Better Offline - NVIDIA Vs. The Media ft. GamersNexus

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about NVIDIA’s approach to the media, AI pushing out real tech at Computex, and the weird world of consumer graphics. Follow GamersNexus:   https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexushttps://gamersnexus.net/https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus 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/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella 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. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my GenX squad

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Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron, and this week we're joined again by the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamer's Nexus. How you doing, Steve? Doing well. How about you?

Doing great. So you were just at Computex, right? Yes. Yeah, we were over there for a couple weeks. So for the listeners who don't know, because there's a fair amount you don't know every conference. So what is Computex and what makes it so important? Computex is the, I think it's the largest computer hardware and computer technology trade. show. So that's hosted in Taipei every year. And it's like a much better CES. People may know CES. And is it more focused on enterprise stuff or consumer stuff? This year, weirdly, they AI commandeered

the entire main hall. So there were actually, there were a lot of pissed off consumer hardware manufacturers who were sort of evicted and driven out of the main hall and put into the lesser one with consumer hardware. What were they even showing with the AI stuff as well? I mean, one company had an AI computer case. Oh, how did that? What's the AI doing there? Absolutely no idea.

Sick. It's so cool that this is absorbed. It's also kind of brutal. That's literally absorbing space. Yes. Did you see anything cool there, though? Anything you're excited about? Yeah, there was a lot of cool stuff.

The, I mean, there was some immersion cool. which is always nice to see, like where they actually literally immerse the system, you know, in fluid for cooling. There was a thermosiphon from Noctua, which is just a really cool use of a, it's another cooling technology. Lots of computer case and cooling solution development. And then on the GPU side, I mean, Nvidia sort of buried its 50-60 launch, and then AMD more formally announced the information for its 9060XT, and both of those. are sort of the slightly more affordable consumer class GPUs. Yeah, so Envidia also was doing some funny business with you recently. You did that wonderful video.

So walk us through what happened there, because they tried to big dog you, so to speak. Yeah, so, I mean, the problem we had with them, and we talked about was for several months, there had been this, I felt sort of pressure from Nvidia with where, so Nvidia, for context for people. NVIDIA sends out GP review samples. We and other reviewers are not entitled to them. That's fine. We can buy them ourselves as well. But they send out samples for product reviews. And in the past, NVIDIA has been in hot water for asking another outlet called Hard Run Box to, I believe the quote was, or paraphrase was, Change Your Editorial Direction.

Yeah. And so that was several years ago. And what did they ask them to do back? then? Back then it was seeking more coverage of real-time ray tracing in video games, which at the time was more or less only found in any kind of meaningful performance on video hardware, but also and the reason at least we weren't ready to fully do testing for real-time ray tracing yet was because it just, it wasn't ready yet. I mean, there weren't that many games with it. You couldn't really test it because you couldn't use it. Yeah, I mean, they launched, and if I remember correctly, there were actually

zero games that supported this technology. And the only thing available were sort of tech demos. And so anyway, that was what they wanted then. Right. They kind of went away. Didn't, at least as far as we know publicly, didn't try to push reviewers in a particular direction with their narrative or their editorial style. And then over the last several months,

we were getting this pressure of basically, so we do a bunch of interviews with engineers and technical people at NVIDIA, and I felt they were starting to use that as a lever to be like, oh, it sure seems like you like talking to the thermal engineers. It'd be a shame if something happened to that. And you did that very long one over with NVIDIA, right? You went and kind of looked at how the thermal stuff worked. Yeah, yeah, we did.

I mean, they're great educational content. The engineers are awesome. And I've spent years working with mostly people who are in different departments or don't work there anymore to get NVIDIA on the same page. I'm like, look, we're not looking for a marketing puff piece. We're looking for actual engineers who just want to talk about the stuff they make and people can learn about it. But it's not like obviously, yes, it can support the product by nature of if it's good and the engineers explain it well, then people will like it. But the objective is not just like come on our show and use us as a platform to sell things. We want engineers, not marketers.

