Hater Season: Corey Quinn

12:54Corey Quinn:that I think is being lost industry-wide. because I've talked to folks at AWS about this and folks who have left AWS. I used to dabble working in data centers, which means I know just enough to know what I don't know. And I've talked to these folks. When Amazon commits to being able to bring certain amounts of capacity online, it is real capacity. It is, each data center they build out, each region they build out is a multi-billion dollar investment and it takes years to go from signed contract to it's serving customer traffic. They are real when it comes to this stuff.

13:26Ed:there are a number of other companies building it well yes and they're really running it they

13:30Corey Quinn:have operationalized how to run these things better than you or i would ever be able to do that is their superpower other companies and they're spinning up a data center do not do this they are well we've rented a warehouse out we wound up throwing some generators in the back and we're gonna call comcast and see what they can do to get it hooked up to the internet next

13:48Ed:but when you say other companies ready to go yeah but you say other companies you don't mean google and Microsoft here. No, I'm talking, well, I am talking Oracle, but yes.

13:56Corey Quinn:Microsoft kind of. Oracle just agrees. Microsoft is shitty at building data centers. Azure has been a disappointment across the board. Capacity shortfalls plagued them for a long time during COVID. They generally tend to view two racks in a data center somewhere as a region, which is weird and messed up. Google is real, but Google has made other interesting technical trade-offs that I can see why they did it. But I would say when it comes to infrastructure, in my experience, AWS is number one. Google is a close second.

14:27Ed:I have heard some crazy shit about Google that they're doing these things called stalks, where they just create these pop-up data centers. Companies have been doing that for a long time. Every company does that for points of presence. Fascinating stuff. Yes. Anyway, but back to the major question, which is AWS seems like a sensible business that does real things. I'm not disputing that. Yes. But -

14:49Corey Quinn:It prints money. Let's be clear on this. despite all, remember, I help companies negotiate their cloud contracts and understand what they're spending and where the money is going, which means that companies can say a lot. People say a lot of things, but one of my prime rules about this stuff is that customers lie mostly to themselves. They're not intentionally trying to mislead me when they tell me what's going on, but I find the bills are the ultimate source of truth because if you're not paying for it, it doesn't really exist. And the AI spend in most of these companies hovers, in my experience, with a few outliers, between 5 % and 7 % of their total infrastructure spend.

15:25Corey Quinn:Hmm. Right. It is not three times. Companies that are doing a$300 million a year contract with AWS are not turning around and saying, better make it$400 because of all the Gen AI. That is not happening.

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16:01Corey Quinn:Lewis Hamilton, Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon. Wouldn't you know it, Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon.

16:08Ed:the story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom. And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both? He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. And plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:46Ed: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, iHeart's 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-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules.

17:27Ed:We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. inside Charlie's place black and white people danced together but not everyone was happy about it you saw the KKK? yeah they were dressed up in their uniform the KKK set out to raid Charlie take him away from here Charlie was an example of power they had to crush him from Atlas Obscura Rococo Punch and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:16Corey Quinn:When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie.

18:20Ed:You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable?

18:21Corey Quinn:Because I want to get confident.

18:23Ed:This is DJ Hester Prynne's Music is Therapy, a new podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist that asks one simple question. Who do you want to be? And what's the song that can take you there? Music changes what you feel. And what you feel changes what you do, right? That moment where a song shifts something inside you, that's where transformation starts. This year, I'm talking to experts across every area of life. Like personal finance icon Gene Chatzky, New York Times journalist David Gellis, relationship legend Dan Savage, human connection teacher Mark Groves, and the man who shaped my ear more than anyone, Questlove.

19:00Ed:They'll bring the strategies. I'll pair them with the right records and we'll teach you how to use the music to make change stick. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year.

