Better Offline - The Coming Generative AIPocalypse

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

We're approaching the end of the line for generative AI as big tech realizes that spending $200bn on chips and data centers isn't going to create any good products. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through what might happen - and why we should still have hope. --- 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 funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going?

On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZo Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. In the last episode, I walked you through how Generative AI has hit ceiling and how big tech has burned billions of dollars chasing a technology that really isn't going to give them the returns they got

from the smartphone and cloud computing revolutions. Not that that's going to stop them. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the potentially massive problems they have ahead, the ones they've created by building these massive supercomputers, the ones necessary to capture this imaginary demand of this kind of bullshit AI revolution, and I'm going to try and guess what might happen next. All right, so. The AI boom helped the S&P 500 hit record levels in 2024, largely thanks to chip giant Nvidia, a company that makes both the GPUs necessary to train

and run generative AI and the software architecture behind them, as well as some of the server parts too. Part of Nvidia's remarkable growth has been its ability to capitalize on Kuda architecture, the software layer that lets you do complex computing on GPUs rather than simply using them to render video games or complex 3D images. Someone's going to email and say that that's partially wrong, just bear with me. And of course, one of of Nvidia's other things they do is continually create new GPUs to sell for

tens of thousands of dollars to tech companies that want to burn billions of dollars on generative AI, which has led Nvidia's stock to pop more than 175% over the last year. Back in May, Nvidia's CEO and professional carnival bar Cajensen Huang said that the company was now, and I quote, on a one-year rhythm

in AI GPU production, with its latest Blackwell GPUs, specifically the B-100, B-200, and GBT, 200, used of regenerative AI, supposedly due at the end of 2024. Except they're now delayed until at least March 2025. Now, before we go any further, it's worth noting that when I say GPU, I don't mean the one you'd find in the gaming PC, but a much, much larger chip put on a specialized server and actually a specialized board as well with multiple other GPUs,

all integrated with special casing, cooling and networking infrastructure, all of which is sold by Nvidia, by the way. You can use other things, but, yeah, may as well buy it in one place, right? That's their product strategy. In simple terms, these are the things necessary to make sure all these chips work together efficiently and also stop them from overheating because they get extremely hot and generative AI makes them run at full speed all the time. Now, the initial delay of the new Blackwell chips was caused by a now-fixed design floor in production, but as I've previously suggested, the problem isn't just creating the chips. It's making sure they actually work at scale for the jobs they've been bought for. Now, what if that?

That wasn't possible. A few weeks ago, the information report that NVIDIA is currently grappling with the oldest problem in computing. How to cool the fucking things. According to their reporting, NVIDIA has been asking suppliers to change the design of its 3,000 pound 75 GPU server racks several times to overcome these heating problems, which the information calls, quote, the most complicated design that NVIDIA had ever come up with. According to the report, a few months after revealing the racks, engineers found that they didn't work properly, even when they use the smaller 36 chip racks, and they've been kind of scrambling to fix it ever since. While one can dazzle investors with buzzwords charts and the term superintelligence, the laws of physics are a little bit more of a harsh mistress. And if Nvidia is struggling mere months before the first installations to begin, though I've heard some are going out now,

it's kind of unclear how they practically plan to launch this next generation of chips, let alone doing another one in a year. The information reports that these changes have been made late in production, which is scaring customers that desperately need them now so that their models can continue. you to do something that they will work out later. To quote the information again, two executives at large cloud providers that have ordered the new chips said they're concerned that such last-minute difficulties might push back the timeline for when they can get their GPU clusters up and running next year. The fact that Nvidia is having such significant difficulties with thermal performance is very, very bad. These chips are very expensive, 30 to 70 grand, I hear, and will be running, as I've mentioned, at full speed, generating an incredible amount of heat that must be dissipated,

while sat next to anywhere from 35 to 71 other chips, which will in turn be densely packed so that you can cram more servers into a data center. New, more powerful chips require entirely new methods to rack-mount them, operate them, and cool them. And all of these parts must operate in sync, as overheating GPUs will die. And while these units are big, some of their internal components are nanometers in size, and unless properly cooled, their circuits will start to crumble when roasted by a guy typing Garfield with a gun and a bra in chat GPT.

