Better Offline - How The AI Bubble Bursts

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

After a year of opulent spending, the markets have begun to sour on big tech's $200 billion bet on generative AI, unfortunately timing with the delay of Nvidia's new AI-specialized "blackwell" chips. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the pale horses of the AI apocalypse - and what this means for the tech industry at large. LINKS: http://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks  Newsletter: wheresyoured.at  Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at  Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron  instagram.com/edzitron  https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fan fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to futas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex? Is it just me or does every woman my age want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes? They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeetsWorld.

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Listen to Podmeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All Zone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline, live and direct coming at you from the middle of nowhere, the center of everywhere, and I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Feels like forever since I talked directly to you, my dear listeners, so I'll get right to him.

And as a reminder, I'll be including links to everything I'm talking about in the episode notes. And if you're just catching up, all you really need to know here is that OpenAI makes large language models like GPT and of course the product chat, GPD, Anthropic makes Claude, a similar product, and that generative AI products have yet to really prove a use case that justifies them losing money on every single transaction. Let's begin.

August 2nd, 2024 was Black Friday for the AI boom, as a week of rough earnings from big tech led to what felt like the entire media industry asking one question. Is the AI bubble popping? And that's the question I'm going to try and answer for you today, and in the next episode two. The Guardian sought to answer why the Big Seven tech companies had been hit with AI boomed doubts. CNN asked, has the AI bubble burst? And the Atlantic suggested several months too late that the generative AI revolution may indeed be a bubble. The Financial Times reported hedge fund Elliott management told investors that NVIDIA was a bubble, and Bloomberg reported that big tech had failed to convince Wall Street that AI was paying off. It's all part of a growing

trend, where people are suddenly realizing what I've been saying for months, that this unprofitable, energy-hungry technology that creates mediocre outputs is not actually the future. It's just another cloud do-hickie. Not a great way of putting it, I realize, but this is my nice way of saying, generative AI isn't completely useless, but the large language models, they kind of are based on the costs. These articles were, for the most part, talking about the sudden and violent declines in the share prices of companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, which, for the most part, haven't really recovered. And as of about August 10th, are down significantly over the past month.

Although these articles didn't say anything particularly new or reveal any individual missteps or scandals that might have prompted the slide, they hinted to a broader awareness among Wall Street that the AI ambitions of these companies, and by which I really mean generative AI, will require these massive upfront investments, and the payoff might not actually be there. And at least, if it is, it's not going to be there for a while. We're talking years, if not a decade. And once a narrative gets settled, it's very, very, very hard to move in. While a stock market isn't always rational, check out Tesla for more,

the one-day sell-off of these stocks and the comments from analysts and industry figures that followed suggest that Wall Street is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the vast amounts of money required to build and grow generative AI into whatever the fuck that's meant to be. These companies, while still making over $10 billion in profit, of course, referring to Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the like, in the last quarter alone, have also spent an absolute shit ton of money on infrastructure to capture the so-called demand for cloud services from generative AI. However, one little problem. None of them seem to actually be making that much money from the thing they're investing in. In the last fiscal year, Microsoft's CAPEX, their capital expenditures, was about $55.7 billion, which is up 75% year-over-year, with more than one-third $19 billion spent in the last quarter,

ending June 30, 2024. This is reportedly split 50-50 between infrastructure and technology, which suggests an aggressive data center build-out with Chief Financial Officer for Microsoft Amy Hood, saying that the company expects capital expenditures to increase on a sequential basis, given Cloud and the, and I quote, AI demand that, as I've repeatedly said, is not really there. And what exactly does increasing on a sequential basis mean in dollar terms? I have absolutely no idea. It's vague and perhaps vague enough to rattle the markets, particularly when Microsoft will be starting from an already quite high valuation.

Worse still, Hood added, and I quote Microsoft's earnings calls, that AI-related spend represented nearly all of our total capital expenditures, with roughly half for infrastructure needs that will support monetization over the next 15 years and beyond. Ugh. In essence, Microsoft spent $19 billion in the last quarter on cloud and AI expenses, and has made it clear that it's not done spending more money than it's ever spent before on a technology that neither makes Microsoft nor the people paying them that much money. It's very stupid.

