How To Argue With An AI Booster, Part Three

23:49I'm really tired of it. I'm tired of being told this again and again and again. That's not what chat GPT is going to actually survive on. Breathe. Okay, let's move on. Here's another boost to grip though. OpenAI is making tons of money. That's proof they're a successful company and you are wrong somehow. So OpenAI announced that it has hit its first$1 billion month on August 20th, 2025. On CNBC, in fact. Weirdly enough, by the way, that quote was not in the TV interview. But anyway, this also brings it exactly in line with my estimated$5.26 billion in revenue that I believe it has made at the end of July.

24:23Did that in a premium newsletter? Please pay me. However, remember what the MIT study that I mentioned said. Enterprise adoption is high, but transformation is low. There are tons of companies throwing money at AI, but they are not seeing actual returns. OpenAI's growth as the single most prominent company in AI, and if we're honest, one of the most prominent in software writ large, makes sense, but at some point will slow, because the actual returns to businesses are not there. If there were, we'd have one article where we could point at a chat GPT integration that helped scale a company, save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money, written in plain English, and not in the gobbledygook of profit improvement.

25:03Also, OpenAI is projected to make 12.5 % $1.7 billion in 2025. How exactly will it do that? Is it really making$1.5 billion a month by the end of the year? Even if it does, is the idea that it keeps burning$10 billion or more a year, every year into a 10? What actual revenue potential does OpenAI have long-term? Its products are about as good as everybody else's, cost about the same, and do the same things. ChatGPT is basically the same product as Claude or Grok, maybe less MechaHitler, or any number of different LLMs. The only real advantages that OpenAI has are infrastructure and brand recognition.

25:41These models have clearly hit a wall in trading, hitting diminishing returns, meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing its service at scale, nothing more. It isn't making its business cheaper other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it other than the site in Abilene, Texas where it's promised Oracle $30 billion a year in 2025. I'm sorry I don't buy it. I don't buy that this company will continue growing forever and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon when open ai opens stargate abilene it will turn profitable how i hear this one a good amount how how how how how how how's it gonna happen nobody ever answers no one ever answers actually how this company will become profitable it's fucking insane to me nobody ever answers the question efficiencies efficiencies they're gonna be efficient they're gonna be efficient if you're going to say chat GPT-5, I wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient.

26:37In fact, it's less efficient. And I'm sure one of you is going to argue, well, you know, they could do their custom silicon. They have a$10 billion deal with Broadcom. How are they fucking paying for that? Also, you realize that, well, actually, no, just, you know, no, you're right. They're going to get the chip from Broadcom because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech, right? It always works and it's always great and it has no problems. that's what i always that's that's what i happen with pretty much every first time they make anything in tech anyway let's move on you'll hear boosters also be like well my brother's friends dog uses chat gpt and they love it well i heard this happen or my mate has it in this or i heard this person or i use it in this one before we go any further just to be clear though is when you hear a booster bring up ai and they'll say something make sure they're talking about generative ai are they actually talking about generative ai is this a large language model thing.

27:30It's very, very, very common for people to conflate AI with generative AI. There are many different kinds of AI. Make sure that the AI booster, whatever they're claiming, whatever they're telling you, is actually about large language models. There are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up. LLMs have nothing to do with folding at home, autonomous cars, or most disease research. But okay, let's do a speed run. Using AI led researchers to discover 44 % more materials. No, it didn't. MIT has now withdrawn in this paper citing concerns about its integrity. I've linked it in the show notes.

28:03There's a huge rundown. Here's another quote. AI is so profoundly powerful it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job. While young people have been having trouble finding jobs, there's no proof that AI is the reason. Every piece of coverage you're reading is citing an Oxford economics report that amidst a bunch of numbers says, and I quote, there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates. A statement that it does not back up other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along the sheer employment declines in some roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from ai and digging deeper the largest displacement seems to be entry-level jobs normally filled by recent graduates there's otherwise new data anyone making this point is grasping at straws i go into this in more detail in a newsletter called sincerity wins the war which i've linked to but it's one of the worst reported stories in tech And now I'm actually going to ad-lib for a second because I forgot while writing this script, there was also this thing that came out of Stanford that said there's been a 13 % drop in jobs affected by AI.

29:05And this was used as proof that AI was taking them. Now, curious little critter that I am, I went and read that. What it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to AI and being affected by AI. They saw they were going down. They went, oh, it's AI that did that. They fart around with various statistics, but that's the long and short of it. I'll give you an example of one of the jobs, accountancy. Now, any accountants listening, big up to my accountant listeners. There's been a hiring crisis in accountancy for years. People are not becoming CPAs. The reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them.