19:11Corey Quinn:Listen to DJ Hester-Krin's Music is Therapy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

19:15Ed:or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:20Ed:That's kind of my point, though. It's like, Amazon Web Services doesn't seem like a business that chases fads, or if it does, it chase them in a more sustainable way they're now credit they docked they ducked blockchain

19:31Corey Quinn:almost entirely and i was worried they were going to fall down that rabbit hole but i mean they're

19:35Ed:doing 200 billion dollars in capex this year what is it they see in ai because to your point just now what like seven to eight percent of a 300 million contract that's dog shit like that's that's not

19:47Corey Quinn:going to pay back that capex andy i believe this is my belief here i can't base it on anything other than what I've seen Amazon do. And what I've seen from customers, Amazon is selling the capacity that they are spinning up, they are spinning up as fast as they can spin it. The question that I have is twofold. One, okay, you invest in all these AI data centers and the AI bubble pops, deflates, whatever. How repurposable are those facilities and that capital expenditure? If it's data centers and networking, yes, very repurposable. GPUs, well, we're all gonna get really into online gaming in a few years.

20:23Corey Quinn:I don't know. Except they don't have video out. They don't have DisplayPort. Yes. We still call them graphics, which I love.

20:30Ed:I think it's... I like the people who... I've also heard people say general purpose units, which is the opposite of what a GPU is. Like it is very much not general purpose.

20:39Corey Quinn:It became public through a press release that they have signed a$38 billion contract with OpenAI. Yeah, with... Insane. There is zero doubt in my mind that... Because I did some digging on this. is there line of sight for aws to bring on line 38 billion dollars of capacity to provide to open ai yes yes there is where my doubts come in is open ai good for the money no i have some questions

21:09Ed:here mostly from reading your work and that's the thing it seems like something about gpus and large language models have broken everyone that's kind of the point i'm getting to because like everything i've read about aws and i read because i'm a dickhead i went and i read all of the previous coverage of the lead up to aws becoming profitable kevin roost by the way literally a month before they did so wrote an article saying it would be a while what fucking three points in that ass wipe anyway um everything i read was everyone saying oh amazon's being really spendy they're spending six to seven billion in capex a quarter oh no and then the total capex of 69 billion, but everything from Amazon was like, we're building something sustainable.

21:51Ed:We see the revenue potential behind it. It was all very boring. Now with AWS, everything they talk about with large language models, it sounds like they've all been huffing ayahuasca or something. They sound insane.

22:02Corey Quinn:They do. Which tells me one of two things is true, or honestly, this is the real world. Unlike on Twitter, two complex competing things can in fact be true at the same time. One of them is they're still doing a lot of that boring stuff, but the publicity all accrues to the things that are far flung. This is also$200 billion across the entirety of Amazon. That includes distribution centers. That includes low earth orbit, basically Amazon basic Starlink. I think they're calling it Leo now. It includes, yes, their AI nonsense, their factory boondoggles, their robotic stuff, office build outs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

22:42Corey Quinn:They don't give clear breakdowns on how much of that is AI services. and frankly, I wouldn't trust them if they did. Not since I saw a job ad a few years back on Amazon.jobs saying, experience with other AI services like S3. S3 is a storage service. That's not AI. You can use it to feed AI, but -

23:02Ed:I hear Anthropics, one of the largest S3 customers I've heard.

23:06Corey Quinn:I've heard from seven different companies so far that they are the largest customer of S3. Yeah, it's funny how that tends to work out.

23:13Ed:God, I miss working in cloud software so much where everyone's the exclusive partner, everyone's the number one partner, and everyone's the largest. It's so...

23:23Corey Quinn:And the qualifiers get there like,

23:25Ed:we're the largest S3 customer in Australia. Great, good street. In the Northeast region, between the hours of 6 a.m. and 12 a.m. Exactly. Okay, so here's the thing with the CapEx. I'm sure a lot of it is for AI, just because if you look at their previous years of CapEx, It was like 40, 50, 60, yeah, 40, 61, 63, 52, 83, 131, 200 billion.

23:52Corey Quinn:Charles Fitzgerald over at Platform Anomics has been tracking CapEx spend of the hyperscalers for a long time now. And he was one of the first people to call out the cloud pretenders, IBM and Oracle specifically, because they're making all the cloud noises, but they're not spending anything on CapEx. And you kind of have to build the data centers for this to work. Not to worry, Oracle's taking care of that. What I want to know, my question is when you start, okay, we're going to spend, even assume it's all AI, whatever, fine,$200 billion on AI spent. How much of that is just in the form of a check written to NVIDIA?