which I have never done, of course. Remember, Blackwell is supposed to be Nvidia's next big thing. It's meant to represent a major leap forward in performance. If Nvidia doesn't solve its cooling problem and solve it well, its customers will undoubtedly encounter thermal throttling, where the chip reduces its speed in order to avoid causing any permanent damage. It could eliminate some or all of the performance gains obtained from the new architecture, a new manufacturing process, despite costing much, much more,

both for the chips itself and the housing for them. invidia's problem isn't just bringing these thermal performance issues under control, but both keeping them under control and being able to educate their customers on how to do so. Nvidia has, according to the information, repeatedly tried to influence its customer's server integrations to follow its designs, because it thinks it will lead to better performance, but in this case one has to worry if Nvidia's black well chips can be reliably cooled. Maybe they can. Invity has worked out crazy things in the past, and while Nvidia might be able to fix this problem in isolation within its racks, It remains to be seen how this works at scale as they ship and integrate hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs starting in the front half of 2025.

Things also get a little worse when you realize how these chips are being installed. In these giant supercomputer data centers where tens of thousands are as many as 100,000 of them in the case of Elon Musk's colossus data center, which is just very funny that that's what it's for. It's for GROC on a dying social network. But yeah, these GPUs, they're running concert to power generative AI models. that's all they're really for. And the Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that building these vast data centers

creates entirely new engineering challenges, with one expert saying that big tech companies could be spending as much of half of their capital expenditures on replacing parts that have broken down, in large part because these clusters are running on GPUs that are running at full speed that need to all be cooled and need to be cooled well. Remember, the capital expenditures on generative AI

and its associated infrastructure have gone over $200 billion in the last year. If half of that's dedicated to replacing broken shit, what happens when there's no path to profitability? In any case, Nvidia's fine. They'll work it out well enough to keep flogging these things. They've already made billions of dollars selling black wells. They're sold out for a year, in fact, and they'll continue to do so for now, but any manufacturing or cooling issues are going to be very costly. And even then, at some point, somebody has to ask the question, why do we need all these GPUs if we've reached PKI? Despite the remarkable power of these chips,

NVIDIA's entire Enterprise GPU business model centers around the idea that throwing more power at these problems will finally create some solutions. What if that isn't the case, though? So, as ever, I'm kind of pissed off. I'm pissed off reading this stuff, and it's not just because I was saying this months ago. It's because all of this money could have gone literally anywhere else.

They could have done something else. They could have... I don't know. I'm not running a big tech company, but I would have put it into climate stuff or new battery technology. Everyone's saying, I will make her own chips now. Yeah, see you in a few years, dickhead. Well, you go to TSM and ask if they've got any spare slots.

I'm sure they've got plenty. I'm sure that you can just go and build a chip tomorrow. Sam Altman talking about building his own goddamn chips. What an absolute farce this is. This fucking farce. All of this money burned in search of a technology that only kind of works on something sometimes. It's just kind of a joke.

The tech industry is over leveraged. They've doubled, they've tripled, they've quadrupled down on generative AI now. And this technology does not do much more than it did a few months ago. And I don't think it's going to do very much more in a few months. Every single big tech companies pile tens of billions of dollars into building out these massive superclusters with the intent of capturing AI demand. Yet they never seem to think whether they were actually building things that people wanted or would pay for or that would make the money or that would help you money in any way. or really anything to do with an outcome other than line go up. While some have claimed that agents are the next frontier, AI agents, frontier Jesus, nope, keep it. The reality is that agents may be the last generative AI product,

multiple large language models and integrations bouncing off of each other and attempt to simulate what a human might do at a cost that won't be sustainable for the majority of businesses. While Anthropics demo of its alleged model that can control a few browser windows with a prompt might have seemed impressive to credulous people, it specifically mean Casey Newton here. These were controlled demos which Anthropic added was slow and make lots of mistakes. Hey, almost like it's hallucinating. I sure hope they fixed an unfixable problem I'd be talking about for months, Jesus Christ. Even if it does, Anthropic has now successfully replaced an entry-level data worker position at an indeterminate cost and likely an unprofitable one too.

