Better Offline - Radio Better Offline: Gare Davis, Victoria Song, Allison Morrow

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York city.Ed Zitron is joined in studio by Allison Morrow of CNN, Victoria Song of The Verge and Gare Davis of It Could Happen Here to talk about the fairy tale of AGI, AI boosters’ religious attachment to the industry’s success, and how the tech industry fears admitting they’re out of ideas.Allison Morrow https://www.cnn.com/profiles/allison-morrowhttps://bsky.app/profile/amorrow.bsky.socialAI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobshttps://www.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceosVictoria Song https://www.theverge.com/authors/victoria-song https://bsky.app/profile/vicmsong.bsky.socialThe Unbearable Obviousness of AI Fitness Summarieshttps://www.theverge.com/fitness-trackers/694140/ai-summaries-fitness-apps-strava-oura-whoop-wearablesGare Davishttps://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jm6ufvsw3hg5zgdpnd3zb4tv https://www.instagram.com/hungrybowtieIt Could Happen Here https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/ 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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This is water extermination, fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth. Souls rotten from the orgasm, drug, flesh shuddering from the ovens. Prisoners of the earth come out, storm the studio. This is Better Offline, and I'm Ed Zetron. We have an incredible studio guest assortment today. We have the wonderful Victoria Song from the Verge. How are you doing Victoria? I'm good.

She's great. And we, of course, have Alison Morrow of CNN, CNN Nightcap newsletter as well? Yes. Wonderful. And of course, Gare Davis. the wonderful Gare Davis who didn't insult me on Blue Sky for being late because I was on time of Cool Zone Media,

Gare thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me again, despite our brief fight on Blue Sky. Our tiff, it was not even a tiff. It was a friendly thing. Buy some merchandise, though, if you're listening to it, we have new hoodies, we have new t-shirts, we have new hats,

and we have an upcoming challenge coin that you can spend your money on and it will flow somewhat to me. That's what's great. But today we're talking about artificial intelligence. There have been a few stories in the media. Allison is fresh back from vacation, so she's about to learn about all the good things that have been happening. But I want to start with one of my favorite stories at the moment.

This is the negotiation between Microsoft and OpenAI. Now, the negotiation is, just to run this down, because Open AI, by the end of the year, needs to become a for-profit entity. It's a little more complex than that. It's the for-profit part of a non-profit needs to convert. That alone would be difficult, but Microsoft owns 49% of this company's future profits and a bunch of other stuff. they get a revenue share, they get rights to all of their IP through 2030 and all these other things. And Open AI has said, okay, what if we give you 33% equity, less revenue share, and you don't get access to all our IP? And understandably, Microsoft has said no.

So we are in the funniest possible scenario here, in that Microsoft could literally just fold their arms and let Open AI die. And I feel like at the moment this is an under-discussed topic. because this is a gun to Sam Oortman's head. And everyone's just kind of acting like it's fine. I guess maybe it's just too complex. I don't know. It's confusing to me why more people are a little bit worried. Anyone?

Numbers hard. Numbers. Math scary. Maths scary. That's, yeah. But I think, I think why I'm going so insane about it is this could kill open AI 100%. Like this is, they don't turn into a for-profit. They're dead, dead.

And I'm just wondering why everyone's just kind of chilling, walking around about it. I feel crazy. I think it's just the sense that, like, that seems implausible to most people. Like, if you look on it, like, maybe, but, you know, chat GPT is synonymous with AI in the sense that Kleenex is synonymous with tissues right now. So, you know, we're at a point in time where when you see the big one of, like, a tech thing, you kind of feel that they're infallible. It's sort of like saying, well, if Apple doesn't get its ducks in a row with these tariffs, they're fucked. In which case you're like, are they? It's like a Marvel movie.

At the end, are they dead? Are they really dead? Or will they come back in some mutated form in Avengers, like, Part 72, the avenginging? Right. And I think everyone's still under the spell of Sam Altman. Right. There's a sense that he's the visionary who's going to lead us into this AI utopia. and, you know, I and others.

You know, a bunch of us have reported that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, but I think investors and shareholders and people who, like, frankly, the people who work for him desperately want to succeed. I think Silicon Valley wants him to succeed. So maybe it's just willful blindness. Yeah. It's the most strange time in history because, Victoria, you've written quite a lot about this. When you look at the actual things that this shit does, it don't do that much, right?

No, no. You've been on the lead AI on the verge for a few months now. Have you seen anything exciting at all? Define exciting. Anything that you looked at and you felt delighted by in any way? Because I'm genuinely curious. By delighted, I think delighted is a strong word. Have I seen things that have been surprising?

Yeah, with some of the, like I wrote a story not that long ago about the, what I call the hug and kiss generators. Uh-huh. Yeah, exactly. What's that? So there are these apps. They're called hugging and kiss AI generators. So you take a picture.

And they were advertised in a kind of skeevy way where it's just like, oh, you take a picture of you and your crush and make them kiss. And like that is the thing that you can do. AI doesn't understand what to do with tongues yet. So, you know, I was generating very cursed content. for Theverge.com. That was those horrible things you were sending me, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sent you some horrible things. Really awful. In terms of the AI bots, a lot of humans don't know what to do with tongues either. No, but they really don't know what to do with the tongues. Like, you know, you're supposed to make people kissing. And so, like, I generated a couple videos of me and Edward Cullen,

not because I'm like a Twihard, but because he was like a preset in the app. Right. And, you know, you just watch yourself kiss Edward Cullen with full on tongue and you're just like, but a little wrong tongue. It's wrong tongue because honestly it's like if you told a toddler what kissing looks like and they just, you know, imagined two faces smoohing together and like things

coming out of the mouths and odd rhythms, that's what it looked like. I mean, I could be wrong here, but I assume most of these products are made by straight men who do not know what to do with the tongue. These apps are just very like weird. But, you know, so I tested them. I deep faked my parents. my dad parents at my wedding and I was like oh this makes me feel weird

I have emotions that mom's teeth are not correct in this story so that was just like one of the I think one of the things that I've tested most recently and I went oh okay this is something no I mean the thing that I've seen this with is like

this woman who made like a video of like her mom hugging her as a kid based on like an old picture right and it's like this is I've never seen a video of my mom before. And you start obsessing over this, this like artificially generated video. When you're ignoring you, you actually have a picture of your mom hugging you. You can look at like that.

And that actually is her. That is like what she looks like. Yeah. Versus watching something imagine, not imagine, just generate. Put on like a skin suit of your mom hugging you, which just isn't like the video is not real, but the picture is. It's a bizarre thing. I felt very judgmental of it before I tried it and then I tried it and I sobbed. I like genuinely sobbed because...

That's interesting. That reminds me of like the VR thing where you're like reconnecting with like dead family members on like VR headsets, which yeah, people were very skeptical of. And then I saw some people try it in Japan and they like totally broke down. It's because like when I like I think the phrasing that I used was like, I know it's fake. It didn't look anything like my dad. Sure. It gave him hair. My dad had never had hair in his life.

But like the shape of it was enough to like sketch this like part of me that was very much longing for my father to have been able to go to my wedding. So like doing it, I was like, this is weird. I don't feel this is not comforting. It's not comforting. But it's makes you feel bad. That nausea is like like indicative of like the hyper reality problem. Yeah. Which which mean people like Altman and the whole the whole industry are.

