NVIDIAdrome with Steve Burke of GamersNexus

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2:11Subscribe to the newsletter, buy one of our beautiful new Fuck Data Center t-shirts, and join me in welcoming the wonderful and incredible Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, who joins us today to talk about how great everything is. I didn't know there was a fuck data center shirt. Yeah, man. We got fuck data. So you got this shirt with like a skull where the you is so that you can wear it out. You're not technically swearing. Yeah, I might buy one. We have the new micro slop shirt. Oh, yes. Between the two of us. We're making the world the better place, just like Silicon Valley. Yeah, I'm just worried that like someone's going to be walking around and do something wearing one of mine.

2:49But, you know, it's not my fault. yeah it's so this this year's gtc was it kind of reminded me of this year's ces in the sense that it felt like a couple doing stuff to pretend that they were doing well like being like yeah you know we're great we're going we're going to puerto rico going on vacation we're feeling great we love each other we're only in couples counseling three times a week it was so weird yeah it was uh i i gotta to say the dlss appearance the gaming appearance i wasn't expecting just because what happened there what happened why was everyone upset this part just completely passed me by i so dlss is a gaming thing and one thing i wonder is that there's a huge amount of backlash towards it from just everybody i mean it's like one of the most hated things i've ever seen announced i'll get into what it is but what i thought was interesting was uh i don't know just like jensen's reaction afterward where they had multiple statements and reactions and i almost wonder if you're jensen if if you look at that and you're like okay fuck gamers like i i mean they're kind of already doing that already they are but i i think i mean in like a more direct uh less of a shrewd business decision and more of a no seriously no yeah we actually don't Yeah, we're just saying it out loud now.

4:14Yeah, so, yeah, it's basically a filter. It's an AI slop filter, more or less. They said it's not a filter, and then they put out multiple different public statements that are, like, paragraphs long when you read all of them. And they say it's not a filter, and then they proceed to describe a filter. But isn't DLSS generally good in that it adds frames? Like, that's a good thing? DLSS has some things it's done pretty well over time. So it started as basically an upscaler, and then it progressed to where there's been times where DLSS can be better than native while improving the performance just because of the way games render different things.

4:57So there's certain types of, for example, fence posts or grates or things that have a lot of repeating patterns, straight lines. Sometimes you have trouble with that at low resolution. So DLSS can upscale and sometimes even repair these things when they're rendered in a way that's just not good. But they've now attached this basically Instagram 2019 face filter to DLSS and kind of tarnish the name with something totally unrelated. It looks like they're trying to say, look, AI, it has uses. Please keep the bubble. And so it seems like it's not just like adding frames. It's attempting to fill in details.

5:40It's almost like yassifying in some cases. This is really horrible. Yeah. So basically what it's doing, so they originally said that it changes, it uses color and some vectors on the screen to then improve things by using AI generation to do whatever it is they think is improving it. what they're actually doing nice yeah they're changing the entire feel of the game and i mean you know this where ai generated images especially when you ask them to be photorealistic they they all pretty much look the same right like yes yeah there's no style there's no character to it and whether or not it's useful for people i don't even care i think what most people cared about was you're stripping all of the character out of the artwork and you know part of the art for video games is you have to work within these strict confines to make it readable yeah and they strip it out and they replace it with something that just looks like the same slop everywhere and nvidia's initial defense was well but the artist can control it and i think the answer to that is i i find it very unlikely that the artists make these decisions i think this is probably an executive level corporate decision of we're gonna partner with nvidia to use this thing and if you're an artist fire artists so yeah yeah like yeah yeah i and also wouldn't it add a bunch of work to an artist anyway because you'd have to tweak this completely separate thing that also is not consistent and is generative yeah and i mean it they didn't even show any like actual motion other than one game and it looked awful and uh i think it's likely that the face details slightly change you know from scene to scene because it's some form of generative so it's it's not going to be perfectly consistent so anyway they're they're trying to shove ai slop into real-time rendering for games now in a way that um i i will say i was uh i guess proud of the gaming community to see the amount of pushback was unbelievable like these large companies have done far more corrupt terrible things in the real world with governments and data centers whatever and this got more pushback than that stuff yeah i i think everyone's just kind of fucking tired of nvidia at this point because it it isn't really clear what nvidia is doing other than selling more stuff and it isn't clear who is actually using that stuff i mean i just the the indignity of watching a company with like a three four trillion dollar market cap talking about open claw truly like to this day i cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw i i liked his uh in their pregame for gtc where uh he made the comment to the other i don't know the podcasters about uh i think ai is going to make us all busier isn't it making you busier ha ha ha you know what do you do all day jensen jensen you're not that busy i refuse to believe any of these people are busy at all in fact i think that they're just kind of fucking sitting around coming up with new ideas of stuff they can say at GTC and then they go to sleep for three months.

