Better Offline - How To Argue With An AI Booster, Part Three

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

In the final part of this week's three-part Better Offline Guide To Arguing With AI Boosters, Ed Zitron walks you through why generative AI is nothing like Amazon Web Services, how the media misled the public about ChatGPT, and why ChatGPT’s popularity does not mean it’s a mass-market product. Latest Premium Newsletter: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On Generative AI: https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on-ai/ 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. BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in --- 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/edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play Stupid Games win Stupid Prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong.

But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Orzo Media. Hello, I'm Ed Zittron, and this is BetRef. Offline. We finally reached the end of our three-part How to Ague with an AI booster series. Big strong men are standing outside of the Better Offline studio suspended 200 feet above the Las Vegas strip with tears in their eyes and they're saying, sir, sir, it's the most beautiful podcast I've ever heard. Please stop recording

it. Everyone else will feel insufficient when they hear it. No, no, I have to continue. I'm afraid my listeners need me. But okay, seriously, folks, if there's anything I want you to take, home so far, is that the arguments that these people, these AI sycophants make, they crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny. And yet these arguments work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who don't understand the rotten economics of AI, or because they force the opposite party to surrender their reason and to exit the planes of reality. To which I say, fuck that. Absolutely not. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on, and I'll hope that you'll all be standing with me side by side. Now, in the first episode, we shook away the claims that it's the early

days for AI and we just need to give it more time. Then I took the idea that Generative AI is like Uber or Fibro Optic Networking to industries that both burned a lot of money at the start, but are otherwise nothing like Generative AI. And now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments. These are the worst of the worst booster quips. Here we go. Ultra boost equip. I thought about recording that with a bunch of reverb, but it didn't really work out for me. But I wanted to do it once. But anyway, their argument is, at home, AI is just like Amazon Web Services, a massive investment that took a while to go profitable, and everybody hated Amazon for it. Now, I actually covered this in-depth in the haters' guide to the AI bubble, but the long and short of it is that Amazon Web Services is a platform, a necessity with an obvious choice, and has burned 10% of what Amazon, and all of them have burned chasing generative AI, and had also proven demand before building it.

Also, Amazon Web Services was break-even within three years, and Open AI was founded in 2015, and even if you start from November 2020, by Amazon. Amazon Web Services standards should be break-even by now. But now I'll quote myself, Amazon, no way, sorry, that's for boosters. Amazon Web Services was created out of necessity. Amazon's infrastructure needs was so great that he had effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything to theoretically everywhere, handling both the traffic from customers, delivering the software that runs Amazon.com quickly and reliably, and, well, making sure things were stable.

It didn't need to come up with a reason for people to run web applications. They were already doing so themselves, but in ways that cost a lot more, were inflexible and required specialist server skills. Amazon Web Services took something that people already did, and what there was already a proven demand for, and made it better and scaled it. Eventually, Google and Microsoft would join the fray. I editorialised a bit there, but I can do that with my own work. Now, a common booster quib, by the way, is for them to say, well, this AI company, they've

got high annualized revenues. And as I've discussed in the past, this metric is basically month times 12. And while it's a fine measure for normal high gross margin businesses like software as a service companies, it isn't for AI. It doesn't account for churn, which is when people leave. It also is a number intentionally used to make a company sound more successful. So you can say $200 million annualized revenue instead of $16.6 million a month. And you're also meant to, but you heard they said 200 million annualized, but you heard. million. Your mind did. That was a bad Plinket reference, but I'll continue. They want you to think 200 million. They want you to think that's what they'll make. More often than not, if they mention

an annualized number, that number will not be how much they make that year. Also, if they're using this number, it's likely not consistent. Now, if they bring this up, you should just say to them, hey, how much profit is the company making? And also, how much are they burning? At this point, they will, I think, mace you. I mean, with the spray or an actual mace. boosters are strange. Now they'll also say, well, this AI company's in growth mode and they'll pull the profit lever when it's time. And the answer to that is always going to be, why have none of them done this? Not one. Not one of them. Now a booster will burst through your don't go, AI, AGI, AGI, and then there's that wheel bullshit again. It's always about the will with these

