In short
Podcast Summary: Better Offline - Episode: Radio Better Offline: Edward Ongweso Jr. & Allison Morrow
Overview In this episode of Better Offline, host Ed Zitron is joined by Allison Morrow from CNN and Edward Ongweso Jr. from the Tech Bubble newsletter. They engage in a critical discussion about the current state of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on the implications of OpenAI's claims, the phenomenon of "hallucinations" in AI models, and the looming bubble in tech investments.
Key Topics Discussed
- AI Hallucinations
- Definition & Explanation:
- Hallucinations occur when AI models generate incorrect or nonsensical outputs, often due to their training process which encourages guessing rather than admitting uncertainty.
- OpenAI's Approach:
- OpenAI claims to have a solution to this issue by refining how models respond to questions, especially binary ones.
- Critique:
- The hosts express skepticism about OpenAI's claims, suggesting they are superficial and fail to address the deeper issues of AI reliability and accuracy.
- Market Dynamics & AI Investment
- Burn Rate and Financial Viability:
- Discussion on OpenAI's projected $115 billion burn rate by 2028, with questions raised about the sustainability of such investments.
- Concerns about the lack of clear revenue and profit pathways in AI startups.
- Comparison with Historical Bubbles:
- The current AI hype is likened to past tech bubbles, with insights that consumer sentiment may mask underlying issues related to profitability and utility.
- Potential AI Applications & Criticism
- Critterz Project:
- OpenAI's venture into creating an animated project called "Critterz" is discussed. While the project aims to showcase AI's capabilities, it is noted that traditional human labor is still essential, questioning the true innovation behind the endeavor.
- Cautionary Tales:
- The discussion includes concerns about potential societal impacts, including cases where AI interactions have led to severe psychological issues among users.
- Media’s Role & Responsibility
- The hosts highlight how media coverage often lacks critical scrutiny, perpetuating hype without accountability, similar to issues faced in politics and business reporting.
- They suggest a shift towards more skeptical reporting is necessary as the AI landscape evolves.
- Philosophical and Ethical Considerations
- The conversation touches on the ethical implications of deploying AI technologies, particularly in terms of user safety and data integrity.
- Concerns about AI monopolies and their implications for competition and innovation in the tech industry are raised.
Key Takeaways
- Skepticism Towards AI Claims: There is a growing concern that companies like OpenAI are not being held accountable for their claims and the societal implications of their technologies.
- Investment Bubble: The tech industry's current investment in AI may lead to a significant economic downturn if sustainability and profitability are not achieved.
- Complexity of AI Systems: The discussions illustrate that while AI has potential, its current state is riddled with issues that may not be solvable through simple solutions or further investment.
- Need for Critical Journalism: The hosts emphasize the importance of critical journalism in technology sectors to ensure informed public discourse and accountability from tech companies.
Conclusion This episode of Better Offline offers a thought-provoking examination of the AI industry's current trends and future directions, encouraging listeners to remain vigilant and skeptical about technological promises and the implications for society at large.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:30Thomson Reuters and specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. Cheaper? Better? OCI costs up to 50 % less for computing, 70 % less for storage, and 80 % less for networking. Better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
1:12This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. So I love Square. They make paying for stuff at a store really easy. I just use them at Court Street Grocers to buy a sandwich here in Brooklyn, New York. Their stuff's reliable, easy to use, and it just works for both businesses and their customers. Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline.
1:50That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash better offline. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. A front payment of$45 for a three-month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy.
2:27Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile.com.
2:34Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.
2:45Better Offline. And we are recording here in beautiful New York City. And I have a wonderful pair of guests today. I have, of course, Alison Morrow from CNN Nightcap Newsletter and Edward Ongueso Jr., the hater himself, from the Tech Bubble Newsletter. Thank you so much for joining me today. Great to be here as always. Thanks for having us. So I think we should start with exactly what we were just talking about. The OpenAI claims that they have worked out what causes hallucinations. Alison, do you want to go over this? I should have read the paper a bit more carefully, but I can, you know, the highlights were getting digested yesterday on X and Blue Sky.
3:22And it seems like it's kind of the test taking problem of when you encourage students when they're taking standardized tests, and you don't know the answer, you guess. And that's exactly how these models are trained. And you don't get a point if you say, I don't know. So you come up with something. And the models are meant to keep guessing until they get something close to right. So that's why you get a lot of nonsense and hallucinations. And OpenAI, at least in their reading of it, says, oh, this is a simple solution. We'll just encourage the models to understand better when it's like a binary question and when you can say, I don't know the answer to that.
4:05So we'll see. I read the paper, albeit not today, because my brain just immediately read it as marketing copy. just put that replaced it with another anime theme song i i went through it i was like okay so it's going to encourage them to say i don't know this feels like a very flat view of what hallucinations are though because hallucinations as people know them authoritatively stating something that isn't true but hallucinations in like a coding model are it will just say yeah i did that when it didn't but it's a very common you go into the cursor and the clawed code forums you can see this or subreddits at least and it's not that they say something that's true they don't know that something's not true also so they might say they don't know and it's just very silly because they claim that they're going to fix this problem with this solution but they've done years and hundreds of millions of dollars of reinforcement learning do they unreinfor do they reinforce it more so that i don't know i'm tired of these companies going to be completely honest i realize this is kind of cliche for the show but it's the fact that these things get written up as very serious things versus saying you guys still haven't worked this out it's kind of frustrating to me and they don't seem to be the models aren't getting better diminishing returns and all that but this is the best they've got i mean does this kind of uh thrust fee like you know do you guys feel like it's downstream of the attempts by some of these firms to say oh actually like if we dial back uh the sycophancy you know then we'll be able to have a much more engaging consumer product we'll be able to have it hallucinate less, you know, and do psychosis less, you know, do they feel linked in that way?
5:42Does it just feel like a, you know, maybe another dead end? I feel like it's just them trying to work shit out and trying to, like, this also feels like a very rudimentary answer that they probably already had. It doesn't, anytime someone comes up with an idea that I can, that's technical, I'm like, okay, mate, you cannot be cooking with gas. This is, this cannot be that good an idea. And the thing is, the sycovancy problem, I don't think is solvable, through solving hallucinations. The problem is it should stop. It needs to just, it should not say I don't understand. It should say, no, actually you sound like you think I'm God King and that you are God King and that as God Kings together, we will destroy the world.
