to do. I mean, that's the thing. I do think that they, I think that have you seen the revenue projections to these companies?

Have you ever seen like oracles, cash flow? So if you see this thing where it's like. out also known as, there's a reason that every time Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, goes and gives a keynote or talks somewhere, they preface it with a disclosure that is the lawyer version of everything you are about to hear is a fanciful imagining of reality. Don't listen to him. He's had a long day. He hasn't taken his nap. Fuck, H.R. Geiger's Jerry Stiller. The thing is, you look at these cash flow diagrams for Anthropic, Open AI, and Oracle.

follow the same thing, which is terrible cash flow, negative cash flow for years and years and years, and then in 2029, everything changes, number go up. And I at this point genuinely think that they think they're going to invent AGI in 2029, that that's the only plan they have, because they're not, they're not doing the things that if they genuinely believe that, they would not be doing these things. We think that we are three years away from launching AGI that will change everything. So what are we going to do? We're going to find a way to put ads into chat jipity. That is not the play when you think you're on the verge of the singularity. I mean, nobody, was it, Demis, I don't know, is it? I don't like him to such an extent.

I refuse to learn his name. The Deep mind bloke. Peebis. I try not to anthropomorphize either AI or its creators. Yeah. Deepus Mbipus. He's the one that every few weeks does an interview. And he's like, and then God is going to come out. I'm really scared of what the computer will do. He doesn't sound like that he wishes. And it's just... You make it sound exciting.

Yeah, exactly. It sounds fun and interesting and comical when these people are just boring, boring people, boring motherfuckers. But it's just these massive over promises and these weird fucking like, these weird things where I, like, look in, let's look at this. There are $650 billion in CAPEX being spent. this year just by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Where is it going? Genuinely, actually, simple question, I actually don't know where it's going anymore.

It's leading to a giant hole in their balance sheet at some point. Right. You'll notice that all of the hyperscalers, all of them that have succeeded, even the pretenders, have other businesses that finance this. Yes. There has never been a successful hyperscaler

that launched as a hyperscaler. The closest story you've got to that, that, and I question whether you'd call them a hyperscaler, is Cloudflare, because they start as a CDN and then just added the rest of the cloud stuff. And let's see how big their stock is. I got a $59 billion market cap. Well, they're a real company. Yeah, you wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to invest in a company that wasn't making egregious

promises, but it's just... Jesus. It's just so strange, because even if they think AI is going to be big, surely all the money their spending today is not going to do that. Like all of these chips aren't going to do it. The models they train today aren't going to do it. It's like they're trying to bootstrap from thing to thing to thing. The story that concerns me is I, okay, you take a look at these companies and their

subscription plans. Top end of it is $200. Great. I pay it myself just so I can dispatch a winged monkey to build me a shitpost website, which is awesome. And sometimes it works. And sometimes I have to prompt it to do different things. Great.

It's better at shitty front end than I am at shitty front end. Terrific. I'm not going to spend five grand on that. But the model for Zoom, and not just talking me here, we're talking effectively everyone. It's like the unspoken message of a lot of these folks is that your boss is going to fire you and then take your salary and split it with the AI company. Right. And also that you will be able to code everything with AI versus what people love that I quote the same thing. Carl Brown's saying makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. We're building software at Duckville. We are hiring engineers.

Is this because we're stupid? I don't believe that to be true. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts

than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey, I'm Joe Rodano. You might know me as that loud guy who yells out, help on the internet. Help! Somebody!

Please! But there's so much more to me than me. I'm an actor. I'm a comedian. And recently, I've become quite the helper myself. And on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with my sage advice and thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian.

I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man. If I'm calling you, even if you're on your phone, let it ring twice. One ring is too scary. Oh, cream of chicken suit. Hey, cream. Cream of chicken soup.

This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite as part of the Mike Coutura Podcast Network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American Soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Raymore sending on to Ernie. Score at the chip. I'm Tab Ramos.

I'm Tom Boe. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real story. I'm not worried about Policic. I'm not worried about Balligan. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. You're going to look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team.

It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. Listen, inside American soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Yeah, and that's kind of the thing. It's like, I don't know, people still seem to be hiring software engineers. The engineers are getting fired and replaced with AI story. It doesn't seem to work. And also, every time I go and read someone who claims that Claude Code changed their entire life, it mostly comes down to, yeah, it took something from a few hours to an hour.

And it's like, cool. Great. Okay. It changed my life. What did it do? It taught me to clearly explain what I wanted. Yeah. But also, I still had to fix things.

