Monologue: AI Is Making The Tech Industry Weak

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Chicago talks a lot. Hold on, let me step over here. People are talking too much. We debate about food, deep dish, tavern style, who's got the best beef. We yell across rooms, across blocks, across generations. Yes, nice earrings, Grammy. And now we're doing it on our phones, too. Video calls from the L train, group chats that never shut up. Neighbors texting you the score before your TV catches up. Get a load of this guy. Ketchup. On a dog. Yeah, we've got thoughts. Because nothing here gets built without conversation. Nothing moves without connection.

0:37So, if you think you know AT &T, it might be time to rethink that. Because their network has improved. Like, a lot. Which means Chicagoans can keep speaking their mind with the top-rated fiber internet in the city. Chicago won't stop talking. Our improved network backs it up. AT &T. Connecting changes everything. AT &T Fiber Limited Availability in select areas. Top-rated and fastest internet. AT &T Fiber, based on analysis by Oocalypse, because intelligence data 2H 2025. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

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2:30Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:42sorry about no monologue last week i've had a very tough few months and needed a break and honestly i'm still flagging a bit but there's too much shit going on for me to stop talking and i love doing this job too much anyway earlier in this week i ran a newsletter that will likely be turning into a few episodes about how few data centers are actually getting built and found that the vast majority of those that broke ground in 2023 and 2024 are yet to be completed. My working theory is now that barely any capacity is coming online, and that's why Anthropic had to buy up all 300 megawatts of Elon Musk's Colossus 1 data center capacity, because there are no other options out there other than the guy who said that Anthropic was misanthropic and evil.

3:23An embarrassing insult when you could just say that Dario Amadei sounds like he's doing Elizabeth Holmes' Steve Jobs voice. in any case i think we're in the good old-fashioned bullshit phase of the bubble i know some of you will say but data centers are getting built but what you mean is that data centers are under construction they are not for the most part being finished across every microsoft data center announced since 2023 i found two fairwater wisconsin and atlanta that were anything close to complete and despite microsoft saying that they're both operational they're actually both stuck on the initial phases i think there's some capacity online but even then i'm not really sure i saw an article in a local newspaper saying that fairwater wisconsin wasn't even working now microsoft has also claimed that it brought on a gigawatt of capacity in each of the last two quarters and i think it's using a different definition of capacity than operational data centers it's weird it's fucking strange i'm sorry i know i'm meant to be articulate and talk about economics and some shite but i'm just i'm kind of tired of it we're four years in and even the largest companies in the world still describe their return on investment like they're the fucking riddler how much capacity do you have satya why don't we know why don't we know how much you actually made on ai why are you still using run rate this is strange what's going on about to fall into tucker carlson voice there but nevertheless for my article i actually reached out to Microsoft to confirm these things.

4:51And they said they'd get back to me last Monday, and then they just stopped replying. That's generally what people do when they're hiding something. And I'm tired of that too. I'm tired of the fact that these companies won't just give me a straight answer, or you a straight answer, or their investors a straight answer. It's frustrating. And I know you're frustrated too, dear listener. And I know you keep asking when this shit ends, I truly don't know at this point. And I'll explain. The obfuscated finances of these firms are so thoroughly mangled that it's hard to tell if Anthropic has$30 billion in the bank or$30.

5:28It's fundamentally impossible to understand how much money OpenAI actually makes because both I and the information have now published very different numbers. Mine are much lower, billions lower for 2025. I mean, I don't have the final quarter. And I will say that I can speak to mine with complete certainty as these are the kind of financials that are borderline impossible to lie about, unlike investor documents which usually, well, are full of them. Now, I want to be clear. I am not even accusing OpenAI of lying. I'm sure whatever it's handed over to investors has more asterisks on it than Qbert reading Mein Kampf.