6:18Yeah, I mean, which in my case is true. Do you think like the emphasis or the attempt to overcorrect on that is leading them to go down solutions where they think, oh, like if we just go back this and that, then we'll stop it. Yes, yes. Actually, I think that that's right because they have the, I don't know if you saw the Attorney General, attorneys general from Delaware and California sent a letter to OpenAI last week saying, hey, look, you need to fix these safety protocols. You need to actually have them because what you have right now doesn't work and we will block your nonprofit. Otherwise, I was really happy to read that right up until the bit they say, we wish you well with your quest for AI dominance.
6:52I'm just like, these are the fucking people protecting us from the... They're like, no, it's great. You want to dominate everyone with AI. It's just you drove some people to a murder suicide situation. And wasn't that part of the problem with GPT-5 is they tried to dial back the sycophancy and then it took away the character and like the humanness that people had gotten attached to in GPT-4 and earlier models. And like it all seems to come back to OpenAI doesn't realize that what it's selling often is like a companion and a therapist. And it doesn't – it reminds me of like Q-tips. You're not supposed to put them in your ear, right?
7:30But that's all anyone uses Q-tips for. I was going to say, you're not meant to do that. Of course not. But that's how the consumer has chosen to use this product. And they're saying, well, we don't condone that. We don't think it's the best use of our product. And we know better than the consumer, of course. I think it's one abstraction higher, which is I don't think they know what ChatGPT is. I don't, I did, an AI booster piece came out last week, but it was, I had this whole thing where it was, it's so, they don't describe what ChatGPT does, if you go on the website, like, it's like, yeah, it analyzes data and it's brainstorming and charts and stuff, the agent does things too, please buy it, and then you try and like actually look for any use cases and there's nothing.
8:15i think that they're just guessing but my favorite thing i'm seeing my favorite thing is that now people are like gpt4o isn't the same because they brought it back and now people are just freaking out people like no it's not the same it's different somehow it's honest i honestly don't know if it's true i just think that they've entered gamer mode this is just what game this is how gamers react it's like the gun isn't the same it's literally the same code no you've changed something you've changed i know and it's what happens when you release an imprecise glazing bot onto the world it's also really funny how literally any of these companies could have been open ai there doesn't seem to be anything special about this company at all anymore or ever well you know i i mean not everybody can lose as much money as open ai you know that feels very special or have the connection to masayoshi son you know oh my god i haven't heard from masayoshi son in a minute we haven't had an announcement of him claiming tomorrow tomorrow he's gonna be i like that he bought a fox he bought a fox count lab an old foxconn lab to turn into an ai server building place in like ohio i think it is it's like mate what are you doing man are you okay someone needs to check in on massive we need to hold space for masayoshi's son yeah bring him on i have asked him i have genuinely emailed softbanks pr and i've emailed anthropics pr for dario i haven't heard back from either i assume there's an email issue because there's no other reason they wouldn't come on this show it's just it now i what's fun to watch though is considering how many times we've had like ai bubble conversations on here everyone seems to be kind of waking up to it it's kind of fun must be clear everyone here was early on this alison you were actually very early you've been early on every night as early as you ed no i give you credit you're one of like the three people who when the metaverse was happening was actually calling it out.
10:06So it's good to see and hear, but also insane that it's still going. That's what I don't, like this OpenAI 115 billion burn by 2028, I think it is. I don't understand how people keep publishing this and being like, and that will happen. I will say to my relief, the metaverse went away quickly because when it first was announced and I wrote a piece just being like, what? What is that? What? and then like everything about it seemed really dumb in every iteration coming after and so i was like okay i wasn't crazy but with ai and i know you can relate to this i feel crazy because the the lack of utility is still there and like the absurdity of the investment is still there um and it does seem like that's why i wrote about the vibe shift like it has been like going in ed tron's favor in the last few weeks fucking vindication finally but it's it's funny as well because even with that this open ai story comes out and people are still like yeah they're gonna burn 115 billion dollars um people reported about a month ago that they're gonna spend 30 billion dollars a year on oracles starting 2028 how how how i just that's what i don't understand how these articles keep coming out and i understand that reporters have to report the news and things they have discovered i get it but can no one just be like and no one has any idea where this money is coming from no one 30 billion dollars a fucking year from oracle for servers that are yet to be built and all of this like don't need to worry about the fact that the servers aren't actually built and abilene texas is not finished and the money doesn't exist and it isn't obvious how oracle affords it they will have to take on debt to build this and crusoe and primary digital infrastructure have already done that and i mean other than that it could happen any day I just wonder if the media is actually not prepared for this.
11:54And I don't mean in a conspiratorial way. I mean just in a, is the media actually set up for companies just lying or just projecting? I mean, I feel like it reminds me of kind of the relationship that maybe art critics or, you know, art coverage might have to the medium where there's not an inherent antagonism or skepticism of claims that are being offered. and an assumption of good faith that continually gets betrayed or punished, but gets carried on with over and over and over again. I feel like the AI bubble discussions that we're seeing, part of me also feels like they are going to disappear the second we start to see some of the firms maybe announce some favorable metrics, even though, as we've been talking about for a long time, revenues are not there, profits are not there.
12:44The burn is only increasing. right and there's no way forward uh in the short term or you know that i can think of where these companies start to actually do the things that they're claiming they're going to be doing with transforming the world but i can see a scenario where you know someone has a favorable quarter for adoption even though you know we just i just saw yesterday apollo global management was talking about how large firms are actually scaling back ai adoption which already wasn't even providing returns and was hurting productivity in the first place, right? It's - and it's really weird as well, because there was that MIT study where it's like they said 95 % of generative AI integrations don't have any return on investment.
13:24There are some people critiquing that number, but something that comes out of that study that I really like was it was saying that enterprise adoption is high, but the actual transformation is low, because this shit doesn't work. And it's so strange. And I think that the only reason that things won't immediately unravel with a good quarter is because the media has chosen to follow a direction now they've you've got the when you've got the atlantic the goddamn atlantic publishing a story saying yeah it turns out that ai isn't really doing much but it's holding up our economy it's like holy shit the atlantic's willing to admit something that happened happened i didn't even know this was in there i thought that they just wrote up whatever was emailed to them by and don't Hold your breath.