And for context, Microsoft made 22. $104 billion in profits in Q2, 2024. Is this really worth sinking an entire quarter's worth of profits into? Let me give it another way to look at it. Microsoft's net profit margin has dropped from 39.44% in Q3, 20203 to 34.04% in Q2, 2024, meaning that it's taking home less money than it usually would, because they're really investing in this thing that only loses money. It's very good.

It's very good that this is happening. This is what you love to see. The other cloud providers aren't really doing much better. Google's capital expenditures are forecast to be $50 billion in 2024, and it spent $11 billion in Q4, 2023 driven by, and I quote, mostly by technical infrastructure, meaning servers and data centers. And $12 billion was what they spent in Q1, 2024. The reason I'm not breaking things out much with Google is because it hasn't been extremely guarded

about its AI expenses, probably because they're not. they're really high and they're not making any money from it. Amazon similarly guarded, with its CAPEX last year hanging somewhere around $48.4 billion. It's spent $30.5 billion so far in 2024. An absolutely ridiculous amount considering its profit for Q2, 2024, was 13.48 billion. They're just sinking their profits into these things. And there's really no sign that anything changes. Every hyperscaler has said that they intend to keep spending all of this money on AI.

and I haven't even mentioned companies like Oracle, which expects to spend $10 billion on cloud infrastructure this year, with much of that new capacity going to support Microsoft and Google Cloud. I don't know what happens if they don't need it anymore. Anyone think about... Anyway, anyway. But no, Black Friday, it was a collective realization of the scale and the cost of AI, and the first signs that the markets are starting to ask

those annoying little questions about whether it's actually worth it. Yet the real chaos and one that, comparatively speaking, slipped under the radar came in the form of one of my pale horses. Last month, I put out an episode called Pop Culture, where I suggested that the first signs of the AI bubbles collapse would be in the failure of a major AI company, though one not operating at the scale of, say, open AI. And I specifically picked one out, character.AI, which raised $150 million in funding, and the information had already hinted might sell itself to one of the big tech companies. Now, the reason I pick them is that their app, which allows you to talk to AI chatbots of Elon Musk and Satorra Gojo from Jiu-Jitsu Kizen, the anime, manga, which we all know I'm tired of waiting for, that's not a business, by the way. And they never really had a sustainable business model or really a meaningful product. And their $150 million raise was the first big, stupid capital raise in the generative AI boom, early 2023 when nobody else could raise at all. In my opinion, their continued existence, other than being a disgusting insult to company building and

startups everywhere, was proof that the bubble existed, and their death, or whatever form this really is, is a sign that the tolerance for bullshit is leaving the market. As my blunt force for shadowing suggests on Friday, August 2nd, and yes, most of this stuff happened on that Friday, Google said that it would license character AI's technology and hire the company's leaders, Noam Shazir, and Daniel DeFritus, along with their research team of 30 people to work at Google's Deep Mind AI division. The fates of the other 140 employees remain uncertain. I assume they're alive, but I imagine some will remain on as staff as the Character.

AI app remains operational. It's a strange, sad end for a company that never really had any business existing and in many ways feels like a con happening in broad daylight. Shazir and DeFritas are both former Google employees, having left the company in 2021 to create character. or AI. It's unclear whether, given their previous employment, they'll be required to wear the Nugler propeller hat that you get if you're new to Google. I actually don't know if they still do that. Email me. It's easy at better offline.com. That's the letter E than the letter Z or Z for my

