Monologue: No, Something Big Isn't Coming

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human

0:06Callzone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline This is your monologue for the week And I'm your host, Ed Zitron

0:18Better Offline So you've probably seen or heard about Or even read the abominable Nonsensical hogslop essay Called Something Big is Coming Perhaps seeing people that should know better like Mehdi Hassan, who called it the most important thing you read today, despite it being both AI-generated and complete fucking nonsense. This essay has done the rounds because of its histrionic tone and deliberate leaning upon the anxieties of those scared of AI and the mythology of AI boosters, and across 4 ,700 boobless shit-ass words says very little new or interesting, along with multiple egregious lies. I will be attaching an annotated version of this essay to this monologue, but I want to give you a broad explanation of what it really says and why it's full of shit.

1:02But let's start with who wrote it. Matt Schumer is a guy who makes an AI startup called Other Side AI, which does this thing called HyperWrite, which is an AI writing assistant with web search and citations, which translates to mean it's a rapper for various large language models that he's prompting. Appropriately, when I asked it to write a critique of his piece, it said that its weaknesses lied in its lack of specifics and that its alarmist framing grabs attention and it's heavy on the hype and light on actual insight and you know what matt you fucking you got one innovation and it's that even your shit assed llm rapper doesn't like your bullshit and i think it's also being too kind schumer makes numerous egregious misstatements about the current state of ai using vague yet scary statements like being able to walk away from the computer for hours and find his work done again his company has done the same thing for years although an unnamed managing partner at a big law firm uses AI for hours to do the work of a team of associates.

1:57I choose these two statements because they're fairly typical of his entire piece, entirely made-up bullshit about how long an AI can work for or what it's capable of doing. Schumer repeatedly talks about AI being able to write software completely autonomously in a way that could not be further from the truth. His most egregious one is when he quotes OpenAI saying that GPT 5.3 codex is the first model that was instrumental in creating itself because it used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluation. These are actual quotes from OpenAI.

2:30He's not lying they said them, he's just lying about what they mean. To be clear, this is OpenAI saying that it used an app it built to test and debug code and to test and debug the actual code and how it went up. It's literally, it's what the product they used they tested the product by testing what the product did it's not the same as saying that software is designing itself which is something that schumer heavily intimates is happening throughout the piece which it is not he also suggests multiple times the ai is learning from itself which is is not barely keeping my cool on this one because it's so fucking frustrating seeing how many people i saw fortune repost this i saw business insider do a post fucking the the technology brothers well well well if it isn't the technology brothers they had this fuck not on it genuinely infuriates me and most of the scary stuff in there that all software engineers will be replaced that 50 of entry-level white collar jobs be gone in one to five years is Schumer directly copy pasting stuff that CEO of Anthropic Wario Amadei said in one of his many interviews where he makes shit up I am begging people to please god engage with basic critical thinking when reading things like this Schumer says a lot of vague marketing fluff each generation builds the next which is smarter which builds the next faster which is smarter still this is written specifically to make you believe that this is actually happening when it is not it isn't the generation is not building the next there are still people doing this he doesn't cite anything he doesn't even bother to choose real life examples he just says stuff like ai is approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas of medicine all without citation well i've got a citation for you on september 5th 2024 matt schumer released a model called reflection 70b that he claimed had benchmarks that made it and i quote the world's top open source ai model built with something called glaive ai independent researchers were unable to recreate the benchmarks and it became obvious that schumer was a lying sack of shit and the reflection 70b was a rapper for anthropics clawed sonnet model with one person posting that they had intentionally made it so that it would not respond to being called clawed or say that it was clawed he also didn't reveal that he was an investor in glaive ai the platform that generated the synthetic data that allegedly trained this shit ass model that does not work did not work never updated never did anything it said and everyone just memory hold it and what horrified me about this essay is how many top tier media outlets and respectable journalists took it as gospel because the statements he made vaguely lined up with the empty hype of scumbags like sam altman and dario amadei if you are a member of the media that shared or republish this you are actively participating in an act of disinformation and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself fuck matt schumer and fuck anybody who takes him seriously regular people got scared because of this because mainstream media validated it you should all be ashamed of yourselves and to the many haters that emailed me about this saying this looks like bullshit you were correct these people are deceiving you they are misleading you so that they can sell ai software that they know is not doing the things it needs to to make any of this make sense and i'm disgusted to see this keep happening i am disgusted to see people like this platformed and i think when all of this ends people think that i will forget i will not forget any of this i am taking fucking detailed notes of everybody who pushes this shit uphill.

5:57I am furious. I am disgusted to see this. 60 million fucking views on this bullshit. And I know there are some people who don't like when I get angry, but I am furious about this. This is lies. This is platforming lies. Anyone in the media who platform this, you need to, I don't know, think about whether you're capable of doing your jobs every day, because you seem to lack the critical thinking to spot a scam artist. Yeah, yeah, I'm done. I'm done, everyone. I'm sorry for flying off the handle a little.