I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again Ft. Nik Suresh & Robert Evans

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2:02Mother, father, come quick. It's Better Offline, the tech podcast. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:17Better Offline. A few weeks ago, the internet was captivated by the work of one particularly pissed-off software developer, who claimed, and I quote the title of his blog, I will fucking pile-drive you if you mention AI again. The writer, based in Australia, lays out in detail how infuriating a distraction AI has become from the wider problems riddling many modern tech companies, as well as the noxious, nasty presence of grifter management consultant types that are deliberately keeping it inflated regardless of whether it actually means anything. One particular quote stood out to me. You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners.

2:57We have a few things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the Omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call politics. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable. This piece caught both my eye and that of Cool Zone Media's Robert Evans, who assured me he promised that I'd be allowed to leave the Cool Zone Media pain cage if I was able to get the author of the piece on the show.

3:41So that's what I did. Joining us to talk about this incredibly aggressive blog is Nikhil Suresh, who's the director at Hermit Technology and an excellent blogger. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you for the very kind words. I'm super excited to be here. But when that piece came out, at least three people said, hey, have you heard of Ed Zitron? And I was like, well, I'm talking to you tomorrow so that'll be exciting now I will so you're angry I think we've kind of got that and I share your anger but what is it about this that really boils your blood that makes you want to pile drive folks yeah so it's interesting because a lot of people read that piece and they reached out and thought that you know I'm actually super angry about AI specifically but a pretty consistent through line through my blog.

4:34It's on a lot of traffic over the past year and a half. It's not about AI specifically. It's about this massive class of non-technical managers that have entered the IT space. And they're essentially cosplaying at doing software engineering. The thing that is infuriating about the LLM thing in particular is that it's uniquely suited for drifting. So if you look at the average company, they can't ship incredibly basic applications. And even if you look at something like the crypto space, which I don't like, but you look around Melbourne, crypto companies actually have some level of engineering discipline.

5:11You know, they use newer technology. There's things in the job descriptions to indicate seriousness. AI companies don't have that. And I don't think at big corporations, CEOs are aware that their staff are just typing in import open AI. You know, you're not doing any complex work. You just call like an API. You just send data to a company in the US. They do everything. And people down here in Melbourne are making out like they're the greatest engineers ever. They're thought leaders. You should put them on conference stages. It's not hard. It's so easy. It takes like a week to make something from scratch.

5:48Yeah, I really appreciated that part of your piece because it gets at something that's like frustrated me as well, which is, and I'm not coming at this from the same kind of technical background you are, but knowing that there's legitimate technology here, but all of the people being trusted with marshalling it and marshalling these companies that are supposed to deliver it to us are on their face conmen. I'm thinking about Sam Altman today, or at least the clip came out today where he's like, soon you'll be able to just ask, ask a chat GPT to solve physics for you. You have to solve all the physics.

6:19That's just a nonsense statement. That's just, that's absurd. There's no way he said that. We know that, right? We can all tell that that's nonsense. if if you're not defaming him that's a crazy thing like if he those are the words i'll find the exact quote but yeah no he he he was very much that's what he said you've spoken of this kind of like organizational cancer inside tech firms is it this kind of grifter yeah yeah um it's not specific to technology it's just the technology makes it very very easy i don't know of any industry that doesn't have this massive horde of people who don't really know what they're doing.

6:56Right. But they just kind of bulldoze people socially. Put it this way. So I think my blog has done 2 million hits in the past year and a million were last week. And when people talked about, you know, offering me work or anything, they said they would give me a reference at their workplace, but they wouldn't mention that piece because leadership would be so embarrassed. Like they can't have someone like me around going. Someone cool. Someone cool. Thanks. It says fuck sometimes. Can't have that. But no, it's just because the emperor very clearly has no clothes. I don't even really get hate mail because people know I'll just point out that they're grifting and they'll have no defense.

7:38So they just leave me alone. Yeah. So how do you think that this has happened? It clearly isn't something that happened overnight, but it feels like, especially the tech industry has just been poisoned by product managers and management consultants. How did this happen? Off the top of my head, something that really influences this is just very strange ideas on how things scale. I listened to those two episodes you suggested, and I think the main one is the Rotcom bubble, which people should go listen to. And there is this idea that everything should scale up forever. And the only way to handle that communicatively is like this hierarchical structure.