British and Canadian fans. If you know about this propeller hat, or indeed can get me one, I would very much like one. Anyway, while this is being framed as a typical licensing, employee poaching deal where nothing acquisition adjacent has happened, it is. It is. is actually an acquisition. Google's paying $2.5 billion to investors. Employee stock options will vest, and that means when you get stock in a company, it usually takes time for you to actually earn it so that you can't just take it and leave immediately, as I would. And that will keep vesting until July 2026 at the acquisition rate of $88 a share, paid for by the money from the licensing deal that is not an acquisition from Google. But after that point, you're shit out of luck. It's no

longer guaranteed. This is a terrible situation all around for everyone other than the earliest investors. It's another great situation where the bad guys win. In essence, anyone who has options that aren't fully vested by July 26 may be shit out of luck. And Character AI's original funding valued them a billion dollars, making this a situation where Andreessen Horowitz saw a 1.5x return on their investment in a company that never really did anything. Employees kind of got screwed. Maybe they didn't, it's unclear. But what is clear is that as of now, character AI is effectively dead. The company will shift from using their own models, their literal only thing that they did, to publicly available open source large language models like Metas Lama, and the original engineering

team is effectively gone. The company will likely shamble a long lifelessly until it curls up in the corner like an old cat, except an old cat has more purpose and meaning in the universe than the bullshit chatbot company. So why does this matter? On one level, the death of character.AI is an indicator of the unsustainability of many of these generative AI applications and companies. Even with $150 million in funding, which is a decent amount of money for a normal company, character likely couldn't keep the lights on for very long, which kind of made it necessary for them to be absorbed or acquired before they shut down and embarrassed everyone involved.

It's also just like a Charlotton's Olympics. This company sucked. made money. It didn't really do anything that different. But they just get bailed out. These fucking start-up people, they always go on about the meritocracy. They're always going on about, ooh, it's about working hard, it's not about your circumstances. These jackholes, these fucking idiots, they got to sell their bullshit company to Google, a company they left to found it. It's just so annoying. And this agreement also strongly resembles an earlier one between Infliction AI and Microsoft, where Microsoft bought Infliction's technology and team

without actually acquiring its equity. So the actual stock in the company. Founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2022, inflection was in layman's terms intended to be a more emotionally aware version of ChatGBT. Just one year after its creation, they'd raised $1.3 billion at a valuation of $4 billion.

As I noted previously, I believe that Microsoft's acquisition of Inflection was an attempt to avoid regulatory scrutiny by structuring an acquisition as a transfer of tech and talent rather than buying the company, where the tech and the talent is. And yet I'm also convinced that inflection would struggle to last out on its own,

even with its smaller user-based and with a $1.3 billion war chest, and eventually it would have had to get acquired or just die. Regardless, I'm beginning to see a pattern. AI's point of failure is shifting or more accurately centralising. At one point, the burden of this entire generative AI farce was shouldered by a large and disparate group of startups and investors, and it's now moving to a few shoulders, those of giants like Microsoft,

Google, Amazon, Meta, and to a much lesser extent, Apple. The two most prevalent large language models, outside, of course, of Meta's Lama, open AI's GPT in Anthropics Claude, are effectively big tech's welfare recipients, receiving billions of dollars in cloud credits to run their extremely expensive models without having to build their own infrastructure. It's also kind of a con, because that's not real money. That's Chuckie cheese tokens. And how are those valued? $10 billion goes to OpenAI, mostly in cloud credits, and they get equity in return. That doesn't make sense, I can't invest in companies in Air Miles. Why can Microsoft do it? Anyway, Microsoft invested billions of dollars in Open AI, and Google and Amazon

are propping our panthropic, too, with the latter completing its $4 billion investment in the AI company earlier this year. I need to be clear that Open AI and Anthropic are wholly reliant on the mercies of a handful of trillion-dollar companies who are themselves at the mercy of the rot economy in the public markets. And especially in the case of Open AI's relationship with Microsoft, they're not just dependent on big tech firms financial support, but also on their ability to procure and build the actual infrastructure of these products. Open AI does not have their own servers, neither does Anthropic. Perhaps they have some, a few, but the majority of their actual processing is done by big tech firms that paid them in Chucky G's tokens, in cloud credits to run their services.

Who knows how you even amortize that? It's completely insane. It drives me insane that they're able to do this every time they find a horrible little thing to do. But me, I'm at the mercy of one of the fine products that you'll hear after this ad break, one that will no doubt echo my exact thoughts, feelings and desires, buy their things, or don't, that's up to you. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

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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 a chicken suit. A cream. Cream and chicken suit.