24:22Ed:and that's the question because from my understanding my understanding the i should bring up the chart i'm just going to do something live on air i'm just bringing up an image and of course i can't find it nevertheless there is an image i have that amazon doesn't well amazon builds its own the tranium gpus and do they still use inferentia or is it just sounds like something my grandpa got diagnosed with you yeah but do they like inferentia i

24:50Corey Quinn:thought was there oh they talk about it a fair bit they talk about tranium and the thing is is what you don't see is people using it in the wild uh i looked at a bunch of stuff with olama that's the run your own stuff there i searched about a year ago for the term inferentia it showed up once in a pull request that had been closed after 60 days because no one responded to it no one is using this in the real world uh a year ago uh you're in the month now they had uh with Lithuanian 2, I think it was, they had speakers from Anthropic on keynote stage talking about it, which, yeah, okay, they invested how many tens of billions into Anthropic?

25:25Corey Quinn:Yeah, I'm sure there's a contract requirement around sending an exec to talk on stage. And the other one was Apple. Apple doesn't admit what they're doing to their own employees, to each other, let alone publicly. So, yeah, that looked about as natural as an oral bowel movement. Nice. But those are the only two companies I've seen doing anything with it.

25:44Ed:so based on this chart i've got which involves various stars and company names it looks like amazon gets their gpus through foxconn also known as hon high precision uh corporation limited i love chinese and taiwanese names by the way tsmc is almost certainly in there no tsmc isn't because tsmc builds the chips no these are the server manufacturers ships themselves because they have anna they bought and do the design but they don't do the fab so they ship I assume that Annapurna, which is the internal place that Amazon makes its chips, ships them, it looks like, to Foxconn, Quanta Computing, and Jabil.

26:21Ed:And then they put them in the servers. So really, it's them cutting the checks to them. I'm going to be watching the monthly earnings of those companies in Taiwan quite viciously, because here's the thing. If it's all$200 billion of CapEx, if they really think they're going to get paid that much, but what happens, Has Amazon ever faced the situation where they did an overbuild? Has that ever happened to them? What did they do? Yes.

26:45Corey Quinn:They made a bunch of noises about it. During the pandemic, they overbuilt their distribution centers. Ah, but that's people buy stuff. Exactly. That was my position on it. And it feels like, okay, like they slowed it down and they didn't shut them down, but they waited for people to grow into it. The thing is, is a warehouse that you use to ship out underpants. Great. that has the same utility more or less five years from now as it does yes exactly a lot of these chips are depreciating assets like oh man i can't wait to get that seven-year-old computer in here

27:17Ed:so i can do some real work says no one ever well also training them especially they've got what

27:22Corey Quinn:they're on generation two three now uh they're now shipping three right at the time to pre-announce four and then a desperate attempt to osborne computer themselves yeah explain that reference Oh, Osborne Computer was a company back in the 80s. They launched the Osborne 1, and their CEO went out and did a whole press junket. And he's like, yeah, this is great, but Osborne 2 is going to blow the crap out of it. Oh, like NVIDIA. And everyone's like, great, we're not going to buy the Osborne 1 then. The company went under and never shipped the Osborne 2.

27:51Ed:Wow, okay, not like NVIDIA then. This is the thing. Surely that sets Amazon up for a big problem with those Tranium chips. success, like even if in some weird world that Tranium 4 or 5 was amazing, I don't think it will be, but just saying, doesn't that mean they're going to be sitting on a bunch of obsolete Tranium? It just feels very questionable.