6:05I'm sure it says that these are non-GAAP numbers, generally accepted accounting principles, which means that they could be any number of different versions of eBittenstein's monster. It's hard to tell how much OpenAI is spending, which makes it harder to tell how much money it needs or when it might run out of it. If OpenAI closes this entire$122 billion round, NVIDIA and SoftBank are paying in three monthly chunks like a fucking Klarna plan, and Amazon has$35 billion contingent on either IPO or AGI, OpenAI will have, if they successfully do this, would have raised over$160 billion in the space of a year.

6:40And even if it doesn't, it will have raised, and I assume spent most of, around$70 billion or more in the space of a year. That's so much money. Where has it gone? Wherever has it gone, Sammy? Do you think they know? Do you think any of these people know? Do you think they really know how their finances are doing? Because according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fisher, they are, and I quote the Wall Street Journal here, not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being a public company. That's pretty worrying to me considering how much money Mr. Altman is now on the hook for, and how much money he's taken in.

7:15Similarly, his equally damp friend Mr. Wario Amadei of Anthropic is now raising at a scale unheard of other than when it just happened with OpenAI, by which I mean that if its rounds with Google and Amazon fully close, Anthropic will have raised over$100 billion in the space of a year. And again, it doesn't seem to want to go public why not mr amaday what do you have to hide what's going on and now mr amaday is out raising another 50 billion dollars that must close in 24 hours nope wait sorry that was a few weeks ago now i mean it's 30 billion to 50 billion dollars uh that might close by the end of the month and yes that is the order of the events and again no one no one seems to think this is strange no one in And the media seems to think this is strange.

8:06No one seems to be concerned about this at all. I'm actually kind of deeply worried about all of this. Because these companies may go public. And if they go public, well, they're going to lose everyone's money if they invest. But if they don't go public, there's still a bunch of money that's gone into them that's just potentially gone nowhere. Anyway, this is kind of exciting. I'll admit it's kind of exciting. I know that's a bizarre thing to say. I know it's strange to suggest that this might be an exciting thing, because the stakes have been raised so much that eventually one or more of us is going to be proven correct.

8:44It's going to be me or the boosters. And if the boosters are right here, this is crazy. I don't think they're right at all. Gun to my head, I think Anthropic is doing some sort of very bizarre accounting, likely taking in API payments paid in advance. to explain i think it's possible they are counting an organization paying its tokens up front say 50 million dollars that's likely to last 12 months and acting as if that's a month of actual revenue versus accounting for it spread out over 12 months artificially inflating the run rate by a factor of over 1000 percent to explain arr is just month times 12 so if they say if 50 million dollars is meant to be spread over 12 months uh counting it in a single month and multiplying that's kind of bullshit.

9:26I don't know for certain if this is what's happening, but pre-selling tokens and using it to drive up ARR is a way it makes sense. And also, it's not the first time this has happened. There are plenty of startups that have done this bullshit in the past, some of them in the dot-com bubble. I find the alternative a little ridiculous. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said on March 6th, 2026, that Anthropic had made$5 billion in lifetime revenue. He said exceeding, but if it was much higher than that, he would have said a different number. If that's the case, Anthropic suddenly grew its business from a few hundred million dollars in January to a few billion dollars a month in April.

10:03This is, on an accounting basis, a step change in complexity. It's a step change in customer scale. Anthropic must have had to hire and scale at a speed that defies all logic to keep up. They've been handling so much fucking cash and they're brand new at this. Also, Krishna Rao, the CFO, got interviewed recently on one of the many booster the podcast where they just sit there and let you say what you want for an hour and he said that the largest user of tokens in anthropic is their tax person that's the one person i would never let use an llm i would slap their hands if i saw them using claude i'd be very worried but krishna seems very excited about this he's talking about how all of this is speeding up all of their uh all of our accounting and i must be clear when you're handling billions of dollars very suddenly coming in you don't want to rush the fucking accounting krishna you need to calm your fucking jorts a little bit fucking it just it's so ridiculous and it's ridiculous that i am somehow unique in the way i cover this that i am unique in my scrutiny i don't know why i am i mean i do it's much easier to not scrutinize these companies and just applaud whenever you see a big number.