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We're becoming more individualized, but we actually meet people in connection. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. As I was previously saying, Friday, August 2nd, 2024 was a rough day for AI and it somehow got worse. That same day, the information reported that Invidio, has reportedly told Microsoft and another unnamed cloud customer that its next-generation blackwell chips, which are designed primarily for accelerating AI compute tasks, will be delayed

by three months due to an unspecified design floor identified by its contract foundry, TSMC. It's entirely possible that this floor takes a little more than three months to resolve. Semiconductor manufacturing is really, really, really, really hard, and issues that initially see minor can rapidly spiral out of control. On top of that, you can't rush them in the same way you can with software. You can't just throw a bunch more money. TSM has plenty, but on top of that, this isn't a money problem. This is one of those scientific ones that you can't just skip over.

And with Blackwell representing a major leap forwarding capabilities, both in the terms of power efficiency and sheer compute power, this is a huge blow to OpenAI and its many, many competitors, by which I mean its other competitor, which is also bankrolled by a big tech sugar daddy. It's also likely to delay some of OpenAI's grander ambitions for an indeterminate amount of time, which in turn kind of dampens its appeal to potential investors. And to be clear, Open AI basically has to raise in the next six months, as the information reported that Open AI could lose as much as $5 billion this year alone.

I will get to that later, but just to be clear, that's not $5 billion in losses plus revenue. That is after you take the money out that they made. It's really bad. It's really, really bad, though. It's all so very bad. I'm not sure why more people aren't freaking out. I'm mostly chilling just because they don't really care if they live or die. I feel bad for the people with the jobs, but I'm rambling. We'll get back to it. And this is a problem that expands to Google and Microsoft too. Invidia's Blackwell chips were supposed to be a major technological leap for generative AI, designed with both inference the way that large language models generate answers in training in mind, and thus providing vastly more

compute power and energy efficiency necessary to make this shit move. But as of now, these chips have been delayed, with their availability not expected into the first quarter of 2025 at the earliest, and the information reports that OpenAI probably won't get access to them until March 2024. And Nvidia might be forced to do new test runs with its foundry partner before scaling up to mass production. One particularly worrying quote, and I kind of just hinted at it there, was that Microsoft managers had planned to make Blackwell-powered servers available to Open AI by January, but, like I said, may need to plan for March or early spring, and that was said by a person with knowledge of the situation, beautiful name. The reason that's bad, well, it's not really just one. First, Open AI

desperately needs something new. They need something that will show both investors and the media, the Open AI is building something meaningful, and while it's possible it will be able to deliver GPT5, which is their next model, in the near-term future, even potential customers don't believe the jump will be significant enough from GPT4. Second, for reasons I've alluded to at the start of this episode, investors are getting a touch itchy with the AI hype boom, and more specifically with the giant tech companies that are bankrolling it. The street needs to results are at the very least a plausible case for the future profitability and marketability of generative AI, a thing that it's genuinely bad at.

Nvidia's Blackwell chips could help OpenAI models run faster and ingest training data faster, as well as, even if it's not possible, fooling investors into believing that Open AI had the latest tech and thus could build the average general intelligence that Sam Altman's been lying about and allow him to continue his con. Regardless, the article from the information put it very plainly. Open AI only gets access to the latest technology as fast as Microsoft permits, or as fast as Microsoft is able to provide it. On their own, even one of these events would be a deeply worrying sign of the bubble popping, and together they've threatened to begin a collapse that I've been predicting since March,

where I said that AI companies had about three quarters to prove themselves, and I quote, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech when things don't work out. But I've realized now that it isn't really super useful to attach things to time, though I stand by my prediction, and thus I think it's more illustrative to suggest what the terms of the bubble popping actually are. So, let's define them. What do I mean when I talk about the bubble popping? For the sake of clarity, I'm defining it as the major cloud companies reducing capital expenditures related to generative AI in a public and significant manner, as in an actual statement from Sachin Adela at Microsoft or Sundar Peshai at Google,

or one of the major large language model companies, Anthropica or Open AI, collapsing in some way. No cheap thrills, no half measures. We're not calling this fucking thing until it actually pops, and it will not pop until one or both of these companies go tits up. To be clear, when I talk about Anthropic and Open AI are collapsing, I don't actually mean in the Enron-style way. These companies are probably not going to fall apart, shut down, close their doors suddenly. It could be that they're absorbed into another company on unfavorable terms, you know, like character AI and inflection, like the things that just happened.