28:11Corey Quinn:You know, you can say a lot about OpenAI, and you do, but that press release where they announced that$38 billion contract, they didn't mention Tranium. They didn't, did they? Which tells me that if it were half as good at the model training as they say it is, open ai would be all about it yeah i am not seeing that to be true well clammy sam altman he's he

28:34Ed:signed a thing with a cerebrus you remember your cerebrus uh is there anyone that sam altman has not signed deals with uh let's think uh grok i haven't signed one with grok yet okay good good i mean actually sorry just to be clear hasn't signed with either well i guess it would he wouldn't someone with grok as technically grok is a competitor i mean g-r-o-q uh the annoying fast inference. I don't know, at this point, my hate of them, and people are going to say this episode was too technical, and the answer is, calm down, this is my podcast. I'm just, I'm wondering at what point they say uncle, because, okay,$200 billion, and let's say$125 billion of that is AI, right?

29:17Ed:AI chips. Takes four or five years, probably, to install all of that. to what end what happens in four are they going to make what i mean it would be that's what no

29:27Corey Quinn:one is able to explain to me what use cases today do are we looking at where wow if we had 10 times as much inference as we do today then x would be possible solve for x i'm not hearing it no i'm not

29:39Ed:either i'm not even being my usual haiti self even though this is hater season it's i genuinely can't get that answer out of anyone even the boosters it's like there's this demand insatiable demand for compute. I don't know if that's true. We're going to summon God through JSON is step one. And step two is we're going to ask God what to do. I mean, that's the thing. I do think that they, I think that, have you seen the revenue projections for these companies? Have you ever seen like Oracle's cashflow? So if you see this thing where it's like -

30:09Corey Quinn:The ones that they put out also known as, there's a reason that every time Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, goes and gives a keynote or talks somewhere, they preface it with a disclosure that is the lawyer version of everything you are about to hear is a fanciful imagining of

30:22Ed:reality don't listen to him he's he's he's he's had a long day he hasn't taken his nap fuck if hr geiger's jerry stiller uh he um the thing is you look at these uh cash flow positive these cash flow diagrams for anthropic open ai and oracle they all follow the same thing which is terrible cash flow negative cash flow for years and years and years and then in 2029 everything changes number go up and i i at this point genuinely think that they think they're going to invent agi in 2029 that that's the only plan they have because they're not they're not

30:58Corey Quinn:doing the things that they're not if they genuinely believe that they would not be doing these things we think that we are three years away from launching agi that will change everything so what are we going to do we're going to find a way to put ads into chat jippity that is not the play when you are when you think you're on the verge of the singularity

31:16Ed:i mean nobody was a demo demis habit i don't know i don't like him to such an extent i refuse to learn his name the deep mind bloke i try not to i try not to anthropomorphize either ai or its creators yeah uh deepest man beepers um he's the one that every few weeks does an interview and he's like and then god is going to come out i'm really scared of what the computer will do he doesn't sound like that he wishes and it's just you make it sound exciting yeah exactly it sounds fun and interesting and comical when these people are just boring boring people boring motherfuckers but it's just these massive over promises and these weird fucking like these weird things where like looking let's look at this there are 650 billion dollars in capex being spent this year just by alphabet amazon meta and microsoft where is it going genuinely actually simple question i actually don't know where it's going anymore it's leading to a giant hole in their balance

32:20Corey Quinn:sheet at some point right you'll notice that all of the hyperscalers all of them uh that have succeeded even the pretenders have other businesses that finance this yes there has never been a successful hyperscaler that launched as a hyperscaler the closest story you've got to that and i question whether you'd call them a hyperscaler is cloudflare because they start as a cdn and then just added the rest of the cloud stuff and let's see how big their stock is i got

32:46Ed:a 59 billion dollar market cap well they're a real company yeah you wouldn't want to i wouldn't want to invest in a company that wasn't making egregious promises but it's just jesus it's just so strange because even if they think ai is going to be big surely all the money they're spending today is not going to do that like all of these chips aren't going to do it the models they train today aren't going to do it the it's like they're trying to bootstrap from thing to thing to thing

33:13Corey Quinn:the story that concerns me is i okay you take a look at these companies and their subscription plans. Top end of it is 200 bucks. Great. I pay it myself just so I can dispatch a winged monkey to build me a shit post website, which is awesome. And sometimes it works. And sometimes I have to prompt it to do different things. Great. It's better at shitty front end than I am at shitty front end. Terrific. I'm not going to spend five grand on that. Yeah. But the model for Zoom's not, and I'm not just talking me here. We are talking effectively everyone. It's like the The unspoken message of a lot of these folks is that your boss is going to fire you and then take your salary and split it with the AI company.

