Better Offline - Monologue: No, Something Big Isn't Coming

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

Starting point is 00:00:15 Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-8-4-i-heart. Callsome Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. This is your monologue for the week, and I'm your host, Ed Zittron. So you've probably seen or heard about or even read the abominable nonsensical hogslop essay called Something Big

Starting point is 00:00:43 It's Coming, perhaps seeing people that should know better like Medi Hassan's who called it the most important thing you read today, despite it being both AI generated and complete fucking nonsense. This essay has done the rounds because of its histrionic tone and deliberate leaning upon the anxieties of those scared of AI and the mythology of AI boosters. And across 4,700 boobless, shit-ass words says very little new or interesting, along with multiple. egregious lies. I will be attaching an annotated version of this essay to this monologue, but I want to give you a broad explanation of what it really says and why it's full of shit. But let's start with who wrote it. Matt Schumer is a guy who makes an AI startup called Otherside AI, which does this

Starting point is 00:01:23 thing called Hyperite, which is an AI writing assistant with web search and citations, which translates to mean it's a wrapper for various large language models that he's prompting. Appropriately, when I asked it to write a critique of his piece, it said that its weaknesses lied in its lack of specifics, and that its alarmist framing grabs attention, and it's heavy on the hype and light on actual insight, and you know what, Matt, you've fucking, you've got one innovation, and it's that even your shit-assed LLM rapper doesn't like your bullshit. And I think it's also being too kind. Schumer makes numerous egregious misstatements about the current state of AI, using vague yet

Starting point is 00:01:59 scary statements like being able to walk away from the computer for hours and find his work done. Again, his company has done the same thing for years, or that an unlawful, named managing partner at a big law firm uses AI for hours to do the work of a team of associates. I choose these two statements because they're fairly typical of his entire piece, entirely made up bullshit about how long an AI can work for or what it's capable of doing. Schumer repeatedly talks about AI being able to write software completely autonomously in a way that could not be further from the truth. His most egregious one is when he quotes OpenAI saying that GPT 5.3 Codex is the first model

Starting point is 00:02:34 that was instrumental in creating itself because it used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluation. These are actual quotes from OpenAI. He's not lying they set them. He's just lying about what they mean. To be clear, this is Open AI saying that he used an app it built to test and debug code and to test and debug the actual code and how it went up. It's literally, it's what the product, they used, they tested the product by testing what the product did. It's not the same, a same that software is designing itself, which is something that Schumer heavily intimates, is happening throughout the piece, which it is not. He also suggests multiple times that

Starting point is 00:03:13 AI is learning from itself, which is not. Barely keeping my call on this one because it's so fucking frustrating, seeing how many people, I saw Fortune repost this. I saw Business Insider do a post. Fucking the technology brothers, well, well, well, if it isn't the technology brothers, they're this fuck not on. It genuinely infuriates me. And most of the scary stuff in there that all software engineers will be replaced, that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs have begun in one to five years, is Schumer directly copy-pasting stuff that CEO of Anthropic Wario Amadee said in one of his many interviews where he makes shit up. I am begging people to please, God, engage with basic, critical thinking when reading things like this. Schumer says a lot

Starting point is 00:03:56 of vague marketing fluff. Each generation builds the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. This is written specifically to make you believe. that this is actually happening when it is not. It isn't. The generation is not building the next. There are still people doing this. He doesn't cite anything. He doesn't even bother to choose real-life examples. He just says stuff like AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas of medicine or without citation. Well, I've got a citation for you. On September 5th, 2024, Matt Schumer released a model called Reflection 70B that he claimed had benchmarks that made it, and I quote, the world's top open source AI model built with something called Glave AI.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Independent researchers were unable to recreate the benchmarks, and it became obvious that Schumer was a lying sack of shit, and the Reflection 70B was a rapper for Anthropics Claude Sonnet model, with one person posting that they had intentionally made it, so that it would not respond to being called Claude or say that it was Claude. He also didn't reveal that he was an investor in Glave AI, the platform that generated the synthetic data that allegedly trained this shit-ass model that does not work, did not work, never updated, never did anything it said, and everyone just memory-hold it. And what horrified me about this essay is how many top-tier media outlets and respectable journalists took it as gospel, because the statements he made vaguely lined up with the empty hype of scumbags,

Starting point is 00:05:20 like Sam Altman and Dario Amaday. If you are a member of the media that shared or republish this, you are actively participating in an act of disinformation and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. Fuck Matt Schumer and fuck anybody who takes him seriously. Regular people got scared because of this because mainstream media validated it. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. And to the many haters that emailed me about this saying, this looks like bullshit, you were correct. These people are deceiving you. They are misleading you so that they can sell AI software.

Starting point is 00:05:52 that they know is not doing the things it needs to to make any of this makes sense. And I'm disgusted to see this keep happening. I am disgusted to see people like this platformed. And I think when all of this ends, people think that I will forget. I will not forget any of this. I am taking fucking detailed notes of everybody who pushes this shit uphill. I am furious. I am disgusted to see this.

Starting point is 00:06:16 60 million fucking views on this bullshit. And I know there are some people who don't like when I get angry, but I am furious about this. This is lies. This is platforming lies. Anyone in the media who platform this, you need to, I don't know, think about whether you're capable

Starting point is 00:06:31 of doing your jobs every day because you seem to lack the critical thinking to spot a scam artist. Yeah, yeah, I'm done. I'm done, everyone. I'm sorry for flying off the handle a little. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letter help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live.

Starting point is 00:07:25 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 Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:07:54 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.

Starting point is 00:08:15 Again, we are experts. Listen to Podmeets Tworl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the education section of a resume, that you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills first hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars, skilled through alternative roots. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage

Starting point is 00:08:41 because hiring managers who start with skills are 60% more likely to find a successful hire. Hire Skills First. Learn why at tear the paper ceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. This is an IHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

Better Offline - Monologue: No, Something Big Isn't Coming

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.