11:18But I think it's letting down listeners and readers across the board to not approach this in a place of scrutiny, even if you think this will work out. Even if you believe AI will be the biggest, most hugest thing ever, I think it's a detriment to your listeners and readers to not approach this with a high degree of skepticism and scrutiny, because this is so much money.

11:48Chicago Talks. A lot. Hold on, let me step over here. People are talking too much. We debate about food, deep dish, tavern style, who's got the best beef. We yell across rooms, across blocks, across generations. Yes, nice earrings, Grammy. And now we're doing it on our phones, too. Video calls from the L train, group chats that never shut up. Neighbors texting you the score before your TV catches up. Get a load of this guy. Ketchup. On a dog. Yeah, we've got thoughts. Because nothing here gets built without conversation. Nothing moves without connection. So if you think you know AT &T, it might be time to rethink that.

12:26Because their network has improved, like, a lot. Which means Chicagoans can keep speaking their mind with the top-rated fiber internet in the city. Chicago won't stop talking. Our improved network backs it up. AT &T, connecting changes everything. AT &T Fiber limited availability in select areas. Top-rated and fastest internet. AT &T Fiber, based on analysis by Eucalypt's BTES Intelligence Data 2H 2025. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

13:01This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who'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 to the group the yard birds right that's the name do you have a name suggestion since you guys are middle aged one erection listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts humor me I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

14:12844-844-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. The story I've told myself about love or relationships can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown and explore the journey of healing, self-discovery, and returning to yourself. We explore higher consciousness, emotional well-being, and the practices that help you find clarity, peace, and self-mastery in a world that can feel overwhelming. The world is becoming lonelier. We're not becoming more social and connected.

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15:19And here's the thing. Maybe Krishna's being honest, maybe they're at 30 billion, 50 billion, whoever knows ARR, and it's just this amazing business. Or maybe it just isn't that big or the business isn't that good. Maybe that's what it is. do you think do you think that i i would be very shocked if anthropic grew from making a couple hundred million dollars in what november last year to four billion dollars in april i'd be really fucking shocked and i think that there is a if if that has happened it's because of the largest pay pig ai psychosis in the world which we'll get to in a bit but i've had some people recently say that I am not talking about the tech enough, and I want to explain why.

16:07And it's the fact that four years into this, I'm just not sure what it is everybody's excited about. What are the big AI applications that are changing my life? Every two days, Anthropic releases some sort of new harness product for finance or law or medicine or accountancy, leading to someone's stock crashing based on the theoretical damage that Anthropic's product could cause without anybody actually trying it or verifying what it does or even explain why it fucking matters what is it that i am meant to be excited about what is it that i'm meant to be impressed by but ultimately the reason that anthropic's releasing so much stuff is its flag it's meant to be an impossible to pass blob of different things that create the gestalt of an indomitable company that can do anything because the markets and the media don't bother to check we hear about everybody using this shit day day in, day out.

17:00Why has nothing changed? What are businesses doing differently? How are they different? What is different? What is it that LLMs are actually doing? These should not be difficult or complex questions to answer, but nobody seems to be able to give me an answer with any real clarity or specificity. Every time they do, it's a weird dance involving someone saying, I now get a summary of some stuff from my open claw, or of course some sort of multi-agent coding fiasco that never actually ends with functional or impressive software or anything being shipped faster. And look, on the coding stuff, I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed.

17:36I speak regularly with very talented software engineers, and their reaction is, it's kind of cool, I guess. It's not anywhere near as good as people say, or this allows bad software engineers to do impressions of functional software engineers, which creates material risk to the stability, functionality and security of software because people trust these people who cannot do their jobs which has begun to decay across the board across the entire tech industry with the rise of ai coding tools it sounds like llm coding is a very inefficient way to sometimes speed up some things in a way that also creates a culture of overwork and either constant bullshit detection or something i call the engineer's torpor a state where your senses are dulled and you stop giving as much of a shit until your shit breaks and you realize your eight concurrent agents are burning $300 a day of tokens and have written two and a half million lines of functional yet brittle software designed with no intent or purpose like an apartment where the rooms vary in size and the number of bedrooms and the toilets are different with varying finishings and the plumbing's different room to room i guess people could live there but it would be a pain in the ass to run and get worse the more people that moved in.