33:51Ed:Right. And also that you will be able to code everything with AI versus what people love that I quote the same thing. Carl Brown saying makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder.

34:04Corey Quinn:We are building software at Duckbill. We are hiring engineers. Is this because we're stupid? I don't believe that to be true.

34:40Corey Quinn:The End

34:44Ed:story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom. And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both? He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. And plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

35:22Ed: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, iHeart's 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-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules.

36:03Ed:We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:52Ed:Ever feel like you're being chased by the marriage police?

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37:38Ed:The meet awkward, the near misses, the heartbreak, and let's not forget all the jokes.

37:46Ed:Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

37:57Ed:Yeah, and that's kind of the thing. It's like, I don't know, people still seem to be hiring software engineers. The engineers are getting fired and replaced with AI. Story doesn't seem to work. And also, every time I go and read someone who claims that clawed code changed their entire life, it mostly comes down to, yeah, it took something from a few hours to an hour. And it's like, cool. Great. Okay.

38:18Corey Quinn:It changed my life. What did it do? It taught me to clearly explain what I wanted.

38:22Ed:Yeah. But also, I still had to fix things. it's like if if all of this money just went into creating slightly more efficient software engineers and even then the data suggests they're less efficient i don't know was this worth it and amazon certainly isn't amazon certainly isn't i guess they're getting the chunk out of anthropic from like this like they're they can claim anthropic success they can have them pay

38:49Corey Quinn:for tranium in project the platform company where when people build interesting things on top of you How do you take credit for that without being obnoxious? I mean, has that ever been a problem for Amazon?

39:01Ed:Well, it's not that they're worried about being obnoxious, it's just they're bad at messaging. Well, I mean, I mentioned him earlier, Panos Panay. Panos Panay came over from Microsoft, from the Surface team, to lead Amazon's Alexa Plus. I mean, now there's something obnoxious. Now there's some real generative AI bullshit. they've lost like billions on Alexa now as well oh god what a strange company Amazon's become

39:33Corey Quinn:they've always been peculiar the problem is is at some point of scale like we're a little weird no longer carries water it's great you're now one of the linchpins of the global economy you have to explain what you're doing a bit more effectively yeah I I what do you think

39:51Ed:you've known you've known amazon for 100 years now what do you think happens if the ai bubble bursts what do you actually think they do like what do you think are they the types to actually mothball this stuff would they just pretend like this never happened aspects of it but there are

40:10Corey Quinn:again they are making money hand over fist on the actual nuts and bolts of cloud computing that's not going away uh they they will their stock will tumble because they're not posting massive growth numbers, but they have a banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is, is what happens when there's a giant hole in their balance sheet? Because, well, it turns out that hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts everyone signed, they suddenly, they don't got the money. What do we do? That's going to be a systemic problem. It's not going to just hit Amazon. It's going to hit a lot of folks.

40:42Corey Quinn:And I think that the answer everyone's sort of hoping for in that space is government bailout. No.

40:47Ed:But of Amazon, though? I would be so irritated. Well, also, what are they bailing out? Amazon's not going to go bankrupt. Even if Amazon had to take a massive impairment on elder Tranium chips, and it was like$30 billion. But the shareholders had. The shareholders. They'll be mad. Don't get me wrong. But it's not going to destroy Amazon. Like, it's not. I mean, it might destroy Andy Jassy's asshole. Like, it might send Andy Jassy and an iron ball into the sun. But it doesn't feel like it will kill them. I just don't know what a bailout would be. I am so annoyed that I had great hopes when Andy took over,

41:28Corey Quinn:but it seems like the company has just continued down the insuredification curve. They're not doing surprising things. The reason I started the last week in AWS newsletter in 2017 was that every week they were fixing massive customer-facing problems, and it was hard to keep track because they were just as bad then as they are now at messaging these things. 2017. Right. Now, they don't do that anymore. It's basically inertia. I would not be able to start the newsletter and build a readership today the way that I did back then just because people do not care nearly so much about the platform as they once did.

