Better Offline - Monologue: AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how LLMs and the obsession with AI is actively destroying the fabric of the tech industry.Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now.

Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new Stuff You Should Know doing science playlist. Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one?

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man,

I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped, like, five right now. Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Better Offline. Sorry about no monologue last week. I've had a very tough few months and needed a break.

And honestly, I'm still flagging a bit. But there's too much shit going on for me to stop talking and I love doing this job too much. Anyway, earlier in this week, I ran a newsletter that I'll likely be turning into a few episodes about how few data sentences are actually getting built and found that the majority of those that broke ground in 2023 and 2024 are yet to be completed. My

working theory is now that barely any capacity is coming online and that's why Anthropic had to buy up all 300 megawatts of Elon Musk's Colossus 1 data center capacity because there are no other options out there other than the guy who said that Anthropic was misanthropic and evil.

An embarrassing insult when you could just say that Dario Amadeh day sounds like he's doing Elizabeth Holmes' Steve Jobs' voice. In any case, I think we're in the good old-fashioned bullshit phase of the bubble. I know some of you will say, but data centers are getting built, but what you mean is that data centers are under construction. They are not, for the most part, being finished.

Across every Microsoft Data Center announced since 2023, I found two, Fairwater, Wisconsin and Atlanta, there were anything close to complete, and despite Microsoft saying that they're both operational, they're actually both stuck on the initial phases. I think there's some capacity online, but even then I'm not really sure. I saw an article in the local newspaper saying that Fairwater, Wisconsin wasn't even working.

Now, Microsoft has also claimed that it brought on a gigawatt of capacity in each of the last two quarters, and I think it's using a different definition of capacity than operational data centers. It's weird. It's fucking strange. I'm sorry. I know I'm meant to be articulate and talk about economics and some shay, but I'm just, I'm kind of tired of it. We're four years in, and even the largest companies in the world still describe, their return on investment like they're the fucking riddler.

How much capacity do you have, Satya? Why don't we know? Why don't we know how much you actually made on AI? Why are you still using run rate? This is strange. What's going on? About to fall into Tucker Carlson voice there. But nevertheless, for my article,

I actually reached out to Microsoft to confirm these things, and they said they'd get back to me, last Monday, and then they just stopped replying. That's generally what people do when they're hiding something. And I'm tired of that too. I'm tired of the fact these companies won't just give me a straight answer, or you are straight answer, or their investors a straight answer. It's frustrating, and I know you're frustrated too, dear listener, and I know you keep asking when this shit ends. I truly don't know at this point, and I'll explain. The obfuscated finances of these firms are so thoroughly mangled that it's hard to tell if Anthropic has $30 billion in the bank or $30. It's fundamentally impossible to understand how much money Open AI actually makes because both I and the information have now published very different numbers.

Mine are much lower, billions lower for 2025. I mean, I don't have the final quarter. And I will say that I can speak to mine with complete certainty as these are the kind of financials that are borderline impossible to lie about, unlike investor documents, which usually, well, are full of them. Now, I want to be clear. I am not even accusing OpenAI of lying. I'm sure whatever it's handed over to investors has more asterisks on it than Kupert reading Mind Kampf.

I'm sure it says that these are non-gap numbers, generally accepted accounting principles, which means that they could be any number of different versions of Ibittenstein's monster. It's hard to tell how much Open AI is spending, which makes it harder to tell how much money it needs or when it might run out of it. If OpenAI closes this entire $122 billion round, Nvidia and SoftBank are paying in three monthly chunks like a fucking Klanar plan, and Amazon has $35 billion contingent on either IPO or AGI. Open AI will have, if they successfully do this,

would have raised over $160 billion in the space of a year. And even if it doesn't, it will have raised, and I assume spent most of, around $70 billion or more in the space of a year. That's so much money. Where has it gone? Wherever has it gone, Sammy? Do you think they know? Do you think any of these people know?

Do you think they really know how their finances are doing? Because according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fisher, they are, and I quote the Wall Street Journal here, not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being a public company. It's pretty worrying to me considering how much money Mr. Altman is now on the hook for and how much money he's taken in. Similarly, his equally damp friend, Mr. Wario Amade of Anthropic, is now raising at a scale unheard of other than when it just happened with Open AI,

by which I mean that if it's rounds with Google and Amazon fully close, Anthropic will have raised over $100 billion in the space of a year. And again, it doesn't seem to want to go public. Why not, Mr. Amadee? What do you have to hide? What's going on? And now Mr. Amaday is out raising another $50 billion that must close in 24 hours. Nope, wait, sorry, that was a few weeks ago.