Can you break that? Rapidly pushing us towards. And the hyper-reality problem, can you break that down? Well, I mean, I guess the turn gets used in a few different ways, but it's like the more, something is so fake that it's more real than real. And we see this problem with a lot of, like, the VR stuff. But now, you see this a lot with AI generated images, which are like, quote-unquote, photorealistic,

but they're, like, too photorealistic because they're being trained on a dataset of, like, highly-photoshopped images. So it looks like really. reality, but it looks more than reality. It's stronger than what reality actually is supposed to be. And that's like completely poisoning the data set. And like, this can affect you like emotionally too. Oh, yeah.

And what, but the thing is that gets me about this is you look at everything. You look at all the AI stuff. And this is a fairly old example at this point. And I'm not, I'm not insulting you were, this is nothing bad about your point. It's just they've not been able to find a doodad or a gizmo that at least. brings you cheer. Ken, if you are twisted, and my mind is twisted, and you can, like, come up with some prompts that are truly cursed

and no editor will let you publish in good faith. Like, yeah, you can have a little fun with it. I'm talking about a thing that people used to do something normal. No, yeah, no. One. I mean, it helped that one kid graduate from UCLA, so there you go. Which one was that? Oh, it's just been a viral video the past, like, two weeks of this guy, like,

showing the prompts he used to graduate from college, like during his graduation ceremony. So cool. Yeah. That's the thing I've pointed out a lot is that AI has found a lot of use cases. They're just all kind of bad. They don't generate money. Right. They don't generate money.

And they take away. This will be a metaphor that you relate to. I can't remember who said it first. It was a tech columnist. Anyway, it was about letting kids use AI to do their whole. homework is like going to the gym and having a machine lift the weights for you. Yeah. Like the point is the process and the learning and AI just kind of subverts that, which can be

useful if you're coding or doing some high level technical stuff, I suppose. Yeah. It's not my area, but. But even then it's like with the coding stuff, they massively overstate what coding, like, coding is only one part of the software engineering stack. And even then you can't like help. They're like, oh, I could build an entire application. Could it, has anyone actually, and this is Matt Hughes, my editor brought this up the other day,

all this bullshit, Kevin Rusian bullshit about, oh, vibe coding is taking up. Oh, God. I've not seen one fucking vibe coded company. Ban the phrase vibe coding. It's just, I haven't heard this before. Vibe coding is when. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible.

Like at Google I.O., they're like, vibe coding. And I was like, please, kill me. Because what does it even mean? So here's what it's meant to mean. It's meant to mean that you as a person do not understand software. True, true. You are able to use the coding thing to build software. And the idea, which the massive liberty they take from there, is that because someone can do a thing like this, whether it works or not, whether it's secure or not, who cares, it means that someone who doesn't understand coding at all could build a huge company that does whatever.

It's kind of like if you saw the, you ever see, watch The Simpsons, anyone? Yeah, there's an episode of The Simpsons where they rebuild Ned Flanders's his house and like the rooms get smaller and they're like, this room has no electricity, this room has too much electricity and all the hair stands up. It's like seeing that and being like, holy shit, these people could build a city. It's fucking insane. And of course, there is a Kevin Rousse article in New York Times where he's like, Oh my God, I made a recipe application.

It's just real like peekaboo moments in AI. And I know I've been ranting about AI for what feels like seven years now, but it's only one. But it's just, I don't know why more people, again, I get the Microsoft open air, I think, I do. But I don't get why more people aren't more alarm. There's nothing. There's not a thing.

There's not a thing that you can point out and be like, wow, this is actually kind of fucking cool. It costs too much money. It requires stealing. It boils legs, with all these things. But at least we have this. Not really. I genuinely, I'm not even asking the question sarcastically anymore.

I'm just like, anything? Anything. Anything. One thing that I don't mean kind of works. I mean, this is a tool that I use every day, like a Dropbox style thing. I don't even mean a file. I just mean a useful piece of software you can point to and go, I use this and it's good. I have one, but I don't know how much of it is LLM based.

Do you use Otter in your work? Yeah, I do. Yeah, like Otter is a dictation service. Yeah, transcription. I was just going to say, transcription. I was just going to say close captioning. That's like the only thing. Like Dropbox is it.

integrated, like, auto-transcriptions for almost all their uploads, and that makes my job really easy because I have to do a lot of interviews, and now I can just refer to that. If I need a more complex transcription, I can send it to one of our services. But, no, like, that's it. But, like, that's... LL albums have been doing that for a long time. It's just transcription. I'm not even being a misanthrope.

I'm just... So much money is going into this. So much money is not going into other things. and the only thing we're having popped out is, hey, we've got a Google search that kind of works but doesn't, and we can do transcriptions, which they did almost immediately, I feel like that. Like, Rev had their AI transcriptions almost immediately. Yeah, they've been around for a few years. There were various companies.

I worked with an AI transcription coming to dead now. A couple years back with like 2023, I think it was. It was like meeting transcription, Zoom's had it. I was using REV's AI transcriptions back in 2020. Yeah, it's just like, it feels. feels, I feel like I'm going insane sometimes. It feels like when I read these stories and they're like in the revolutionary power of AI, but you look at it. It's like you don't even have a funny, you have a funny thing, I guess, a joker level thing. Yeah, I think the problem is, is just like we are promised one thing. Yeah. You're promised this personalization, this automatic, this automation that it's going to know you. And like we've been fed through so many generations of like science fiction, what we think. AI is going to be, this is not that. This requires so much work from you to train it.

You have to understand the language to prompt chat GPT or any of these other AIs in order to get something remotely useful. So you're actually having to learn a new language. And like if you look at the most successful chat GPT prompts, they're like four paragraphs long. They're insane. You have to like, you have to be preempting what like this thing could be. Like, I was just like, you know, to your point about vibe coding, I'm not a, I'm like a spreadsheet girly, but I'm not like an advanced spreadsheet early.

And I was trying to pull some data insights from this set I was looking at. And I was like, okay, I don't know, fuck all about spreadsheet formulas besides like the really basic ones. How am I going to do this conditional logic program? Let me ask chat cheap. And it took me so long just to figure out the stuff. and it was always wrong. And because I could like, because I understand math,

I could parse out how to fix the completely wrong formulas it was giving me. But that was such a painful process. And so, was the output even that good? Oh, no, it was an excellent output. Okay. I got a beautiful spreadsheet out of it. That's cool. And how much time would you say you're invested? Two and a half hours.

Nice. Victoria, though you're a journalist who understands math. Like, you're a rare and special. I was just basically like the fact that this conditional if and statement is not working or it's working opposite to what I want for to find this one particular data set is driving me cuckoo for cocoa puffs. It's very simple. I know how to do the math manually. Why can't the computer tell me how to write it to the other freaking computer?

That took me two and a half hours. I love innovation. And I think that that speaks to the larger problem, which is generative AI isn't. completely useless. If it had been sold as it is, which is kind of niche cloud software, like cloud compute stuff, they wouldn't have been able to fund any of the data centers.

If they would have been like, all right, we're going to be able to, in two and a half hours, give you the world's best spreadsheet. They would... It was a good spreadsheet. It wasn't the world.

Not the best. No, it was a decent spreadsheet. That's the thing. Even the asterisks have asterisks. And it's just, I feel like, and the feedback I get from listeners is very much

that everyone is like a lot I don't get any emails from people being like hey actually man I have the most useful thing I get the occasional Bright Spark is like I have over the course of hours created a very useful thing that I use sometimes it's like cool okay

fine bidet sounds more useful than that like I'm trying to think of like other innovations that exist that could be yeah everything is more useful like Apple Pay is more useful than any of the shit that they've built But it's this thing where we are being told again and again and again that it's the future. And we're being told that it's this ultra-complex thing that will never understand, which leads really neatly into my favorite story of the week, which is all of you, I assume, have heard about this meta offering $100 million to Open AI staff and how there's this big talent war and four people just left Open AI to go to meta.