fuckers. We do not know how thinking works in humans and thus cannot extrapolate it to a machine. And at very least human beings have the ability to re-evaluate things and learn, a thing that LLMs cannot do and will never do. We do not know how to get to AGI. Sam Olman said in June the Open AI was now confident they knew how to build AGI as they have traditionally understood it. Then in August, Altman said that AGI was not a super useful term and at the point of all this is it doesn't really matter and it's just this continuing exponential of model capability that will rely on for more and more things. really tired of people quoting this guy. He doesn't make any fucking sense. Read out, read anything he

says out loud and it's just really, just total bullshit. Even Meta's chief AI scientist, the Anne Lecun, says it isn't possible with transformer-based models to make AGI. We don't know if AGI is possible, and anyone claiming they do is lying. Anyone who's talking about AGI is talking about fan fiction again. Ask them how they feel about Banjo and Kazui. Do you think they made love? Actually, if next time someone brings up AGI to you seriously, bring up Banjo and Kazui and their romantic involvement. I actually, I think that that's the only response you should give now. Stop humoring them. It is fan fiction. But putting Banjo and Kazui aside, there's also a really stupid booster thing they do, which is,

I'm hearing from people deep within the AI industry that there's some sort of ultra-powerful models they're not talking about. And this, by the way, is Hogwash. nothing different than your buddy's friend's uncle who works at Nintendo that says Mario is coming to the PlayStation. Ilyos Sutskava and Miramirati raised billions of dollars for companies with no product, let alone a product roadmap, and they did so because they saw an opportunity for a grift and to throw a bunch of money at compute for no reason. Anyone who has secret shit is not talking about it because it doesn't exist. Also, if someone from deep within the industry has told somebody big things are coming, they're doing so to con them or make them think that they are privileged information.

ask for specifics. And if they say, I couldn't possibly tell you, then they're full of shit. They're full of crap. They're full of do-do. And if they get vague, get specific. Oh, it's going to be able to automate other things. What things? How? How's it automate them? Oh, I don't know. Then you don't know shit about fuck. Now talking about not knowing shit about fuck. Here's another booster quip. Chat GPT is so popular. 700 million people use it weekly. It's one of the most popular websites on the internet. Its popularity proves it's you, utility. Look at all the paying customers. Now that paying customers part we'll get to in a second, but this argument is poised as a comeback to my suggestion that AI is not particularly useful. A proof point that this movement is not inherently wasteful, or that there are in fact use cases for chat GPT that are lasting, meaningful or important. I fundamentally disagree. In fact, I believe chat GPT and LLMs in general have been marketed based on lies of inference, which I realize is ironic.

I know, it's pretty clever. I had a whole blog written called the lie of inference that kind of became this. It wasn't very good, though. This is. This is good. Don't say it's bad. I also have grander concerns and suspicions about what OpenAI considers a user and how it counts revenue. Let me give you an example. They claim to have five million business customers, yet 500,000 of those are from a $15 million year deal, year-long deal with Cal State University, which works out to around $2.50 a user a month. Open AI has also started doing $1 a month trials of its $30 a month team subscription, and one has to wonder how many of those subscribers accounted in the total, and indeed for how long. I do not know the scale of these offers, nor how long

Open AI has been offering them. Areditor posted about this $1 for a month deal a few months ago, saying that Open AI was offering five seats at once, so one buck for a month per se. How many people cancel after that? Who knows? Maybe they just hope they don't. In fact, I found a few people talking about these deals, and even one adding that they were offered a annual $10 a month chat GPT plus subscription. That's like, not like $10 a month for just one month, that's for 12 months. With one person saying a few weeks ago that they'd seen people offered that same deal for canceling their subscription. And actually, I got the same thing when I tried to cancel. Yes, I pay for chat GPT. I need to actually use the fucking thing to criticize it.

When I tried to cancel, it was like, hey, do you want three months for $10 to piece? And I was like, sure, just to prove my point. Suspicious. But there is a greater problem at play, by the way, and it goes beyond pricing. And it's that chat GPT and OpenAI has been marketed based on lies. So chat GPT has 700 million weekly active users. Open AI has yet to provide a definition. Yes, I've asked them, which means that an active user could be defined as somebody who has gone to chat GPT once in the space of a week. This term is extremely flimsy and doesn't really tell us much. Yes, it's a lot of people, but how active are they? similar web says that in July 2025, the chatGPT.com had 1.287 billion total visits, making it very popular.