And in that case, I think investors are going to take a massive loss. Open AI or Anthropic might be forced to radically limit their operations, either by shutting down their free chatbots or limiting access to enterprise customers or by slowing down development massively, by the way, will be deaths embrace. It will be over. We could see massive layoffs, or we could see these companies pivot to a less capital-intensive business model, such as licensing their patents and IP to other technologies or companies, but not really offering an actual tangible product to consumers or business customers, as opposed to what they're doing today, which is offering a tangible thing that doesn't really do that much. I'm rambling again. Yeah, I can imagine all sorts of terminal endings for generative AI's big too,

and some of them aren't even legally actionable. But I believe that the collapse or absorption of these companies is the one critical sign to look for. Open AI began this hype cycle, and Sam Altman is definitely the PT Barnum of the Large Language Model Circus. And Open AI has absorbed more money and attention than any other startup of the last few years. And outside of Uber, I think they might be getting the most all time.

God, I hate it. It's symbolic of the excess and the waste of the generative AI boom and its death, or as I mentioned, some alternative. collapse is the sign that we're done here in the same way that FTX signaled the end of the cryptocurrency boom. And if OpenAI's collapse marks the apocalypse for generative AI, I believe it will be accompanied by one or several of the following pale horses, real, tangible signs that things are falling apart, things you can send to your friends and family and laugh at. Let's take a look, shall we? Number one. Any significant price changes by any large language

model company are a bad sign. Desperate times require desperate measures and any oscillation in pricing is a bad sign. We could see a race to the bottom, which is kind of already happening, with model developers releasing increasingly cheaper options to grow revenue and build their customer bases, which is an idea that only makes sense of the underpinning technology is profitable, which generative AI is not. And it's already kind of begun with OpenAI's reduced price GPT40 Mini and Google Gemini's Google Flash 1.5, I believe it's called,

they just reduce that pricing to compete with GPT40 Mini's cheapest option. This is totally unsustainable, which means it fits right in with the rest of the hype cycle. Conversely, if prices start increasing, this is a sign that the company's getting really, really desperate and have to find a way to start recouping the massive costs of the unsustainable shit show they've been participating in. Now, this, I think, is probably one of the later ones. If they do this, if they even get to it, it's just a sign that things are falling apart. We also think we're going to see stories about general discord in AI investment. Any articles you see about investors fleeing private AI deals, as they did with the Metaverse, are a sign that things

are falling apart. And the things I'm hearing, by the way, is that this has already begun. But that's anecdotal. Don't take my word for it. Just watch the media. We might also see stories about open AI having trouble raising money. Up until now, there haven't been any rumors about them having trouble, despite the fact that they're expected to lose, like I mentioned, $5 billion in 2024. They need to raise billions of dollars and they have to do it soon. And if they can't raise, nobody can. But moving on, there's another Harbinger to look out for. And it would be evidence that Google or Microsoft is reducing the CAPEX as discussed.

Because it's really important to realize that venture capital and Silicon Valley really, they're not the ones propping this up. They might be the cheerleaders. They might be the ones talking about how important it is. But Google and Microsoft are the ones holding this up. And Amazon as well, they're the ones who are, bankrolling, Anthropic and Open AI. Microsoft, as I will get to, basically owns Open AI. If those companies decide they don't want this to continue, it will stop.

Venture capital cannot afford to keep Open AI alive. But moving on, you should keep out a beady little eye for any discord within any of the major players in generative AI. But I'm not talking about Open AI and Anthropic. I'm talking about companies like Scale AI, who are a training data company that's raised over at one and a half billion dollars and cohere, another large language model company that recently raised another $450 million from Nvidia and Salesforce. And Salesforce, they've been talking about doing AI for like a decade. I don't know what product they sell. I'd watch those two very carefully.