Alison, you're on vacation, so you missed some of this, which is probably best for your mental health. Oh, I saw the seven-figure bonus story came out right before I went on vacation, so I was I was aware. I can't blame these people. Oh, no, absolutely. Get the bag. It's your way to a 401K that's fat and sizable. Yeah. No, no.

I think it rocks. I think it's great. I think they should demand. There was a part of the Erin Wu from the information of a great story about this where she was talking about how some people like, oh yeah, I just threatened to quit. and they gave me more money. I would join one of these companies and day two, just be like,

I fucking quit, Mark. What are you going to do about it, Mark? I'm going to go right back to Open AI. They're going to give me this money. And then Mark Zuckerberg would give you whatever you. He's been flying them to his house in Tahoe, and they're still saying no. That's the best part.

The people are just like, no, I don't want to, don't want to mate. But it might be because they're all in a weird, I'm going to say click, but I want to believe Polly situation. So, okay,

I have no knowledge that they're fucking. But the recruits on the list, which refers to the meta list for potential people that they could hire, typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experienced places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their 20s and 30s, and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power. And their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued. So these stories have a thread through them I'm really enjoying, which is that the writer and the companies don't know what these people are doing.

And I just feel like they are scamming. I think they're scamming them. Another quote from the Wall Street Journal, Megan Borodowski, I believe it wrote this. The handful of researchers who were smartest about AI have built up what one described as tribal knowledge that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the needs. next great breakthrough. We are very aligned on research directions and interests, one of them wrote. I hope we get to work on more stuff together in the future.

They are fucking lying to them. I'm sorry. They are just making shit up. This has to be. I think that this is the funniest thing ever. I think that this is a true revenge of the nerd situation. Have they reinvented collective bargaining? They have.

They've basically done unionization. It's amazing. Good for them. No, I love it. Higher education is really expensive. They have a lot of debt. Yeah, I love this. I think that they should ask for more money.

I think they should all get together and just refuse to take less than 50 million a day. Eight figure. Eight figure, nine figure. Sky is the limit. Sam won't want to burn anything. But back to Aaron Wu here. This is another quote about this. This is from inside the great AI talent auction, the deals, the free agents, and the egos. But a senior leader, another of the major AI labs, said it was hard to know what research

specialties actually mattered for improving AI models. AIS fieldware researchers are designing such complicated systems that is difficult to break up one aspect of the work from another, the leader said. Ultimately, they said, recruiting often comes down to word of mouth, a game of knowing a person, or having worked with them before. It's a scam. Isn't that just like normal job stuff, like word of mouth, knowing having worked with someone before and going like, yeah. Yeah. It feels like hyper-focused Silicon Valley stuff. But generally you know what they did at the job.

Generally you do. And Mark Zuckerberg is... AI. We did AI. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

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podcast network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There is a WhatsApp group. I think it's called recruitment and it's the party emoji. And that's where Mark Zuckerberg invites people. He like has his little weird little WhatsApp hot, like, hole.

He invites people and he's like, hey, I'm Mark Zuckerberg. Do you want all the money in the world? What do you do? I don't care. How many, and apparently one of the metrics they measure them on is like citations in papers.

I genuinely think this is a scam. It's genuinely a scam. I think it's the coolest scam. of all time. It's nerds versus management consultants. So nerds versus different types of nerds. Management consultants are not nerds. Actually, I want to say management consultants are not nerds.

They're jocks. I would agree with that. I would agree with that because they are professional deck makers about, and they go, in slide one, we can see that number go up. Yeah. And slide two, we can see number flat. Here's a pie chart. Bada bing, bada boom.

And someone else made this. Yes. that's it. I can see it. It's jock shit. Yeah. I went to a drama private school. I know, everyone's surprised.

This is not shocking. Yeah, I thank you. All boys as well. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was like the dumbest kid in that school, which is really, and I was the fattest as well. So school was great for me. But you run into a lot of people who can memorize a lot of things, but don't know how to put them together.

There's no real, like, synthetic thought. It's all just like, I don't know, like having a big pile of information that they arbitrarily draw from and they don't really know what any of it means. Sounds familiar to all the AI fitness summaries that I've been suffering. I just wrote a thing about it. Actually, tell us about that. What's the AI fitness shit been doing? This is...

Yeah, so I ate it during a run last week. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, it was too hot outside. And I was, you know, I was on the Vox Union bargaining committee, so I've been like sleep deprived for two months, basically. So, congratulations. Salute. Yeah.

Congratulations. It came down to the wire, but we averted a strike. It was real great stuff. And I basically was like, oh, now time to look into my fitness and wearable data from this time period and kind of gain insights. And it was just like not that it was beyond. I called my article the unbearable obviousness of AI fitness summaries because it was just not great. But to my point, I ate it on this run. You can kind of see my hands fucked up.

I-HF playing basketball the other day as well. My knees are fucked up. So, like, I was basically like, all right, let me see what all of these things said about my data. And could I find, could I get these AIs to say, like, hey, you've been, like, really strung out over the last two months. Your sleep schedule has been supremely disrupted. Your metrics are completely off. These are all things I know from looking at my baselines and knowing what they are. But could I get it to say you showed hot, like you've shown signs.

of elevated risk of injury. Not a single one of them could do it. And Stravas was like the most egregious because it's like, you had an intense run. And I had uploaded pictures of my injury. I had like uploaded a note saying that I had like injured myself pretty badly. There was no like context of like what I should do with that. It was just, it's literally stuff like you ran 3.1 miles. It was 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was slightly higher effort than other efforts that you've made in the last 30 days. Have a nice day. And I was like, that's not useful when you put it right next to a chart that says the same thing. Your elevation was 88 feet of elevation gain, and it was up and down during your run. And literally it's next to a thing that says elevation gain, 88 feet, and a graph that shows up and down. Like, it's that. There's no intelligence. There's no intelligence thing.

Like AI, there's no intelligence. This feels like the thing it should be able to do already. This is what people wanted to do, because at least in my field, where you generate a massive mountain of, like, quantified self-data that you're looking at and you want insights from, I wanted, I wanted ORA to tell me, like, what my average weekly number, like, how many hours per week do I sleep on average, on a 12-month basis, and then how much of a sleep debt did I incur in this specific week? And it's like, oh, we can't do that.

We can only do it the most recent week and the most recent month for trends. And I was like, that's fucking useless. I have six years worth of aura data that I should be able to mine for that kind of insight. And I can't do that. So that's not at all useful for the purposes of what I was trying to prove. And so I ended up arguing with this thing for like an hour trying to get it. I feel like you did prove something, though. Yeah, I did.

But it was at the same time just like it's sort of like a wicked person. It's like a book report written by a fourth grader who decided to read the entry of the book on Wikipedia instead of actually reading the book for insights. So it's like, here you go. Here you go. It feels like the most elementary thing it should be able to do. I have over a decade of fitness data. Yeah. And I still don't have shit.