Yeah. And so that was great. And the like I said lever that it became was they wanted more and video wanted more coverage of this thing called MFG, which is multi-frame generation. Which is something that Jensen Juan, the CEO, talks about on stage as being part of their technology suite that is, is big surprise AI accelerated that effectively multiplies the frame rate to be used as a smoothing technology

So it's supposed to help Is this different to like DLSS and things like that Or is that It is part of the DLSS or the Deep Learned Super Sampling technology suite So it's sort of It's almost like a subset of DLSS Right and so it basically just

looks better at higher resolution. It fills in the frames, I'm guessing. Just trying to simplify it. Yeah. So, yes, the simplest version of it is MFG sort of interpolates frames. So it's able to add in or insert additional, effectively artificial or generated frames

if you're trying to be charitable with it that are not literally built by the game engine. And so the GPU is working with its own software to construct these frames. and construct pixels based on what it thinks is going to happen next. And we've actually tested it, and there's situations where it's not bad. There's situations where it's awful, like with any technology. But what it does is on a chart, if you just look at the number that comes out,

the so-called frame rate or the amount of frames in a given period of time, that looks higher with this technology. but it's not measuring the same thing as something without this technology. So it's effectively, you know, you're comparing apples and oranges if you try to put real frames that are rendered in the traditional way up against these generated AI frames that are effectively guessing at what they should look like. And do they look bad as well? They can. They can look really bad.

I mean, we've done some testing where in some of the games, games, it's just, like, text, for example, will get completely garbled. Text on screen, yeah, interface. Interface issues. It'll draw the interface in the wrong area. You could have a really bad-belurting. That seems insanely bad for, like, any RPG of any kind or any kind of, like, Twitch. I don't know. It feels like anything you'd be doing ever would be ruined by that. Yeah, so there's scenarios where it works okay, but the RPG example you brought up. So Final Fantasy was one of the games.

we tested where there's just areas. I mean, it's just, I personally would turn it off. It looks worse. And I'd rather have a lower, quote, unquote, frame rate than have this sort of potential blurry mess every now and then. So strange. Low quality is, well, just a very strange thing to push out the door. Yeah.

And the, you know, I think sort of finish the editorial narrative thing. No, I mean, it's fine. But I'll finish that first. I'll come back to your comment you just make because that's also interesting. But on the editorial side, they wanted more coverage of MFG, and we disagreed from an objective standpoint. I kind of made the case to them several times over several calls, over several months, of why we think it just doesn't belong on the same charts as normal benchmarking,

normal objective testing. Right. And so there was, yeah, there's just a disagreement, which is fine. The problem came in when I felt repeatedly on various calls with the NVIDIA people that they were almost sort of holding hostage the idea of working with engineers again, where it's, well, the way we're able to make this happen is by you covering things like MFG, you know, sort of that type of conversation. Yeah. And they mentioned something about like budgets in the video, I remember? Yeah, I mean, there was like discussion of one of the times specifically the statement was that this is how we can secure budget for these types of things. And like to be clear for listeners, we don't take money for interviews.

Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I've paid now over five figures to visit NVIDIA on numerous occasions for set interviews personally. Like I have paid for those. And I can say this from the PR side, and not work with InVVVVDIA or anyone associated, it's like, no one talks about budgets. No one is like, oh, I can't visit a journalist due to budget. And certainly not NVIDIA, a company that had $39 billion, I believe, in revenue just in the data center portion last quarter.

I mean, it's kind of farcical. Multi-trillion dollar market cap. I think if I try to take devil's advocate, maybe there's some in, budgeting, whatever, like the marketing department needs to budget time from the engineering department or something. But we're talking like a couple hours of time max normally, you know, especially when I'm traveling to them. So it just seemed like, I don't know, it, I didn't buy it. And also, that was only one of the numerous calls, you know, like that. The defensible reason for them changed. It felt like each time where it's like,

oh, let's try this angle. Let's try this angle. So did they end up blocking you? How did that situation resolve itself? I have not spoken with anyone there since we posted our video talking about it. And part of the challenge with posting that video is, you know, it's like the first couple times this came up, I assumed that it was just sort of okay, maybe the guy phrased it Ron. You know, I've worked with these people for a while and maybe it just came out Ron. After a couple of times, I did call one of my reps after the meeting where they kind of pushed this, you know, you testing this technology that you think is not appropriate to share on charts with competitors. That's how we get you these interviews.

