Better Offline - Monologue: The Questions I'm Asking

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron lists the questions he’s asking - and the things he’s looking for - that he believes will actually burst the bubble.  Reach out at ezitron.76 on Signal. Want to support me? Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-8-44-I-Hart. All-Zone Media. You know what time it is? It's your better offline monologue for the week, and I'm Ed Zittron. Better offline. Now, today's monologue is an attempt to bring you further into my work, which I've kind of already been doing with multiple listeners materially contributing to the reporting behind this show.

So many of you are eager to help, and if you want to help, well, reach out to me with information and do so on Signal at E-Z-I-Tron.76.76 on Signal. Also, before I go any further, I've had a lot of emails and Reddits and the such. If you're wondering about my thoughts on the Open AI Disney deal, they are as follows. Wow, Disney invested a billion dollars in Open AI. That's about a month's worth of inference. This only delays the inevitable. No one cares. They're threatening Google with legal action.

Google will settle and they'll do exactly the same crap with VO. Nothing will happen. A bunch of money will get lost. Similarly, if you've heard about time naming AI executives as its person of the year, Remember that Mark Benioff of Salesforce, a huge AI booster, owns the publication, and literally ran advertorial for Salesforce's Agent Force wank. It's nothing. Nothing's happening. It's just more money being passed around so we can all get blown on nothing. But back to the rest of the monologue. I'm going to tell you about the things I need to do a better job. Don't literally mean the research. I mean, if you know this stuff, I need your help.

Let's start with a big one. If you have first-hand knowledge of GPUs being warehoused, this is Nvidia AI GPUs. Please God, if you reach out with this about gaming GPUs, I'll be genuinely pissed off of you. But I need to know about this. I want pictures if you can get them. I want numbers. I want to know whose GPUs they are and ideally what models, A100s, 8100s, it's probably not going to be that. It's going to be those Blackwell GPUs if you see them. Similarly, if you've heard anything about Nvidia's AI GPUs that might not be well known, reach out, especially if it pertains to how much they cost to run. Similarly, if you know anything about Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs that you suspect I don't, please do reach out. I had somebody recently tell me about

remarkable failure rates and I want to know more. Similarly, costs, I cannot ask for costs enough. Help me, please. If you have any information pertaining to the revenues behind OpenAI Anthropic or any major AI company, please get in touch. Similarly, I would. want to hear from you if you work at any of the large cloud companies and know anything about the AI revenues or indeed the associated costs of running AI on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. And yeah, if you have anything from OpenAI or Anthropic about what they might be paying for Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, please, please reach out to me. Similarly, if you have anything of the same from Corweave or Lambda or Nebius or any of those,

please reach out. Also, if you work at an AI startup, one that pays open AI or Anthropic to use their services or models, please tell me about those costs. We don't know very much about them at all. And your thoughts and your help, well, it'd be very much respected and loved. And you'll be the better offline legend of the week if you can help me out here, maybe even the legend of the year. I'm also looking at any and all information related to data center costs. I want to know the total cost of ownership of any AI GP, and that includes the A-100, the H-100, H-200, H-200, B-200, B-200, B-300, and so on. Blackwell, obviously, my biggest priority.

I want to know how many GPUs hyperscalers have, too. So if you work at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, and you know how many of the goddamn GPUs they've got, please reach out. And I want to know the hourly cost of running these GPUs, ideally on a per-GPU basis. I'm trying to work out how much it actually costs to run these goddamn things, and it's insane we don't know.

Now, my grail data, the things that would materially change my reporting, other than everything I just mentioned, would be the underlying cost of running large language models, which means understanding both how many GPUs are used for inference and training, and the actual costs of running said GPUs. The costs of running GPUs are at the center of the bubble, and I believe that truth will be what bursts in. Though I'm repeating myself a little, my other grail data is the underlying cost of running chat, GPT, Google Gemini, or any other major popular L.S. LLM service, such as cursor or replica. The same goes from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google, Oracle, or really any other major cloud provider. Look, together I believe we can make the world better by providing the public with the truth. And this era is one steeped in outright lies in societal selfishness that deprives good companies of funding and shoves dysfunctional software on millions of people that just wish it would go the fuck away. Now, so many of you have already been so

helpful, and I hope I can hear from more of you as the show continues to grow. It's been a crazy year. I'm insanely grateful to have all of you. And next week, we have a three-part NVIDIA podcast that tells you all about the largest, weirdest. I'm not fixing it. I'm not fixing that. You want the raw stuff. Anyway, Nvidia is the weirdest company in stock market history. Oh, God, I'm going to hear from you all about that one. I really do love hearing from you, though. It's been really crazy. 2025 has been crazy and bad and good in many different ways. And I'm sure I'm going to hear fun stories from you all because a bunch of you reach out, no matter what I say to reach out about or not reach out about.

And I kind of love it. I love how chatty you all are. So yeah, look forward to hearing from you. And I hope you enjoy the podcast about the weirdest company on the stock market. 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. 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 I-Heart 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.

A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits. my basketball and college football journey or my career in sports media.

Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford show on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to learn the hard way. with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere,

but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to, listen to learn the hard way on the IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.