What do these facts actually mean, though? As I said previously, chat GPT has had probably the most sustained PR campaign for anything outside of a presidency or pop star. Every single article about AI mentions OpenAI or ChatGPT. Every single feature launch, no matter how small, gets a slew of coverage. Every single time you hit AI, you're made to think of chat GPT. GTPT by a tech media that's never stopped to think about their role in the hype or their responsibility to their readers. And as the hype has grown, the publicity compounds, because the natural thing for a journalist to do when everybody is talking about something is to talk about it more. Chat GPT's immediate popularity may have been viral, but the media took the ball and ran with it, and then proceeded to tell people it did stuff it did not. People were pressured to try this

service under false pretenses, something that continues to happen to this day. And I'm going to give you a really fucking grisly example. When I discovered this, when I went and looked at this, it filled me full of rage. It's disgraceful what happened. On March 15th, 2023, Kevin Roos of the New York Times would say that Open AI's GPT4 was exciting and scary and that it was exacerbating, in his words, the dizzy and vertiginous feeling I've been getting whenever I think about AI lately, wondering if he was experiencing future shock, then described how it was an indeterminate level of better and then said something that immediately sounded ridiculous. In one test conducted by an AI safety research group that hooked GPT4 up to a number of other systems, GPT4 was able to hire a

human task rabbit worker to do a simple online task career, solving a capture test without alerting the person to the fact it was a robot. The AI even lied to the robot about why it needed the capture done, concocting a story about a vision impairment. Now this doesn't sound even remotely. real now, but this was two years ago. So I went and looked up the paper and pretty much everything that Ruse described was illustrative, i.e. doesn't really seem whether it happened. Now he's referring to the safety card, which every model has that lists all the measures used to train it and such. And this safety card led to the perpetration of one of the earliest falsehoods and most eagerly parroted lies about this fucking industry. And that was that chat GPT and generative AI is capable of agentic

actions. Outlet after outlet and some people who should definitely have known better, led by Kevin Roos, eagerly interpreted an entire series of events that took place that doesn't remotely make sense, starting with the fact that I don't think you can hire a task rabbit to solve a capture. Or at the very least, without a contrived situation where you create an empty task and ask them to complete it, why not use mechanical Turk or Fiverr? There are people right now offering that service. There were actual real things. But you know me, I'm. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm I'm a curious little critter, so I went further and followed the citation from the safety card to the study, and this is by METR and the research page. It turns out that what actually happened was METR had a researcher copy and paste the generated responses from the model and otherwise handled the entire interaction with the task rabbit.

And based on the plurality of task rabbit contractors, it appears to have taken multiple times. On top of that, it appears to open AI and meta, that's METR, sorry, were prompting the model on what to say, which kind of defeats the point. Like, we don't naturally know what they prompted it to do. And when you look, it even says it does like chain of thought reasoning, which didn't really exist back then. And if it did, it was extremely, like chain of thought is reasoning. And that came out end of 2024. This whole thing is absolutely insane. It's absurd that anyone wrote about it is real. What happened, just to be really blunt, is that they, if they even opened a task rabbit, it's really not obvious whether they actually did this. They had to go to the model and say, okay, I'm opening a task rabbit window, and now the person has said this, and now this is, it just doesn't sound real at all. But even if it did, it's very obvious that they were telling the model what to say and then copy-pacing the response, and it took them multiple tries. It took me five whole minutes to find this article, partly because it was cited on the GPT4 system card. I then read it within that time, then

wrote this part of the script. It didn't require any technical knowledge other than the ability to read. It is transparently, blatantly obvious that GPT4 did not hire a task rabbit or indeed make any of these actions. It was prompted to, and they did not show the prompts they used, likely because they had to use so many of them, if they even did it. Anyone falling for this as a mark. An open AI should have gone out of their way to correct people. Instead, they sat back and let people published outright misinformation. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, 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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The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. 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're dedicating a series to understanding the mind. when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen.