Now, I mean, it's $30 billion to $50 billion that might close by the end of the month. And yes, that is the order of the events. And again, no one seems to think this is strange. No one in the media seems to think this is strange. No one seems to be concerned about this at all. I'm actually kind of deeply worried about all of this because these companies may go public. And if they go public, well, they're going to lose everyone's money if they invest. but if they don't go public, there's still a bunch of money that's gone into them that's just

potentially gone nowhere. Anyway, this is kind of exciting. I'll admit, it's kind of exciting. I know that's a bizarre thing to say. I know it's strange to suggest that this might be an exciting thing, because the stakes have been raised so much that eventually one or more of us is going to be proven correct. It's going to be me or the boosters. and if the boosters are right here, this is crazy.

I don't think they're right at all. Gone to my head, I think Anthropic is doing some sort of very bizarre accounting, likely taking in API payments paid in advance. To explain, I think it's possible they're counting an organization paying its tokens up front, say, $50 million that's likely to last 12 months, and acting as if that's a month of actual revenue versus accounting for its spread out over 12 months, artificially inflating the run rate by a factor of over 1,000%. to explain ARR is just month times 12.

So if they say if $50 million is meant to be spread over 12 months, counting it in a single month and multiplying, that's kind of bullshit. I don't know for certain if this is what's happening, but pre-selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR is a way it makes sense, and also it's not the first time this has happened. There are plenty of startups that have done this bullshit in the past, some of them in the dot-com bubble. I find the alternative a little ridiculous.

Anthropic CFO Krishna-Rowls, said on March 6th, 2026, that Anthropic had made $5 billion in lifetime revenue. He said exceeding, but if it was much higher than that, he would have said a different number. If that's the case, Anthropic suddenly grew its business for a few hundred million dollars in January to a few billion dollars a month in April. This is, on an accounting basis, a step change in complexity. It's a step change in customer's scale. Anthropic must have had to hire and scale at a speed that defies all logic to keep up. They've been handling so much fucking cash in there brand new at this. Also, Krishna Rao, the CFO, got interviewed

recently on one of the many booster podcasts where they just sit there and let you say what you want for an hour. And he said that the largest user of tokens in Anthropic is their tax person. That's the one person I would never let use an LLM. I would slap their hands if I saw them using Claude. I'd be very worried. But Krishna seems very excited about this. He's talking about how all of this is speeding up all of their accounting. And I must be clear, when you're handling billions of dollars very suddenly coming in, you don't want to rush the fucking accounting, Krishna. You need to calm your fucking jorts a little bit.

It's just, it's so ridiculous. And it's ridiculous that I am somehow unique in the way I cover this, that I am unique in my scrutiny. I don't know why am I. I mean, I do as much. easier to not scrutinize these companies and just applaud whenever you see a big number. But I think it's letting down listeners and readers across the board to not approach this and replaces scrutiny, even if you think this will work out. Even if you believe AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing ever, I think it's a detriment

to your listeners and readers to not approach this with a high degree of skepticism and scrutiny because this is so much money. streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate, love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHartPride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts. than ads-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

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Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here at the Happiness Lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer, big ideas that just might reshape how you think about your well-being. Like, we've been thinking about the loneliness epidemic all wrong. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. I don't think loneliness is actually about solitude. Loneliness is about something much bigger. Or that we should get rid of small talk altogether. We talk about current events. We talk about what you do for a living, but not do you love what you do for a living. Is this your dream job? Or that the mental health crisis isn't what we think it is. And that kids today are

doing better than we assume. It was really disorienting for us as researchers to be so wrong about our hypothesis. We are so scared that we are going to underreact to a severe challenge that we tend to overreact. For more surprising ideas backed by

psychological science, check out our new series. Happiness Hot Takes. Listen to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's the thing. maybe Krishna's being honest, maybe they're at 30 billion, 50 billion, whoever knows ARR and it's just this amazing business, or maybe it just isn't that big or the business isn't

that good. Maybe that's what it is. Do you think? Do you think that that's, I would be very shocked if Anthropic grew from making a couple hundred million dollars in what, November last year to $4 billion in April? I'd be really fucking shocked. And I think that there is a, if that has happened, it's because of the largest pay pig AI psychosis in the world, which we'll get to in a bit. But I've had some people recently say that I am not talking about the tech enough. And I want to explain why. And it's the fact that four years into this, I'm just not sure what it is everybody's excited about. What are the big AI applications that are changing my life?

Every two days Anthropic releases some sort of new harness product for finance, a law or medicine or accountancy, leading to someone stock crashing based on the theoretical damage that Anthropics product could cause without anybody actually trying it or verifying what it does or even explaining why it fucking matters. What is it that I am meant to be excited about? What is it that I'm meant to be impressed by? But ultimately, the reason that Anthropics releasing so much stuff is it's flat. It's meant to be an impossible to pass blob of different things that create the gestalt of an indomitable company that can do anything because the markets and the media don't bother to check.