I don't get it told my aura ring the other day. I got aura. I got somni. I got the thing that electrocutes your head. Yeah, that's why I'm so smart. It's like I just watched the X-Files episode with the computer bit. that's what's happening to me. I'm getting electrocuted every day. I got aura. I got the eight sleep in Vegas. I got all sorts of gumpf. And I don't know a single goddamn thing. It told me two days ago,

I'm like, something is wrong. Yeah, I'd slept three hours two days straight. It was just a bad combination of red eyes. And it's like, yeah, you should do something about that. Mm-hmm. It's like, thanks. I'm glad I pay you $10 a month for, but this just feels like the obvious, how does it not know how? And maybe it is just the ultimate limitation that we've been complaining about. It's just, it's kind of insulting. I don't know. Yeah. Not to be like, I don't want to be the hippie here, because I use Strava and I like track my, uh, workouts and it's like, I know when I'm tired. And I know when I'm hungry and when I've eaten too much or eating too little, like, you know, why do we need the computer to do that for us is a real question.

And it's part of this consumer trend of just trying to get AI into every single app on my phone. And it's like, I don't need Strava. Like, Strava's doing great for me for what I need it for. I like it to show me how many miles I ran that week and, like, my bike ride to work looked like. I wanted it. I would have loved it to be like, okay, so when you go run after a prolonged break, particularly in hot weather, you have self-reported an increased number of injuries. That's the type of shit that I want. And so it's like, so seeing that it was really hot after a prolonged injury, you have a real bad habit of getting injured after that. So like, you dumb, dumb.

Yeah, maybe. Drink some more water. Do the thing. So, like, that is the type of insight I would have liked after this most recent run where I ate it. Well, the last three months, I've increased my cardio, a shit time playing basketball. I would love to see, and it has all the stuff and this doesn't feel that difficult. If it could say, yeah, your cardiovascular has improved. Or it likes to occasionally be like, yeah, you're four years. or two years younger than your age, cardio-wise? And it's like, the fuck does that mean? Don't get me started on those, like, longevity metrics. But just, there's nothing useful to it other than I'm a data pervert,

and I like looking at the numbers, going, number up, number down, why? But even then the simplest things are kind of hard to get. But Strava, you have to go through, like, three menus to just see how much you've worked out. There's, like, eight different options. None of them, you can't turn any of them off. There's one about biking, because I used to bike. I don't bike anymore. I don't need that.

No, you need to show the biking, mate. You got to make sure it's zero miles, you fucking idiot. You loser. It's just... It is the wider thing of tech just not being for us anymore. Almost it's like, hey, got some data, I guess. Pay me now. Pay me.

And even then with Aura and A, I've been using them for five years, six years. You know what? I've never got a single bit of advice about my sleep. I've never had it say, I, what if you did this? Nope. Have you tried using the chat pot about the Nora? No, I thought about it yesterday, and I was like, I'm going to get angry at this.

It's actually one of the better implementations. Does it work? It's one of the better implementations if you, like, know how to talk to it. Okay, how do I talk to it? Well, you have to be very specific about the information that you're wanting. So you're like, tell me about my sleep trend, and I've noticed that I have this problem. What are some ways that I could get around that? Right.

Or it's just like, do I show signs in the past month of sleep irregularities? If so, like, what are some? The thing is, like, the things that's going to tell you to do that are actionable are going to be like, well, do. Really only helpful if this is your first foray into fixing your health, into fixing your health. If you've literally Googled anything before or have any base knowledge of, like, you should have consistent sleep schedules. You maybe just don't eat ice cream before bed, like common sense things. Maybe it's not going to necessarily help you. But, you know, other things I were, because I'm also, I've got a CGM at the moment.

And so it's just like... Is that a constant glucose? Yeah, yeah, continuous glucose monitor. And I was like, I've had a lot of stress. Does stress impact glucose levels? And I was like, yes, it does. And I was like, okay, cool, that's nice to know that it's high because of that. And then it'll remember that when you ask it questions in the future.

So you just have to be like, you just have to talk to it so much and like kind of train it. It's like literally like training a toddler. So the amount of effort that you're putting in versus what they're telling you, like all the insights, they'll be so personal. Personalized and so automated. It's like, yeah. You just have to do all the work to make it useful, which appears to be the AI theme. Yeah. You have to do an immense amount of legwork and like training and thinking like an AI in order for it to spit out something.

that might make you go, huh. Wow. The future's so cool. I love living in this wonderful period. I saw Wired mention this thing called Limitless earlier. Yes, yes. It's the class. It's like B, the thing that I talked to you last time.

The AI device that constantly listens to you. What is limitless, though? It's similar. It constantly listens to you and generates insights based on listening to you constantly. Stephen Levy, the Larry Bird of big wet kisses in tech journalism wrote about it like it's the future. And it's just like, I just wish some writers would experience humanity just once. Because the idea of someone constantly listening is not fun or good, nor has it ever really worked. I don't want to age anyone here, but I feel like we're roughly the same age.

And we experienced kind of the revolution of social media as this kind of like, oh, look at how cool it can be if we're able to connect in mass all the time anywhere. And that was cool. That was revolutionary in its time. And now we're at kind of like the denouement of that. And it's turned us all inward. We're all like tracking our personal data and like, you know, we're more isolated than we've ever been. Not entirely social media's fault, but doesn't help. We're like talking to our AI therapist and our AI boyfriends and girlfriends. I don't know how many people are actually doing that, though. I know a lot of them are. I think that like the step back narrative right now is just like, well, there should be a next thing.

It shouldn't just be social media was cool and the internet was cool for a while and things are getting kind of stale. And it's like, well, what's the next thing? And I think, I think tech journalists can be guilty of this sometimes of feeling like, well, 2012 was really exciting. So 2022 has got to be just as exciting. In 2025, boy, can't wait. Maybe the technology is just not there yet. And it's going to take a lot longer than anyone expects. Or maybe this is just not the right approach because the way LLM's work is that it's a mirror. And like, we have tech journalists left and right failing the mirror test and like not understanding. that when you talk to chat GPT or you talk to these AI girlfriends and boyfriends in a different avatar, you are just talking to yourself in the mirror. It is a digital version of talking

to yourself in the mirror, which can be useful. It can be useful to talk to yourself in the mirror. There's a reason why people go like, you're great. Yes, awesome. Affirmations. Sometimes you need to hear yourself think out loud and that can be useful and helpful, but that's what you're doing.

You have to understand that you are talking to yourself. You are just having a conversation with yourself. And I think a lot of people don't get that. They think they're talking to a higher intelligence. Literally, no, you are just talking to yourself if yourself could Google a little faster than you currently could. Yeah, that was the gist of Keshmer Heels' amazing New York Times piece about the people who really fell into a rabbit hole around these chatbots,

like ChatGPT, convinced them that they, They were in a matrix, like, you know, alternate universe and, like, one guy committed suicide. Didn't he pull a knife on a cop or something? Yeah, he, like, told the bot that he was going to kill himself, do suicide by cop. And then his dad was, like, worried about his mental health, did call the cops. And he was like, listen, I think my son's going to try to kill himself by attacking you. And guess what? He did because the chat bot was like, what do I do?

And guess what? What do I do? just came right over with the, yeah. Guns blazing. It's like, yeah, you know, some of mental health. What do they need? Oh, they definitely want to die by a cop. Well, let's pull our guns. I'm saying it's our society's not in a good spot, right? No, our society is not prepared. Our policing is prepared to arrest rather than help or service. So it's the natural, I think it's that all of this is the natural comeuppance of a society built with very little intention.