I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is the procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety

and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rousse, along with his co-host Casey Newton,

would go on to describe this example at length on a podcast that week, describing an entire narrative where the human actually gets suspicious and GPT4 reasons out loud that it should not reveal that it is a robot. It's not a reasoning model. At which point, the task rabbit solves the capture. During this conversation, Newton gasps and says, Oh my God, twice. And when he asks, Ruse, how does this model understand

that in order to succeed at its task, it has to deceive the human, Roos responds, we don't know, that is the unsatisfying answer, and Newton laughs and states, we need to pull the plug. I mean again, what? Disgraceful, embarrassing, reprehensible. All that and more on the Hard Fork podcast.

Publish weekly. You can cut that, that adds for free, fellas. Credulousness aside, the GPT4 marketing campaign was incredibly effective, creating an aura that allowed open AI to take advantage of the vagueness of its offering as people, including members of the media, willfully filled in the blanks for them. Altman has really never had to work to sell his product.

Think about it. Have you ever heard OpenAI tell you what ChatGPT can do or go to great lengths to describe its actual abilities? Even on OpenAI's own page for Chat GPT, the text is extremely vague. You scroll down, you're told that ChatGPT can write, brainstorm, edit, and explore ideas with you. It can generate and debug code, automate repetitive tasks, not clear what the tasks are, and help you learn new APIs, question mark.

With chat GPT, you can learn something new, dive into a hobby, answer complex questions, and analyze data and create charts. What repetitive tasks? Who knows? How am I learning? Unclear. It's got thinking built in. What that means is also unclear,

unexplained and thus allows a user to incorrectly believe that chat GPT has a brain and thinks. To be clear, I know what reasoning means, but this website does not attempt to explain what thinking means. You can also offload complex tasks from start to finish with an agent, which can, according to OpenAI, think and act, proactively choosing from a toolbox of agenic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer. This is an egregious lie, employing the kind of weasel wording that would be used to torture I.R. Baboon for an eternity.

Precise in its vagueness, OpenAI's copy is honed to make reporters willing to simply write down whatever they see and interpret it in the most positive light. And thus the lie of inference began. What ChatGPT meant was muddied from the beginning, and thus ChatGPT's actual outcomes have never been fully defined. What chat GPT could do became a kind of folklore, a non-specific form of automation that could write code and generate copy in images that can analyze data, all things that are true, but one can infer much greater meaning and use from. One can infer that automation means the automation of anything related to text, or that write code means write the entirety of a computer program. OpenAI's chat GPT agent is not by any extension of the word, and I quote,

already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks, but it has not, in any meaning of the way, for sense committed to any actual outcomes. As a result, potential users, subject to a 24-7 marketing campaign, have been pushed towards a website that can theoretically do anything or nothing and have otherwise been left to their own devices. The endless gaslighting, societal pressure, media pressure, and pressure from their bosses has pushed hundreds of millions of people to try a product that even its creators can't really describe or don't feel compelled to. And if I was wrong, we'd have real use cases by now and better metrics than weekly active users. As I've said in the past, OpenAI is deliberately using these weekly active users so that it doesn't have to publish their monthly

active users, which I believe would be much higher. Now, why wouldn't it do this? Well, OpenAI, as I've mentioned, has 20 million paying chat GPT subscribers and 5 million business customers with no explanation of what the difference might be, really other than it involves teams and edge you, but not pro. Anyway, this is already a mediocre 3.5% conversion rate. Yeah, it's monthly active users, which are likely 800 or 900 million, but these are guesses, would make that rate lower than 3%, which is pretty terrible considering everyone says this shit is the future. I'm also tired of having people claim that search or brainstorm or companions are a lasting meaningful business model. I'm really tired of it. I'm tired of being told this again and again and again.

That's not what chat GPT is going to actually survive on. Breathe. Okay. Let's move on. Here's another boost of grip, though. Open AI is making tons of money. That's proof they're a successful company and you are wrong somehow. So OpenAI announced that it is hit its first $1 billion month on August 20, 2025, on CNBC in fact. Weirdly enough, by the way, that quote was not in the TV interview. But anyway, this also brings it exactly in line with my estimated 5.26 billion in revenue that I believe it has made at the end of July. Did that in a premium newsletter, please pay me. However, remember what the MIT study that I mentioned said. Enterprise adoption is high, but transformation is There are tons of companies throwing money at AI, but they are not seeing actual returns. OpenAI's