9:08Yeah, I'm not even sure. It's just not even a good... I don't know. It's not news that these executives are tone deaf, obviously, and disconnected from reality, but it is a very disconnected from reality thing to say, to make the sell of AI is going to reduce the workforce for the executives, and then also say that it's making people busier, and it's just like these... This isn't the cell you think it is. Also, these aren't thoughts that connect together. If you say them both in a sentence, you sound insane. I just... I'm sure you haven't really explored OpenClaw much. I certainly haven't wanted to.

9:47But it appears to just be, what if I turned over my computer to a large language model and nothing really changed? That's long and short of it. So, which is what makes it so insane that NVIDIA is... Like, GTC used to be a place they announced... hardware and new technology not hey guys the latest open source thing you're going to forget about in six months that is now the most important thing in nvidia's stack it's it's really weird because we've covered nvidia for so long that i've met a lot of the engineers there yeah and the the people who are running these ai departments now are at hardware and software levels are people that I worked with on the gaming side, you know, anywhere from 15 years ago until even more recently, like three years ago.

10:38And it's a little sad for me seeing these people move over to purely AI in these big important roles. And it's just like, I don't know, they're smart people. And I have nothing I respect about their work anymore for the most part because of the just, I think sort of feckless rollout and widespread damage uh that it's causing and it's just it's interesting where you see nvidia moving their pieces around like a chessboard where they're okay this guy is really good at this specific type of research let's strip him out of the thing that he's been doing really well for 10 years in gaming or whatever and put him into ai you know and then outcomes like the dlss nemo claw or nemo nemo claw nemo claw this literally like four months ago no one knew what the fuck this was like they the guy who made open claw sold himself to open ai cool for him i guess and now this is like in now this is the most important thing to nvidia now like what's it's just it's so strange it's it's just very strange they did a song at the end of gtc as well they had a song i saw a horrible author i saw take him i was a disgrace to journalism sorry tay uh who was like not gonna lie it's just kind of a banger may go to the said the song is a banner yeah banger yes he did uh go to the doctor that's my first thought is like you need to go to the doctor man you have like i did hear it and it was not good i heard it and it made me angry yeah yeah i i was thinking about this um when ai music covers first started to really propagate on youtube and right yeah i remember the first one i ran into it was like slipknot reimagined as soul like blues yeah and i i did actually that was the first one i saw i listened to it and i was like damn this is like not bad and it was only you know 30 seconds into it where you realize the horrors of music and entertainment the entire currency of it is attention and you only have so much time you can give to listening to music in a day and uh for each of these ai songs that someone's going to listen to and even worse for the the real artists if people start liking them you know that's one less real artist who may already be like a starving artist archetype uh who doesn't get that view or that listen and yeah and i've heard some of those ai things and it's always like the first 10 20 seconds you're like, okay, this is, and then nothing changes.

13:26It's just very repetitious. But you're right. It only exists as a kind of phishing law to get people in to just kind of hear in the background. It's just patently evil. It's just wafting evil at the moment. And even by the standards of regular software, it's not really clear what any of these companies are doing anymore. Like GTC, I don't know if I'd describe it as exciting, but it felt like they were selling real things every year. and now it's just, you want an open claw? Oh, actually, I forgot my favorite part. So Jensen went on the All In podcast, you know, the classic guys we don't think of anything happening to.

14:07And he went on, he was like, so what should happen now is that you should give engineers when they join your company$250 ,000 worth of tokens a year. And that's part of their comp package. it's like oh i'm sure i'm sure he would love that i'm sure he would love that i'm sure like so much of the so much of this is just jensen going out there and being like it'd be really good if you use my stuff that's not even comp though right like if they're using it for work it's literally just budget yeah it's it's it's it's your compensation so that you can do your job like it's just it's really weird it it's really weird the the more of these we see the weirder it gets like it says on the website now nvidia is uh opening in the agentic frontier with sorry nvidia launches vera cpus purpose-built for agentic ai i'm not sure that that's really true considering gpus run it yeah large language models and something about vera rubin and agentic as well it's just it feels like mad libs at this point i mean i remember pieces together going to old gtc's like some of the really early ones and announcements the exciting announcements were you know they'd have the shield like handheld gaming device or they'd have the shield tv if you prefer that uh they sometimes some gpus sometimes it would be quadro or or professional class that's fun gaming class yeah and um it was pretty interesting and they had servers too a lot of the time and they were also interesting it wasn't pitched the same way but the biggest thing about it and i actually really did like the show was um there are a lot of panels where you could do really technical discussions and they still have those but it's just completely transformed into now it's the ai show and there's like almost nothing else there so we don't even bother going anymore um total company shift i mean they're they're really all in on this i speaking of things that jensen though has said he's all in on i don't know if you even want to get into this one but he made the comment in the in the all-in uh i think it was podcast about ai uses in the middle east given the current situation oh god what do you what why is jensen jensen you run a you run a gpu company come on man oh he he said that he believes there's a uh a paraphrase and he believes there's a reason for the war with iran and talked about potentially i use cases in the middle east and I don't really he said he did say I'm 100 % in on that when he was talking about this subject which is just like how did we get from you're on stage talking about like doom and quake and making jokes about crisis you know to like judging the reasons for various wars I don't know you just you wonder like they've been angling for this military industrial side for a while now and that To me, it seemed kind of like more of a signal to the US government than anything.