I called a rep and said, you know, hey, this, if you guys say this to people, this is going to be taken the wrong way. And like, I'm still assuming it's not meant this way. Right. To really try any hardest that. But if I hear this again, right? Like, I didn't have to start assuming it's the way it sounds. And it did come up again. And part of the challenge with making the video we made was, you know, we want to blow the whistle on it in case other people are facing that pressure.

And also in case consumers are watching or reading content, which may be influenced without their knowledge. The problem is, I think, Vidia may now be in a situation where let's just assume everybody makes up and it's fine at some point. I don't know that they will ever be able to put an engineer on camera anytime in the near future with anybody without the audience questioning it. And for good reason, because that was what we felt was being used as the lever against us. And so it's just kind of, I don't know, we tried to, you know, I explained to them several times why this is a problem and why the phrasing is a problem. And the more you hear it, the more it's like, okay, I mean, at some point, like, I think you're saying what it sounds like you're saying. And I'm going to stop.

Yeah. It's good that you did it, though, because it's, well, GN's got over a million subscribers. So who knows what they're doing to much smaller outlets as well? Yeah. I mean, and that's what I'm really concerned about is I've had conversations with, in the past that will probably get into in a future video, but about their strategy for newer creators. And I don't like what I've heard.

I mean, it sounds very much like we're going to sort of try and shape these newer creators. And I think the problem is as especially old guard media, as in people like OGs before us, retire or move to other industries. There's openings to change how media interfaces with these companies in general because you've got newer people who don't have the historical background with these companies to know what to expect. And so it's easier to kind of slowly creep that goalpost where it's less independence and it's more marketing arm of the companies. And that's what I'm really worried about is if they get in any of these companies

with newer creators early and are able to change the expectancy of the relationship. So change it from independent reviewer analyzing large companies' device, into more of a, hey, we're all friends. We're all working together to try and benefit the consumer. If you're talking about a multi-trillion dollar company, their motives are far different from, like, the guy in his bedroom who's trying to do hardware reviews. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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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 group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle. It's 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.

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How Hard Can It Be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's just so weird as well because they're already so successful. Is this, it sounds like historically in video has been a bit traconian like this, though not necessarily pressuring in this way.

I mean, I certainly think Nvidia is one of the most vindictive companies in the space. The stories we've heard and told in some instances of their partners, not reviewers, but actual business partners like board vendors, people who make the video cards that the Nvidia GPs go on, those stories would seem to indicate a sort of vindictiveness. Can you give an example? Yeah, allocation. So GPU allocation is the concept of how many of a high demand GPU can you as a partner get to then attach to a product to then sell to a consumer. And there's a limited amount of these because they're going to sell 100% of them. And allocation is typically measured by percent. So company A might get 25%. Company B might get 5% of the G. if you supply, whatever that is.

And that allocation, we've been told in the past, has been used also as sort of a lever. And so an example would be back in the EVGA days, which EVGA sort of famously was a graphics called company. Correct. Yeah, they were Nvidia's number one partner. And they were so NVIDIA favored that they only made NVIDIA video cards. They did not work with any competitors.

Right. And they famously cut that relationship publicly, and we ran a story about that. But one of the things that they were unhappy about was NVIDIA slowly tightening the screws, which is a direct quote from an NVIDIA PM I spoke to once. Jesus. Slowly tightening the screws is the quote. But on what the partners were allowed to do with their products, and slowly over time, they're losing some of this creative freedom.

When you say they lose creative freedom, what are they being constrained to do? One that's public is we did an interview with a famous overclocker who used to work for EVGA, Kingpin is his username, and his name is on video cards that are world famous. We did a video with him, and he talked about how he wanted to add two power connectors to a card to basically make it more fun.

to overclock with for consumers. And so it'd be, it'd be able to pull more power and it would also be able to do so safer because the current power connector has this issue of burning and catching on fire sometimes. Right. And so he wanted to do two of them to kind of resolve some of that. And in the public discussion we had with Kinpin in the video,

he said, paraphrasing, but the conversation was, he said they wouldn't allow it or they restricted it or something like that. And I said, who is they? And he said, they. Yeah, like we, we, there was only one they there could be. Yeah. Who could it be? Yeah. But there's plenty of examples like that where the, another one would be a couple generations ago, the cheaper cards, like the $200, $300 models, they were, those models were difficult for the partners to actually make and still make any money.