And so because. It's vibes. Because that's the thing. It is vibes and large language models are the ultimate vibe slop. It's something built with no real. And people love to say, well, Sam Orton's plan. No one has a single goddamn plan at all. That's why there are no use cases. Because if anyone sat there and went, what can we do with this? They go, fuck, I don't. I don't know. Is there anyone that we can pay $100 million to? Well, you can do anything that you can imagine. That's why Andy Jassie is saying. the future is up to you guys imagine how you're going to use it. I can imagine a lot. And it's, but that's the thing like, Alison, you had an excellent piece on this. It's like the whole job loss story is just them being like, please, please, up the shares.

Up shares, go on. Number go up, please. Yeah, it's like, I have to say this because everyone's paying attention to me. And it's like, I'm sure shareholders and investors on Wall Street are saying, what is your AI strategy? And how are you planning to massively lay off? your staff so that you can cut corners and replace people with AI. And so you have someone like Andy Jazzy come out and say, you guys are all doing great work.

We've built incredible products. Alexa, everyone loves it. Spoiler alert. No one loves Alexa. It's stupid. Yeah. And as a result of that, sometime in the near future, I won't say when, but sometime soon, a lot of you are going to be laid off or have your jobs changed by AI.

And I'm shocked every time one of these CEOs does this, we report it out as if it's like, oh, it's true. God in heaven just said, like, this is what's going to happen and that is what's going to happen. Like we had, you know, banner headlines saying like Amazon CEOs says AI is going to take your jobs. And it's like, well, he didn't really say how or when or by what mechanism. and there's no evidence of it happening yet. So what are we talking about? I think that there is an alarming amount of journalism that's excited for it, or there's just a doomerism behind it.

I think you can replace the word AI in a lot of these articles with just God. And this is something that we talked about the first time we met in Vegas, right? It's how all of these, like, the people who are into AI talk about it as if it's just a cult. There's this divine aspect that has, like, ordained. You have to lose your job because AI is taking... It's here. God, God has mandated this. And like even, even like with the, you know, talking to an AI, like it's a person,

they often gain this, like, divine aspect when people are treating these chatbots like they are like sentient beings. It's like the same way that we like project divinity onto aspects of nature. And I think that is like a big part of it because now you have God telling you that you're actually in the matrix and you need to do this thing. And for some reason, there's not safeguards put put on this God program to protect you. God's creation. They're all programmed to be super friendly and to tell you that you're great. And it's like if you're actually like trying to use this thing and you're viewing it as you talking to you,

like I have to tell chat GPT all the time you're putting too much flattery in. You have to cap all of your flattery at 1% because I can't, I can't handle you. And I need you to like explain why everything you said has no bias or as little bias as possible or to explain all of your bias in it so that I can read and evaluate and just go like, no, that's not it. And I've been told I'm insane for for like programming all the AI I talk to you that way. It's input output shit. It's making, it's adjusting a program to do a thing for you.

It is. Because like if you just leave it at the default, it's trying to warp your brain. Like if you leave it at the default, it's just like, you've done nothing wrong. You are absolutely correct. And everything you said,

what a brilliant thing that you've said. And if you like listen to that enough times, it's bleh. Well, I mean, I think it's warping your brain because there is no intention behind this. They train it whatever, but they could, relatively easily put a thing saying,

just to be clear, you are talking to you, they don't want to do that. And I think it might have been an one of the Gumbas from Open AI. It breaks the illusion, right? It's like the Wizard of Oz thing. Yes, but they should break the illusion. No, they have to, but they don't want to. They don't want to because it means

they will get less... Attention economy. It breaks the engagement. You're not going to engage it with it if you're like, this is obviously a robot. That's the part where I get actually emotional and angry about AI is when the CEOs of these companies talk about it. They talk about it as if it's inevitable and we have no agency.

That's where the God thing comes in, where it's like, yes, this is happening whether we keep doing it or not. And we are the ones who will fix it, of course. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah. I mean, Sam Altman, I was just rereading like a... The gentle singularity? That fucking blog? Oh, I hadn't read that one.

No, I was talking about he created World Coin. Oh, Christ Almighty. Because he's so convinced that No, let me stop you there. Okay, I'll stop. No, I just want to stop you because he said he's so convinced. Your only source of information for that claim is Sam Orkman. Sam Orkman did WorldCoin so he could sell a cryptocurrency, that's the only reason.

Yes. So he could collect a bunch of things. No, he's so convinced. He's convinced of nothing, I believe. Okay, this is literally me editorial. Sure, the pitch of WorldCoyne. Like, I interviewed their CEO last year. Oh, he's a real bozo.

He's a real dumb. I had a lovely conversation with him. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. But, you know, the pitch is AI is going to become so ubiquitous and it's going to destroy all the jobs and flatten the economy. And we're going to have to have this UBI that's distributed by this blockchain mechanism. And I'm sitting here and I'm going, yes, but we are actually full agents in this world. Like, we all need to step back and realize that we have sovereignty over what we do and the technology we make and how we regulate it.

And it's a real just like kind of abdication of responsibility for society where I'm just like, what do we want to make for future generations? And that's all the like Pablum that comes out of Silicon Valley is like building a better future. and it's like, you can't have both things be true. So what are you building? It's because, like, what they really are building is money machine go up. And, like, that's the main thing. It's like they say all this lip service about making everything better. Well, you could cure cancer.

That would, like, legitimately make everything better. Well, he said that they will. Sure. You could do that. But it's like their first and foremost thing where they serve his money. I believe Joe Biden will cure cancer before Sam Ormond. Both have claimed they will. I believe Joe Biden would.

No, I mean, neither of them will do it, which is my larger point. But, I mean, you're both wrong because to quote Sam, to quote Sam Maltman, as data center production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. People are often curious about how much energy chat GPT queries use. The average query is 0.34 what hours about what an oven would use in little over a second. Now, someone has almost immediately thrown water on this entire thing, but this blog, a gentle singularity by Sam Altman was quoted, like scripture, by everyone. And that I think it,

I'd love that you brought up divinity, because it really is just like the pseudo-religious, it's religion and capitalism. It's all it. It's just we found a way to love a company like a god and also kind of abdicate any responsibility or thinking about it, because when you look at the people who love AI and the way they talk about it, it's not about what's happening today. It's no in it. They're like in the future when this happens. It's always this future prophecy. And if we believe in this God enough and if we build up this religion enough, it can deliver us of infinite automated money machine. But what's crazy is the money machine is bad.

It doesn't make any money. It loses so much. They spent $327 billion in capital expenditures this year or projected to. And the revenue of this industry is like $40 billion. That's because money is fake until you have none. That's the only time it's real. And that's the thing. Money will run out.

Money go down. money go down not work good. And the story that's really been twisting me up this week I was telling you about earlier, and I swear it won't be this boring, is OpenAI is Microsoft's biggest customer. $10 billion in projected revenue this year for Azure. And Azure revenue has been kind of like not growing so good.

So we just have one of the largest tech companies in the world that is just handing itself cash. And as part of the deal when they funded them in 2023, They funded them principally in cloud compute credits. So $10 billion of Microsoft's Reddit of revenue is going to be partially in air miles. And everyone's just sitting around and being like, this is great. On top of that, $10 billion of revenue from OpenAI, so $13 billion total from Microsoft. Then OpenAI projected to make $12.7 billion.

Half of the revenue in this fucking industry is Open AI or the slop, the cost slop of OpenAI. It's okay, yeah. We can just keep blowing up the balloon. It's never going to pop. We can keep blowing it up. It's just crazy. We found the infinite balloon. It's this crazy material that's indestructible.