17:08I'm like, hey, we want to sell you stuff. I just, I think it just feels that it's kind of my thing to say, but it's the end of the hyper growth era in the sense that it's just everyone going like, oh, what do you want to do war with the GPUs? I guess you want to, yeah. What do you think of the, do you want to blow stuff up? It's not really what we do. Well, I mean, actually I take that back. doesn't nvidia also already involve itself with um what's it called the robot platform they're definitely involved with palantir which is involved in war uh is it is it's not isaac there's they have a specific uh jetson oh yeah jetson uh-huh jetson's already involved in so i can't say specifically because truly but i i swear to god i heard it was involved in some sort of related sensors yeah i'm not sure if i should i probably shouldn't say it but yeah jetsons we we have photographs of things that they are in that have been used in uh in ukraine um so i don't know i don't know if i can say any more than that that was a conversation with some congress people earlier yeah that's the thing though it's like they talk about the nemo chlorine and they talk about doing war stuff, and they talk about all these things, when the only 90 % of their revenues from these fucking GPUs.

18:25It's not even a case of like, oh, they're making like 50 % of revenue. Pretty much all of their revenue comes from the GPUs. And just before we got on, I've been trying to answer a question of how many data centers have actually been built in the last year. It is a very difficult question. But from what I can tell, based on like there's like four or five gigawatts might have gone online which means we're running at about it takes about a year may to install like half a year's worth of gpu cells oh wow okay it's it's really i don't think people realize how slow this is but i just can't work out at this point why anyone's buying these gpus anymore like it's just just as if they stop doing it it's like the bus from speed their company will shut down like yeah i mean it might be like there might be a uh a chain reaction you know just it's just so bizarre because metaverse was killed last week they killed it they shot it with a gun horizon worlds will no longer you can but then they were like oh we're gonna keep it running kind of but it's not clear what that whole thing was stupid to begin with it's so it's so cool it's just a shitty video game like it's not even you could literally just play a video game and it would be the better it's just but the great thing is is they are no longer bringing it to horizon worlds to vr but they are also bringing it back for an indeterminate amount of time i i just i don't think the tech industry knows what it's doing ever anymore i think that they just wake up one day and they're like what what do we what do we do today what we do we fucking do what if we buy more gpus that what do you like that

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23:24it's validation seeking right it's almost like the whole industry is seeking validation and i i think some of that may mirror what we saw happen to intel for for multiple ceos running where it's uh they eventually moved from engineering focused ceos to accounting focused ceos and and marketing in one instance you know and that didn't work out very well for them and i i don't know i wonder if maybe there's just so much money in everything now that it's become a game about and it's like cost engineering or it's stock engineering or whatever rather than engineering engineering um i think maybe that's some of where we're seeing that well i think we came out just before we got on as well.

24:12We're finally getting Enron shit though, because OpenAI is trying to offer, they're trying to do this spurious joint venture thing with private equity firms. And they're like, well, what we'll do is we'll raise money and then the private equity firm will pay us in advance to install ChatGPT across their portfolio companies, right? And as part of this deal, open ai is guaranteeing a minimum minimum return of 17.5 now you may be thinking that's a good question and also a 17.5 return on what i like i've read the i've read the reuters article four or five times i cannot work it out i just this whole thing feels like an exploitation of ignorance it's just like how many reporters actually read the emails they get or when they write up a story how hard do they think about it i had a um i had a reporter from another from a business focused publication email and um asked to talk about nvidia and basically the reporter was interested in learning from our perspective why is it that gamers and why is it that consumers are so mad at nvidia and the first question that was asked of me was uh uh did when did gamers for like did did gamers notice or were they happy about nvidia's stock going up when it started to go up and i had to start it's like let's start from scratch the consumers 10 years ago weren't paying attention to nvidia stock you know they wanted to buy gpus to play video games like people weren't you weren't interested in the gpu for the stock price you don't get stock when you buy a graphics card you don't get that that is a good idea though maybe that's what they can do next i yeah and they're just like that's how they do stock buybacks but each time they sell a gpu they buy back it's just i love it but that's i actually think that that question is really indicative of the media problem with nvidia where it's just like oh nvidia right so every single person who's ever used nvidia cares about the stock right that's that's not true like most people should not think about the stock market i i would say the i mean for sure i don't know exactly but at least going back to the earlier days for nvidia i can't say their stock price ever really came up in any discussions like in in technical news like it definitely came up in news in general But in our space, you know, it never came up.