And so there were times where we were told about how this MSRP level video card, meaning the number that NVIDIA says is the MSRP, that would only exist for a fixed period of time because it was simply impossible to afford to make it. But NVIDIA really wanted them to exist at this certain MSRP. It allows them to advertise a lower price. And so they're pushed to make these cards. that allows them to potentially get things like more access to allocation or whatever privilege they may get.

So on a much larger level, what do you think is going on with Nvidia as a company right now? I'm not asking for stock analysis, like that totally not that, but just as a company that both makes consumer graphics cards and underpins whatever the AI thing is. What do you think is going on there right now? I think there's definitely a focus on AI to try and get money. I mean, there's a, Jensen Juan was in an interview, I don't know, last year, sometime, I think, or early this year, and made a comment about how they use AI to write their own driver software now or their own software or something like that. And, you know, this is, it's their number one focus. It's what they're making the most, I guess, investor money on.

So they're focused on it. The concern I have is it's one thing to sort of let the consumer hardware side dwindle or get less competitive effort. It's another thing to, in my opinion, sort of drag the entire industry down with it. as they shift focus to the higher revenue AI side. Right. When you say drag them down, how do you mean? I mean things like trying to, in my opinion, control the media narrative and shape it. Like that, that to me goes beyond, okay, we don't care much about consumer.

We're going to focus on making money with AI. That gets into we are going to actively damage the credibility of independent media and also potentially harm consumers who are influenced by that media, which has been shaped with a certain corporate narrative to push. And that's my concern. So that's where I draw the distinction between, as we said in our video, if you want to just focus on AI and if they want to just sell all the GPUs to big enterprise companies, go for it.

But don't screw all the rest of us over at the same time. And do you think that they're abandoning consumer, or is it just they are focusing on the shiny object of the day? I don't know Jensen Juan personally. My read on him, though, I feel like it's unlikely he would want to abandon something he already has. Right. Even if it's only out of maybe sort of pride. And so I don't think they'll abandon it. I do think they're focusing on AI.

It's just that, I don't know, I mean, they have like 92% market sharing consumer GPUs now, according to John Puddy research. So it's just like they can, it's a monopoly. I mean, that's just like, this is what monopolies look like. Well, that's, it feel, I would say there was an opportunity for someone to come in, but based on everything you've shown with like AMD recently, even on the lower end, It just, it doesn't feel, it almost feels like consumer graphics are being not treated with the respect they deserve, despite PC gaming being a huge industry and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's a massive industry and pro-sumer too. I mean, even just non-AI use cases include people who edit videos or make movies or do 3D animations.

Yeah, I think Intel's a good barometer here because Intel decided to get into consumer GPU and they're new to it. and they've had a hell of a time. They're doing much better now with this current generation. But one of the quotes from an Intel person I spoke with previously to us was, for their last generation, was we should be wrapping these with money when we sell them because they were just, they were basically subsidizing the buildout of this new division, this GPU division,

by undercutting prices from competitors to just try and get their foot in the door with what at the time was a lesser product. And so, yeah, I think they're a good barometer because if you want to be, I mean, first of all, to have a fab, a fabrication facility costs these days potentially tens of billions of dollars and years to build. So a new vendor would have to be fabless like Nvidia and like AMD, unlike Intel. And to be fabulous and make a... Sorry about it.

this. This is just for the listeners, what is a fab in this case? Yeah, so a fab, a fabrication plant is basically a factory for silicon. It's a highly controlled clean room environment, and that means that there's basically absolutely no dust, ingress, the small pieces of skin or whatever, you know, just working in an environment, that's all either captured or controlled, and that's because a single particle of dust on a wafer can destroy at least part of that silicon supply. Cool, sorry. Yeah, and so a new vendor would have to be probably fabulous, unless they're already huge like Intel. And that means they need to go get supply from most likely TSM, possibly from Intel, maybe, I mean, the past Samsung has been used. There's really not a lot of

options here and everybody wants their silicon. So to even get allocation of these silicon waferes would be difficult. It's just all of the chips are stacked against someone who wants to do this and they would, I think the only way you get in is if you're an existing multi-billion dollar company or have obscene amounts of investment. Well, that fucking sucks. Yeah. Actually, that's a good question though.