And in many organisations, those jobs have already been outsourced or automated or staffed with cheap contractors. So the people who are going to lose out here are people who are already getting shot on by life. It really sucks. And the obscenity of this mass delusion, it's just nauseating. It's a monolith to bad decision making and the herd mentality of Texmo's powerful people, as well as an outright attempt to manipulate the media into believing something was possible that never was. And the media bought it, hook, line and sinker. You all bought it.

hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted building giant data centers to crunch numbers for software that has no real product market fit or while trying to hammer it into various shapes to make it pretend that it's alive, conscious or even fucking useful. There is no path from what I can see to turning generative AI from what it is today into anything resembling a sustainable business and the only path that big tech appeared to have seen or thought about was to throw as much money, power and data at the problem, an avenue that appeared to be and definitely appears to be now a complete dead end. And worse still, nothing's really come out of this movement. I've used a handful of AI products that I found useful, an AI Power Journal, for example.

But these are not products that one associates with revolutions. They're useful tools that would have been a welcome surprise if it didn't require burning billions of dollars, blowing past emissions targets, and stealing the creative works of millions of people to train them. It's just sickening. It's sickening because this did not have to happen. Had Sondar Pishai seen what Microsoft did with Open AI and said, Not for me, mate. That's definitely not how he talks, but nevertheless, none of this would have continued.

You think Microsoft was going to hold this shit up on their own? God no. They have no juice. Satchin Adela, he's just a cult leader, something I'm going to get into in a later episode. And it's just, it's all very sad. But if you want to cheer yourself up, maybe you could listen to one of the following advertisements, And this is a short episode, so if they don't put one after this, you might just have a short gap between me talking.

That's up to Matt. Matt's a genius. That's my producer, by the way, Matt Osowski. Anyway, ads. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel 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 the knock a pelle 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 group. 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-Haw. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Cuba 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. 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 I-Hart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-8-4-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Life throws hurdles big and small.

The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout, Kate Martin, and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.

If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone

and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail, in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning.

It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human between. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. Yep, that's me.

Clipper Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from. from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment,

and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. And we're back. Look, I truly don't know what happens next, but I'm going to walk you through what I'm thinking.

If we're truly at the diminishing return stage of transformer-based models, it's going to be extremely difficult to justify buying further iterations of Nvidia GPUs past Blackwell. And also, I have doubts they're going to be able to make a new one every year. The entire generative AI movement lives and dies by the idea that more compute power and more training data makes these things better. And if that's no longer the case, there's not really a reason to keep buying bigger and better. What's the point? Even now, what exactly happens when my mind?

Microsoft or Google has racks worth of Blackwell GPUs. Models aren't getting better. Faster, I guess. What does faster even mean? What does better even mean? Better has yet to mean a new product. Better has not seemed to be measurable by humans just by bullshit benchmarks. This also makes the lives of OpenAI and Anthropic a little more difficult. Sam Altman has grown rich and powerful lying about how GPT will somehow lead to AGI, some conscious computer. But at this point, what exactly is Open AI meant to do? What are they doing? The only way this company has ever been able to develop new models is by throwing masses

of compute and training data at them. And their only other choices to start stapling their reasoning model onto the side of their large language model, at which point something happens. Something, everyone, it's happening, something that is so good that literally nobody working for Open AI or in the media appears to be able to tell you what it is. Yeah. Putting that aside, OpenAI is also a terrible business that has to burn $5 billion to make $3.7 billion,

and there's no proof that they're able to bring down their costs. The constant thing I hear from VCs and AI fantasies is that the chips will bring down the cost of inference. Yet I don't see that happening. I've yet to see that happening. There's cerebrous, dinner plate-sized chips, but you know what? I just don't think that shit's going to scale.

And at that point, you have to wonder, Do they have, like, where is this going? I know you're listening to an episode where I tell you, but still, even reading this stuff all day, you just look at it too hard and you start feeling a little crazy. I've read pretty much every article on OpenAI at this point. I've read Microsoft's earnings, multiple quarters straight, same with the rest of them. I've read all their blog posts. I've read all their shit.

They don't have any idea. I'm confident that they don't have any idea. It's terrifying. And this is just this dismal situation where the only other, there's really only a few options, if I'm honest. You stop now. That is the biggest one. You just stop. Someone has to admit, Microsoft, Google, they'll never do this.