26:46Why would it come up? Why would it come up? You are covering hardware. You cover hardware. Why would the stock come up? Yeah. Why? And I think it's also because, and I mean this with no offense to the reporters that listen, I'm sorry, but people did not know who NVIDIA was four years ago. They had no idea. They did not. They had no idea. They were not thinking about NVIDIA. They did not think about. It's kind of like how a much larger version of how I think I now see 75 different guys who are now an expert on the straight-off hummus. Oh, yeah. Despite learning what it was around two weeks ago.

27:22Right. Like, I'm now, oh, look at the straight. Did you see the venture capitalist whose solution to it was to just build a big road? There's this little, like, blob, like, the kind of the tip of it. Does he understand how large it is? It's fine. You just draw a giant road from the coast of Iman to the coast of the UAE. And you also, there's just a bunch of - Infrastructure is famously quick to build. Exactly. Especially during a massive assault from a nation the size of Alaska. Yeah. But on top of that, I assume he has some way around the giant rocks either side and also a way for the boats to get in.

28:10It's just that easy. But I genuinely think that that's the era, though, because people like, yeah, you know, there's like 240 gigawatts of data centers being built right now. And it's great. Actually, there's only about five gigawatts in America that's actually under construction. but you know it's crazy because if you look at maps of like announced or planned or hopeful data centers there's thousands of them in the u.s you know yeah there's um oh god i i had it i was just working on it before i came on but it's something like there's 240 gigawatts but let's see yeah it it's very very very strange that's you know yeah there's about five gigawatts that are actually under construction despite like 60 or 70 that's allegedly meant there's meant to be like 13 to 14 gigawatts that actually the there's meant to be i think 14 that comes on this year from yeah sightline sorry i'm gonna get it right this time because i actually found it in my notes i'm sorry everyone 16 gigawatts of capacity was slated to come online in 2026 across 140 projects but only five gigawatts is currently under construction and that's under construction that's under construction that's just being built it doesn't mean they're actually going to be built and the only reason this is happening is so that we can keep nvidia inflated i i people still i don't know who they're pulling the wool over the eyes of these days but um we i was reading the following this news of some of the ones that were canceled and you know from pushback from the community and town council hearings and stuff and um it's interesting reading the comments where if they're even humans these days i don't know anymore but some of the comments being about uh why are people proud about turning away jobs and it's just like do you know how many jobs this like million square foot facility would create because it's not a lot and on top of that even the jobs supposedly created by building them they're all flown in like yeah they're they're not local it's not like you get local builders well Stargate Abilene they've just flown in people to just move in to town so I guess like that helps the economy and then when it turns on which it never will there'll be like 70 jobs I mean that's the same right is like it's the when it turns on where okay you get this transient burst great but this isn't it's not like you're I think the branding of data centers as AI factories which is insane by the way uh but i think the the branding of it as it's like blue collar washing or something it's like they they they're trying to make it sound like a i don't know like like the grit and the hard work and like the manpower you get out of a traditional factory except it's a bunch of computers in a room yeah you know and there's like 15 guys in the on the floor who are just keeping them turned on which is a real job and can be an important job but it's not a factory yes it's not like bringing thousands of factory jobs from the bygone era like we're not like we're not going to repeal NAFTA so we're not actually going to fix the problem here but my favorite my most favorite of all recent data centers are not being built story is from Sachin Khati who is head of infrastructure open ai march 6th 2026 construction is underway at our site in port washington wisconsin and there is just a single steel beam that was my just one beam i saw your tweet that was like probably my favorite tweet of all time when you put that out just a single just and at this rate great this will be done in like 2029 maybe the beam was almost entirely in the ground yes and it's like there's still there's like four guys like three guys that sitting they're kind of standing around it like poking it and one guy walking towards it it's just it's just really what's great but they only do this because none of no i don't think i know i sound conspiratorial but it's like the mainstream media just doesn't say anything like to naturally move into my favorite story super micro yes with a wally liar who so to explain for the listeners super micro is an AI server company.

32:34They, two years ago, had a massive accounting scandal where a bunch of people resigned. I forget exactly what happened in the scandal, but they had to restate earnings, they had to delay earnings. But then things got back on track late 2024, 2020. Sorry, it's 2018 when the scandal was. But 2024, 2025, they got back on track. They were selling GPUs to Crusoe, they were selling GPUs to CoreWeave. And then very recently, the Department of Justice arrested three different guys including co-founder wally leao for shipping like hundreds of millions of dollars of gpus to china and like changing the serial numbers using a uh hair dryer yeah yeah i fucking love it they were moving the uh serial numbers and the stickers then using a a middle in logistics company to basically repackage and forward them and this story this story's just kind of disappeared already.