It's like if all of this money just went into creating slightly more efficient software engineers and even then the data suggests they're less efficient, I don't know. Was this worth it? And Amazon certainly isn't, I guess they're getting the chunk out of Anthropic from this. like they can claim anthropic success. They can have them pay for Traneum in Project Craneer. It's the curse of the platform company, where when people build interesting things on top of you,

how do you take credit for that without being obnoxious? I mean, has that ever been a problem for Amazon? Well, it's not that they're worried about being obnoxious, just they're bad at messaging. Well, I mean, I'll mention him earlier, Panos Panay. Panos Panay came over from Microsoft from the Surface team to lead Amazon's Alexa Plus.

I mean, now there's something obnoxious. Now there's some real generative AI bullshit. They've lost like billions on Alexa now as well. God, what do strange company Amazon's become? They've always been peculiar. The problem is, is at some point of scale, like we're a little weird, no longer carries water. It's great. You're now one of the lynchpins of the global economy.

You have to explain what you're doing a bit more. effectively. Yeah. I, I, what do you think, you've known, you've known Amazon for 100 years now. What do you think happens if the AI bubble bursts? What do you actually think they do? Like, what do you think, are they the types to actually mothball this stuff? Would they just pretend like this never happened? Aspects of it, but there are, again, they are making money hand over fist on the actual nuts and bolts of cloud computing. That's not going away. They, they will, they're stockle-tumble because they're not posting massive growth numbers, but they have a banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is, is what happens when

there's a giant hole in their balance sheet? Because, well, it turns out that hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts everyone signed, they suddenly, they don't got the money. What do we do? That's going to be a systemic problem. It's not going to just hit Amazon. It's going to hit a lot of folks. And I think that the answer everyone's sort of hoping for in that space is government bailout? No. But of Amazon, though? I would be so irritated. Well, also, what are they bailing out? Amazon's not going to go bankrupt, even if Amazon had to take a massive impairment on Eldatranium chips, and it was like $30 billion. What the shareholders had? The shareholders. They'll be mad. Don't get me wrong, but it's not going to destroy Amazon. Like, it's not, I mean, it might destroy Andy Jassy's

asshole, like it might send Andy Jesse and an iron ball into the sun, but it doesn't feel like it will kill them. I just don't know what a bailout would be. I am so annoyed that I had great hopes when Andy took over, but it seems like the company has just continued down the insuredification curve. They're not doing surprising things. The reason I started the last week in AWS newsletter in 2017 was that every week they were fixing massive customer-facing problems and it was hard to keep track because they were just as bad then as they are now at messaging these things. When did you start that? Right.

Now, they don't do that anymore. It's basically inertia. I would not be able to start the newsletter and build in our readership today, the way that I did back then, just because people do not care nearly so much about the platform as they once did. So when did you notice the shift happened? It was first gradually and all at once, I think, is probably the way to frame it. when I realized that I went from every week having the problem of there's so much stuff here, which ones make the cut to there's so much filler here, where's anything actually worth writing about?

And when you say filler, what do you mean? They used to say, they used to talk about things like AW's Lambda, a transformative shift in how a compute could be run. They put that out with the same enthusiasm corporate voices. there's now a third cloudfront edge location in Dallas, which even people in Dallas do not give it to us about. Right. What does Lambda do? In effect, you give it its code. It runs the code when certain trigger events happen,

be it a web request, be it a time being hit, be it something, some other event hitting. And it only charges you for while it runs. Huh. And it massively scales up, and you don't have to worry about any of the care and feeding of the infrastructure around it, which... That's really cool. It is. It was cool. It was dated in 2015.

It's one of the last truly great things Amazon put out that changed the way I thought about how this could work. Except now Amazon doesn't really put out fun new updates. It's just incremental updates. We have a new thing. We've launched our own large language model called Nova. It's not as good as the ones you currently use, but it's less money. Yeah, what's great, though. When we're still a POC stage, they don't care.

What's great is if you look where Nova is, wow, it's in the, uh, top 25 below Cat Coda Pro, Kimmy 2.5, Grock 4.1, Memo, Minimax, Quen Thinking, Kimmy K2, basically every other model. Right, exactly. It's like, they're racing neck and neck with Ed's taxidermy and Frontier AI Lab.

It really is that, though. It's like something called, yeah, Ernie from Baidu. Like, every Chinese model appears to cry. That's so funny. What a horrible situation. situation we found ourselves in. Well, Amazon provides itself on being frugal, and it turns out that when, I have to assume the reason of Titan models that were so bad, they never really saw broad release in light

a day, was that it's, okay, it's going to cost us a billion dollars to train this model. What can you do for 20 million? Like, that is the Amazon ethos. Fail is the answer. Unless it comes to CAPEX, though. Like, that's the thing. It feels like what you say there goes directly against how they're dealing with AI. It feels like AI has just poisoned their brains.