So this is, for the old time as listening. I remember having a 3DFX, there was a Voodoo 5500, picture of a halo on the box, actually. I don't know what happened there. What happened to all the smaller manufacturers? Did they just get kind of absorbed? Or did they just fall apart? Yeah, they got bought or, yeah, I think 3DFX, if I remember correctly, was bought by NVIDIA. And I just check that.

but some of the others, I mean, there's like VIA, Cyrix and some of these CPU companies. Yeah, 3DFX bought by NVIDIA. SGI was another, so they... Oh, yeah, I forgot about SGI. Yeah, so SGI is interesting because they sort of pursued heavily, I guess, at the time, what enterprise would have been, or at least workstation hardware. And they're really invested in workstation. the story I got from someone, I wasn't covering things back then, but was that SGI was less

interested in consumer and didn't really think consumers could afford video cards, which at the time was sort of true. And that's when Nvidia came in and started really kicking ass in the early days. But a lot of them just they either got bought or they sort of exited that space. So changing tax lightly, how do you feel about AI in general? I know that I'm not expecting like an industry and that. I'm just from your perspective, at least from what you've told me and watching your videos, it feels like AI is something now being stapled onto the side of literally everything within your world.

Do you think there's like, do you use it? Do you have any thoughts on it? There's uses. I mean, one thing I am actually worried about long term with AI use cases. And the biggest thing I'm worried about is on the media side, we obviously get a lot of comments. I probably read or at least skim, you know, tens of thousands of comments a year. And I'm seeing more and more AI comments and not just the really obvious YouTube spam bots, but somewhere you kind of, you read it and you're like, ah, that could be real, you know.

And I don't want to like, yeah, I don't want to like remove it if it's a valid, comment, but then a few comments down the thread, there'll be this discussion amongst what are obvious sort of bots about, say, some new crypto BS or whatever. And so I'm actually worried about sort of like dead internet theory, I guess, the concept of you're the only human in the room and you might not even know it. That's concerning to me. There's a loneliness factor there I'm worried about. But the big one is just how easily

people are manipulated by comments that sort of appear to have the prevailing opinion just in general, even from real comments, you then take that and you apply it to potential AI that becomes

very convincing in the future. And you then think one step further of who owns these LLMs and the companies that sell so-called AI products. And all of them are these multi-billion dollar companies that if they want to, could tune it to filter the responses in ways that are beneficial to them. And that to me is sort of the dystopian old man yells at clouds, you know, like concern I have. 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 the 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 I-Heart 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 podcast. Podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-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. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time.

You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that Ness was going to be.

Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How high can it be? How can it be? Getting naked at 50 with the new guy. That one's kind of hard, well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is about to explode.

The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on the only store at the chip. I'm Tad Ramos. I'm Tom Boone. On our podcast, inside American soccer, you'll get the real storylines. I'm not worried about Policic. I'm not worried about Balagan. I'm not worried about McKinney.

My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. If you're going to look at stats and numbers, he has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals.

The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. Listen, Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. But it feels like a more practical one because everyone freaks out about AGI which is fictional and all of these other things. But yeah, the idea that comments would be filled with people who are just subtly being nudged in different directions. And when you talk about corporate narratives as well, who knows that? And I don't usually, with LLMs in particular, I try not to lean into anything too conspirator. But like this is a simple one that you're kind of seeing signs of, even on blue sky. I will occasionally get a comment from someone. It will take me half a second. second and go like, what's wrong with you? This doesn't feel like a human being saying this. No one speaks like this, but you sound human adjacent.