29:37It's nothing to do with AI. Imagine if anyone put half as much effort into writing up these stories as I did writing up one of these booster quips. But here's another one. The AI is replacing young coders, and it is not. In fact, Amazon's cloud chief just said that replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard. There is no actual real evidence that this is the case. Every single story you have read is anecdotal. Anyone peddling this has an agenda or is not reading. Every CEO mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that AI is replacing people because AI can't replace people.

30:13I will add an aside, there are people's jobs that have been replaced by ai translators transcribers brian over at blood is in the machine but in the machine even sorry brian he's doing a great job on covering this there are people that have lost jobs these people are losing it because their bosses are fucking stupid because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work and slopping it up that's not happening at the knowledge worker scale nor is it happening at the CODA scale. Everyone telling you that has an agenda. But boosters will also claim that AI is doing science for search somehow, or will do it.

30:48And it won't. I've included a write-up about why foundation models can't do this. Someone's going to read it and say, but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of LLMs. And the reason he says this is because, I shit you not, that LLMs aren't incapable of doing scientific research. He says they're insufficient, which is the same thing. They're insufficient. Anyway, he claims they're also not dead weight for science, then spends hundreds of words meandering around that thing to kiss up to AI boosters for some reason, I assume, because they've terrified him by being really annoying. And these people need to go outside and touch grass.

31:26Now, a lot of people think they're going to tell me that they use AI all the time, and that will change my mind. I cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use case. Every use case I hear is one of the following. I use it for brainstorming, to which I say, who cares? Not a business model. It's commoditized. I use it like search. Who cares? It's not even good at search. It's fine. It's not even better than the low bar set by Google search. The results it gives aren't great, and the links are deliberately made smaller, which gets in the way of me clicking them so I can actually look at the content.

31:55If you're using ChatGPT for search, you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at. If I'm wrong, great. You now have a functional search engine. Congrats, your fucking lations. Well, I use it for a search, and if you use it for research, you do not respect actual research. You want a quick answer. It's that simple. These reports are slop. I've read many, many, many AI reports and they're not good. Sorry. Well, I use it for coding. I know someone who used it for coding and I'll get to that in a minute. But all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about this stuff as if it was changing society.

32:27None of these use cases come close to explaining why I should be impressed by generative AI. It also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that AI did for you once. We are so past the point when any of that matters. AI is being sold as a transformational technology, and I am yet to see it transform anything. I am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me, or even one thing that feels possible that wasn't possible before. This isn't even me being a cynic. I'm ready to be impressed. I just haven't been impressed in three fucking years, and it's getting boring. Also, tell me with a straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure.

33:01Remember, AI boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful. None of these use cases are powerful sounding. But sir, oh, you're back, great. Sir, vibe coding is changing the world, allowing people who can't code to make software. Now, this is one of the most brain dead takes about AI and coding. And it's that vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software. And you'll never guess what Kevin Roos covered this. he legit did this article. While writing the script, I hadn't even noticed he'd legit. Anyway, while technically true in that one can just type build me a website into one of many coding environments, this does not mean said website is functional, secure, or useful.

33:40Let's make this really clear. AI cannot just handle coding. Go into the show notes and read this piece I've linked from Colton Bogey. I have actually interviewed him now. He's going to be coming out in the next few weeks, the episode. The interview is fucking brilliant. And then the other I've linked to by Nick Suresh. If you contact me about AI and coding without reading these, I will send them to you and nothing else will crush you like a car in a garbage dump into a cube. One or the other I will choose at the time. Also show me a vibe coded company, please. Not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features, a fully functional, secure, and useful app that has made money and made by somebody who cannot read or write code.

34:21You won't be able to because it is impossible. Vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals. And are AI coding environments making people faster? I don't think so. In fact, a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers 19 % slower. The reason that nobody is vibe coding an entire company is because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go. And oftentimes when you add something, it breaks something else. This is all well and good if you actually understand code. It's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or clawed code like a kid at an arcade machine, turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo's going on.

34:59Vibecoders are also awful for the already negative margins of most AI coding environments, as every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise, burning tokens in pursuit of a goal they themselves don't really understand. Vibecoding doesn't work, it will not work, and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance, and at worst supporting a campaign built on lies.

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37:45And this is all built up to one final point. I'm no longer accepting half-baked arguments. If you're an AI booster, please come up with better arguments. And if you truly believe in this stuff, you should have a firmer grasp on why you do so. It's been three years, and the best some of you have is it's really popular. Uber also burned money. Your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true. And it's deeply embarrassing. Then again, there are many well-intentioned people who aren't necessarily AI boosters who repeat these arguments, regardless of how thinly framed they are.