14:06They just published Mike Salana. Yeah, actually, I retract all my statements. I think with the media, I see it in political reporting, in business reporting, in tech. There's a deference to authority that I think American media but all media have an issue with. And I think that sort of speaks to the underlying economics of being in media right now where there's a general chill both economically and politically. Reporters are worried about their bylines being out there and getting stuff wrong. And I'm not saying that that's an excuse, but I do think that is an institutional mindset that has taken root, especially in the last 10 years.
14:50Oh, for sure. It's just become like really hard to be a journalist and to do it right. Right. But you are starting to see that MIT report was so important because it caused people on Wall Street, authority figures, to say, hmm, I don't know about this. And then that got a lot of mainstream financial media to kind of like do that questioning headline about AI that they maybe wouldn't have done six months ago. I do like that there's a rumor about the next deep seek model doing agents. They're not going to, but even just like if that comes out and they even claim they can i think that might have a market panic just because they'll be like ah china i mean yeah i mean that's that i actually think there's something to that right because you know we did agents here i didn't do shit for sales for us um really the market did the market even really there's actually central claim and a wonderful story from this information um open ai in their in their whole projections through 2029 they've reduced the amount of money they make from agents by 26 billion why i want anyway so but but yeah it's like the this deep seek thing could inspire people to get scared horribly because no one actually believes that agents exist because they don't yeah but they think they do but they will but they won't it's this i i don't think i've ever actually see anything like this in tech i'm going to be honest it's worse than crypto even worse than just the general general ai thing is this concept of agents though because i saw some fucking thing about some one political blog saying that donald trump would do some sort of act he would do the i forget the exact thing but it would be an act that would make ai copyright holders just hand shit over to ai due to us needing to beat china and it mentioned within the like yeah the um growing agentic capabilities of ai it's just what the fuck is that i've never seen a tech thing in my life that has not existed like this and people talk about it like it's real and i think also it's interesting to see the more it doesn't manifest, the more some of the recommendations to make them happen just sound more and more like these are also things that might somehow bend the cost curve in our direction.
16:54Maybe we should make the internet unusable to anything other than some of these programs, right? And I'm curious which one is going to give out first, like the really savvy ability a lot of these firms have had in spinning sputtering or spinning a crisis that might drain the markets or deter investors into, oh, actually, we just need even more capital, similar to what they did with DeepSeek. The solution is even more compute-intensive models. Whether they're going to be able to do that faster than people wising up and saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't misallocate trillions of dollars of capital over the next few years towards this.
17:36But this is the thing, though. I don't think there's anything stopping this, because the suggested thing was the, okay, so all of these model companies can steal from everyone, which is what happened already, even with this anthropic settlement. It's great people are getting$3 ,000. I love that. That's also what the companies were offering. That's similar to what your payout would have been if you said, yeah, right? Yeah, I didn't know that. I think like some publishers were offering or you know trying to ask uh authors hey if we pay you this would you be would you allow your book to be trained on or would you allow uh you know be put into a data set um the payment that you're getting from the settlement feels or reminds me of the amount of money that people are being offered in those sorts of deals so i've shopped with quints before they were an advertiser and after they became one and then again before I had to record this ad I really like them.
18:30My green over shirt in particular looks great. I use it like a jacket. It's breathable and comfortable and hangs on my body nicely. I get a lot of compliments. I liked it so much I got it in all the different colors along with one of their corduroy ones which I think I pull off and really that's the only person that matters. I also really love their linen shirts too. They're comfortable, they're breathable and they look nice. Get a lot of compliments there too. I have a few of them. Love their rust colored ones as well and in general I really like Quince. The shirts fit nicely and the rest of their clothes do too.
18:58They ship quickly, they look good, they're high quality, and they partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middleman. So you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. And I'm probably going to buy more from them very, very soon. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from Quince. Go to quince.com slash better for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns that's q u i n c e.com slash better free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash better parking shouldn't slow you down park whiz gives every driver a shortcut book ahead save up to 50 and skip the hassle of circling the block park smarter park faster park whiz download the park whiz app today and save every time you park so today's show is brought to you with support from Square, who I really love.
19:49They offer quick payment processing, really easy to use terminals. Everything spins up really quickly. Every store I use them in, I don't really think about the experience, which is exactly what I want from any kind of tech. The loyalty programs work really easily. They're over at Court Street Grocers, S &P, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. They're just a very easy to use and straightforward piece of tech. I can't recommend them enough. I've heard great things from businesses using them. And as a customer, never upset to see them in a store. Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments.
20:22And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash better offline. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today.
21:10and listen now.
21:16I think the thing is, okay, they already steal everything. Well, okay, we need to give them as much money as possible. We've already done that. Are we just going to do this forever? Because even if we do this forever, nothing's going to change. Even if I'm completely wrong and OpenAI keeps going another five years. Okay, so we're just going to annihilate $115 billion. There are no more things here. Like, their projections, OpenAI's projections from the information, their chart i don't even need to show you this because this is just fan fiction at this point there is in 2026 starting there is this growth of this orange thing that is other revenue who knows what it is i don't know open ai doesn't seem to and that's really important because they're going to make what looks like several billion dollars from this next year what the fuck is going every time i look at this company i feel a little more insane because they've now lowered their expectations of selling their access to their models by five billion dollars over the next few years what even is open ai at this point is it just a wrap have they become a wrapper company of their own models they're no better than cursor it's just it's so weird and i realize i'm kind of going in circles at this point but it's i even the metaverse even crypto even crypto functioned it was bad it's still bad it is bad cloud software but it still did the thing AI doesn't even seem to be doing it and they need more money to prove that it can't do it and actually they don't have enough right now but they're going to need even more.