8:17But it's really hard to find good people. And I think a huge hierarchy can work if you only have really great people in it. But it's really hard. There's one good software engineering company I know in Melbourne, Flip down in the CBD, and they regularly interview 40 people for one role, right? Because just the quality of candidates not there. If you insist you need this massive structure and you need a hierarchy for it, you're just going to have to insert people who don't know what they're talking about. You can't find good people fast enough. And then those people who aren't very good to hire other people who aren't very good.

8:51And soon that's the whole industry, right? And that feels good. Something I've been writing that will end up being a podcast that may run before or after this is just this idea of shareholder supremacy, that the companies have been engineered to make a market need work, to hit analyst expectations, Jack Welch, classic bastard. And it feels like this, the LLMs in particular have become the ultimate form, like the super a saying of rot capitalism where people just kind of, like you said, just bullshit about them. They're just like, yeah, I can do all this shit, right? Yeah, it's the future. What is your actual background?

9:29So I've got a four-year qualification in psychology. So I mostly did cognitive psychology and circadian science. And then I moved over to a postgraduate qualification at one of Australia's bigger universities. So that was in data science. I did a master's with a little bit of thesis work in it. So I'm reasonably good. I'm not a PhD, but I do know what I'm talking about in the space. I did want to drill into something because you're coming at this from the perspective of somebody who is working in a technical capacity, seeing the way this group of people who are talking nonsense are coming in. And as you said, kind of like bulldozing their way into conversations with people.

10:05Can you talk socially about the way that kind of happens? Because we all sort of see the way these people try to monopolize conversations about technology events. If you're coming at it from like press, it's something like CES, but also just kind of if you're looking at things on Twitter or looking at just sort of the way popular conversations go. But I'm curious about like the social dynamics of these people who are coming into organizations full of real people trying to do real things and hijacking that for the purpose of cashing out. Yeah, I think a lot of them are latching onto some pre-existing level of grift that's just been in the industry.

10:41So when I entered around 2018, 2019. That's when I got into the Australian tech market. LLMs were not this massive thing, right? There were a couple of GPT-2 demos, but there was no way for you at a normal company to roll out something like Gen.AI, right? You really had to know what you were doing. You didn't have the resources. You couldn't just hit an endpoint somewhere and get a result. And I cannot emphasize that enough for non-technical listeners. It's like two lines of Python to use OpenAI. People making these chatbots are not serious practitioners. I could teach my 13-year-old cousin how to do this.

11:18But there's this kind of this pre-existing class of person that talks a lot, gets on stages, doesn't really know what's been going on. But they were much smaller back then. They did talk about AI relentlessly. But the difference in 2019 and 2024 is those people in 2019 didn't have any working products. They would talk and then they would leave organizations every two years before they were on the hook for their failed projects. The difference now is people are going to those same people. So you just turn up and you go, hey, I'm going to be your lead data scientist, your chief data officer, whatever you want.

11:53I'm going to do this AI revolution for you. And then they can very quickly ship stuff that doesn't quite work. But organizations are really bad at tracking what actually drives revenue. So the moment you get the flashy product out, people think you're some sort of superhero. Even if it's broken. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been, I probably shouldn't say this, but I will and just leave the details out. I've been leaked a couple of confidential documents from, I would say, small to medium businesses on how Gen AI has worked in their chatbots. I can't name the companies because I'm not supposed to have the documents.

12:26Like, it's not impressive. Even the ones that sort of work, you get really weird statistics like interacting with the chatbot predicts tickets being escalated to human support teams, like way worse than usually. But they still roll them out, right? That's good. So the one thing that they say this is going to be able to do, customer service. Very cool. It definitely can't do it now. Great. Jesus fucking Christ. Do you get the sense they're rolling it out even though they're not seeing an immediate positive effect because the kind of effect on their potential valuation by throwing AI in is higher than whatever they lose by having a less efficient actual solution?