They're seen as stable revenue generating yet, as discussed unprofitable, ancillary firms that will likely need to raise again in the next 12 months. If we hear about problems such as employees being unhappy or troubles fundraising or making money, this means that people on the inside are making nasty little noises because they know things are falling apart. And the same, by the way, goes for any discord in Open AI or Anthropic. This one's obvious. If we hear there are problems, they're worried, or if they're getting worried, if they're, if they can't raise money, if they're losing people, which is kind of already happening,

if they can't seem to make a deal work, if they're having trouble progressing their software, Anything about these companies is probably a bad sign. If I were you, I'd keep an eye on the Washington Post. Natasha Tiku's done great work there as the people at Shira Vidae and Jeffrey Fowler, but Natasha's done some great work on Mr. Altman. The information has got some great people doing work on this, Reuters, TechCrunch, 4-o-Fel media, they're the ones I'd keep an eye out for. We've already seen a little bit of this happening already.

A few days ago, OpenAI lost two of its co-fellers. founders. John Schulman left for competitor Anthropic and chief operating officer Greg Brockman has gone on something he's calling extended leave. As an aside, this is objectively one of the funniest thing anyone has ever done in tech. Yeah man, nothing big going on. Enjoy your vacation, mate. Not like the entire industry is falling apart. Not like the bubble might be popping. Enjoy Carbo. Anyway, as things get especially bad, I think we're going to see discussions of layoffs. Based on people I've talked to, generative AI companies are paying. at these massive salaries in stock and cash, and they're not run particularly efficiently

because they are really driven by dreamers, by which I mean con artists. If AI jobs are no longer these cushy little Heidi holes for the most expensive engineers in the valley, things are going to sour fast, because they need the best to do this mediocre crap that you see every day. But I'd argue the biggest and most desperate of these pale horses would be some sort of big, stupid magic trick. No, really, as these companies get desperate, expect someone, especially Open AI, to try and show something new and crazy as a means of trying to turn this narrative around. When or if this happens, look very carefully at what they say about the product's availability, what it can actually do or who they show it to. Is it available publicly? Are there limitations on it? And are there any weird terms and conditions to look out for?

If Open AI gets desperate, it may move up the public launch of Sora. its generative video product. Doing so is really only going to cause more problems. There isn't a chance in hell that this thing is profitable, and I am 100% confident that it's much, much, much, much more expensive than the video and the text-based generation tools they already have. And I imagine its visual inconsistencies and hallucinations would make for some entertaining content for YouTubers and tech reporters, which will mean that they just have hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps of people, requesting shitty videos off of this thing, burning servers, quite literally in this case, losing the money, and for what? How much can they charge for this thing?

Because it's not going to be enough. The common thread between all of these events is that they're all expressions of desperation, fear, and a total lack of confidence in the underlying company. So far, and this is napkin maths, I'd estimate that a total of $200 billion has been spent to get generative AI to this point, in infrastructure, and funding, and energy in so many different meaningless ways, or to get us to the point that we have a tool that's really good at generating things that aren't as good as what a human could make, and only sometimes are they good enough to actually use. To be clear, we're not quite at the bubble popping yet. The reason I chose the collapse of Open AI as the event is because it will mean that Microsoft decided to cut them off,

and that there wasn't enough banker or venture capital interest to prop them up further. Open AI's collapse would be both financial and symbolic, the sign that the Valley would let a company die, and that this idea was not good enough for everybody to stake their futures on it. In any case, things could change. The bubble could stay inflated. But while you're thinking about how, why don't you take a breather to hear from someone, one of our wonderful, beautiful, precisely chosen advertisers that you simply must pay money to? Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. Now, I don't want to give you any homework. I know you're currently holding up a convenience store or maybe trying to get a hubcap off of a car wheel. You hear me speak enough, but a few weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter called How Does Open AI Survive, an 8,000 or so word analysis of how difficult it's going to be to keep that company going at its current burn rate. To simmer it down as quickly as possible, Open AI costs about $8.5 billion a year to run, and only makes about $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion a year in revenue. A number, by the way, that does not sound right, but it's what's being reported. Open AI's costs are increasingly nearly, and generative AI, as I've said a few times, is deeply unprofitable and unsustainable.