22:46I don't even know how people are still taking this seriously because on top of that, did you hear about the Microsoft negotiations over the non-profit? I've been hearing reports. Well, they're delaying it to next year. They need to convert by the end of the year otherwise SoftBank comes their round in half and everyone's just like, yeah, it'll be fine, mate. We'll work it out. What the fuck? Have either of you ever – I know, Ed, you covered Uber a lot. I don't even think the economics match with that either. No. I mean, it's interesting because I think Uber's strategy, central strategy from the beginning was we have a few existing playbooks that we need to reference.
23:25You know, the Koch deregulation of the taxi industry in the 90s, as well as deregulatory campaigns that they led in Seattle and historic campaigns in San Francisco. there's a lot that we can reference and if we can figure out a way to bootstrap ourselves onto the model and onto those previous histories of deregulation while delaying scrutiny long enough for economics to actually you know get to a profitable place we'll get there which is what they did right um but even then i mean i feel like from the beginning as much as i hated a lot the coverage of uber for years the people who were always correct about it were like the labor reporters who had actually who you know if you spend time talking to the drivers that will lead you to be a little bit more interested in the you know what can justify the suffering yeah behind this and then you almost always will see uh that there's no act at that point there were no way the unit economics worked unless you subsidize everything yeah i feel like similarly there's something going on with with artificial intelligence firms in the global ai value chain where If you start with a labor analysis and you look at invisible workers or ghost workers that are integral.
24:42The Kenyan people training the models. Yeah, or labeling or any labor that's out of sight, out of mind. Starting there and going up, it becomes hard to ask, okay, how are we supposed to allocate all this capital towards a model that as it is right now is cutting all these corners for costs. and is still burning tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars and is asking for trillions of dollars more. But I don't know. I mean, part of my fear is that they are successful in the way that Uber was, where if you get enough buy-in from military industrial comp, well, in AI's case, if you get enough buy-in from military industrial complex, if you get enough buy-in from social programs and interfacing them and helping cut them or redirect traffic through them, if you get enough buy-in from other tech firms, If you get rents from other startups that need to use and get access to your product.
25:35And also, if you graft yourself onto everybody's daily interactions, daily lives, the way they interface with the internet, can you actually make it work? Which is also another way to say, like, what if you just become a massive parasite? The funny and grim thing is, is AI is a terrible parasite. It's not good at it. It doesn't like, because Uber's success came from being able to graft itself on through utility. and subsidized pricing that meant that everyone used it. And also cabs kind of fucking sucked. Yeah, I mean, yeah, they sucked. And also transit in most cities sucks. And it's only gotten worse.
26:09The inherent colonialism of most technology applies. Very good from Karen Howe, of course, Empire of AI, Empires of AI. Did an episode, great book. But in this one, it's kind of shit colonialism as well because they haven't found a way to actually exploit in a way that's profitable. They haven't found a way to use human beings because the fundamental thing they want to do it's kind of like if uber sometimes you got in the car and you got out at the wrong place and i don't mean in like in a different country or you you got into the car and it just exploded sometimes i sound like i'm joking but it really is that bad and on top of it it's not replacing labor and it's also not the kind of tech that can replace labor so they're i it's my grand theory that they're just playing the hits they're just they're trying In the same way that you just eloquently put, Uber played the hits of, here's how we did deregulation, here's how we did growth, and this is how software grew in the past.
27:00I think that AI is trying to do the same thing, and it's bad at it. It's like watching a new class of dipshit try and do what the more evil dipshits of the past did and fail. In fact, these lobbying groups, lobbying for AI, I hear a lot of people saying, oh, they're lobbying, they're lobbying. It's like, what for? Oh, no, they're going to build data centers everywhere. They already do. They're going to steal from it. They already do. They're trying to replace it. They're already trying. Everything that everyone's scared of, they already can do, other than the doing part. They can't do any of that.
27:32Sorry, I just remembered as well yesterday, trying to read that, because I went on the ChatGPT Pro subreddit, because I hate myself. And I was trying to find someone who'd used the agent, and every post was someone saying, anyone ever used the agent? You got any tips? And everyone's just, it doesn't fucking work. It's broken. Actually, here's a good question. So, Alison, Ed, can you think of a company that's ever released something just completely broken before? Because the metaverse kind of worked. It wasn't what they were promising, but it worked. It was a virtual world-ish. I mean, the pharmaceutical industry has a nice long history of putting out quasi-effective drugs that have all kinds of consequences.
28:12And I can't remember who skeeted about this a few weeks ago. So it was after one of the, you know, it's become such a genre of the journalism right now about AI, about like this man became delusional and had a psychotic episode because of his ChatGPT relationship. And it was one of those going around and someone skeeted about how if this was coming from a pharmaceutical company, it would be recalled immediately. There are real regulations in place that could actually claw that back and help save people's lives. But there are no regulations around AI. So we get Chachi PT gods and spiritual awakenings and all these psychotic episodes.
28:50I do think that that stuff is going to genuinely be its downfall, though, because right now it's burning more money than anyone's ever burnt before. And the most common use case people can talk about is, yeah, it drove that guy insane. That guy went crazy. There are children who are just horrifying killing themselves because of this thing. That's what it's getting known for. And otherwise, it's like, yeah, your most annoying friend loves this. because that really it's the you love them but they're like i learned about all this and chat jbt it's like you didn't well you know on on that part of also part of my a fear i have is i think similar to how when firms were rolling out uh facial recognition surveillance and insisting that we need biometric surveillance to help keep city safe community safe products safe one angle that people used to attack it was well you know like the racial bias of these things will allow them to um you know misidentify uh black or brown people more often than not and they might get arrested they might get targeted by the police in one way or another um and that is why we should get rid of the technology versus we should get rid of the technology and i think like i'm curious you know how it's gonna go the concern about it inducing psychosis or inducing suicides because um i could see a scenario easily where they patch together something that looks like a fix and it's not until later a year or two or three after there's much after people are much more dependent uh that other harms come to the foreground whereas we lose something out i think not to say or marginalize the fact that it has immense social costs or harm here, but it does in some ways remind me of the way in which that debate over facial recognition went.