13:06I think it's threefold. So the first one is it's speculative, which means even if I was dishonest and I thought it was bad for the company, I might want AI on my CV specifically. It doesn't actually have anything to do with the company. right it's it's just for me uh the second one is yeah there's obviously it's very easy to get funding um someone reached out to me uh ceo of a company that does llm work and this person admitted to me their product doesn't work so they don't accept funding because they're trying to get it to work and people are still flinging money at them this thing that like self-admittedly doesn't function that's very cool yeah it's uh it's great it's great that the industry's in that position And the last one is...

13:47Yeah, good for them. The last one is, you know, the chatbot piece. I don't work in that domain, but I kind of wonder, is it cheaper to just provide bad customer service and lay off all your support stuff? Like when I'm trying to cancel my mobile plan, do they actually care that I got frustrated and put the call down? That sounds good for them. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that's so insane about this is that this could work out for them, at least in, I still don't think that when you're looking at the kind of like the dollar amount of valuations that like OpenAI is seeing, I don't think that letting companies that don't give a shit about customer service economize more is going to be the size of industry that they're hoping for.

14:31You're certainly not going to, it's not trillions of dollars in value, right? That could be a profitable business and just making everything a little bit worse for everybody like that that could be a very good business to be in yeah just google no i mean yeah i mean yeah that's google's done well off of that it's just just making things gradually iteratively worse well i i will say that i i get a lot of email from people who left google and you know some of them are it's a huge company so they do some useful stuff but a lot of people were like i left because it sucks there now so that's that's definitely a thing

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17:13So you said the data science field was large but largely fraudulent. What exactly does that mean? that most of data science is just grifting or is it just something a little more deep? It's a little deeper than that. So as a technical discipline, machine learning is very, very serious, right? You do see it used in genuinely helpful things. It's probably being used right now as we're recording this. It's somewhere in the supply chain. And you'll hear more old school practitioners, they get very annoyed at the words AI and machine learning. They say things like it's just statistics. You know, LLMs are obviously doing something.

17:52It would be wrong to just say they're classical statistics and not impressive in any way. But when I say it's grifting, I mean this whole artificial intelligence thing. The people deciding on the size of the data science market are not technicians. So when you say AI, they're thinking Skynet, generative AI, general intelligence. Like they really have no idea what they're hiring for. But they'll do things like, say, we need to hire 20 data scientists tomorrow, right? Right. Without really knowing what they do with them. No idea what they do with them. And it's really hard to solve problems with data science, right?

18:26It is entirely possible to have a problem that is fundamentally intractable, no matter how disciplined your team is, because the data doesn't exist, or the problem is just too hard mathematically. That happens all the time. it almost feels like the problem with the tech industry is that nobody knows what they're doing you have people that know stuff how to do things and then they get a job at Google in a pile of people that can do stuff run by someone who goes alright dickheads put the AI in it now and then stuff comes out it almost like the problem you mentioned earlier of just they're not being enough good people also appears to be there are no good managers.

19:11I wonder kind of pivoting, or not pivoting, but building on that, I wonder how much of it is that the guys who are really good at keeping the hype going are also just better socially than the kind of people who are really good at coding and are really good at the actual science. Like if some of the being bulldozed effect is that the people who really know their shit just are not used to the kind of energy that a hype man is capable of deploying against them. Yeah. So this has come up. I've thought about this a lot. So that's a kind of component of engineering I work on a lot, not hyping myself up, but actually being able to hold conversations.

19:49But that's not quite the attribute I see in the managers who do this kind of thing. Because what you're describing is like a pure con man. And at least, and not to be mean to people who aren't con men, but at least there's some skill in that. but what we're talking about is they just like this is where steve jobs comes in right there's a version of this that requires talent right right like it may not be talent i um respect like morally but i'm like that it's an actual skill set but we're talking about people who have really just learned how to like mimic the trappings of success and responsibility you know they're real big on suits they're real big on uh talking very slowly with long pauses but like they don't have novel thoughts their brain has just had like Forbes magazine flashed onto it like there's nothing else there so when we talk about social skill and bulldozing I'm not talking about the art of war and you know we're not talking about people who are doing this very savvy political piece where they finesse things and you know it's very Machiavellian we're talking about people who just turn up and if you point out they don't know what they're talking about they're a fucking dick to you and they do this until you leave them alone and that's their whole career the industry is just full of that they're not even smart i have seen an executive at a restaurant order the wrong dish have their family eat the whole thing then tell the wait staff that like hey you brought us the wrong thing and when a kid piped up they shush the kid you know it's it's not like a talent that they've cultivated in the managerial space.