Right. And at your scale, I imagine that becomes a lot harder to moderate slash process. Yeah. And it really is just, I mean, I'm highly, my job is to be skeptical. And you try to do that in a healthy way. You know, it's easy to go way overboard. but this is something where I just, I think there's so much opportunity to be abused. And I was actually looking at, there's that meta story about meta and Facebook pirating all of these books

or taking books from pirated materials and integrating them. And there's a lawsuit over it. One of the things I was thinking of, though, and actually speaking to a copyright attorney about was, it really feels like right now the companies that are willing to break the most laws, especially intellectual property laws, and steal the most stuff,

will make so much money that it's like, you know what, let's just, we'll just deal with the consequences in five years when it gets through the court, and we'll be so far out ahead of anyone who didn't lie, cheat, and steal, you know, to get here. Yeah. That it won't matter. which is just how the big corporations broadly behave,

but applying that to a new area like AI, I don't know, it's, I'm really concerned about it. I think there's absolutely good use cases. And I mean, as an example, internally we've used it to concept things. So like,

I'll have an idea in my head for art, like for a product. And I can see it, but I'm a terrible artist. And so there's a use case there where I'll sit down with my artist and try to explain it as best I can. And he'll take a go at it. And if I'm like, nah, it doesn't really like how it looks in my head, that's when I might try to pull some mid-jorney thing. Like, okay, here's like broadly, like the style artistically I'm trying to get.

You know, then he can take that and actually make something. So, but just to be clear, you would never use any of that stuff in the real. It is literally just a concept tool. Correct. Just making sure the listeners have a good view on this. Yeah, correct. The artist, so Andrew, he's been working with me forever. He makes it all from scratch, like in Blender, normally,

and actually flattens it into a 2D image for the shirts and things. Cool. So, yeah, it is purely used if in the first conversation he can't, like, quite figure out what I'm trying to explain as a non-artist. You know, it's like, okay, let me go, let me try and figure out, like, I don't know, I don't know art words. You know, I don't know how to describe style. So, yeah. Yeah.

How do you do with the ethical side of that? Because it's just, it is still working on copyright material. But I guess if you're not putting it out there, it's just like, this shit sucks. Even like looking at it feels bad. Yeah, I mean, it's hard because it's the first step for us, so it's always like a Google search to see what's out there already. And so we'll do a Google search if I'm trying to explain something I want. And normally that's pretty successful. But like now it's the same.

It's like you're getting all this AIR. art surfacing. And so at some point, it's sort of like the downloading and uploading and downloading and uploading a PNG multiple times. It feels like it's just getting like the quality is getting lost somewhere in that chain. It is funny. We're also like three years into it.

And the best we've got as far as like from you, arguably one of the most like, I don't mean this. I mean this actually is in a good way. Like you would be excited about something cool in tech coming out. Yeah. Like if something cool happened, and the coolest we've got is, yeah, sometimes I can't work out what I'm thinking. So I just make one image and hopefully my artist gets in. But the artist, yeah, it's just like that we're three years in and that's the best we've got.

Yeah. And I think we early, early on with GPT, when we ran one of the first news stories that we ran about it, and I was trying to understand, like, what is this thing? I remember feeding it a spreadsheet I had made with our own data. and asking it to analyze the results. And it was just like, and keep in mind this was early, but it had hallucinated so much that I was just, I was disillusioned. She was like, okay, this is just,

it literally just made everything up. And that was kind of how I was at the beginning as well, because I love my doodads, my gizmos. I was kind of like, okay, everyone's talking about this. And so I tried to do all of the things they talk about, it could automate your work. I'm a spreadsheet heavy guy. And this crap can't even do that.

The funniest one for me was that, you have a manus, mainus, you heard of this one? No. They claim to be an AI agent company. Okay. And I asked it,

can you go and find all of the links that mentioned me for the last two years, probably over a hundred of them? And it takes 11 minutes or so, and it's writing Python for every single step, and it comes back with 11 links. Or like nine links. I go, hey, you miss some,

and it comes back with nine links. more after like another 10 minutes. And this was about a month ago. It's just what, it feels like they're pushing them up a hill. But back to Nvidia for a second, because this will be the last Nvidia one, I think. You have done a really good job of kind of tracking Nvidia as they've jumped towards these movements. But they've done this, but they did, how big was their move towards crypto?