You can keep blowing more in and it's going to be fine. It's just, it's so funny as well. The economy's going to be fine. It's so good. I just feel like AI is just like the imbecile magnet. It's just this idea that people who don't really know stuff but have got to positions of power can go, yes, finally. A thing that will make up the reason I have to buy it for me. I see this in journalism all the time. I'm getting like conversations about, well, AI could replace entry-level journalism jobs. I think that's like a real concern. If you're like just a, I started as a copy editor with zero responsibilities other than like finding typos and misspellings and occasionally getting to write a headline and being like, oh, thank you for letting me write a headline. And I could see a large language model filling that in, in which case,

I don't get a jumping off point to do what I want to do. And I mean, they've been offshoring those jobs as well. It's just another offshoring. My point is, I've been in this for like 20 years, and it was happening then. It might happen at a more accelerated time frame with AI. But I'm skeptical. You're still going to need, as we saw with that Chicago summer book list, you know, like, in case anyone missed it, you know, you got the authors right. and then just made up complete horseshit for the books that they didn't write

and were about whatever AI made hallucinated they were about, you know, an entry-level copy editor would have caught that, but we've already fired those people. We've already laid off the entry-level copy editors. So, you know, all of these things, these ways that, like, technology is going to create job losses. That's standard in our age. AI is going to create some job losses, yes. Is it going to be the, what was it, white color blood bath?

I don't think so. 10 to 20% unemployment, according to Wario Amadei. And that's the CEO of Anthropic, and his name is Wario. Everyone makes the typo and typed Stari. I'm not sure why it's in books and literature, but let's start correcting the record. 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 Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

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as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It fucking pisses me off as well because I mentioned it earlier. There's almost like a excitement in journalism for job loss and AI. Maybe it's doomerism. Maybe they're just like, oh, I'll get ahead of this. But it feels almost like they want it to happen. And they want it so that it proves AI is the big point.

It is religious. It always comes back to that. We've been talking about this for two years. Like this cultish nexus around AI. I mean, this goes like the early superintelligence hype of like the 20 teens, right? It's all got on this idea. Wait, there was a hype cycle on that? fucking forget that one.

It was a long time ago. Like the Rock Coast Basilis thing, right? Oh, God. It's the very, like the early stages of this. Yeah, like viewing AI like this inevitable god. Have you heard of Eliza Yadowski? Sounds familiar.

I keep having this person brought up to me by serious people. He is a person that writes about AGI and writes scary. He wrote like a fanficter, Harry Potter fan fiction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to be clear. If anyone else brings him up to me, I'm going to email you back. just some sort of obscenity, because you should not take this man seriously.

He writes Harry Potter fan fiction. He has just ingratiated himself with other cultists from less wrong. And I see real journalists mentioning them. And it's almost like people just want to find any possible proof they're right so that they can ignore the signs that everyone's wrong. And I also think that regular people see the problems of AI way more than the journalist do. And it's strange. It's bizarre. It's like another thing, I forget who said this.

If you're the person that said this to me, I'm very sorry for forgetting. But it's like everyone feels bad that they missed out on social media. I'm calling social media as the biggest movement. Or they feel bad on missing out on GPUs and not saying GPUs would push the next thing. And by the way, there are people who tried in like 2017 to say that GPUs would be the next computing thing. They were ignored. It was crazy how early they were. But it's...

And journalists in particular were late to the internet. So there's probably an institutional bias toward taking tech seriously because we are paying for brushing off the internet in 2000. I think I'm going to start an award show called the Felferit Awards. That's a good idea. And I'm going to win because it's like, you say that. And they were late, they weren't late to the Metaverse. How'd that go? They were late to crypto.

NFTs. NFTs. That's because crypto sucks and it's hard to talk. Like, it's hard to explain. Blackchain. Having to explain blockchain. No, it's, the problem with crypto is it's complex, but you can explain it quite simply as a decentralized database. But when you explain it like that, it sounds fucking boring because it is.

Yes. It's connected to money sometimes. I wrote about crypto for years, and every time I think about writing it again, I feel sad. Come do my job. I'll switch with you. Sure. Sure. Absolutely.

Give me a CNN column. Michael Balabano kick my ass. But it's... He's a wonderful man. It's just so frustrating as well because as ever, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the big show, it's like the people who get fucked here are regular people. AI bubble bursts.

It's not like Sam Altman will be humiliated, I will make sure of it. But it's not like Wario or Sammy, clammy Sammy, clammy Sammy is going to get done in at the end of this. It's going to be the stocks are going to crash to fuck, people's pensions will be fucked I mean 35% of the American stock market is magnificent 7, 19% of that is

Nvidia. I think 42% of Nvidia's revenue is magnificent 7 stocks. I will have a citation in the notes, Laura Bratton at Yahoo Finance, the goat, but it's going to hit everyone, but it's not going to, I don't think it'd be great financial crisis level, but it's going to be really bad.

And I don't think these AI companies are going to be offering the free spigot anymore. It costs them so much money. So we're going to see all of this it will still be there, but like this festering hole at the side of, in the side of the tech industry as everyone goes, what the fuck's next? Do you have such a beautiful way with words in? Yes.

Well, it's kind of the way the metaverse still exists within Facebook, but like it's not the star child at all anymore. I was talking to me later later last night about this, and it was driving me insane. Isn't it fucking insane? Meta, a multi-trillion market cap company just went, don't worry, legs are coming in the metaverse? And then just went, actually they're not. Actually, we're pivoting to AI glasses now.

A huge company just lied. They lied constantly for like over a year. You had people being like, absolutely believe you 100%. And then everyone just went, oh, isn't that fucking straight? What the fuck is going? It's weirder than the AI thing. Though the AI thing is pretty weird. It's like we live, tech journalism sometimes lives in an alternate reality.

Oh, yeah. It's so, I don't know. I don't know what's going on with a lot of things, but in particular, it just feels like it would be more fun if we were honest. It would be so much more fun. I wrote a thing today, coming out in a few days,

so the thing they're right on Monday, is just make fun of them because they're not charming, they're not interesting, they're not hot. Not a tasty looking. I think St. Altman has had some work done recently. Do you think he has, what's done?

His lips are looking a little fuller than you. Juicy Sam. Just saying. Juicy Sam, All right. That's a new, that's a new phrase to me to text eight people. But it's like they're not charming. They're not interesting. Steve Jobs, complete monster, but at least interesting to listen to it.

They're boring. They're all management consultants. They don't. I went and reread the iPhone announcement today. And the beginning is him just being like, yeah, we did this, we did this. And then we came up with a thing that did all of this. And I'm about to show you. Yeah, I get why people

cheered that, but now it's like... I tried watching the liquid glass presentation. I fell asleep in like five to seven minutes. Damn. And like, I think there's parts of liquid glass that seem compelling. Hopefully it'll get worked out before it has the full launch.

But like, it's presented in the most non-compelling way possible. It's glass. Based on VisionOS from the most successful... The most successful Apple product of all time. All time. You remember the first. Vision Pro. No.

Me neither. But that's the thing as well. I'm trying to get us excited for liquid ass. And it's very confusing as well because you could just describe it in a boring way and said, yeah, it'd just be very matter of fact about it. But I guess it's for shareholders, but is it even? No, even the most slimy apple people were kind of like, eh, you know. They needed a literal shiny thing to describe. from the AI.

How about they fix cropping in screenshots? 50% of my screenshots do not crop properly. If you work for Apple and you know why, email me. But it's, oh, I don't know. Make odd devices work good. They're all a mess. Everything's like, if you think about the iPhone, it's 17 years old. It's ready to go to college.