21:35It's like personality disorder that just bleeds into everything and ruins the family. I'm the hero of reality. My dinner will be how I want. It's some of it is cause like we talk, I talk about jobs a lot and I think you have to, cause a lot of these guys, if not all of them at some level wish they were him right. With the exception of the, not, you know, the, the medical issue, but like they, he's, He's like mythologized to a significant degree, especially I'm recording from San Francisco right now. I mean, he's almost like a saint down here. And I feel like the act of copying him, you get these people who are like carbon copies of just the personality disorder without any of the actual insight.

22:16And I think that's like further exacerbated because they're all like, yeah, read The Art of War. Read like one of three Malcolm Gladwell books. Read The Four Hour Body and do not read anything else. There's no humanities. There's nothing like, because all you need to learn how to do is be the most optimized asshole you can be. I like how you just pick the, if I had Hitman budget, like that would be my hit list. As a data scientist, Malcolm Gladwell, like I might hate him more than anyone on the planet. Oh, I'm right there with you, buddy. He's been advertising on our shows and I don't love it.

22:55I don't love it. So with that in mind, Nick, what do you think of Sam Altman? I don't really know a whole bunch about him because out here in Melbourne, I don't really play around in the Fang super huge space. Our clients are relatively small. I work at medium-sized businesses, tiny compared to the size of Google and OpenAI. all I will say is if he said what you just said about physics like he needs to come out with the greatest innovation I've ever seen in the next two years or he will be one of the most insane people I've ever heard of right like that's he really has to deliver on that statement or he's obviously full of shit it just it blows me away that he's even able to say it without someone just being like what the fuck you talking about Sam Altman Sam Altman did you hit your head somewhere on the way here because it's not even the first insane thing he said he has said so many times i was super smart it's gonna be a super smart friend that knows everything about you the fuck are you talking what does any of this mean and my own frustration i've shared about the media is that no one ever seems to say the appropriate thing which is wait what was that excuse me mate what but it almost feels with everything you're talking about and in your excellent blog that also feels like the problem that you've just got these guys who just say things, raise money, go up in organizations, and don't actually do anything.

24:23Sam Altman did not make GPT. Someone else did that. Mira Morati did not do it. CTO of OpenAI didn't do it either. It's just so strange. It feels like we're living in an alternate reality at times, and it's freaking me out. I'm going to be honest. it's i'm putting on the clown makeup the joker makeup almost every day now was uh was mira marati the one who couldn't answer that question on whether they used youtube to try yes i mean yes yes she sure couldn't and i i found at least i watched the video with captions while we were doing this of sam altman and the exact statement was basically someday you'll be able to ask uh ChatGPT, discover physics for me.

25:08It'll do it. Discover all the physics, something like that. I've got the link in there, but like just a nonsense statement. Like at least go to make it – you could make like Star Trek claims, right? Like that's the rational end of this. I don't know that it will actually be that good, but it will be like one day we'll have a computer and you can tell it to do all these things. It will organize your life and answer questions. It will run complex systems. It will let us explore space. That's nonsense too, probably. at least in any kind of near term, but it's at least a thing that theoretically could happen as opposed to just telling a robot to discover physics for you.

25:42And he says, computer, solve all the physics for me, which is so funny. Right. And it's not what anyone also, it's just not what, I don't know. I don't need to go into this. That's not how physics works. You don't solve physics. You don't solve physics and it's not what's appealing about the Star Trek dream of a computer that works the way the ones on those ships do, right? Like it's, the enticing thing is the idea of like technology that is hopeful and still needs humans at the center of it. And I don't know, he doesn't seem to know how to like promise anything but the elimination of human creativity, interest, action, which I guess is part of what I find disturbing about him.