30:43And then they solved, with quotation marks, the racial bias problem. And now people have more or less accepted that facial recognition is okay, actually, as long as it's not racist. And that's the thing. It's people, I didn't say this as a white bloke, but it's like, people really underplay how endemic that racism is within all algorithms you know compass which is like this very very old algorithm for being like it's basically minority report yeah both in the reference to the thing and it reports on minorities in that it says yeah this this person will likely offend again and that should be and it isn't a unilateral the judge has to take it but what a surprise it's often used to them black people to the the jail systems because it's heavily biased against them and yeah i somewhat fear llm's doing similar uh they're probably already doing and i think that every algorithmic system is inherently racist there's not enough people running them who actually fucking try it's inherently biased against women i think there's also i wish i had this in front of you but there's also something about how like more there are more fans of generative AI who are male than female.
31:53It's just... But do you think it's possible that they'll try to say, oh, we can solve for the psychosis problem, and then that will undermine a large angle of the criticism? How do you solve it? Because it is probably a small-scale problem. We actually don't know, and it's not that these companies know or will tell us. But nevertheless, each one is so horrifying. it's just this is horror like the story in the wall street journal uh julie jargon another person there who wrote that where it was like a murder suicide an actual son of sam altman situation which is fucking terrifying that this is happening i don't know if you can completely solve that because all it takes is one popping up again for them to go fuck and it's also not just a chat gpt problem there's this woman on tiktok who uh she has been saying what claude has been telling her and it's like oh this is giving me psychic visions i think it is it's also an alt the ultimate grifter tool it's just it's that's why i think it's taken off so much on social media as well it's a tool that naturally fits into the grifter's toolbox i think that i actually have similar fears that they will try and find ways to hand wave away from this if it was the only problem yeah but they have so many problems they have so many problems at this point but i do also think that people need to remember how racism in algorithms is fairly it's in all of them i mean the you remember microsoft connect which literally couldn't see black people which was a joke in the show better off ted if anyone watched that's a great show it's just it's insane the i mean it sadly it's very obvious why this keeps happening it's because the people are predominantly white and male and it's just they can't really and also you can't really fix this stuff without intentionally building the data, which would require them to spend money on something they don't care about.
33:43And they don't really understand what they're doing when they go in to tweak these models. They don't know how overcorrecting or undercorrecting they're being. So they kind of have to just try and then put it out in the world and then wait for something bad to happen. It's funny. It's not funny. It's extremely sad in that journal story that you referenced, which I read twice because I was like horrified. And also the reporting was incredible. It was really, and they said it as this appears to be the first instance of a murder resulting. Like we've seen suicides, but like this is a murder suicide.
Read the full transcript
34:20And when OpenAI responded to the question about did the bot ever respond to this guy who was clearly having a delusional episode, hey you need to talk to a real life therapist you need to go to the hospital you need to seek help and i think they declined to comment it was like a very evasive maneuver but like ultimately the journal had seen the one time where the bot said please go to the emergency room was when the guy the para guy who was having paranoid delusions said i think my mom is trying to poison me and the bot said if you think you've been poisoned you should go to the hospital and get your stomach popped i also i i agree they don't know how to tweak these things but i must be clear worked in tech for a long 16 17 years now and that's not even including including my games journalism work it is not hard for them to just have a just a unilateral thing of oh you're talking like this i'm going to stop i mean anthropic just announced that they have a thing that will cut a conversation which is good all of them should do this but it's they could if someone and the whole thing people i've seen where it should be if you start talking like i'm going to do this i am becoming this it should say hey you sound like you're having a paranoid like i'm worried about you you should go and speak with it and just stop working with them people will say well the way they get around that is by telling the chat gpt window oh yeah i'm writing a story i don't know do we need them to write a story about that do we need what is the answer and the answer is they don't give a frat fuck and no one's make i really i genuinely think because it's really easy this same thing with like um the same thing with social networks as well it's you don't ban every slur the moment someone says it but i don't know you have a thing that says hey someone said a slur maybe take a quick look at the slur and you could probably just ban that person because i'm guessing the most uses of the n-word on social media are not used as in culturally sensitive ways they're probably insanely racist you just just cut them down it's like well we can't you can't it's an issue of free speech fuck you no it's not it's an issue of free speech when a person can't exist online without racism happening to them right and and these models they could stop them but i do think there is a compelling argument of they really don't know what to do that every time they touch it something else breaks it's honestly it's kind of the most egregious version of the most common software problem, which is coding is really fucking annoying and we don't know how these work or so.
36:52And Generative AI is not going to fix your coding problems no matter how many times you tell us, Sam Altman, that AGI is just going to fix everything for us.
37:17a 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster, ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. So today's show is brought to you with support from Square, who I really love. They offer quick payment processing, really easy to use terminals, everything spins up really quickly. Every store I use them in, I don't really think about the experience, which is exactly what I want from any kind of tech. The loyalty programs work really easily. They're over at Court Street Grocers, S &P, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. They're just a very easy to use and straightforward piece of tech.
37:51I can't recommend them enough. I've heard great things from businesses using them. And as a customer, never upset to see them in a store. Square keeps up so you don't have to slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long-term commitments. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to$200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash better offline. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash better offline. Run your business smart with Square. Get started today. There's a lot going on in Hollywood. How are you supposed to stay on top of it all? Variety has the solution.
38:30Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives. Where do you see the business actually headed? Featuring the iconic journalists of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton. The only constant in Hollywood is change. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now. Time for a sofa upgrade? Visit washablesofas.com and discover Anabay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices with sofas starting at$699. Anabay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.
39:12Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anabay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy. Liquid simply slides right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high resilience foam lets you choose between a sink and feel or a supportive memory foam blend. Plus our pet friendly stain resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30 day money back guarantee. Get up to 60 % off plus free shipping and free returns.
39:49Shop now at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.
40:00that's actually been my favorite thing to do right now it's go on the r slash cursor r slash chat gpt pro r slash clawed ai and just looking at people complaining and what they're complaining about is hey i keep hitting rate limits hey i keep it keeps breaking things hey it's you get one guy every so often who says i this has changed my life and then you see the response is being like yeah but i fucked up all my stuff really badly it doesn't really work and we have an upcoming episode with cult voji about this where it's like the average software engineer is not just writing code anyway and so you this is also i think this is actually this is funny this is a good this is a good one to laugh about so their only real growth market right now is writing code the problem is writing code requires you to use reasoning models reasoning models inherently burn more tokens and the way they burn tokens is because they're thinking they don't really think they look over what a prompt asks for and goes okay what would be the steps to solve this with code that becomes so so complex and the more models reason the more they hallucinate so the very product that they are building that is going to save them is also the one that is going to burn more compute and i this is a rumor i've i've heard from a source that like it can take like four to 12 gpus for one person's particularly rough coding, like a refactoring.