33:29Yeah. There is a picture where Jensen Huang is standing next to co-founder Charles Liang of Supermicro. My personal opinion, and this is an opinion, but my opinion is that there is no way that NVIDIA couldn't have known this was happening. I just think it's actually impossible that they were not aware of GPU smuggling. but wouldn't they don't these gpus have some mechanism of phoning home oh for sure they can be they can be identified through the internet 100 i mean yeah they they have the firmware has identifying information in it for the gpus you don't need the serial number on the sticker to know what it is you know you don't have to physically see it to know what it is and so yeah if this is like connecting to some kind of server somewhere or whatever it may be doing if in any way that's linked back to nvidia they would know about it if there's ever a service request i would assume at some point someone figures out and maybe it's a okay well kind of you know blind eye approach but it's just i there's i don't know i really think there's no way that they were ignorant to this because to quote one of the guys we spoke with when we did the black market gpu smuggling documentary last year uh the professor of a university in hong kong we spoke with i asked him i was like do you think nvidia knows and yeah his reaction was well how could they not these are very expensive gpus you would think you would traffic them all extremely carefully yeah i just and also it's the co-founder of super micro and just to be clear wally liar the co-founder resigned in 2018 rejoined as a consultant a few years later and then was just added back to the board.

35:18Yeah. And now he is in jail. And you're telling me that Charles Lang had no idea. No idea. No one in Inventor, where they think they were going. But this is yet another story that is just ignored. And I'm trying to work out if it is a journalistic competence issue or whether it's just a don't fuck with that out Disneyland problem. I think there's, yeah, I'm not sure. So first of all, NVIDIA has a lot of money in different media publications. And then also the ones that are. How do you mean? Yeah, the media publications that are involved in like stock coverage, they're all going to be biased towards protecting NVIDIA in some way or another for the most part.

36:01But secondly, also, I do think there's probably an issue of what's a super micro for a lot of the reporters. Yeah. Yeah. I just there's a picture of he Wally Liao was at he was actually at GTC there's a picture of him with an ice luge there's a picture of him standing three people over from Jensen Huang and there's you can like Lambda an AI compute company he was he was commenting on their LinkedIn very recently being like super congrats all he's like clearly a dorky old man because he's like super congratulations super great i kind of i kind of love that and i kind of love the text he sent where somebody basically said you're going to jail and he just responded with three crying i saw that that was honestly it was sad but it was funny could be oh if i would do the same thing i would be responding the same way if i was going to jail for like the most obvious crime but it's so weird like there's super micro is the backbone of core wave like they're a big i also wonder if so some behind the scenes is um after our black market documentary last year i went to washington dc and met with um a number of congressional staff on one of the committees there and it was they they one of the things they told me was that they had some stuff in the works um there was some talk about you know maybe testifying or something but uh they had stuff in the works and they were hoping it would materialize early this year i didn't know what that was at the time but i know they said it was related to the gpu smuggling they had a bunch of questions about it and how it works and whatever and uh i think this is probably what they were working on i think it was probably the super micro case i guess but just the fact that super micro is just walking around still doing business and they weren't named in the indictment yeah yeah that's right they weren't a defendant right it was the three yeah and it's just i don't know that doesn't see it doesn't seem very likely that nobody knew but you know it's just a few bad apples right just the co-founder of the company yeah just one guy couldn't be i just feel like by the end of this we're going to have a few of those i don't think you've got everything that you could possibly want from a scam for a scammer you've got a vague technology that could do everything but doesn't really have to do anything and a shit ton of construction just an absolute that's a funny point on the construction it's it's easy to hide money there and just also let money just like marinate the one thing that i i can't find any way of like structuring this into an argument i could point out with data but i've never seen a building project come in under budget not not once in my life and you're telling me none of these companies need follow-on funding yeah none i i think the uh i think the construction alone is i don't know it's all part of this interesting like the meme that's gone around of buying gps that don't exist yet to put in data centers that aren't built you know where it's yeah the amount of promise especially open ai uh versus actualized is is there's a huge disparity there well my my favorite thing is them claiming that the more compute they get the more revenue they make because that that doesn't make sense at all i mean jensen said that in one of the interviews where i think he went as high as 10x he was like if they had 10x more right and they would have 10x the revenue just like i don't think so

40:14We'll see you next time.