18:45The more agency you give a coding model, the less you understand what it is you're building. No matter how intently you're prompted or how many agents you throw it in, how many weird little tweaks you make to your Claude.md file, the more that you don't build, the less that it makes sense. To make matters worse, the more you hand over, the more rusty you're going to be at writing code. The shit isn't good enough, it's not getting good enough, and it cannot be trusted. And my evidence is that a lot of software is just kind of fucking broken all over the shop in ways that's so common that we're entirely numb to it.

19:16We are tolerant of our shit being broken or terribly designed. It was a problem before LLMs, and it's got worse since. Let me give you some examples. Sometimes my iPhone will randomly show a black screen with a pinwheel. It just resets. It's fine. It'll even keep playing my music. It's happened every iPhone for years. Sometimes it doesn't happen for months. Sometimes it happens multiple times a week. sometimes apps just arbitrarily slow down my phone isn't hot or anything they just slow to a crawl on chrome when i load certain websites like tech crunch for some reason my two-year-old macbook pro 16 inch with ultra m3 core or what have you and has let's have a look actually while we're live on air let's see i have 64 gigabytes of ram and this shit slows down because some ad cookies it doesn't like insane a lot of popular video games crash regularly the Madden franchise has looked like total shit for years and is getting worse each time.

20:11The menus are incredibly slow. The Google Docs iPhone and iPad apps are so unstable I want to take away their car keys on top of having some of the most vexing design decisions across the board, almost as if they don't know how to make things right anymore. And let's talk about all those organizations burning, what, 10, 20, 30 % or more of their headcount on tokens. This is a sickness. It is a psychosis. The amounts of money being spent are genuinely disgusting. Any company that spends anything more than 5 % on their headcount on tokens is a fucking mark. Your businesses are not getting better.

20:51Your CEOs have AI psychosis. The more they speak to the machine that tells them they're the smartest, sexiest boy in the room, the more they'll be convinced that you must join them they do not see this as annihilating money for effectively no reason they see it as praying to a soulless non-existent god a non-spiritual god made up of more annoying math requiring the largest amount of infrastructure spent on anything ever it fucking sick it is just fucking sucks i'm not correcting that but you'll just have to deal with that, okay? This is what happens when every boss is a fucking business idiot who doesn't actually do any work.

21:34What do you think Mark Zuckerberg does all day? He walks up to the mirror sometimes, just looks down at his willy and goes, what are you? What do you do? What are you for? What is your concept? Or he walks into rooms and bumbles in there and he says, we need to do more on the exponential. And then some wretched worm tongue-like figure like Boz or Adam Mirsky oinks and squawks at one of 2 ,000 different vice presidents to spread his nasty, vague ideas, whatever they might actually be. If you're lucky, you might even get to deal with one of five different dysfunctional AI divisions with different ultra-oafs that you have to placate, as Mark Zuckerberg does something with AI that seems to change every fucking week.

22:14Not to worry, the Wall Street Journal will cover it anyway. And I think that this is how a lot of Silicon Valley and a lot of businesses are being run. I think that's how Jack Dorsey acts. I bet it's how Uber's run. Think of an app you're using right now that's anything other than okay. Do you love any app? Does anything work great for you? I like Flighty. Flighty's a good app, but that's one. Even the Apple Notes app I use constantly doesn't sync right at random for no reason and has a bunch of random shit come up whenever I choose a menu. Everything's a fucking mess. Nothing is smooth or easy.