They need to go, this is not going to scale, we need to pair this back, or we need to stop it. And it will hurt their stock. It will hurt their media. But it's the right thing to do for the environment alone, but as a sustainable business. But assuming they don't do that, we have another problem, which is the only other option they can have is to keep flooring the gas. It costs $100 million to train GPT40. An Anthropic CEO Dario Amadee estimated a few months ago that training future models would cost $1 billion, if not $10 billion, with one researcher claiming that training OpenAI's next model, GPT5, will cost around a billion dollars. outside of a miracle we're about to enter an era of desperation in generative AI

we're two years in and we have no killer apps no industry defining products other than chat GPT a product that burns billions of dollars and nobody can really describe every episode i'm like email me tell me what chat GPT is and i'll get some smart ass who sends me three paragraphs no no no no that's not a description that's an essay mate you actually need to tell me what the hell this is and if you can't you've proven my point in my extremely thin and rigged game Anyway, neither Microsoft nor META, nor Google, nor Amazon, seem to be able to come up with any profitable use cases, let alone one their users actually like,

nor have any of the people that have raised billions of dollars in venture capital for anything with AI take to the side. An investor interest in AI is already cooling, according to the information. It's kind of unclear how far this fast goes from here, if only because it isn't obvious what it is that anybody gets by investing in future rounds of Open AI Anthropic or any of these other generative AI companies.

At some point they must make money, and the entire dream has been built around the idea that all of these GPUs and all of this money would eventually spit out something, something revolutionary, something world-changing. Yeah, what we have is this clunky, ugly, messy, larceness, environmentally destructive and mediocre piece of shit. Generative AI was a reckless pursuit,

one that shows a total lack of creativity and sense in the minds of big tech and venture capital, one where there was never anything really impressive, other than the amount of money it could burn and the amount of time Sammel and could say something stupid and get quoted for it. I'll be honest with you. I don't really know what happens here. The future was always one that demanded big tech spend more

to make even bigger models that would at some point become useful and it isn't happening. In pursuit of doing so, big tech invested hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure specifically to follow one goal and put AI front and center of their businesses, claiming it was the future without ever checking if it was if it actually did anything useful.

And really, as I've said in the rockcom bubble a few months ago, they don't have anything else. They don't have another growth market. And maybe that's why they're shoving all the cash into this, because they don't have it anywhere else to put it. They don't want to admit they've got nothing else. They don't want to admit that their businesses are crumbling under scrutiny from antitrust. They don't want to admit their services are kind of deteriorating, especially in the case of meta. They don't have anything else. The revenue isn't coming.

The products aren't coming. Orion, Open AI's name. model, it will overwhelm, as will its competitors model, and at some point somebody is going to blink in one of the hyperscalers, and the AI era will end. Almost every single generative AI company that you've heard of is deeply unprofitable, and there are very few innovations coming to save them from the atrophy of the foundation model system, which, by the way, is the main large language models that they're training in all of these cases. Now, I've tried to keep my emotions in check, but you might be able to tell that this pisses me off a little.

I just feel sad and exhausted about it all. I feel drained as I look at how many times I've tried to warm people. I'm pissed off at the many members of the media that failed to push back against the over promises and outright lies of people like Sam Altman and Dario Amadei. Wario Amadee is what I'm calling him now. It's not particularly funny or accurate, but it's funny to say for me. And I'm just full of dread as I consider the economic ramifications of this industry collapsing as well as the damage it's already done to our fucking environment.

Once the AI bubble pops, there are no hypergrowth market. it's left, which will in turn lead to a bloodbath in big tech stocks as they realize that they're out of big ideas to convince the street that they're going to grow forever. There are some that will boast about being right here, and yes, there is some satisfaction in being so. Of course, you take the moment you do the victory lap, whatever, I said a thing, and I was right. I don't know if I'm really doing the Joker kick down the stairs here. I don't know if I'm really happy about being right here. I think Generative AI is a huge waste of money. I think the damage it's doing to the environment is disgusting. I think the stealing

required to make the training data side is disgusting. I think all of that ending is good. And I think it needs to, just to be clear where I sit. But you know what? The other problem is that when this all falls apart, it's going to be rough. It's going to be rough for people in the tech industry. And it's going to be rough for the economy. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smyl 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 headwriter, 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 group. The yarn birds, right?

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 Smygel 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 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. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Life throws hurdles big and small.

The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we said, down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going from the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.

It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything.

I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win.

A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined.