That's actually something I've had trouble encapsulating before. did they really shift the company that aggressively in that direction? That's a good question. So from my, Envidius relationship with crypto is weird. I remember at one point there was some kind of earnings call or something where it was during one of the GPU mining sort of apocalypse where consumers couldn't get cards because they're all being bought by crypto mining.

And I remember doing a report on, in hardware news, on the earnings where it seemed like the amount of revenue for mining was sort of obfuscated and it was a challenge where the devices are shared with gaming and so okay I could see how it would be difficult

to decouple these in a revenue chart if you sell gaming devices and they're used for multiple things. Right. So it's like I kind of get it but at the same time they weren't like hiding from making sales to crypto mining and then later on

and video released these LHR low hash rate cards, I think it was the 30 series. And that was done to try and get more cards, well, they say to try and get more cards to gamers. Now there were bypasses for that, which is a separate story. But it was done at a time when the 30 series, it was really unfortunate covering it because like,

the hardware was pretty good. The prices at the beginning were good, but there's no supply. to meet the demand, which was partly because of COVID shutdowns where people were building new computers for home and also partly because of mining. And so they tried a few things

like these low hash rate cards to reduce the viability for mining operations. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely, they've kind of, that pendulum has swung back and forth, I think at NVIDIA or it's like, okay, we'd sell a lot of these make a lot of money to people are really pissed off. You know, and we can't get them to consumer users who might actually be repeat customers in the future,

and so let's try and restrict it. So it's definitely, I don't know, I mean, it's not unexpected behavior, I guess, for big corporation where it's just, where's the money? And if the pendulum swings back the other way, you know, we need to try and minimize how much both of these potential client groups

hate us for catering to the other one. So final GPU-related question, actually. And forgive me if you don't know the answer for this exactly, but assuming the AI bubble burst, and you don't have to commit to whether you think that will happen or not, what else can these big enterprise-level GPUs actually be used for? They can be used for a lot. I mean, like, some of the...

We're talking to a professor at a university for an upcoming piece, and they have some very serious, like, machine learning, research use cases. And I've looked into some of the other ones. And as you might expect, there's really promising use cases in medical and pattern recognition and like so-called AI being able to do early identification of potentially cancerous masses and people that, you know, it's one of those like, if you treat it like a tool rather than like the answer, then I suppose in this example, as someone who knows nothing about the medical world,

but I suppose a skilled doctor might be able to use it to help the process. I think the concern I would have as a skeptic would be, okay, but can we keep that doctor in the mindset of, I'm using this to help catch my mistakes or help see things I can't? rather than, you know, I'm overworked and I need to lean on this to do my job. Yeah. That would be the concern. I'm just, my whole thing is just if they, and I believe they have, this is my personal opinion, I think they've massively overbuilt and oversold these cards.

And I, sorry, cards is inappropriate to refer to like the enterprise ones, racks, I suppose. But it's, what do they do next is going to be the question eventually. And I mean, there's just very clearly not going to be enough use cases for them. but I think that's going to be really interesting. And now I've got two fun questions for you. First of all, did you hear about this $3,600 keyboard? I did not. The Norbauer Seneca.

Okay, so I'm going to send you this later. So Nathan Edwards over at the verge reviewed this $3,600 keyboard, which I need to send you because I assume you would want to look at this. Seneca. I see the review. Luxury keyboard. It's insane. Listeners, I will drop, with everything we've been talking about,

I'll have links in there. but this thing, it's like precision honed, and if he gets it wrong, he has to start again. It takes him like a full day to do like the things that absorb impact. So cool. This is, this reminds me of the, I don't know, probably almost 20 years ago now, there was the super expensive.

I think it was like an optimist keyboard or something. Oh, was it like the, the opt or the dash keyboard where it had the little screens on each key? Yeah, it was screens for every key. And back then, you know, that was before we were putting screens on everything. Uh-huh. I want, that's the thing.

