Better Offline - Monologue: The Year Ahead

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through the seeming collapse of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines, and why the AI bubble can’t survive the death of OpenAI. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful!  Kylie Robison’s scoop about Thinking Machines: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2011572331798548899 Max Zeff of WIRED’s follow-on story: https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-cofounders-leave-for-openai/ 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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All-Zone Media. Hello and welcome to your first better off-line monologue of 2026. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Better offline. We're back from CES and we've already had a great conversation with the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamer's Nexus. And this felt like a good time to take stock and talk about what I see happening in the year ahead. Also, legitimately thank you for all for listening at CES. It was one of the best weeks of my life and we made some amazing stuff.

And you've all sent wonderful emails and such. Love hearing from you. But let's talk about this year. I have a strong gut instinct that this is the year of Reckonings for the AI bubble. Nothing I'm seeing in the news, the markets or hearing from people I talk to. behind the scenes suggest that things are improving at all. In fact, it kind of feels like when your dog takes a shit somewhere in your apartment, but you can't quite find it. There's that little stink, but it's not strong enough to give you an idea of where it is, but you know, one day,

without fail, you're going to find a nasty brown delight under your foot. Colorful similes aside, though, generative AI is not becoming cheaper, more effective or more efficient. Invidia's new Vera Rubin GPUs are likely to be more expensive than ever, in part thanks to the ever-increasing price of RAM, and in part because of its single vendor monopoly, which allows and to set prices, well, to stun. And the other thing with them as well is they're going to allow people to use the same racks from Blackwell, so the things you put the JPUs into, but only for the beginning of Vera Rubin. Then they're going to move to these giant, I think they're called Kaiba racks, the current ones are called Oberon. Someone will email and correct me, but it's one of those

two. The new one is going to require an entirely new cooling system, architecture. It's all very good. But on the subject of things that are also very good, I believe we're also on the verge of the multiple con jobs of the AI bubble collapsing too. In July of last year, former Open AI CTO Miramirati, who barely appeared to be able to get out a fucking sentence in every interview I've seen, founded thinking machines, raising $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, all while refusing to tell investors what product they'd make or what the business plan was or how they'd make money or anything like that. Naturally, investors were like, take my money, please, I need to give this to you, mirror. I am an idiot, I'm a moron, I'm a goofball. I just love wasting money. Now, when this happened, they were able to poach open AIs, VP of Research for Post-training Barrett Zoff, among two other staffers, I just really can't engineer the excitement to name. And then a few days ago, as reported by friend of the show, Kylie Robeson of Core Memory, Zoff was fired from thinking machines after telling

Marathi he was considering leaving with Wired's Max Zeph, reporting in a follow-up, that the firing involved of sharing confidential information with competitors. What confidential information? What possible information could he have had? About the things they're not building? About the bullshit? Who knows? I think she just fired him because she was mad that he was leaving. What the fuck is thinking machines building exactly? They put out a single AI thing last year for, and I quote, controlling every aspect of model training and fine-tuning or some such bollocks. I realize I'm being a little dismissive, but I just do not have it in me anymore to feign a excitement over every single one of these two or three or whatever fraudulent. Okay, not literally

fraudulent. I have no evidence of that. This is a libel. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not fraudulent. It just looks like bollocks. I can't be excited about the new asshole who raised a billion or $2 billion to do nothing. I don't have it in me anymore. I'm not going to read a sentence about post-training or fine-tuning and pretend that means anything. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Nothing has changed, nothing is going on, everyone is wasting money. And I can't care about who looted billions of dollars from venture capitalists last. Nor do I believe that anything should happen to this venture capitalists other than being tardened feathered by the limited partners.

These people aren't building anything. They're huffing their own farts and getting paid tens of millions of dollars to do it. I'm sick of hearing about them. And I think this is the year we see this kind of con die. We're long past the point of which generative AI has made sense. Bloomberg reported last year that there were $178.5 billion of data center deals in the US alone in 2025, and based on my rough analysis, there's less than a billion dollars of actual compute revenue outside of hyperscalers who were just trying to move it off of their balance sheet, so their earnings look better.

The demand isn't arriving, and neither are the products, and all of this speculative money sloshing around is going to zero. I also want to be clearer about something else I keep hearing about. If Open AI dies, the AI bubble bursts with it. Mr. Sebastian Malaby of the Council on Foreign Relations had a piece in the New York Times a few days ago, saying that he believed Open AI would run out of money by July 2027, adding that, and I quote, an open AI failure wouldn't be an indictment of AI, but merely the end of the most hype-driven builder of it. He also said that the probable result is that Open AI would be absorbed by Microsoft, Amazon, or another cash-rich behemoth, which I am going to sit down and reread a lot of my newsletters, I'm pretty sure that's fucking lifted from my work.

Like OpenAI being absorbed by Microsoft, I know I fucking said it. If you can find it, email me, easy at betteroffline.com, and I will give you a big thumbs up in a photo. But I want to be clear, in any case, if Open AI dies the bubble bursts aggressively and brutally. Open AI is the biggest brand name in AI, Sam Oatman is the only well-known founder, and ChatGPT is the only AI product with any consumer penetration.

And no. Microsoft and Google renaming products doesn't count, nor does nanobanana. I can't believe I nearly got away with saying or thinking about nanobanana for a week. More importantly, OpenAI is the only company with any real demand for AI compute outside of Anthropic, another company that relies on billions of dollars of venture capital subsidies to stop itself from falling over and dying. As you can hear, I'm a little bit heated on this subject, because I'm really, really sick of hearing this.

I'm really sick of hearing things from these AI boosters are getting more crazy and more defensive, claiming that this is an open AI bubble, not an AI bubble. What do you think happens when AI companies try and raise money after open AI dies? Do you think investors are going to think, you think they're going to do the Tobias Funke-Poly thing from a rest of the development where it didn't work for them, it would work for us? No, they're going to say, oh shit, oh shit, the one company with all the press, all the money, all the infrastructure, all the attention, all of the governmental support died on its ass. Why would I invest in more in this? And I realize venture capitalists are fucking stupid at the best of times.

But even by this standard, I think that they're going to be too scared to put the money in. And I don't think anyone else is going to be able to justify it either. But I do think, by the way, AI boosters are about to get real crazy out there. I think you're going to see them say it's an open AI bubble, not an AI bubble, then we need these investments to beat China. then they're going to blame people like me, AI skeptics, they're going to say Luddites destroyed innovation. And if you hear that, know that in reality the people destroying innovation are the ones diverting more than half of all venture capital to invest in unreliable, unproductive, unsustainable, and unremarkable software in pursuit of creating the future of digital slavery.

I'm sick of these fucking people, but that doesn't mean I won't be here to tell you all about their collapse. I'll be back next week with a three or four parter, and it's going to be be a bomb burner. You're gonna love him. Zitronel. 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, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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