Oh, my God, yes. I wound up doing a... So back when these stuff all started coming out, I had fun with it. I ran a bunch of custom questions against these things, like rank the U.S. presidents by absorbency and then see how long it's going to bully them into doing it. Or give me some criticisms of Corey Quinn.

And one of the early chat GPT things made me question, like, aspects of my life and go home and drink heavily. Whereas I asked one of the early Amazon models that question, and it would have been like Exhibit A in the defamation case, except I'd have to prove that anyone took anything Amazon said even slightly seriously. Right. It's just weird.

There's something that I think that... I don't know if AI psychosis is it, but I mentioned this with David Gerard. It's like people getting one-shotted by this. It must one-shot executives. I think... Oh, it absolutely does. I use it myself in the curation of my newsletter. For example, because this is a terrific use case, and I think it encapsulates my philosophy

on this. where Amazon, I consume all their RSS feeds every week, and there are roughly 150 items that come out. So what I do is I have a scoring thing that pops up two columns. Here's the good ones. Here's the crap ones. And I have a whole rubric that I have put into this. It saves me a tremendous amount of time.

I go through and I put some from, I move some back and forth as I read down the list. And increases it learns from my decisions, it's getting it mostly right. It speeds up my workflow. It is convenient. Is this worth changing the entire? entire world for? No, no, it is not. But I'll make hay well, the sun shines. Besides,

if I'm going to make fun of something, I should be using it so I can understand it to make fun of it more effectively. Right. But would you pay the real rates for it? Because that's what I think is going to break this as well. It's when these companies start having to charge the real costs, when they have to start getting, paying the margins. Right now, this is costing me seven cents a month. I am glad to pay that. I would probably pay as high for that as, I don't know, 20 bucks a month, which again, that's a significant increase there, sure. But too much beyond that? No, I spent seven years going and doing this by hand.

I don't feel the need to stop. I did use Claude Code for several weeks to rebuild the entire interface because I had this janky, horrible newsletter publication thing that I kept meaning to replace. I looked into what it would take to have an engineer do it between $20,000 to $50,000. This was just three weeks over the holiday break of prompting the thing and it finally got it dialed in and correct.

Now, in practice, if neither one of those two things is a viable option, there's a bunch of stuff off the shelf these days that didn't exist back then that I could have worked with and had a much better base. but this was fun. This was, I could use some software in this small place. The cost of generating this software now, for my time perspective, is minimal, and it fills in a gap. And these things are good at building tools to solve one very specific problem. Where these things fall down, software has always fallen down on this, is as soon as the requirements change. I sit out a link list every Monday. I built software myself to handle this. When I started sending out blog post with it as well, I had to go back to the drawing board and redo an awful lot. lot because, oh, it's a different model. The entire flow changes when I introduce the requirement

downstream. When software becomes free and is no longer the bottleneck, more or less, you can build custom tools for any given situation far more effectively. I started writing a bash script to give someone access to just run, run this one command in your terminal, it'll give you access to this thing. And I started writing it myself, threw it into one of these things. It came out with a much better script as a one-off that I don't need again. Could I have done it myself? Yeah, at about four hours. but would I have? No. It solves those small problems. They're point solutions.

But I'm not firing people for this. I'm not replacing segments of the economy with this. My brother is one of the few people I have heard about being definitely impacted by the rise of AI. Until last year, he was a freelance translator. I'd believe that. That feels like it's something that is easily prone to disruption. I buy less stock photography when I can have shitpost images of giraffes on fire and data centers now. Well, they're not going to love that.

They're not. They're not going to love that. The listeners are not going to love that. Oh, no, I don't even, I think AI art is just genuinely ugly, you know, even that it would suck the life out of the shitpost. And I pay for artists to do things correctly. Okay, good. I have stickers. I gave out of reinvent for shitposting.a.i.

And it was bad AI art in a 1950s style, like a dog with an extra leg, people with extra hands and whatnot, that we hired an illustrator as a human to draw in the stock. of bad AI. I thought that was a lot of fun. For something like this, yeah, I am paying artists and I'm making it work. I'm building a shitpost meme to throw on Twitter and never think about again. That's the thing, though. Posting is an art. Posting is an art and you're bringing, there is no Bushido in generating images. But let's move on from this subject, because I have one final question. Please hit me with it. So, you've seen this thing about how everyone's freaking out about, and I know you're going to love this. Everyone's like, oh, Claude Code is replacing software. How funny is it? How ridiculous is it to you? The leading question, I realize, the idea that instead

of buying on a per se basis, people are going to just replace SaaS with their own internal shit. I think it's one of the funniest and stupidest things I've ever heard. Oh, I think it's a terrific thing that is totally happening because obviously, again, I am building software for enterprises. Well, they can just write this code overnight to do it. Yes, they can easily generate a website that purports to do something. But what if they need that thing to be correct? What if they're, oh, I don't know, signing a billion-dollar contract on the result of what that software spits out? Maybe YOLO slamming it isn't the right answer.