I love that this exists because if you look at the verge story, which I'll link, it's just a guy who literally sits in this garage and just builds these things like an artesian. I wish we had more weird shit like this. This is what I miss about the tech industry. Yeah, the weird stuff and the cool stuff and things where, that's what I like seen at CompuTech. It's, okay, I could, this isn't a product yet, but I could. see it becoming a product or there's pieces of this that could become an affordable product. That's the stuff I like.

Yeah. Did you see anything really bizarre like that there? Yeah, I mean, the, well, actually most recently, this wasn't CompuTechs, but the most sort of bizarre cool thing I saw and worked with that I was really happy about was the pre-built PC made by a small company called Cherry Tree. They make modded computer cases. and it's just a computer inside of the husk of a video card. Okay, that's cool.

Yeah. I love that. That's it. They reminds me of the Corsair 1000D case, which I actually have at home where they have, you can fit micro, I think it's a micro ATX and a regular sized motherboard in there. I love that stuff. Like, it's, that's why I, that's the thing I love about tech, the really, really dumb kind of niche stuff. And actually, with that in mind, what are you actually excited for as we were

wrap up? What are the things coming out soon that you're kind of pumped up to see? I mean, the cases in cooling are really interesting to me. I just think in the computer, actually, CPUs have gotten interesting, too. So on the silicon side, AMD has done really well to actually get into gear competitively over the last several years. And these, they call them X3D CPUs, which have a bunch of extra cash on the... them they've been really good for gaming. And that's a, I mean, seeing those. What does the extra cache allow?

Yeah. So because you can fit more stuff local to the CPU, like, you can store more of what the CPU needs to process within the CPU Silicon itself, it doesn't have to go out to system memory. So the way it normally works is like if you're playing a game and you need some kind of file for. drawing something in the game or whatever. I mean, it'll go into memory of some kind.

So it might be GPU memory, might be system memory. But if we take the system memory example, something goes into system memory, you need that file. There'll be a transaction where you can imagine these bits going down a bus to the memory and coming all the way back to the CPU. And that's a long highway to go down.

Whereas with extra cash, you can store more local to the CPU. It can transact via basically like a shortcut and that allows, in the real world, significantly higher performance in gaming or in cash-heavy applications. Instead of the new AMD ones. Yeah, it's the new, like the 9800 X3D, for example.

So those, I'm really excited about that, how that's gone, because that actually, you may like this, but that was actually a sort of a skunk works project where this team of engineers in AMD And we ran a story on this too, but they decided, let's just try this idea. And they experimented with it. They got it working and they brought it through management and said, hey, this looks viable. And then they were able to actually make a product that it came from an abnormal path of an underground sort of, you know,

skunk works effort in the engineering department to actually being the leading gaming product. for CPS on the market. That's it. We will have that link in the episode notes as well. And we can wrap on the product, the AMD Skunkworks product you mentioned in a recent video that I'd not. AMD made a mountain bike at one point. Just want to what? Yeah.

So, yeah, that was not a good moment for AMD. No. Fortunately, it didn't particularly damage their CPU or GPU credibility because it was so on. I couldn't imagine so. But why? Why did they do what? It was during the COVID bike shortages. I don't know if you remember, but like all kinds of bicycles, yeah, were difficult to get. And, yeah, so they made these $300, so-called mountain bikes.

I think they're like Kent Walmart bike rebrands, basically. Nice. So they went real cheap. Yeah. And, yeah, it was advertised, you know, for mountain biking and off-road trails and whatever. and so we took it down a trail and I actually had trouble getting out of the parking lot that's how messed up the bike was.

We had to take it to a shop before I rode it for a safety check because it used V-breaks and they were going through the spokes so they definitely would have stopped me. Jensen Wong sitting there being like, we could have had a fucking mountain bike man. Yeah, we could...

How do we get rid of? Yeah, if we make a bike we can get rid of them. Yeah, they're just like $20 billion shot. into mountain bike research. That would be so good. Steve is always such a pleasure having you on here. Where can people find you? And gamers nexus on YouTube. Thank you so much for being here. I'm of course Ed Zitron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Have a great week, everyone. Steve, thanks for coming on. Thank you. 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 Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K. I.com. You can email me at EZ at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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