38:16In part because we live in a high information, low processing society where people tend to put great faith in people who are confident in what they say and sound smart adjacent. I also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out or seeming stupid is being used against them. If you don't understand something, it's likely because the people you're reading or hearing it from don't either. If a company makes a promise and you don't understand how they'll deliver on it, it's their job to explain how and your job to suggest it isn't plausible in clear and defined language.

38:46This has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an outright failure of journalism. I have never seen more misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career, and it's largely peddled by reporters who either don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible, in part because all their peers are doing the same thing and saying the same nonsense. As things begin to collapse, and they sure look like they're collapsing, but I'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet. It will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say.

39:18Never have I seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than Sam Altman saying that GPT-5 was actually bad and that GPT-6 will be even better. Members of the media, Sam Altman does not respect you. He is not your friend. Clammy Sam Altman is not secretly confiding in you. Clammy will think you are stupid and easily manipulated and will print anything he says, largely in part because many members of the media will print exactly what he says whenever he says it. And to be clear, if you wrote about GPT-6 and made fun of it, that's great. But let's close by discussing the very nature of AI skepticism and the so-called void between those who hate AI and those who love AI from the perspective of one of the most prominent people in the skeptic camp.

39:59Critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace, patience, or in many cases, hospitality when it comes to their position. While they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side, it's always framed as the work of a firebrand, an outlier, or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify. Skeptics are demonized, their points under constant scrutiny, their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or intellectual weakness. Skeptic and critic are words said with a sneer of trepidation, that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that AI is the most powerful special thing ever.

40:36To not immediately fall in love with something that everybody is talking about is to be framed as a hater, to have oneself introduced with the words, not everyone agrees, or on 40 % of your appearances. By comparison, AI boosters are the first to get TV appearances and offers to be on panels. Their coverage featured prominently on TechMeme, selling slop-like books called Shit Like the Future of Intelligence, Masters of the Brain, featuring 18 interviews with different CEOs that all say the same thing. They don't have to justify their love. They simply have to remember all the right terms, chirping out test time compute, and the cost of inference is going down enough times to summon Wario Amadei to give them an hour-long interview where he says the models, they are, in years, going to be the most powerful schoolteacher ever built.

41:18And by the way, yeah, I did sell a book, because my shit fucking bangs, my shit rocks. I'm not, I'm, I'm not going to be too smug, but like, I put a lot of effort into this and I research it very well. Others should try harder. I have consistent, deeply sourced arguments that I've built over the course of years. I didn't become a hater because I'm a contrarian. I became a hater because the shit that these fucking oafs have done to the computer pisses me off. I did The Man That Destroyed Google Search because I wanted to know why Google Search sucked. I wrote Sam Altman Free because at the time I didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath.

41:52Everything I do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology. I started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with 300 subscribers and 60 views and have written it as an exploration of subjects that grows as I write. I do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what I am. And if that's strange to you, well, I'm a strange man, but at least I'm an honest one. I do have a chip on my shoulder in that I really do not like it when people try to make other people feel stupid, especially when they do so as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good.

42:23I write this stuff out because I have an intellectual interest. I like writing, and by writing I'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology, and talking it out actually feels good. It's an intellectual exercise that I really enjoy. I happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month, and I'm not specifying where those people go, and if you think that I've grown this by being a hater, you are doing yourself the disservice of underestimating me, which I will use to my advantage by writing deeper, more meaningful, and more insightful things than you, and then I'll say them with lots of curse words on this podcast.

42:55I've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again and make billions doing so, and all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like Google, Facebook, and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth. I can't manufacture my disgust, nor is it hard to, nor can I manufacture whatever it is inside me that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things. I don't know if I take this too seriously, whether I don't take it seriously enough because I keep saying fuck and shit, but I'm honored that I'm able to do so and I really appreciate everyone who listens, reads, or engages with me in any way.

43:27I really do love you all for listening. I know that this was a long three-parter. I've enjoyed recording it. I've done lots of retakes. Matt Asowski, love you, man. Sorry for all of this. I'll catch you next episode.

43:47Thank 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 dot 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.

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45:34Bring the boom. XBoom. There's a lot going on in Hollywood. How are you supposed to stay on top of it all? Variety has the solution. Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives. Where do you see the business actually heading? Featuring the iconic journalist of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton. The only constant in Hollywood is change. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now. Ugh, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech?

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