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42:05Like our 15-acre tropical water park, wildlife sanctuary, world-class golf course, and so much more. Visit Bahamar.com today. Well, the thing with that, that I always say is, where is the current state of affairs, if that's the case? Like, where are the people that cannot do something because there's not enough compute? What is the thing being held back? Who is holding it back? Like, are they sitting there and they're saying, when this comes online, X bazillion dollars will slosh out of it? Like, what is the, what is not, well like what's going on in the previous cnbc interview i think it was where altman and juan were with uh brockman who's a dollar store jensen juan with his leather jackets they were talking about that hundred billion dollar investment back at the time and uh altman to answer your question his angle for the cnbc or whoever was audience was uh if you could choose if if you could choose between free education for everybody or curing cancer and he pitched it as that those are your choices but if if they only had more compute they could do both right as opposed to neither right correct as opposed to to nothing of the sort happening at all anywhere but i do like that that's it's i don't like the examples he chose they're just so intentionally manipulative i think you know where it's like well you could you could choose from preventing puppies from being kicked or from preventing cats from being homeless it's just like you you you can only crush one animal like it's it's just very it's also the kind of thing that you come up with if you do not do any work if you don't really know what happens in the real world you're like fuck yeah what if education was free or what if cancer no no happen good do you like this like and of course cnbc was like yep can i have money now yeah this is good and that hundred billion is very real that that's enough this is the thing maybe conspiracy theorists are right all along in the sense that it's like yeah there was a point last year where nvidia and open ai lied hundred billion dollar deal never happened amd and open ai lied as well just nobody talked about their guidance didn't change for amd they do not appear to have sold a single chip to open ai uh broadcom still nothing like three quarters in we don't have a single sale what the fuck jensen was really defensive about that one when the taiwanese media asked oh yeah about it yeah oh he there was never any commitment he said there's never any commitment from any of these things though i just i i think and i think at some point we're just gonna find out that nothing happened like i just that nothing actually moved to anyone like we still haven't heard if nvidia has sent a dime to open ai softbank has to raise 40 billion dollars to send 30 billion dollars to open ai yeah that hasn't happened yet did you see the uh the game so there's a game that came out this past week called crimson desert and i've been meaning to play it but i hear it's a mess yeah it is it is a bit of a mess i think but the interesting thing was um they had a bit of an unexpected scandal where amongst all the other various problems like blocking intel from working they had uh some users noticed that there was very clearly ai generated art in hell yeah hell yeah yeah so it's like you walk into the whatever the tavern and on the wall there's a painting hanging and if you get close to it you can see it's like the the early several years ago generative ai art that's just very obvious and uh so on steam you're supposed to disclose if there's ai art or assets in the game they didn't do that they're too big so they're not going to be punished for it but they put out a statement apologizing saying these are placeholders they're supposed to be replaced we're going back through and removing them all whatever and the uh mike ivara who's uh currently the ceo of prize picks and previously was president of blizzard and previously was also a vp of microsoft windows he he tweeted out asking why the studio was apologizing and basically saying this is going to be in everything so you shouldn't apologize and it's just it's crazy to me where the approach to a lot of the ai stuff it feels so like this is inevitable is what you're being told by the suits and the vps and the ceos i don't think they realize that that's the part a lot of people don't like is the the part where it's being forced and you're told this is inevitable get used to it yeah it doesn't have to be good or you don't have to like it but you're going to have it because of us we're going to make you have it and that'll be good well it won't be good but you'll have it and we will ostensibly something will change like they're not even making i don't even think they're saving money doing this stuff or if they are it's the kind it's like very it's just firing three people which is a lot for the people being fired and their work would make the game better but it's just a fucking excel spreadsheet entry like it's for the for the larger companies i mean it's just so it i think that this is also a mask off moment for so many of these companies it's the ones that just don't give a rat fuck about anyone who just they don't make stuff they don't contribute things they just like yeah you know man well you know the the thing you like it's it's gonna suck shit and we're gonna save like uh 80 dollars yeah it definitely enables grifting right like the whole uh let's like you said earlier where you have the just the entire premise of the way the technology is set up and pitched and the lack of understanding technically for a lot of like media and coverage it just it's set up where people can grift and i think you saw it with crypto too where there's a lot of blockchain you know is the big word everyone's throwing around suddenly all these people on tv who had no idea what that meant but same same type of thing it's i don't know the situation's right where maybe there's some real use cases for sure but um but it's pretty easy to to scam people right now i just i also think that it's just showing how many dunces there are how many people that don't actually want to learn anything i mean even the coding side the little code i've learned so far has just made me aware that there are a lot of engineers who don't read any of the code that comes out and they're like it'll be fine should work fine i think i had someone um really pushing me to try claude where he's basically like no no like you don't the other ones because i've tested a few of the llms and i'm not too impressed but he was like this one this is the one you know this is unbelievable how good it is and um i guess my use case wasn't maybe the right fit or something i never seems to be yeah i mean it's just like but like i tried it and the thing i tried it for was uh i wanted to make a template for adobe in design which i've never used right and uh you can go buy and download a template and whatever but i wanted like a specific one made in the way i wanted to use it and because in design can accept code it might be xml i don't remember but it's got some kind of code it can accept i thought okay this should be able to write the code it's not it's not a design i'm asking for it's code and then i should be able to shove it into in design and have a template and uh i experimented with it for probably i get like really obsessive when i'm trying to make software work yeah i spent like eight hours on it jesus it did this the same thing as chat gbt where you know it gives you code uh it didn't work i feedback the error to it and it's like oh i see what went wrong it was this and then it sends you more code and it doesn't work and before you know it you've blown through all your tokens for the day right like which seems like a great way to make more money and i ended up after that experiment i was like let me just do this the old-fashioned way and i watched like three tutorials and within two and a half hours i had done what i wanted myself you know the model did not provide you with the thing you needed it did not and it not only that but there was a moment there where i was starting to feel that that disconnect or that like psychosis i think some people get as they use these tools more and more and rely on them where it starts to feel like well i can't do this and this thing isn't helping me so there's that temptation of like i'll just give up but then you know you try to do it yourself for like five minutes like oh this isn't that bad to learn new software you know i can handle this and uh i just worry the people who get really reliant on this stuff i don't know it seems not good well that's the thing though whenever i've because i i have the times i've experimented with like claude and chat gpt i've always thrown it stuff where i'm like i've already finished a model i've already finished uh a power off what do you think and it will say something i'll be like okay but what about this and i'll just make up something i just be like actually there were 80 gigawatts i didn't ask what what do you think about that i'll be like oh my mistake it's just like you're gaslighting no i'm gaslighting you like i'm i am abusing the model but that's the thing you better be careful that's gonna come back to you one day Yeah, what, Rococo's modern basilisk?