42:01Corey Quinn:So when did you notice the shift happened? It was first gradually and all at once, I think, is probably the way to frame it. when I realized that I went from every week having the problem of there's so much stuff here, which ones make the cut, to there's so much filler here, where's anything actually worth writing about? And when you say filler, what do you mean? They used to say, they used to talk about things like AWS Lambda, a transformative shift in how a compute could be run. They put that out with the same enthusiasm, corporate voice as there's now a third CloudFront edge location in Dallas, which even people in Dallas do not give a toss about.

42:44Corey Quinn:Right.

42:45Ed:What does Lambda do?

42:46Corey Quinn:In effect, you give it its code. It runs the code when certain trigger events happen, be it a web request, be it a time being hit, be it something, some other event hitting. And it only charges you for while it runs. Huh. And massively scales up, and you don't have to worry about any of the care and feeding of the infrastructure around it, which... That's really cool. It is. It was cool. It was beta in 2015. But now the last truly great things Amazon put out that changed the way I thought about how this could work.

43:13Ed:Except now Amazon doesn't really put out fun new updates.

43:17Corey Quinn:It's just incremental updates. We have a new thing. We've launched our own large language model called Nova. It's not as good as the ones you currently use, but it's less money. Yeah, what's great stage, they don't care. what's great is if you look where nova is wow it's in the uh top 25 below catcoder pro kimmy

43:41Ed:2.5 grok 4.1 memo mini max quen thinking kimmy k2 basically every other model right exactly it's

43:49Corey Quinn:like like they're racing neck and neck with ed's taxidermy and frontier ai lab there's it really

43:55Ed:is that though it's like it's something called yeah ernie from baidu like every chinese model appears to cry that's so funny what a what a horrible situation we found ourselves in well

44:07Corey Quinn:amazon prides itself on being frugal and it turns out that when i have to assume the reason the titan models that were so bad they never really saw broad release in light of day uh was that uh it's okay it's gonna cost us a billion dollars to train this model what can you do for 20 million like that that is the amazon ethos fail is the answer unless it comes to capex though like that's

44:30Ed:the thing it feels like what you say there goes directly against how they're dealing with ai it feels like ai has just poisoned their brains oh my god yes i i wound up doing a so i back when

44:40Corey Quinn:these stuff all started coming out i had fun with it i i ran a bunch of custom questions against these things like rank the u.s presidents by absorbency and then see how long it's going to to bully them into doing it or give me some criticisms of cory quinn and one of the early chat gpt things made me question like aspects of my life and go home and drink heavily whereas i asked one of the early amazon models that question and it would have been like exhibit a in the defamation case except i'd have to prove that anyone took anything amazon said even slightly

45:06Ed:seriously right it's it's just weird there's something that i think that i don't know if ai psychosis is it but i mentioned this with david gerard it's like people getting one-shotted by this. It must one-shot executives. I think... Oh, it absolutely does.

45:22Corey Quinn:I use it myself in the curation of my newsletter, for example. Why? Because this is a terrific use case, and I think it encapsulates my philosophy on this, where Amazon, I consume all their RSS feeds every week, and there are roughly 150 items that come out. So what I do is I have a scoring thing that pops up two columns. Here's the good ones, here's the crap ones. And I have a whole rubric, that I have put into this, it saves me a tremendous amount of time. I go through and I put some from, I move some back and forth as I read down the list. And increasingly, as it learns from my decisions, it's getting it mostly right.

45:59Corey Quinn:It speeds up my workflow. It is convenient. Is this worth changing the entire world for? No, no, it is not. But I'll make hay while the sun shines. Besides, if I'm going to make fun of something, I should be using it so I can understand it to make fun of it more effectively.

46:13Ed:Right. But would you pay the real rights for it? Because that's what I think is going to break this as well. It's when these companies start having to charge the real costs, when they have to start paying the margins. Right now, this is costing me seven cents a month.