growth as the single most prominent company in AI, and if we're honest, one of the most prominent in software writ large, makes sense, but at some point we'll slow, because the actual returns for businesses are not there. If there were, we'd have one article where we could point a chat GPT integration that helped scale a company, save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money, written in plain English, and not in the gobbly gook of profit improvement. Also, Open AI is projected to make $12.7 billion in 2025. How exactly will it do that? Is it really making $1.5 billion a month by the end of the year? Even if it does it does the idea that it keeps burning $10 billion or more a year every year into a 10? Like, what actual revenue potential does Open AI have long term? Its products are about as good as everybody else is, cost about the same and do the same things. JetGPT is basically the same product as Claude or GROC, maybe less Mecha Hitler, or any number of different LLMs. The only real advantages that Open AI has are infrastructure and brand recognition. These models have clearly hit a wall in training, hitting diminishing returns, meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing its service at scale, nothing more.

It isn't making its business cheaper, other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it, other than the site in Abilene, Texas, where it's promised Oracle $30 billion a year in 2025. I'm sorry I don't buy it. I don't buy that this company will continue growing forever, and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon. When Open AI opens Stargate Abilene, it will turn profitable. How? I hear this one a good amount. How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How's it going to happen?

Nobody ever answers actually how this company will become profitable. It's fucking insane to me. Nobody ever answers the question. Efficiencies? They're going to be efficient? Mm-hmm? Mm-hmm? They're going to be efficient? If you're going to say chat GPT5, I wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient. In fact, it's less efficient. And I'm sure one of you is going to argue, well, you know, they could do their custom silicon. They have a $10 billion deal with Broadcom. How they fucking pay him for that? Also, you realize that, well, actually, no, just, you know, no, you're right. They're going to get the chip from Broadcom because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech, right? It always works and it's always great. And it has no problems. That's what I always. always, that's why I happen with pretty much every first time they make anything in tech. Anyway, let's move on. You'll hear boosters also be like, well, my brother's friends, dog uses chat GPT and they love it. Well, I heard this happen. Or my mate has it in this, or I heard this

person, or I use it in this one. Before we go any further, just to be clear, though, is, when you hear a booster bring up AI and they'll say something, make sure they're talking about generative AI. Are they actually talking about generative AI? Is this a large language model thing. It's very, very, very common for people to conflate AI with generative AI. There are many different kinds of AI. Make sure that the AI booster, whatever they're claiming, whatever they're telling you, is actually about large language models. There are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up. LLMs have nothing to do with folding at home, autonomous cars, or most disease research. But okay, let's do a speed run. Using AI led researchers

to discover 44% more materials. No, it didn't. MIT is now withdrawn this paper. but citing concerns about its integrity. I've linked it in the show notes. There's a huge rundown. Here's another quote. AI is so profoundly powerful that it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job. While young people have been having trouble finding jobs, there's no proof that AI is the reason. Every piece of coverage of reading is citing an Oxford economics report that amidst a bunch of numbers says, and I quote, there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates. A statement that it does not back up, other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along the sheer employment

declines in some roles since 2022 suggested some displacement of effect from AI and digging deeper, the largest displacement seems to be entry-level jobs normally filled by recent graduates. There's otherwise new data. Anyone making this point is grasping at straws. I go into this in more detail in a newsletter called sincerity wins the war, which I've linked to, but it's one of the worst reported stories in tech. And now I'm actually going to ad lip for a second because I forgot while writing this script, there was also this thing that came out of Stanford that said there's been a 13% drop in jobs affected

by AI. And this was used as proof that AI was taking them. Now, curious little critter than I am, I went and read that. What it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to AI and being affected by AI. They saw they were going down. They went, oh, it's AI that did that. They fought around with various statistics, but that's the long and short of it. I give you an example one of the jobs, accountancy. Now any accountants listening, big up to my accountant listeners, there's been a hiring crisis in accountancy for years. People are not becoming CPAs. The reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them. It's nothing to do with AI. Imagine if anyone put half as much effort into writing up these stories as I did

writing up one of these booster quips. But here's another one, the AI is replacing young coders, and it is not. In fact, Amazon's cloud chief just said that, replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard. There is no actual real evidence that this is the case. Every single story you have read is anecdotal, anyone peddling this, has an agenda or is not reading. Every CEO mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that AI is replacing people because AI can't replace people. I will add an aside, there are people's jobs that have been replaced by AI, translators, transcribers. Brian over at blood is in the machine, blood in the machine even, sorry Brian. He's doing.