We hear about everybody using this shit day in, day out. Why has nothing changed? What a business is doing differently? How are they different? What is different? What is it that LLMs are actually doing? These should not be difficult or complex questions to answer, but nobody seems to be able to give me an answer with any real clarity or specificity. Every time they do, it's a weird dance involving someone saying, I now get a summary

of some stuff from my open claw, or of course, some sort of multi-agent coding fiasco that never actually ends with functional or impressive software or anything being shipped faster. And look, on the coding stuff, I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed. I speak regularly with very talented software engineers, and their reaction is, it's kind of cool, I guess, it's not anywhere near as good as people say, or this allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality, and security of software, because people trust these people who cannot do their jobs, which has begun to decay across the board, across the entire tech industry, with the rise of AI coding tools.

It sounds like LLM coding is a very inefficient way to sometimes speed up some things in a way that also creates a culture of overwork, an either constant bullshit detection or something I call the engineer's torpor, a state where your senses are dulled and you stop giving as much of a shit, until your shit breaks, and you realize your eight concurrent agents are burning $300 a day of tokens, and have written two and a half million lines of functional yet brittle software, designed with no intent or purpose, like an apartment where the rooms vary in size and the number of bedrooms and the toilets are different with varying finishings, and the plumbing's different, room to room. I guess people could live there, but it would be a pain in the ass to run and get worse

the more people that moved in. The more agency you give a coding model, the less you understand what it is your building. No matter how intently you're prompted or how many agents you throw it in, how many weird little tweaks you make to your Claude MD file, the more that you don't build, the less that it makes sense. To make matters worse, the more you hand over, the more rusty you're going to be at writing code. The shit isn't good enough, it's not getting good enough, and it cannot be trusted. And my evidence is that a lot of software is just kind of fucking broken all over the shop in ways that's so common that we're entirely numb to it.

We are tolerant of our ship being broken or terribly designed. It was a problem before LLMs and it's got worse since. Let me give you some examples. Sometimes my iPhone will randomly show a black screen with a pin wheel. It just resets.

It's fine. It'll even keep playing my music. It's happened every iPhone for years. Sometimes it doesn't happen for months. Sometimes it happens multiple times a week. Sometimes apps just arbitrarily slow down. My phone is. isn't hot or anything, they just slow to a crawl. On Chrome, when I load certain websites,

like TechCrunch for some reason, my two-year-old MacBook Pro 16-inch with Ultra M3 Core or what have you and has, let's have a look actually while we're live on air. Let's see. I have 64 gigabytes of RAM and this shit slows down because some ad cookies it doesn't like. Insane. A lot of popular video games crash regularly. The Madden franchises looked like total shit for years and is getting worse each time. The menus are incredibly slow. The Google Doc's iPhone and iPad apps are so unstable I want to take away their car keys on top of having some of the most vexing design decisions across the board, almost as if they don't know how to make things right anymore. And let's talk about all those organizations burning, what, 10, 20, 30 percent or more of their headcount on tokens.

This is a sickness. It is a psychosis. The amounts of money being spent are genuinely, Dissuantly disgusting. Any company that spends anything more than 5% on their head count on tokens is a fucking mark. Your businesses are not getting better. Your CEOs have AI psychosis. The more they speak to the machine that tells them they're the smartest, sexiest boy in the room, the more they'll be convinced that you must join them. They do not see this as annihilating money for effectively no reason. They see it as praying to a soulless, non-existent God. A non-spiritual god made up of more annoying math requiring the largest amount of infrastructure spent on anything ever. It fucking sick.

It is just fucking sucks. I'm not correcting that, but you'll just have to deal with that, okay? This is what happens when every boss is a fucking business idiot who doesn't actually do any work. What do you think Mark Zuckerberg does all day? He walks up to the mirror sometimes. She looks down in his willy and goes, what are you? What do you do? What are you for? What is your concept? Or he walks into rooms and bumbles in there and he says, we need to do more on the exponential. And then some wretched worm tongue-like

figure like Boz or Adam Mersky, oinks and squawks are one of 2,000 different vice presidents to spread his nasty, vague ideas, whatever they might actually be. If you're lucky, you might even get to deal with one of five different dysfunctional AI divisions with different ultra-oves that you have to placate as Mark Zuckerberg does something with AI that seems to change every fucking week. Not to worry, the Wall Street Journal will cover it anyway. And I think that this is how a lot of Silicon Valley and a lot of businesses are being run. I think that's how Jack Dorsey acts. I bet it's how Uber's run.