Making Open AI's models better, which doesn't necessarily mean they're more valuable or more useful, also costs hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. As a result, OpenAI needs to raise more money than anybody has ever raised in the history of the valley in the next 12 to 24 months, or launch a product so significant that it blows chat GPT out of the water and actually is profitable. And these things are unlikely, but possible, I guess. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon could somehow change the narrative, but doing so too would require some sort of technological breakthrough, or a product, a very obvious product that would make people money,

more money than is being spent on the thing. And the markets are also capricious, and thus I really wouldn't count on there being a narrative turnaround, especially with the shifting sands of investor sentiment. As I've mentioned previously on August 2, Elliot Management, the hedge fund with over $70 billion in assets under management, said in the letter to clients that AI is overhyped and that Nvidia is a bubble, adding that AI had not delivered value commensurate with the hype. While it's possible there are others that descend against the rapidly forming consensus against generative AI to prop things up, which I do think is possible, especially if you deepen the hole with Microsoft or Nvidia, it's worth putting Elliott Management's note in a broader context. It's only the latest voice in a loud, or at least increasingly louder chorus of critics, whose members include esteemed analyst houses and some of the largest investment banks in the world. Goldman Sachs put out a report in July that you've heard in the pop culture episode

that said generative AI was too expensive and didn't solve the complex problems that would need to justify their expenses. At the end of July, Gartner put out a report predicting that 30% of generative AI products would be abandoned entirely after a proof of concept by end of 2025. And the Washington Post reports that Barclays Bank thinks that, and I quote, Wall Street analysts are expecting big tech companies to spend around $60 billion a year on developing AI models by 2026, but reap only $20 billion a year in revenue from AI by that point.

Little Astrosk on there for you. That does say revenue. That doesn't say profit. And by the way, that's only a billion dollars more than Microsoft's entire capital expenditures in the last quarter alone. Microsoft also has a storied history of pumping and dumping ideas. For Microsoft, augmented reality was, and I quote, an absolute breakthrough in 2019, before it was quietly shoved in a corner with mass layoffs and a business line closures a few years later.

In 2021, Satchinadella, their CEO, couldn't overstate how much of a breakthrough the Metaverse was. Yet two years later, and big props to Preston Grauhrler of Computer World for saying this in February 2020, he laid off most of the people involved and bet everything on artificial intelligence. And that bet everything thing, that's a headline from Wired magazine. Very good. It's also important to remember that Microsoft effectively owns Open AI. As part of their 2019 funding round, which I believe was a billion dollars, Microsoft has full access to all of OpenAI's intellectual property and research. Which begs a thorny little question,

why at this point would Microsoft give OpenAI any more money other than to save face? That was a very real possibility that Satchin Adela is surrounded by Yes Man, who don't know what they're talking about. Microsoft also has access to sell Open AIs, and I quote pre-AGI products, which is all of their products right now, and full access to all of their research, as well as, and I quote, certain rights to Open AI's intellectual property. Unless Open AI is capable of delivering something meaningfully different, something Nadella can wave in front of analysts' faces and show them that they can automate all of these jobs away,

its existence is just another cost centre and one that could get eliminated in a tough quarter. And to be clear, Satchinadella has been extremely frank about his leverage over Open AI and its effective ownership of their tech, albeit buffeted with the usual bull, bullshit platitudes and niceties that you'd expect from a shape-shifting tech CEO monster. In a late 2020 interview with PR person Kara Swisher, Sachin Adela said, if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, I don't want any customer of ours to be worried about it, quite honestly,

because we have all the rights to continue the innovation, not just to serve the product, but we can go and just do what we were doing in partnership ourselves. We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. Mr. Nadella, that is an insane thing to say, and the kind of thing you'd only say to someone like Kara Swisher, Swisher should have made that the headline, that Microsoft effectively owns OpenAI.