And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment, and the next we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations,

stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me, or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Cliverts Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or we're you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. So I'm going to start wrapping up here. I'm going to read you a quote from bubble trouble, a piece I wrote in April. Ahem. How do you solve all of these incredibly difficult problems? What does Open AI or Anthropic do when they run out of data, and its synthetic data doesn't

fill the gap, or worse, massively degrades the quality of their outputs? What does Sam Altman do if GPT5, like GPT4, doesn't significantly improve its performance? and he can't find enough compute to make the next step. What the Open AI and Anthropic do when they realize they'll likely never turn a profit? What does Microsoft or Amazon or Google do if demand never really takes off and they're left with billions of dollars

of underutilized data centers? What does Nvidia do if the demand for its chips drops off a cliff as a result? I don't know why more people aren't screaming from the rooftops about how unsustainable the AI boom is and how impossible some of the challenges are that it faces. There is no way to create enough training data for these models and little that we've seen so far suggests that generative AI will make anybody but Nvidia money.

We're reaching the point where physics, things like heat and electricity, are getting in the way of progressing much further, and it's hard to stomach investing more, considering where we're at right now. Once you cut through the noise, it just seems kind of barely goddamn mediocre. There's no iPhone moment coming, I'm afraid. So, right, not going to be too smug, but reading that back pretty accurate, pretty good for April. I was right then and I'm right now. Generative AI isn't a revolution. It's an evolution of a tech industry overtaken by growth-hungry management consultant freaks that I neither know the problems

that real people face nor how to fix them. It's a waste. It's a sickening waste, a monument to the corrupting force of growth and a sign that people, empowering tech no longer work for you, the customer, but for venture capitalists and for the markets. I also want to be clear that none of these companies seem to have ever had a plan. They believed that if they threw enough GPUs together, they would turn generative AI with a probabilistic model for generating stuff, either into

a sentient computer in OpenAI's case or into some sort of useful product in Microsoft's case. Neither of them are right. And I get it. I get some of you that you're like, well, this is all the big plans so they can proliferate data centers. This is all the big plans so they can steal everything and ship it

back to us, so they can do this to us. It's much easier and more comfortable to look at the world as a series of conspiracies, these grand strategies, and that all of these people are powerful, which they are, but powerful in a way that is kind of the dread hand controlling your everything. But honestly, it's far scarier to see reality for what it is. Extremely rich and powerful people that are willing to bet insanely large amounts of money on what amounts to a few PDFs in their fucking gut. These people have no plan. This is not big tech's big plan to or their excuse to build more data centers. It's the death throws of 20 years of growth at all cost thinking, because throwing a bunch of money at more servers and more engineers

always seem to create more growth in the past. In practice, this means that the people in charge and the strategies they employ are born not of an interest in improving the lives of you, their customer, but in increasing revenue growth, which means products they create aren't really about solving any problem other than what will make somebody give me more money, which doesn't necessarily mean provide the money. with a service. Generative AI is the perfect monster of the rock economy. It's a technology that

lacks any real purpose sold as if it could do literally anything, one without a real business model or a killer app, proliferated because big tech no longer innovates. They clone and they monopolize. Yes, this much money can be this stupid, and yes, they will burn billions more in pursuit of a non-specific dream that involves charging you more money and trapping you in their ecosystem. But they're out of ideas. This was their big thing. If they had to be a lot of, they had to be a lot of had anything else, they wouldn't have done this. They don't. They're kind of screwed. I don't know how long it will take for you to see how much they're screwed. Could be a year, could be two quarters. I honestly don't know. But it cannot go on like this. It cannot, because at some

point burning billions of dollars every month is not going to work. At some point, the markets will react or at some point, I don't know, CFO of Microsoft Damien Hood might say, hey, we're burning billions of dollars to lose billions of dollars. We don't have the customers. These products aren't useful enough. Or maybe she keeps driving to hell. I don't know. But the longer it takes, the worst it's going to be, for the industry and for the markets. I'm not trying to be a doomsay, just like I wasn't trying to be one in March. I believe all of this is going nowhere. And at some point, Google, Microsoft Meta, one of them's going to blink and they're going to pull back on the CAPEX. And before then, you're going to see a lot of desperate stories about how

AI gains can be found outside of training new models to try and keep the party going, despite reality flicking the lights on and off and threatening to call the police on them. Really, though, you're going to see so much of that. You're going to see people in the media who should know better still pumping, still pumping that bag. Because it gets back to the conspiracy theory I was talking about before. It gets back there because it's so much easier to think, oh, they'll work it out, they're smart, I trust them. I trust these people.

they're going to work out and make generative AI, make so much money, it's going to be so profitable, always going to be so good. Because when you don't accept that premise everything you write about, it feels like writing about a dying person. Oh, Anthropic claims it can write in your writing style now, great. Where's Anthropic going to be in two years? The toilet, probably. Going to need a pretty big toilet for all those GPUs. Oh, Open AI, they have this idea.