46:26Corey Quinn:I am glad to pay that. I would probably pay as high for that as, I don't know, 20 bucks a month, which again, that's a significant increase there. Sure. But too much beyond that? No, I spent seven years going and doing this by hand. I don't feel the need to stop. I did use Claude Code for several weeks to rebuild the entire interface because I had this janky, horrible newsletter publication thing that I kept meaning to replace. I looked into what it would take to have an engineer do it between$20 ,000 to$50 ,000. This was just three weeks over the holiday break of prompting the thing, and it finally got it dialed in and correct.

47:02Corey Quinn:Now, in practice, if neither one of those two things is a viable option, there's a bunch of stuff off the shelf these days that didn't exist back then that I could have worked with and had a much better base. But this was fun. This was, I could use some software in this small place. The cost of generating this software now, from my time perspective, is minimal. And it fills in a gap. And these things are good at solving, at building tools to solve one very specific problem. Where these things fall down, software has always fallen down on this, is as soon as the requirements change. I set out a link list every Monday.

47:35Corey Quinn:I built software myself to handle this. When I started sending out blog posts with it as well, I had to go back to the drawing board and redo an awful lot because, oh, it's a different model. The entire flow changes when I introduce a requirement downstream. When software becomes free and is no longer the bottleneck, more or less, you can build custom tools for any given situation far more effectively. I started writing a bash script to give someone access to just run this one command in your terminal, give you access to this thing. And I started writing it myself, threw it into one of these things.

48:06Corey Quinn:It came out with a much better script as a one-off that I don't need again. I could, I have done it myself. Yeah. And about four hours, but would I have no, it's so things. It's all those small problems. They're point solutions, but I'm not firing people for this. I'm not replacing segments of the economy with this. Uh, I have, my brother is one of the few people I've heard about being definitely impacted by the rise of AI until last year. He was a freelance translator. I'd believe that that feels like it's something that is easily prone to disruption. Uh, I buy less stock photography when I can have shitpost images of giraffes on fire in data centers now.

48:40Ed:Well, they're not going to love that. They're not. They're not going to love that. The listeners are not going to love that. Oh, no, I don't even... I think AI art is just genuinely ugly. You know, even that it would suck the life out of the shitpost. Oh, it is. And I pay for artists

48:54Corey Quinn:to do things correctly. Okay, good. I have stickers that I gave out at reInvent for shitposting.ai and it was bad AI art in a 1950s style, like a dog with an extra leg, people with extra hands and whatnot, that we hired an illustrator as a human to draw in the style of bad AI. I thought that was a lot of fun. For something like this, yeah, I am paying artists and I'm making it work. I'm building a shitpost meme to throw on Twitter and never think about again. That's the thing though, posting is an art.

49:25Ed:Posting is an art and you're bringing, there is no Bushido in generating images. But let's move on from this subject because i have one final question please hit me with it so you've seen this thing about how everyone's freaking out about and i know you're going to love this everyone's like oh claude code is replacing software that everybody how funny is it how ridiculous is it to you i'm leading question i realized the idea that instead of buying on a per seat basis people are going to just replace sass with their own internal shit i think it's one of the funniest and stupidest things I've ever heard.

50:02Corey Quinn:Oh, I think it's a terrific thing that is totally happening. Because obviously, again, I am building software for enterprises. Well, they can just write this code overnight to do it. Yes, they can easily generate a website that purports to do something. But what if they need that thing to be correct? What if they're, oh, I don't know, signing a billion-dollar contract on the result of what that software spits out? Exactly. Maybe YOLO slamming it isn't the right answer. We're going to just replace all the software with custom bespoke stuff. Great. A terrific example I saw is that for payroll, Anthropic, the company uses ADP.