a great job on covering this. There are people that have lost jobs. These people are losing it because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work and slopping it up. That's not happening at the knowledge worker scale, nor is it happening at the Coda scale. Everyone telling you that has an agenda. But Boosters will also claim that AI is doing science research somehow, or will do it. And it won't. I've included a write-up about why foundation models can't do this. Someone's going to read it and say, but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of LLMs. And the reason he says this is because I cheat you not, that LLMs aren't incapable of doing scientific research. He says they're insufficient, which is the same thing.

They're insufficient. Anyway, he claims they're also not dead weight for science, then spends hundreds of words meandering around that thing to kiss up to way I boosters for some reason. I assume because they've terrified him by being really annoying, and these people need to go outside and touch grass. Now, a lot of people think they're going to tell me that they use AI all the time, and that will change my mind. I cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use case. Every use case I hear is one of the following. I use it for brainstorming, to which I say, who cares? Not a business model, it's commoditized.

I use it like search. Who cares? It's not even good at search. It's fine. It's not even better than the low bar set by Google Search. the results it gives on great and the links are deliberately made smaller, which gets in the way of me clicking them so I can actually look at the content. If you're using chat GPT for search, you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at. If I'm wrong, great, you now have a functional search engine. Congratulations, well, I use it for research. And if you use it for research, you do not respect actual research. You want a quick answer. It's that simple. These reports are slop. I've read many, many, many AI reports and they're not good. Sorry! Well, I use it for coding or know someone who used it for. coding, and I'll get to that at a minute. But all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about this stuff as if it was changing society. None of these use cases come

close to explaining why I should be impressed by generative AI. It also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that AI did for you once. We are so past the point when any of that matters. AI is being sold as a transformational technology, and I am yet to see it transform anything. I am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me, or even one thing that feels possible now that wasn't possible before. This isn't even me being a cynic. I'm ready to be impressed. I just haven't been impressed in three fucking years and it's getting boring. Also, tell me with a straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure. Remember, AI boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful. None of these use cases are powerful sounding.

But sir, oh, you're back great. Sir, vibe coding is changing the world, allowing people who can't code to make software. Now, this is one of the most brain dead takes about. about AI and coding. And it's that vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software, and you'll never guess what Kevin Roos covered this. She did this article. While writing the script, I hadn't even noticed, he literally, anyway, well, technically true in that one can just type, build me a website into one of many coding environments. This does not mean said website is functional, secure, or useful. Let's make this really clear. AI cannot just handle coding. Go into the show notes and read this piece I've linked from Colton Bogie. I have actually interviewed him now. He's going to be

coming out in the next few weeks. The episode, the interview is fucking brilliant. And then the other I've linked to by Nick Suresh. If you contact me about AI encoding without reading these, I will send them to you and nothing else or crush you, like a car and a garbage dump into a cube, one or the other I will choose at the time. Also, show me a vibe-coded company, please. Not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features, a fully functional, secure and useful app that has made money and made by somebody who cannot read or write code. You won't be able to, because it is impossible. Vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals. And are RAI coding environments making people faster? I don't think so. In fact,

a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers 19% slower. The reason that nobody is vibe coding in entire companies because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go. And oftentimes when you add something, it breaks something else. This is all well and good if you actually understand code. It's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or clawed code like a kid at an arcade machine, turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo's going on. Vibe coders are also awful for the already negative margins of most AI coding environments, as every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise, burning tokens in pursuit of a goal they themselves don't really understand. Vib coding doesn't

work, it will not work, and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance, and at worst support. a campaign built on lies. 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.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea

that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me.

I need some jokes to make me seem funny. 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. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.

From the WMBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star Lela Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeki.

The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world, Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning.

It's about showing up, even when it's hard. 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. 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're dedicating a series to understand the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic.