22:49I have to log into something every four minutes. I have to give somebody a 2FA token every six minutes. Sometimes Google just logs me out of shit for no reason. Sometimes my email client loses its access to Outlook or Gmail, and sometimes my password system hasn't saved a password, and I have to reset my password. I have to go to my email, and there's three fucking emails from a pizza place I visited in New Jersey 15 years ago. And by the way, if you fucking email me and tell me get one password get bit warden get look part fuck you fuck off it's so sickening that everyone thinks that there is some panacea oh my app works for me apps do not work consistently across the board that is a unilateral truth one password works well for 100 people and doesn't work well for 50 others i've seen it with my own fucking eyes same with last password same with bit warden the state of these fucking companies is dog shit and i know i'm going to get emails from people saying bit warden works i'll pay for bit one don't like it barely fucking works it's a bit better than one password but it's like which of these do i trust now which is what's being saved where i'm sick of it i'm absolutely sick of it apologies for getting heated i know it's atypical of this show for me to rant now i want to speak to if any llm coding people the real code jockeys if you use it a bit for work i don't care but the people who think that this is truly the most amazing thing do any llm coding folks actually use software it stinks it's bloated it's counterintuitive it's slow it's inefficient the 10 or more tracking cookies and 100 apis you connect to every two seconds for some reason have created a sludge that is making every single experience on the computer worse doing varying degrees of kayfabe to impress another dickhead with two million dollars in rsus doesn't make up for the fact that the current state of software is fucking sad and ugly across the board.

24:37Do you think the modern state of software is good? And do you think the insecure, bug-ridden slop fest of OpenClaw is a good representative of your industry's future? You should be burning it to the ground. You should be killing OpenClaw. It's destroying the fabric of software. LLMs make shitty code. I don't care how it makes you feel. And I think it's made a select few people genuinely mentally ill in a way that we're yet to account for. And I don't mean random people. I mean prominent VCs and CEOs and a lot of software engineers who are obsessed with this stuff, who have now been irredeemably proven to be insane gullible marks.

25:14And we do not talk enough about how insane this all is. $800 billion, more than that, spent by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta on AI so far. And for what? A tech industry that has unilaterally increased its expenses across the board to varying degrees for a return on investment that's nearly impossible to actually explain, and impossible to explain in clear terms like, does it make more money than it's spent? It's not profitable. The state of software is arguably worse. Most products try and make you use an AI feature with questionable utility or efficacy, and some organizations actively ostracize you if you fail to use it because their CEOs have AI psychosis because their models told them they were brilliant.

25:55Every time somebody explains AI's economic value, they sound like they just got caught committing a crime and they're trying to lie their way out of it why does open ai need all this money why does anthropic need all this money what justification is there for any of this expenditure i know some people want to come up with a conspiratorial reason that all of this is oh it's a super secret government military thing and trump's going to bail it out it's all a secret government it's all built for government government government government it's all a secret trump conspiracy no stop it stop that's not what this is that is a comfortable way to feel smart or in control of a situation you have no control over.

26:31It is a doomsaying philosophy that allows you to avoid the hard intellectual work of actually thinking of what happens when bad things happen. And it also avoids the intellectual exercise of accepting that these are a bunch of men who do not really know how to do business and are self-involved cowards that only know how to follow each other. I realize it's easier to look at the world as dark and scary and say, wow, it's all a big secret plan. And this is all government spying already happening way before LLMs. Oh, it's all a big data gathering. It's all a big surveillance thing already happening way before LLMs.

27:06LLMs aren't even particularly useful for it. I'm sure there's some uses, but come on. Doing that makes you feel like you're smart. It makes you feel like you're ahead of the game. When in reality, the world is dark. It is scary, but it's also directionless and full of followers and cowards and people that don't know what they're fucking doing that will spend over a trillion dollars on data centers for an AI industry that does not have a future. It's a dark and scary world we live in when the mainstream media has moved away from reality. But it's a reality I live in. It's a reality you live in.

27:38But don't give these people credit. Don't give these people credit or a strategy that does not exist. In the end, you need to just ask simple, obvious questions. Open AI have to become profitable at some point. How will they do so? When will they do so? Nobody has an answer, which is entirely inexcusable for the most annoying, expensive, destructive, and wasteful bubble in history. Citroen out!

28:08Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella 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. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, And on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be?