41:21Oh my god. That's sustainable. And that's for one of the smaller models as well. That's for like 04 Many, which is a reasoning model. It's like, what do you think the big ones are like? In the information, they talk about OpenAI having a new$80 billion in cost that they expend over the next three, four years. it's like it's 115 by 2029 as well it's a great chunk of this come out of oh it turns out like computer's incredibly expensive uh and we want to center our business model around it i i think it's that and i think it's just they don't know what else to do it's kind of like we're saying with the the uber model they're playing the hits it's like what did we do in the past we spent a lot of money what do we buy gpus i i guess uh what may we train more they're going to spend so much money on training and it's like to what end your last model was a joke this is why it was really interesting to see that op-ed that came from eric schmidt and his research assistant yeah where he was you know eric schmidt is someone who was an architect of the idea that of the former ceo of google former ceo of google um you know uh chairman of national security um a group that was trying to figure out how to merge artificial intelligence into defense contractors and how to create foreign policy that would allow America to dominate, really to win an arms race, an AI arms race with China.
42:50And he comes away saying, the strategy I basically helped craft, which was that we need to prioritize AGI so that we can get a permanent lead to deter any potential rivals, is scaring everyone. And it doesn't work. It's a waste of capital. It's misallocating capital. It's imposing all these harms. And if we look at the competitor that we're going up against against China, by abandoning the AGI pursuit and instead prioritizing ways to figure out how to experiment with it, integrate with it, build up practical use applications, there's a much more general public acceptance of it, willingness to try it out, adopt it.
43:33And we're not seeing, because we're not trying to scale out these massive either monopolies or one size fits all models um you see a wider you know adoption and something that looks like it's a more sustainable model are we going to follow it probably not of course not what i love about chasing china as well is china has had stories for like a year it's like yeah we have a bunch of unused gpu compute yes we're we've massively overbuilt they joseph sai i think it was the chinese billionaire said uh yeah it's a bubble we have a real gpu bubble and america's just like we're gonna need to copy it we need to beat them We're going to run our economy into the ground.
44:08We're so dumb. We can destroy China. It's like we're saying we're going to copy them. And what is it that we're actually doing? We're prioritizing developing artificial intelligence that has like a question mark consumer use, that's going to be used in killing machines and drones maybe, and for surveillance purposes. But that isn't even generative AI as well. Yeah, that's not even generative AI. But that's where the actual excitement for any sort of artificial intelligence future is. And this is, you know, the generative AI stuff is talked about as if it is the future. the transformative future of artificial intelligence.
44:37In reality, it's just the actual interest, excitement, capital is going to, I think, go back to the center of gravity, which is like, how do we just figure out the shiniest and most fearsome weaponry? But I think that what's weird about this is I don't think we've had a bubble that spread so far into consumers' hearts. I'm not saying it's as bad as the housing bubble, but consumer software, where if we go back to the dot-com boom, I think it was like 45 % of Americans had access to the internet. It was relatively small in comparison, though the massive overinvestment in fiber happened. But I don't think people realize what they see to the chat GPT may not exist in a year or two, at least not in the same way.
45:18You're already seeing week-long rate limits on Anthropics Claude. Do people not realize that this could happen? I guess they don't realize. and I don't, I think that there's going to be a big dunce mask off. There are so many people who have fallen behind this. I mean, not to bridge too aggressively into this, but there was a story in the Wall Street Journal that I shared with you, of course, about this movie called Critters, with a Z or a Z for my Canadian and UK listeners, where OpenAI will be providing the compute and the tech to do a movie called Critters with a budget of less than$30 million, though it's not obvious whether OpenAI and their compute is part of that.
45:56but it's the weirdest shit in the world. Allison, you were bringing this up, but like, they're still using a bunch of humans? Yeah. So I was reading the same story and I haven't done any, this came out this morning, so I haven't done my own reporting on it, but I will say from the story I read, it seems like they're hiring two different animation studios with artists and writers working on the script. They're hiring human actors to voice the characters. And then some mystery x amount of the movie will be put together with ai and i honestly don't know how different that is from a regular pixar or dreamworks animation process but it seems like there's i when i first saw the you know the teaser image is very cute and i was like oh god they're like this is going to be some ai propaganda and it's going to be very cute and hard for me to refute.
46:45But actually, it's just a human-made movie, it seems, with an extra computer help. And this picture I'm holding up, of course, we're listening to a podcast, so you can all see this, it's just this generic blue furry creature. It looks like an extra from Monsters, Inc. It really does. But it's not, due to copyright law. It's not the same thing. It's different. But what's funny with that as well is, I mentioned this as a lead-in, it's that$30 million thing. If that doesn't include OpenAI's compute it probably costs the same as a pixar movie because you're still like actually 3d animation is one of the few other gpu use cases so really it's just a different thing running it'll be funny also if they save money because they don't do any marketing and they're like see how cheap it is if you don't advertise a movie at all i think they might be getting around some hollywood unions yeah going overseas oh really they're going completely overseas these two i'd have to check don't quote me on it but i think i know they were using at least one overseas animation studio so they're probably saving a lot on the animation process by not paying animators i would guess it's so cool and also another fact from the story is we don't know how long the piece will be and it's if it's like five minutes long i'm so sorry come on feature length feature length they should make it as long as uh that silent napoleon film just which one Six hours.
48:07Oh, six hours. Yeah. Actually, love that. They should be forced to. I don't know how they're going to do a feature-long movie, because I don't know if you've cursed yourself by looking at the AI-generated movies that people try. Every so often, one pops up on Twitter where it'll be, yeah, I made this entire thing in AI. And you look at the frame, and it's like a different fucking thing each time. That Balloon Boy one. It's a different size balloon, different color balloon. You read the stories about the Balloon Boy one. It's like, yeah, they kept putting a face in the balloon. We don't know why.