We're going to just replace all the software with custom-bespoke stuff. Great. A terrific example I saw is that for payroll anthropic, the company uses ADP. Well, why would they do that? They can clearly build their own payroll systems internally. Because you're not buying the software. You're buying the compliance, the keeping up with all the different jurisdictions in which you operate. Someone who is going to certify with their reputation that this is going to solve a problem.

There are a bunch of things out there. Like there's some software that will be disrupted by this. Picture a bunch of the obnoxious stuff. Like, I just want to convert this from one videotype to a different video type. You'll find some, like, random thing for $10. Yeah. Well, now, ClaudeCode or whatnot is going to fix that because I don't know how FFM-Peg command line flags are supposed to work. It does.

Great. It's easier than looking it up. Am I going to go and replace actual line of business software? I wish, but no. And that's the thing as well. People think that people pay for, like, Salesforce or what have you, because they're like, oh, because I have to pay for it. And also just because it's a simple piece of software,

no, they're these intricate API racking things that roll around in their own filth. And then they maintain them on the backend. Even if even the shittiest cloud software you use has some weird backend stuff. They have to constantly maintain because things break. And the bigger the company, the more things that break.

Yeah. And it's just... I mean, the gen one of all of Salesforce is just an Excel spreadsheet. It is, who am I contacting? what is the last thing I did and the rest? And it gets complex quickly. And where the leap happens is, okay, now it's not just you. Now it's an entire sales team.

Now you're going to have some turnover in that sales team over the course of doing business. How do you wind up having a provable chain of issue on this? Someone pops up for three years from now. They said they talked to someone here. We have no record of that because Claude rebuilt it five times this week. Where does that going to live? How is that going to exist? And even then it's like audibility, auditability.

auditability even. Jesus Christ. But this is not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one comment on Hacker News was, this is just our sync with some extra bells and whistles. This isn't a product.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that turned out. Yeah. I mean, even then, Dropbox is like, it's not just storage. It is the support services around it.

I don't know. Well, even Dropbox doesn't want to do what Dropbox does anymore. Every time I use it, a folder that sinks everywhere is what I loved about Dropbox. Yeah, same. Now it's trying to basically compete

with Zoom and Google Docs and all the other stuff. No, no, no, just think the files. Well, Corey, let's wrap it up there. We've done some good hating. We have some good links for you. We'll link to Duck Bill, link to last week in Amazon, was it? Last week in AWS.com with an obnoxious, sarcastic platypus. One more use of AI before we go that I think you'll appreciate.

If people email me, Corey.com at DuckbillHQ.com. and I don't like what you're doing and you're trying to sell me something. I now have an AI-powered executive assistant in the form of Billy the Plotipus who will tell you in corporate appropriate ways to go fuck yourself, which is just chef's kiss. Because I can't say that to people. I have a reputation. The obnoxious platypus responding to salespeople does not have this constraint.

This is the one liability shift I have found that actually works and you can blame AI for things you personally approved. Well, I don't endorse the AI platypus. You should get a real one. You should get a real one. Exactly. They're in danger. The customs officials had many questions I did not wish to answer. Train the platypus, Corey.

All right, you've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zittron. You'll have a monologue this week, I guess. 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 Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com.

You can email me at EZ at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. dot where's your ed. dot at to visit the Discord and go to R slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get, Your podcasts. Therapy is fantastic, but once again, it does not have a monopoly on healing. That's why I create the resources and that's why I create the community because I really just want you to have more access. On the podcast, Cultivating Her Space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where

black women can show up fully and be heard. It's tough because we're suppressing our emotions and so many of us are like high achieving individuals. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This week on Crimless, Rory and I welcome a very special guest. When I did podcasts, I wear my sleep masks. I like where this is going.

So if you guys will indulge me. That's right, the incredibly talented and hilarious Will Ferrell on an episode dedicated to crimes committed by people named Will Ferrell. You're good for 300 crimes? Yeah. We got two. I'm ready to go right up to present day. Listen to Crimless on the.

IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses, calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.

So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.