Yeah, their ideas have fucking sucked so far. And the irony is large language models as an idea aren't a bad one. The concept is interesting, a word calculator, sexy or correct, whatever you call it, there are meaningful things you could build with that. But not at this cost. Not like this. Not this much money. Not stealing from artists.

Not stealing from writers. I don't know if mine have been used, but if they have, I got the legal resources to fight and I fucking will. I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of what I see in being done to contractors. I'm sick of what I see happening to art directors who lose their jobs to some shithead using Dali 3 Mini. It's grotesque. It's enough to turn your stomach. And as we come towards the end of the year, you may have at the beginning of the show being like, why Ed is so, why is he so annoyed?

I think I've done a good job explaining it. But I want to end on a good note. And look, I fear for the future for many reasons, but I always have hope because I believe that there are deal good people in the tech industry. And I love technology. I'm going to say it every episode, but I can, because I really do. I love my computer. I love the people I find through it. I love the friends and the families and the loved one I've found through it. And I know a lot of you do too. And I want to make that clear, because none of this is a problem with tech is it whole. The people who have taken over tech are the problem. The management consultant elite.

The business people who just want to see growth at all costs. But I do have hope. I do have hope because of Blue Sky, which is a social network that I've posted on for over a year, that's finally taking root. And this isn't an ad. This is just somewhere I spend 11 hours a day posting. But it feels different. It's growing rapidly. It's competing with threads and with Twitter. And they're doing so on an honest product and an open protocol. I'm not saying it's the solution for everything. I'm just saying solutions are possible. People are building them. People are trying. It doesn't have to be like this. economy does not have to control the destiny of tech. And I think better things can happen. It's

going to take a while. Things are going to blow up. I'm scared for this industry for what happens after generative AA collapses and not just for the initial problem, but when they don't have anything else the next quarter. But there are other ideas out there. There are other ideas for the future that aren't just born out of this shitty scuzzy billionaire mindset from shit heels like Sondar Pichai and Sam Mortman and Prabaghar Aghaegovan, and they can and they will grow out of the ruins that these people create. I want you to have hope. Hope isn't just about blindly being optimistic. You can feel hopeful while still being pissed off at everything. Hope is about getting up every day and being willing to say what you think better looks like. What you think a better world could be. You don't have to do it

at scale. You don't have to be an influence. You don't have to write. You don't have to have a tech podcast. You just have to talk to your friends. You have to talk to the people you know. You have to fight within the institutions you are in to find the joy and to push out things like generative AI. We can have better. And you are the beginning of fixing these problems. And I actually believe that with enough pushback, these big tech companies can change too. I'm not relying on them. I hate that I have to use their products. But you don't. Perhaps you can find alternatives.

I always say it's a great day to join Blue Sky or use Signal. Proton mail is apparently great. I'm very much stuck in the Gmail ecosystem, which sucks. A few decades in there, it's tough. Is it decades now? Either way. It's hard to escape the rot economy whole, but there are bits of yourself you can remove from it.

Please do not give up hope. Please stay angry. if you are angry, not telling you to be angry. Your indignation is necessary. Your righteous indignation is necessary to tell these people to go fucking pound sand. Your little changes, those discussions you have with colleagues and friends and loved ones about these problems. That knowledge is powerful and I encourage you to talk about these things. The tech industry has grown big and strong telling you you're too stupid to understand what they're doing. And unless I'm very much mistaken based on the readers I and listeners I talk to. You all get this. I just explain

GPUs and server architecture and shit. I think you mostly got it, right? I'm assuming you did, you keep listening. And that's because this stuff isn't that complex. They want you to believe it is so that they can stay powerful. But you're a lot goddamn smarter than you give yourself credit for. You're a lot goddamn stronger than you are too. Don't let these people make you feel oppressed. Don't let them make you feel weak. You are not. You are so much more valuable to them than they'll ever be to you. You have been conned. You are the victim. And you will succeed long term.

Spread the good ideas. Talk about what a good world looks like. And thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email. me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course

my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed?at to visit the discord and go to R slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman

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