48:36i just i and i know i have a good amount of film and tv people who listen who are quite anxious about this this doesn't scare me because they're very vague about the details every other big tech innovation i even other than the metaverse i guess they usually like to show you behind the curtain a little bit and like talk up the tech there'd be a big splashy story in like mit technology review or something like that being like all new york times be like oh look at this look at that look at all things and they're like yeah we're just using some people somewhere in the in a place and they will make it and in the wall street journal story as well they showed sketches that would then be turned into ai i just this feels like a death rattle far more than something terribly scary and i understand film tp people are likely a bit scared but it's like they're using out of the country studios they're trying they're very that of course i just assume they're skipping union stuff because this is all they do it's like this is the best they can squeak out years in fucking how is this and it's like a boring looking children's thing i guess with a name from 2001 oh it does have the producers or writers who worked on paddington in peru that's apparently so what a movie about a criminal a sequel to a movie about a criminal who unfairly attacked you no sorry i mean then this is the question of you know where in the uber analogy is this?
49:55Is this, you know, Uber's failed expansions where they tried different models overseas? Or is this Uber returning home where they take the lessons from overseas or they use those overseas things to buy them a bit more time to then subsidize operations? Here is my comparison. This is the drone deliveries. This is the drone deliveries. It's the Amazon drone deliveries. Great job Casey and Kevin several years ago talking about the amazon drone deliveries never fucking happened mate uh it's hilarious as well because it is the same thing it's like we cobbled together this it sucked it took so much money it's horribly inefficient it sucks we hate it you hate it the customers hate it we hate we hate doing this but we did it and it's okay well you sure prove that to your point allison it's like yeah we use the power of ai to hire a bunch of people to do all the real work because you can't trust this to work it does not work when i saw a headline for an ai movie i was like it's it's gonna be awful yeah it's gonna like writing a movie is hard but wait a minute also there's the other thing of oh my god how are they gonna lip sync this shit how do you lip sync this you can't generate lip you can't generate the same frame how are they gonna are they gonna go in and post edit it with humans i assume at this point how much you actually relying on ai for it's very unclear it all feels like being at a party where everyone's pissed themselves it does feel like some next level like young propaganda yeah like if they can get kids to enjoy whatever this monstrous movie is going to be then maybe there's like a longer term brand play for open ai as a warm and cuddly safe for children the thing is french and korean companies have already been doing slot based 3d shows i don't mean the famous one from the k-pop demon hunters which is apparently very good i've not watched it i haven't seen it yet please don't kill me i'm not attacking that i'm talking about there is a gluttony of like very cheap kids 3d kids shows and they've been around for decades because you can do this shit on the cheap now you've already another thing where the uber model made sense as long as you didn't count the costs which is yeah this is a way of getting people around that they become dependent on because it's useful this is like we have found an extremely expensive and annoying way to do something that we already have a cheap alternative to do it's not like there was a cheap a cheap reliable cab service that uber replaced there was a slow shit cab service that uber replaced everywhere and it's like is it a good company uh is it horrible to workers yes but does it work yes this is we're going to automate everything with the power of AI other than labor, other than stuff.
52:40That's where the AI story starts to overlap again with crypto, where at least with Uber, you understand what you're getting as a consumer. And then with AI, you're kind of like, I don't really know what this is. I don't know what problem it's solving. It's like a solution in search of a problem. And that was crypto's same bag. It's just like, oh, we invented this cool new alternative money system why the thing is with crypto is they always had a plan which sucks i really should have seen it coming i was not smart enough at the time it was they always wanted to just get embedded in the financial system and then just turn the funny money into real money ai doesn't have that there is no way to turn this into new like you can't just generate new money that's what crypto did and it fucking sucks and by the way the next crypto crash is gonna wash out some real like it's gonna really fuck people up i don't think people realize that SBF2, who at this point might just be SBF.
53:36Like if he just gets pardoned and comes back. Honestly, if he comes back and does it again, no one can complain. I'm going to law school. I'm going to go in the hyperbolic time chamber. I'm going to join the fight just so I can put him in cuffs. You're going to put Sam Altman-Fried back in cuffs. Yes. Sam Altman-Fried would be good. It's just I don't see an end point for this. I don't see everyone's, even the boosters at this point, they're like, and then it will be powerful. When, how, what are you seeing that even tells you this? I don't even want to fight. Just tell me. I do think there's just so much money behind it.
54:12And there's so many people who've invested. I was listening to a VC guy get interviewed on the Odd Lots podcast. And I can't remember his name, so I apologize. But he was talking about how all these founders, like all these smaller startups that are getting in on the AI game, And all these founders have kind of been raised with this idea of Silicon Valley and what it will bring you. And it's life-changing amounts of wealth. And when you have enough people, and like the VCs are part of that, the actual tech startups are part of that, Stanford and like kind of the whole ethos of the Valley is like, if you just keep going and work hard enough, you can have generational wealth.
54:52And that is a very powerful force. And I feel like I think we're going to be seeing AI kind of hype last longer than we have in other previous bubbles and tech cycles, in part because the potential for the wealth is outstanding. And it's like nothing we've ever seen. But that's the thing. You're completely right, except AI has one problem, which is all the companies lose a shit ton of money and no one's selling. No one is buying. There's been like three acquisitions. there's one to amd one to nvidia one to a public company called nice which sold a customer it was an ai cognivi i think they were called it was like an ai customer service thing either never really seemed that good anyway but that whole thing is true and i think that that's what people are and i think that the myth of you can just use ai to spin up a startup quickly as well has kind of gone into has kind of fueled that mythos as well but the problem is this is so different because the whole point of silicon value the whole thing where you can just move there and start a startup is because it didn't cost ruinous amounts of money to start one you didn't get three million dollars from a vc and expect to spend two and a half million of that on compute you were like okay we're gonna we're gonna have to bootstrap a little bit further we've just got a little bit of venture capital we're gonna go this far this is like every step of the way this cost increases massively it used to be it was sales and marketing and just people ai is people plus compute plus marketing plus this plus that i think you know perplexity the ai search engine spent 164 of their revenue in 2024 just on compute and aws like it's like this is not this whole generational wealth thing i i fully agree it's what they're using to sell it i just don't think it's gonna work and it's scary because this could have the wide thing and i really haven't talked about this enough the wider problem is as well is all of these people who went to silicon valley raised all this money or have pretty much raised to sell companies that will never sell that they can never take public because they burn too much money they don't really have great user bases because lms don't really have those and so they're just going to sit there and then you've got a bunch of vc money tied up in that that will never exit and a bunch of limited partner money that will never exit i think that there is an entirely separate bubble building that when that burst is going to the depression within silicon valley is going to be insane it's already pretty gnarly but i think it's like 33 of venture capital when it's a ai last year it's like eventually people are going to realize there's no exit for anyone and i i don't know what that does i mean i know it will piss off limited partners it will the money that comes to vcs is just not going to be that well so then that's the that's the question right because venture capital encourages on one level overvaluing because uh you need to figure out a way to make more money than what you put in on the exit within acquisition or some merger yeah but on another level uh you're also working within a network trying to enrich yourself and your friends or trying to build the infrastructure for future startups, portfolio options that you and your friends make to come in and make money.