Think of an app you're using right now that's anything other than OK. Do you love any app? Does anything work great for you? I like flighty. Flighty's a good app, but that's one. Even the Apple Notes app, I use constantly. doesn't sync right at random for no reason and has a bunch of random shit come up whenever I choose a menu. Everything's a fucking mess. Nothing is smooth or easy. I have to log into something every four

minutes. I have to give somebody a two F a token every six minutes. Sometimes Google just logs me out of shit for no reason. Sometimes my email client loses its access to outlook or Gmail and sometimes my password system hasn't saved a password and I have to reset my password and I have to go to my email there's three fucking emails from a pizza place I visited in New Jersey 15 years ago. And by the way, if you fucking email me and tell me, get one password, get Bitward and get fuck you, fuck off. It's so sickening that everyone thinks that there is some panacea. Oh, my app works for me.

Apps do not work consistently across the board. That is a unilateral truth. One password works well for 100 people and doesn't work well for 50 others. I've seen it with my own fucking eyes. same with last password same with bitwarden the state of these fucking companies is dog shit and i know i'm going to get emails from people saying bitwarden works i pay for bit warn don't like it it's a bit better than one password but it's like which of these do i trust now which is being what's being saved where i'm sick of it i'm absolutely sick of it apologies for getting heated

i know it's atypical of this show for me to rant now i want to speak to if any l l lm coding people the real code jockeys if you use it a bit for work i don't care the people who think that this is truly the most amazing thing. Do any LLM coding folks actually use software? It stinks. It's bloated. It's counterintuitive. It's slow. It's inefficient. The 10 or more tracking cookies and the 100 APIs you connect to every two seconds, for some reason, have created a sludge that is making every single experience on the computer worse. Doing varying degrees of k-fabe to impress another dickhead with $2 million in RSUs doesn't make up for the fact that the current state of software is fucking sad and ugly across the board. Do you think the modern state of software is

good? And do you think the insecure, bug-ridden slop fest of OpenClaw is a good representative of your industry's future? You should be burning it to the ground. You should be killing OpenClaw. It's destroying the fabric of software. LLMs make shitty code. I don't care how it makes you feel. And I think it's made a select few people genuinely mentally ill in a way that we're yet to account for. And I don't mean random people. I mean prominent VCs and CEOs and a lot of software engineers who are obsessed with this stuff, who have now been irredeemably proven to be insane gullible marks. And we do not talk enough about how insane this all is. $800 billion, more than that, spent by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and meta on AI so far. And for what?

A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses across the board to varying degrees for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain, and impossible to explain in clear terms like, does it make more money than is bent? It's not profitable. The state of software is arguably worse. Most products try and make you use an AI feature with questionable utility or efficacy, and some organizations actively ostracize you if you fail to use it

because their CEOs have AI psychosis because their models told them they were brilliant. Every time somebody explains AI's economic value, they sound like they just got caught committing a crime and they're trying to lie their way out of it. Why does Open AI need all this money? Why does Anthropic need all this money? What justification is there for any of this expenditure? I know some people want to come up with a conspiratorial reason

that all of this is, oh, it's a super secret government military thing and Trump's going to bail it out. It's all a secret government, government, government, government, government, it's all a secret Trump conspiracy. No, stop it. Stop. That's not what this is. That is a comfortable way to feel smart or in control of a situation you have. control over. It is a doomsaying philosophy that allows you to avoid the hard intellectual work

of actually thinking of what happens when bad things happen. And it also avoids the intellectual exercise of accepting that these are a bunch of men who do not really know how to do business and are self-involved cowards that only know how to follow each other. I realize it's easier to look at the world as dark and scary and say, wow, it's all a big secret plan. And this is all government spying, already happening way before LLMs. Oh, it's all a big data gathering. It's all a big surveillance thing, already happening way before LLM's. LLM's aren't even particularly useful for it.

I'm sure there's some uses, but come on. Doing that makes you feel like you're smart. It makes you feel like you're ahead of the game. When in reality, the world is dark. It is scary, but it's also directionless and full of followers and cowards and people that don't know what they're fucking doing that will spend over a trillion dollars on data send us for an AI industry that does not have a future. It's a dark and scary world we live in when the mainstream media has moved away from reality. But it's a reality I live in, it's a reality

you live in. But don't give these people credit. Don't give these people credit or a strategy that does not exist. In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. Open AI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer, which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive, and wasteful bubble in history. Zitron out! Joy is essential, and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby.

If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotfi is presented by CVS. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new stuff you should know doing science playlist. Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one? We got you covered.

Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park. Well, come on down. So distill a nice pot of tea, everybody, turn down the gas on your bunsen burner, and slip into your most comfortable lab coat, and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee.

Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped like, 30 albums. We drop like five right now. That's the rate we gotta be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names

and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing. I talk to composer Mark Shaman. It's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with.

You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. And director Morgan Neville. Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.