51:56I don't fucking know. It's just like the fact that they can just have their arm twisted immediately makes them useless because the whole point of artificial intelligence is it's meant to be intelligent and kind of support you when you're like not agree with you when you're wrong, but be like, hey, you're wrong here. But it's just very weird as well that every time I hear a story, it's like yours where it's like yeah i wanted it to do stuff but it didn't and you talk to someone who's a booster and they go well what you should have done it's like so so you're just gonna just let's start from the point of this thing doesn't work and you have to find a way to make it work well it does work you're just not using it right well why not yeah well how did you prompt it how did you exactly but the thing is you can hold something wrong there's no way to use these right It's just how much can they gaslight you into believing that you're deficient and that you should sink hours in?

52:53And I think even if I made it work, it just seems like, at least for the task I was doing, the amount of time required to baby step it through the process is so much greater than just learning something new, actually. I also don't know about you, but when I don't understand something, the more I don't understand it, the more worried i get like i don't i can't sacrifice myself to a machine i'll be like i will straight up just think like i don't get this this i'm worried that i'm gonna learn something wrong because i'm looking at this and it seems to be trying to gas me up when i do not understand what i'm talking well i'm just like i don't fucking know what you're talking about brother i well you had a great quote uh when we met up when you came down here and uh i've i've I actually said it to writers on the team for training, but you know, one of the thing I made a comment about how I needed to do a bunch of fact checking that day or something.

53:50And, uh, you made a comment about how, uh, you always double check your facts. And if you want it to be right, you check it a third time, which was brilliant. I think if you add AI to that, you know, it's like, it's kind of that same feeling where it's like, if anything comes out of an LLM, uh, the amount of anxiety I have. Mm. Yep. is not even worth whatever the answer is. And also, a while ago, I had access to a much bigger, more financial-focused one, and I used it to look up a bunch of stuff, like do a report on this. Three or four of the links were just dead. One of them referred to something that just was an irrelevant link.

54:36I did look something up on Claude once, and it gave me two different citations from Grokipedia. Wait, okay. You're not familiar with Grokipedia? I am not. Well, that's the special Grok Wikipedia that they make. Okay. At X, the everything app. Uh-huh. They have their own Wikipedia? Yep, and that's what Claude is citing from. That's scary. The basic Wikipedia. It's so good. It's just, I do think that there is also a degree here where AI is just a test of how much you're, how willing you are to just be like, yeah i get it i guess like just quickly you can wave off something and be like ah yeah it's fine i guess i mostly get it this sounded good enough for me the best use cases have still been for browsing chinese internet or browsing the internet generally in another language uh and specifically it's for like when i've needed sources and research so for the i I don't know if I gave this example on your show before, but the one that came up previously was for the DRAM cartel piece and for the rise of Chinese memory.

55:47We were looking into a bunch of different filings for these companies in China. I wasn't 100 % sure if they had like an SEC equivalent or something like that. And so using, I don't know if I use, I think I used GPT to try that, but using GPT or whatever it was at the time, it was useful for providing phrases where it's like, okay, here's the Chinese characters of what you should search for. And the reason Google Translate wasn't good enough on its own for that is because I didn't know the colloquialisms of what might they call these different things that I know exist in the US, but I don't know if they exist there.