That's scary. People who are 21 who can vote and go to war and do all those things, most likely have no memory of a life before. the smartphone. Right. Like, we're at a point where people want what's next. And so I think you just have, like, tech journalism, we have to chase clicks and SEO farm bait. We have to chase all of this to stay alive.

And so it's very much like, this is the next thing. Get hype. Because if you all care, it's like we're looking for the next Game of Thrones, but for tech. Because Game of Thrones was such a huge traffic magnet that literally anything that happened, like, we're all drinking at the tit of, like, SEO traffic. add monies are coming in. So I just think there is like an incentive and like, you know, journalists always get pushed in any, doesn't matter who you write for.

You always get pushed to like, do the next big thing, find the next big trend and yeah, if you're a Beltway journalist, you have to think about what's the next election, who's going to be the next thing? You know, it's like all the horse friends. What's the take? And I think that the reason no one wants to write that is that there's nothing left. I don't mean this. That's the scary thought, right?

like, what if this is it? Like, because like, we're trying to come up with what's the thing that'll be the new thing after the smartphone. And like, it's like, like, AR contacts. Like, come on. It's been a minute. Like, it's, until we start getting the chips implanted, like, I didn't. I thought Joni I was hired to fix this to figure out what the, what's the phone that's not a phone. We've come up with a new kind of phone.

It's, there's no screen on that. I mean, I just think we're at a point where, like, the tech is stalled out, right? Because if you have, like, the law of diminishing. returns and just rock-com bubble episode last year it but it is though it's we're at the are we at the I'm not going to say end of history because people misquote for kiyama but it's we're at the end actually anyway I'll get back to it later it's we're at the end of innovation for a minute because if you look at how they're trying to innovate right now first of all I know I've been making fun of the overpaying people but the overpaying thing they're doing is only something

you do if you have no fucking clue they don't know what to do and yeah yeah They're just throwing around money. They're investing $327 billion this year into something. They built massive data centers. I don't think that any of, I think they all kind of have realized there might not be a next thing. And I think that their obsession has become something different, which is line go up, money go up, but how can I charge you $10 a month?

How can I charge you and 1,000 people at your organization, $30 a month? To the point that they don't know how to do math anymore. And they're like, well, I got you to pay you. $30. It cost me 75 to get that money from you. But I don't know how to fix that. But what if I spent more money to find out maybe?

I don't know. And they don't know how. And they will say this if you ask questions, which people tend not to with these people. And it's just even you've got analysts doing, there was an analyst earlier who's like, oh yeah, Google's, they're making $3.1 billion in Google One subscriptions because of AI. And it's not. They're just like

Google One subscriptions have gone up and they're like, fuck I think it's AI. I mean, this is why everyone's focused on AI is because it's like, it's like the final boss of our like collective tech on consciousness, right? It's the thing, Victoria, you were talking about earlier, it's like, like in like, you know, like 80s sci-fi,

this is always like the final thing. Yeah. After we've gotten like, you know, augmented reality, you got the contacts, got the glasses, like AI's, that's like the last thing. That's the last like ghost of our past that we're still trying to chase. That's this thing that's still trying to like control us

like time traveling, like, backwards in time, this idea that eventually we will have this AI thing. And like it is, yeah, it is like the final boss and we're always trying to chase it. And we're coming up with like the, the barrier of like maybe this thing isn't actually ever going to be real. And I think they think it's the magical thing because it will tell them how to run their business. Because it'll, it'll tell them what's next. The only, this is as far as we can get. And then we have to create something smarter than us so it can tell us what the next thing will be. Because this is the, final thing we can imagine.

And this is like, this is like it. But even when you listen to Clammy Sammy talking about it and he'll say he will be like, Juicy Sam, Juicy Sam, Julie Sam, oldman. Clammy Sammy's thing he always says is, I can't wait to see what you'll build with this. And it's like, motherfucker, that is your job. And that's actually the thing with AI as well. I'm always being to, but the few haters who dare end to my dojo is they say, oh, well, you don't know how to use it right. you're not doing it correctly.

I think even, Alison, you might have mentioned this, like, you're holding it wrong thing. But it's like, no, I'm the customer. I am, I am paying you for work. I shouldn't have to write a 950 word prompt that tells you to imagine you're a space man or whatever. Like, whatever makes it work. Fuck you. Fuck you, man. I, I, I, me pay you money.

You give me thing. 900 word prompt to generate a 900 word story. Yeah. That sucks. They're like straight upset. There's just like bereft of... And it's also, we've handed over society to people that don't create things. We've handed people who were just like showing different faces to enough people that they get where they need to go, the business idiot, writ large.

And it's just, it's so funny as well because it's going to fall apart. And when it does everyone, I genuinely, I mean, I look forward to it because of the obvious yucks and chuckles I will get out of it. But there's going to be a really interesting period. of journalism having to sit and go, why did we fall for this? And if there isn't, I will make this happen with all of my energy. I will hold everyone. Because it's, I think, and I'm not insulting your outlet. But Victoria.

No, no, no, no. This is not an insult, I promise. Read the comments on AI stories on The Verge. I do read the comments on AI. Because you see regular people are so skeptical of this shit. Oh, no, I read all the comments on all. the stories that I write, which are just like, thank you for calling out how stupid it is. But that's the thing, though. Regular people seem to get it.

There's going to be, well, it depends. I think there's a sector of, of counterculture that's developing like a neo-ledite perspective. Like beyond just like, you know, like anti-tech like green anarchists, which have carried the Luddite torch for the past like 30 years, we're starting to see like, like, quote, the cool kids adopting this like new Luddite tendency. mostly in response to like, you know, like alienation and like automation. Right. And I think that trend is going to like continue.

Like that's going to be like almost like a social status, like a signifier is the fact that you're not reliant on these things. Because there will be a version of AI that does keep getting like normified, I think. How do you mean? There's going to be like even if you look at the way higher education is working right now. The level of people who are graduating just on the basis of, like, AI helping them with large parts of their assignments. Like, I have a few friends who are professors, and the majority of assignments that are turned in are majority written by AI. And we get to this point, we're going to have a new generation of the workforce that doesn't really know how to do anything because AI has been doing everything for them, but they got their degree, you know, like, I am employable certificate. But now they don't really know what to do.

And that's the ramifications of all this year. But there's going to be a counterculture. that refuses to use that, right? That's been like, I will not be using AI. That's going to be after thing you have to prove and, like, talk about. And it's going to be a version of a social, like, status card. Have you heard of Cluelly? Oh, I've seen Cluelly.

Tell us about Clue. Oh, I love Cluelly. Yeah, it's the Cheat on Everything app, and so it was invented by this Columbia Kid Drop, who I interviewed him for a story about. Oh, I heard about this guy. Okay. So it's the cheat on Everything.

app. I tested it. It helped me cheat on nothing. It was terrible. I cannot wait to have all my dates go flawless. It can't even do that. Now that I read from a teleprompter. It can't even do that. Like in its current state, it's like you use it. It's like a prompt machine for when you are on a video call and it very slowly can answer prompts based on a transcript of your video. It's not that usable. It messed up the mics on my computer from testing it to this point where like I delete. I delete. needed it from my computer and video software programs like Google Meet and Zoom will pick a non-existent Cluley mic. And I'm just like, oh, I don't love that from my computer. It's so cool.

Yeah. But, you know, like, as soon as I wrote that story up, someone, another company messaged me is like, we're using AI to catch the AI cheaters. And I was like, oh, okay. Finally, we have bear force from the Simpsons. Sure. Solving this problem we created. That's the perfect use case for AI. AI, though. Using AI to fix all the problems caused by AI.