50:39Corey Quinn:Well, why would they do that? They can clearly build their own payroll systems internally. Because you're not buying the software. You're buying the compliance, the keeping up with all the different jurisdictions in which you operate. Someone who is going to certify with their reputation that this is going to solve a problem. um there are a bunch of things out there like there's some software that will be disrupted by this picture a bunch of the obnoxious stuff like i just want to convert this from one uh from one video type to a different video type and you'll find some like random thing for 10 bucks yeah well now cloud code or whatnot is going to fix that because i don't know how ffmpeg uh command line flags are supposed to work it does great it's better it's easier than looking it up am i going to go and replace actual line of business software?

51:26Ed:I wish, but no. And that's the thing as well. People think that people pay for Salesforce or what have you because they're like, oh, because I have to pay for it. And also just because it's a simple piece of software. No, they're these intricate API rat king things that roll around in their own filth. And then they maintain them on the backend. Even the shittiest cloud software you use has some weird back-end stuff they have to constantly maintain because things break. And the bigger the company, the more things that break. And it's just fancy.

52:00Corey Quinn:The Gen 1 of all of Salesforce is just an Excel spreadsheet. It is, who am I contacting? What is the last thing I did and the rest? And it gets complex quickly. And where the leap happens is, okay, now it's not just you. Now it's an entire sales team. Now you're going to have some turnover in that sales team over the course of doing business. how do you wind up having a provable chain of issue on this? Someone pops up for three years from now. They said they talked to someone here. We have no record of that because Claude rebuilt it five times this week. Where is that going to live? How is that going to exist?

52:31Ed:And even then it's like audibility, auditability even. Jesus Christ.

52:36Corey Quinn:But this is not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one comment on Hacker News was, this is just our sync with some extra bells and whistles. This isn't a product. Yeah. Yeah.

52:48Ed:Well, yeah, that turned out. Yeah. I mean, even then, Dropbox is like, it's not just storage. It is the support services around it.

52:55Corey Quinn:I don't know. Well, even Dropbox doesn't want to do what Dropbox does anymore. Every time I use it, a folder that syncs everywhere is what I loved about Dropbox. Yes, same. Now it's trying to basically compete with Zoom and Google Docs and all the other stuff. Hello, stay acquired. No, no, no, just sync the files.

53:10Ed:Well, Gory, let's wrap it up there. We've done some good hating. We have. I'll have some good links for you. We'll link to Duck Bill, link to last week in Amazon, was it?

53:21Corey Quinn:Last week in AWS.com with an obnoxious, sarcastic platypus. That's right. One more use of AI before we go that I think you'll appreciate. If people email me, cory.quinn at duckbillhq.com, and I don't like what you're doing and you're trying to sell me something, I now have an AI-powered executive assistant in the form of Billy the Platypus who will tell you in corporate appropriate ways to go fuck yourself, which is just chef's kiss. Because I can't say that to people. I have a reputation. The obnoxious platypus responding to salespeople does not have this constraint. This is the one liability shift I have found that actually works.

53:58Corey Quinn:And you can blame AI for things you personally approved.

54:01Ed:Well, I don't endorse the AI platypus. You should get a real one. You should get a real one. You should train it.

54:07Corey Quinn:The customs officials had many questions

54:08Ed:I did not wish to answer. Train the platypus, Corey. All right, you've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. You'll have a monologue this week, I guess. Thank you so much for listening, everyone.

54:26Ed:Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez 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.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline 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 podcasts.

55:30We'll see you next time.

55:42Ed:as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid, the story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike, and plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent gumster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Then she says, have you seen a photo of my son? And I'm like, who is this person? Welcome to the Boys and Girls podcast. Arranged marriage is basically a reality show And you're auditioning for your soulmate And who's judging?

56:17Ed:Only your entire family I sacrificed myself to this ancient tradition Hoping to find love the right way And instead, I found chaos, comedy, and a lot of cringe Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts It's the new me, and it's the old them This Woman's History Month, the podcast, if you knew better with Amber Grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. My like tunnel vision of like, I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything.

56:58Ed:Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

57:04Corey Quinn:On the Sino Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Adish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.

57:24Ed:I'm an alcoholic and without this group, I'm gonna die.

57:28Corey Quinn:Listen to Sino's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

57:34Ed:This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human