I miss this at the time. I found out about this quote like a week or two ago. It's crazy to me. It's crazy to me that this was said and it's not front page news. Microsoft owns OpenAI, who gives a shit about the non-profit structure. But it actually gets better because he followed up that quote with this. Microsoft's investment of $13 billion in OpenAI gives us significant rights, as I said.

And also this thing, it's not hands off, right? We are in there. We are below them. We are above them. We are around them. We do the kernel optimizations. Very funny, if you consider the crowd strike thing, by the way. We build tools.

We build the infrastructure. So that's why I think a lot of the industrial analysts are saying, oh, wow, it's really a joint project between Microsoft and Open AI. The reality is we are, as I said, very self-sufficient in all of the world. this. Well, I'm not saying it's for certain. Microsoft can very clearly, if they so please, simply drop open AI and keep all of their stuff. Nevertheless, as the market's sour on generative AI, I think it's time for big tech to prove something. It's time for them to prove that this wasn't all a huge, big, stupid, fucking waste of time and money. To continue with their current paths, Sundar Pishai of Google and Sachinadella of Microsoft as the loudest of the publicly traded

generative AI hype men will have to show everybody something remarkable. But even then, they will have to show how it actually makes money. And if they can't, at least in the case of Satchinadella, they can still walk away as winners. In the best case scenario, these companies would either have to dramatically reduce their costs, something they've really shown they're not capable of doing and, in fact, have said they'll do the opposite of, or show ways to make generative AI so significantly efficient that it somehow finally balances itself out. What we're really waiting for now is for somebody to blink. If none of the major cloud companies change course over the next few months,

we could potentially see this boom continue for another quarter. And just to be clear, they're usually in lockstep. They love holding up each other's oligopolis and monopolies. They love being a weird cartel that sells data. To continue, though, they'll have to commit billions of dollars in at the very least cloud credits for Open AI and Anthropic, as neither of those companies can survive without further cash infusions. They'll also have to find some way to make any of this useful and profitable.

Two challenges that generative AI has never really been able to deal with, not even once. And I, just as an aside, I've had people email and saying, well, I use it for this. I was on a show the other day, so he uses it for show notes. These are all fine, whatever. These are like little use cases. These people need this to make a trillion dollars. Show notes aren't going to do it. Shitty translation's not going to do it.

A picture of Garfield with a gun is not going to do it. And Big Tech is going to have to figure out a way to support these companies in the face of rising disquire among shareholders, who, in the most recent route of AI companies, lost them about $2.6 trillion in market capitalization. As I pointed out in the shareholder supremacy, investors don't really care about the future or innovation. They just want profits and their portfolios to get bigger and they want to see the number for profit go larger and the costs go lower, and absolutely nothing else matters at all. Which is why they love Generative AI at first, because if this actually made a bunch of money,

this is a way that Microsoft could just route cloud costs from themselves to themselves. I'll get to that in a future episode about monopolies, though. And I think that if Generative AI becomes an albatross around the necks of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which I really believe it will, these companies are going to face really nasty pressure to curtail their investments and their CAPEX. Investors will ask why these companies are spending a collective $100, $200 billion by the end of 2025

on a technology that likely won't drive much revenue growth, when it could be used for things like stock dividends and stock buybacks, and I don't know, thrones for the demon lords that live underneath the offices. I don't know how Microsoft truly makes money. That's a joke. Don't email me about it. But I believe in any case, the next month is going to be critical to the future of the AI boom. and I believe this is a time for industry-wide introspection and to really consider everyone's roles

and why this bubble existed in the first place. In the next episode, I'm going to take a closer look into Open AI's likely demise, what it looks like, and why the company's few avenues for salvation, in fact, look like dead ends. And I'll get into how fucking ridiculous this whole bubble is and what its potential collapse spells for the future of the tech industry.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Lash 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 Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel 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. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything.

I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to futas to skis. Scheduling sex. Wait, what sex? Is it just me or does every woman my age want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes?

They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfridell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge.

That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. Again, we are experts. Listen to Pod Meets World on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety.

I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Intercosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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