That's the real... I think it's beautiful. That's the actual singularity. We've created problems to create solutions for. Neither of them work. But clearly, one of the people from Andresen went on a podcast is like, yeah, you know, it's when marketing and virality overtake making a perfect artesian product. It's like, what you mean is when something goes viral for fucking lying.

lying. Like, it was a lie. Like, when you say something that is not true intentionally, that's called lying. It's called an IRL hallucination. Yes. It's weird because the way that app was born, initially it was like some other app

that was used to kind of make a point about how stupid technical interviews are for devs. Right. And I was like, that's actually kind of radical. And like it is proving a point and you have lost the point. And now you have $5 million in some, somebody gave you five.

going into $100,000 commercials. A nice apartment. Did you hear about Miramirati, though, the former CTO of Open AI and her new startup, intelligent machines? No, so they raised, I think, like a billion dollars, I want to say. And they did not share anything about the financials. They also did not share anything about the product. So anyone investing just went into a room, Miramarty went,

yeah, so I need money, me, money now. And they went, fuck yeah. absolutely, there were reports where people would, the VCs were just like, can you share anything she said, no, on top of this, and by the way, I admire the scam at this point, I just get it. She has her voting rights

supersede everyone. Get it. No, I'm, I fuck these pigs who cannot even bother to even think about what they're building or what it is they do. They just, like, I will take an, I will give you an unlimited amount of money because of the vibes I have. Because of the...

When's it my turn? I would love that. No, I definitely had a moment where I'm like, could I? I have great vibes. Give me money. Give me $100 million. Give me money and I will vaguely promise to write you something in the future at a time unspecified from now. I will never do anything.

I will guarantee you that, I mean, I'm in Aalya Sutskeva, the other Open AI guy, misreported by Pivot to AI that generally does good work but needs to work on their fucking headlines, suggesting that they guaranteed they would not do anything until super intelligence when the actual headline was that they said they have nothing and they want to build super intelligence, which is way funnier. Honestly, at this point, like it's evil to lie and extract capital, but the people you're extracting it from, your wallet inspecting them. But also you could fix almost, you could fix like world hunger, I think, for $6 billion

they worked it out. Yeah, yeah. You could. And challenged Elon Musk and he said, If you figure out the number, I'll give it to you. And then they figured out the number. The number's not based. It's very upsetting.

I saw an outlet as well say today that GROC only makes $100 million in revenue. It's so fucking cool as well. They all burn money. I mean, just give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. Sponsor a journalist. You too can sponsor a journalist to live a life.

And the funny thing is, is like, I actually think you could make a shit ton of profitable journalism just by like talking about this bluntly. I'm doing it all the time. But it's it's weird. And I actually, it's kind of wrap us up as well. I have to wonder if at the end of this farce, whether there will be a rise of critical tech journalism, I'm not holding my hopes out. But I think that there is a slogan like you two actually, Victoria, Alison, you've both inspired me a bit that it's possible. Yay. I just write what's true. I try it and I tell you what happened when I tried it. That's it. That's it. It's literally my job.

Imagine that. Imagine if that happened on Hard Fork. Sorry. I'm saying nothing. No, no, I know, I know, I know. I'm not going to let... These are my opinions. Just mine.

I think about them all the time. I'm hoping this happens because I think you've got Brian Merchant, you've got Edward and Grace Jr. Molly White, of course, one of the fucking best in the business. Molly's great. Molly is... You've got really good criticism, and I think people are hungry for it. The reason I brought up the Virgin's comments is this isn't like a...

any kind of funmaking. It's you see people saying it now just being like, hey, why the fuck am I having to pretend here? And I just, I think it's the business idiot idea I had a few months ago where it's like, hey, maybe we've handed over our economy, our finances, the editorial structure of some publications and the people with the biggest microphones to people that don't understand a single goddamn thing. And it's kind of, that scares me more than anything. Because we talk about the harms of generative of AI. And it's, Yeah, there is no intention. No intention is far scarier than people being like, they want all of your data and all of this.

When they have no idea, I was actually kind of disappointed. Meredith Whitaker of Signal, she's really good, admire her dearly. She said a thing on stage about, like, yeah, AI agents, which is the marketing term, but they're going to do this and they're going to do this. Whenever anyone speaks about AI agents, just imagine like clown noises. Circus music if it helps because A. AI agents do not exist. They do not work. There are people who are getting close to a thing that might work one time.

They had a big study out of Salesforce. With multi-step processes, you know, things that require you to do more than one thing. Yeah. It failed like less more than, I think it was that more than 32% of the time. It's like, sorry, it only succeeded 32% of the time, which is very bad and not getting better. And it's like, this is what, and everyone's talking about AI agents despite them not working. I realize the sentence started in one point and it's going to end of the... I feel like I'm going fucking insane.

Every time I read the news and I see a new thing that does not exist and everyone says it exists. Am I crazy? Am I having a problem? Like, it's... I mean, yes, but is it... Is that why I'm reading the stuff that doesn't exist? It's just driving me insane. But now you've said the divinity thing.

I'm just like, this isn't actually about building stuff. This is a belief system and plate spinning. This is just an intention to build... a vibes-based economy, except it can't last long term? Oh, God. Or until the next revolution that replaces the AI God. You know, if like Industrial Revolution and Modernity killed God, qua God, then maybe AI is the demigod that we replace God with, and then something else will happen.

Sam Altman is the Antichrist. I like where you're at that. Many people are saying this. Many people. Many people are saying this. Many people in a New York City podcasting studio are saying. Did I do that? It's, sorry.

But even then, the reason I say is the Antichrist is not any recent interviews on the New York Times podcast. It's specifically about the fact that he is able to charm every business idiot. He's so good at it. He's good at saying nothing in a way that makes people give him a billion dollars. And he has wrapped, I think he's wrapped everyone up in this insanity. And no one really knows why they're doing it. You've got journalists, you've got investors, you've got consumers even who are like chasing this dream. And I genuinely think he may lead the tech industry to a kind of ruin.

I don't think all the companies are going to shut down, but this is the ultimate hubris of basing everything in tech on venture capital, invested by people that don't really understand, and public companies run by people with MBAs. Mark Zuckerberg's a rarity. He doesn't have an MBA, but all the rest of them do. even the guy who replaced Andy Jassy AWS, the cloud part of Amazon has an MBA. MBAs are everywhere. I think we should bar them from running companies.

And also being allowed to have housing or health care. No, sorry, I'll stop that one there. But it's just, I don't know, we're all going to suffer for this. I will blog about it, I guess. And we'll all blog.

We'll do podcast, Gare. But you know what, I'm going to wrap it on that happy note there. Gare, where can people find you? Well, I help run a daily, yikes, a new show for Kulsa Media called It Could Happen Here. That's where you can find most of my work. Right now, I'm finishing my final piece on the Stop Cup City movement in Atlanta, as well as an upcoming piece on liberal accelerationism. What is that?

You know, that's what the piece is about. Well, we'll have to find out and listen to it. Alison, where can people find you? I read a business newsletter for CNN called Nightcare. You can just Google CNN business nightcap. And I'm on Blue Sky. And Victoria. You can find me at The Verge and all my handles on everything, Blue Sky, Twitter,

Instagram, all the things is at Vic M's Song. You can find me inside your computer. That's where I live. I'm Ed Zertron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you, of course, to our wonderful producer, Daniel Goodman. You've been hearing us recorded out of the beautiful New York City, Nevada. And yeah, you keep listening to my goddamn show.

We'll have monologue this week as well. Peace out. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

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