56:23you know and then i can take that and i can put it into google translate which is a dumb translator that's just word for word and just make sure it makes any sense and that it was useful for but so far that's pretty much the only um you know the only use case i've i've had yeah and it's also it's the classic thing of maybe an on-device model could do that i think that eventually that will be the case and it's just is that really enough to substantiate nearly 200 billion dollars worth of gpu and networking sales from nvidia a year 193 billion dollars yeah it's it's not enough to be worth the the destruction of consumer hardware you know and that that was constantly like every time i i try to poke at these things every now and then so that i'm at least i want to make sure if i'm criticizing them i've at least used them same yeah yeah but it still feels bad it's just and then you even then just having my twitter feed up while we're talking random shit pops up such as sass ceos if your ceo cfo hasn't used clawed for excel by now you need a new cfo only the curious will survive shut the fuck up just shut the fuck up like what are you talking about why why what do you mean that's so i feel like that's so dangerous specifically for i'm just responding with why feed all of your companies financial information into this lm also all what do you think like what do you think a cfo does oh they just they build models i guess yeah well the good idea for financial modeling is when you distance yourself from everything as far as ideally you're so abstracted from the problem that you don't even really understand it anymore as we're finding out isn't a problem anywhere it's just insane it's i feel like we live in a truly insane period and it's bad i mean the consumer space is just like uh last time i talked to you similar topic but um more of the companies in the industry computer industry that don't sell silicon products you know cases coolers accessories whatever motherboards um we've had more of them now contact basically saying hey we're in big trouble and they want to talk to us about it for a video but it's just when i say big trouble i mean a lot of these companies are down like 50 plus percent from expectations and that's because you can't build a computer as a consumer if you can't afford like five six hundred dollars minimum for basic memory now because of the data center demand for it how does any of this turn around though like how quickly is there any possibility that when the bubble bursts anything returns to normal within gaming like you've seen i'm sure you've seen areas where they've oversold memory in the past yeah not like this though um yeah i've never seen it like this memory is a really unique industry because of how it's been corrupt for 40 years uh and when i say how do you mean well yeah so like the department of justice uh under the bush administration w um busted the memory makers for what they called a cartel.

59:46And by definition, that's what it was, price-fixing cartel. And this has been happening at least once a decade, where in the late 90s, early 2000s, the memory suppliers all got together and would agree on price ceilings and floors. So when they go and sell memory to Dell or Apple or HP, they've already spoken to their competitors and agreed we're not going to go below this price cool yeah and and this has happened multiple times for that industry very cool and you know what my favorite part of this story and i didn't know this till we did our report recently was uh so there were there were several people there were like over 100 people involved if i remember correctly and if you look up the people who were charged with crime including fined and even sentenced to prison for that for a price fixing cartel if you look up what happened to them after a lot of them got promoted yep one of one of them his reward was to become ceo geez at what company samsung europe very well didn't someone from samsung also go to jail a few times like i swear to god like people from samsung yeah it's just it really does feel that by the end of this someone else is going to jail like there's just somewhat so and they'll get out and they'll be promoted you know well the question is whether it's clammy sam altman though that i don't think they're gonna i don't know i hear people being like someone was gonna go to jail i don't know if i buy it but this private equity thing with the minimum returns maybe just do a classic ponzi i hope so yeah classic ponzi at least has some some history of meaningful busts and and sentences right so i don't know but a lot of the white collar stuff i feel like a lot of the time it's kind of a whatever you get like in the price fixing cartel most of them got seven or eight months max so i just america doesn't really have antitrust anymore otherwise this this would be i don't know all of the all of this just feels like it's going to set back consumer hardware for a decade at this point oh yeah yeah and it's not just gaming either like i think that's just what we specialize in but yeah it's it's more it's becoming increasingly viable i think for people on the surface to rent their computer or rent access to a computer in the cloud and that's a bad thing we don't want that is that really a likely outcome i i mean the low end is drying up and so if if you can't really afford the cheapest let's just keep it a gaming gaming computer anymore uh your best option might be to go rent server access from nvidia and use one of their thousand dollar gpus for twenty dollars a month god what a fucking bleak what a bleak environment i just hope it i hope it works out more that just these companies lose shit tons of money i don't know if because surely the memory prices would come down and storage prices would come down as well i would think so yeah i would think so oh i think everyone involved with this should suffer in ways i can't say on the show due to uh legal reasons you know just the thoughts they have inside my head all right steve we're gonna wrap it there you got anything you want to hype no i mean we've got a yeah i guess i'll throw one out there we've got a big another documentary we're working on right now but uh it's gonna be on the the war on huawei so we went and dug through all of huawei's history it's pretty interesting and interesting yeah and that should be over an hour long and lots of um they're a wild company and the it's very politically intertwined with the u.s and china so uh so that'll be our next big one should be fun and yeah you know where to find me the links will be in the show notes thank you as ever for listening to Better Offline.