And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations

about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And this is all built up to one final point. I'm no longer accepting half-baked arguments. If you're an AI booster, please come up with better arguments. And if you truly believe in this stuff,

you should have a firmer grasp on why you do so. It's been three years, and the best some of you have is it's really popular. Uber also burned money. Your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true, and it's deeply embarrassing. Then again, there are many well-intentioned people who aren't necessarily AI boosters or repeat these arguments, regardless of how thinly frame they are, in part because we live in a high information, low processing society where people tend to put great faith in people who are

confident in what they say and sound smart adjacent. I also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out or seeming stupid is being used against them. If you don't understand something, it's likely because the people you're reading or hearing it from don't either. If a company makes a promise and you don't understand how they'll deliver on it, it's their job to explain how and your job to suggest it isn't plausible in clear and defined language. This has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an outright failure of journalism. I have never seen more misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career, and it's largely peddled by reporters who are whether don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible,

in part because all their peers are doing the same thing and saying the same nonsense. As things begin to collapse, and they sure look like they're collapsing, but I'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet. It will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say. Never have I seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than Sam Altman saying that GPT5 was actually bad and that GPT6 will be even better. Members of the media, Sam Altman does not respect you. He is not your friend. Clammy Sam Altman is not secretly confiding in you. Clammy will thinks you are stupid and easily manipulated and will print anything he says, largely in part because many members of the media,

will print exactly what he says whenever he says it. And to be clear, if you wrote about GPT6 and made fun of it, that's great. But let's close by discussing the very nature of AI skepticism and the so-called void between those who hate AI and those who love AI from the perspective of one of the most prominent people in the skeptic camp. Critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace, patience, or in many cases hospitality when it comes to their position. While they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side, it's always framed as the work of a firebrand, an outlier, or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify. Skeptics are demonized, their points under constant scrutiny, their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or

intellectual weakness. Skeptic and critic are words said with a sneer of trepidation, that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that AI is the most powerful special thing ever. To not immediately fall in love with something, that everybody is talking about is to be framed as a hater, to have oneself introduced with the words not everyone agrees, or on 40% of your appearances. By comparison, AI boosters are the first to get TV appearances and offers to be on panels. Their coverage featured prominently on tech meme, selling slop-like books called shit like the Future of Intelligence, Masters of the Brain, featuring 18 interviews with different CEOs that all say the same thing. They don't have to justify

their love. They simply have to remember all the right terms, chirping out test time compute and the cost of inference is going down enough times to Simon Wario Amaday to give them an hour-long interview where he says the models they are in years going to be the most powerful school teacher ever built. And by the way, yeah, I did sell a book because my shit fucking bangs, my shit rocks. I'm not going to be too smug, but like, I put a lot of effort into this and I research it very well. Others should try harder. I have consistent, deeply sourced arguments that I've built over the course of years.

I didn't become a hater because I'm a contrarian. I became a hater because the shit that these fucking oaths have done to the computer pisses me off. I did the man that destroyed Google Search because I wanted to know why Google Search sucked. I wrote Sam Altman Free because at the time I didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath. Everything I do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology. I started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with 300 subscribers and 60 views and have written it as an exploration of subjects that grows as I write. I do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what I am,

and if that's strange to you, well, I'm a strange man, but at least I'm an honest one. I do have a chip on my shoulder, in that I really do not like it when people try to make other people feel stupid, especially when they do so, as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good. I write this stuff out because I have an intellectual interest. I like writing, and by writing I'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology, and talking it out actually feels good. It's an intellectual exercise that I really enjoy.

I happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month, and I'm not specifying where those people go. And if you think that I've grown this by being a hater, you are doing yourself the disservice of underestimating me, which I will use to my advantage by writing deeper, more meaningful, and more insightful things than you. And then I'll say them with lots of curse words on this podcast. I've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again, and make billions doing so. And all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like

Google, Facebook and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth. I can't manufacture my disgust, nor is it hard to, nor can I manufacture whatever it is inside me that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things. I don't know if I take this too seriously, whether I don't take it seriously enough, because I keep saying fucking shit, but I'm honored that I'm able to do so, and I really appreciate everyone who listens, reads, or engages with me in any way. I really do love you all for listening. I know that this was a long three-parter. I've enjoyed recording, it. I've done lots of retakes. Matt Asowski. Love you, man. Sorry for all of this. I'll catch you next episode. 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 Mattersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's YourEd.at to visit the Discord and go to our 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 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 Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L'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 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.

On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win Stupid Prizes. Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect.

We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more.

You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.