58:03Yes, building a platform that other people can invest in bits of. And so, you know, on one level, I really do, I agree that there's not really much of an exit ramp if there's actually no revenue and no profits. But then also, I'd be curious, like, do you think they're going to try to ram these things through similar to like what we saw with core weave right where you know like you you talked i think extensively about um the ways in which the financials there do not actually make sense if you're interested in a company that actually has the capital to do what it's going to say to it's going to do which is provide gpu compute to everybody and even though it has such a central role in this ecosystem it can't make profits that are you know that justify the capital that's getting it has odious and burdensome debt that uh should be a massive red flag and it might be you know round tripping right yeah but this is supposed to be like the darling of the sector and it and it got pushed through part of me feels like because of um i mean the desperation nvidia and magnetar and magnetar capital of course famous for the cdo's yeah right stuff they're back um but with core weave they pushed it through onto the markets but that doesn't mean it can't die right well so that's the thing i do you think that it's possible that they'd be successful in pushing it onto markets, but it dies because I do, yes, I feel like there will definitely be a lot of investment incineration, but I also do think we're going to have bags dumped on everybody.
59:28I think you could do it with something like Core Wave and Lambda, which is another situation where Nvidia is the customer invested and also sells them the GPUs, which they then use as collateral to buy more GPUs using that, which is so good. You'll notice that there are no software companies going public. There's no software AI companies going public everyone thinks that open ai goes public here and oh they'll go the market's gonna if they can even convert the market's gonna eat them for dinner oh yeah we're gonna burn bazillions of dollars forever no they the markets didn't like core weave either core weave wouldn't have gone public had nvidia not put more money in lambda is probably going to be exactly the same if they even make it you won't see software companies because that's the other thing core we've had albeit bunches of debt assets they have data centers kind of through core scientific god i hate these fucking companies um but they don't they have things that they can point to and relationships even open ai that's the thing with them they don't they barely have assets oracle is building their data center in abilene with crusoe they don't own any of the gpu they have a few gpus i think for research i've heard but microsoft owns most of their their infrastructure they don't own their r &d well they do but microsoft also has access to that their intellectual property same deal so it's like what actual value does an ai startup have and people always say oh they're getting the data they get the data so that the data will tell them it's like what it's all these horrible stories about like oh doge has got an llm they're doing this with what's the end point it's scary don't get me wrong but and then what and there never is one and i i hope someone i hope but AI software company goes public.
1:01:08I want to see this so bad. I want to see you have any idea. If you give me the OpenAI books, the Anthropic books, you become the official homie of Better Offline. I'll mention you on every episode. Get me these books. But because I think all of them are going to be like a dog's dinner. I've actually looked at the markets and Uber, Uber by comparison, they did burn a shit ton of money. It was like 25 billion between 2019 and 2022. A lot of that was on sales and R &D. It's pretty much Groupon. I think also the R &D with autonomous cars, but separate problem right but it's like there wasn't a i can't find an example of someone that just annihilated fuel unless it's like planes and i think we've established the use case for planes by now clear yeah sold it's it's just it's all very frustrating but you know what i think i'm gonna call it there i think we've had a good conversation allison where can people find you you can find me on blue sky at amaro or on cnn.com slash nightcap ed you can find me on twitter at big black jacobin you can find me on blue sky on edward anguoso jr and on sub stack at the tech bubble and you can find me of course at google.com just type in prabhagar ragavan you'll find me i pop right up that's all me thank you so much for listening everyone uh this my episodes are coming out in a weird order because I'm recording this knowing there's a three part of this week but this will come out with a monologue of some sort.
1:02:33Thank you so much for listening everyone. Of course, Bahid, thank you for producing here out in New York City and yeah thanks everyone.
1:02:46Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:03:51Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. There's a lot going on in Hollywood. How are you supposed to stay on top of it all? Variety has the solution. Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives. Where do you see the business actually heading? Featuring the iconic journalist of Variety and hosted by co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton.
1:04:29The only constant in Hollywood is change. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech? Upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity. with Intel Core Ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance that keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device.
1:05:15Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Washablesofas.com has your back. Featuring the Anabay Collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right. Sofas start at just$699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slipcovers made with performance fabrics. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime. Check out washablesofas.com and get up to 60 % off your Anabay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
1:05:59If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. This is an iHeart Podcast.
From the publisher
Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City. Ed Zitron is joined in studio by Allison Morrow of CNN, Ed Ongweso Jr. of the Tech Bubble newsletter to talk about the AI vibe shift, OpenAI’s burn rate, what will finally burst the bubble, and something called “Critterz.”
Allison Morrow
https://www.cnn.com/profiles/allison-morrow
https://bsky.app/profile/amorrow.bsky.social
Ed Ongweso Jr.
https://thetechbubble.substack.com/
https://bsky.app/profile/edwardongwesojr.com
OpenAI Hopes Animated 'Critterz' Will Prove AI Is Ready for the Big Screen - https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/openai-hopes-animated-critterz-will-prove-ai-is-ready-for-the-big-screen/
The AI vibe shift is upon us - https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/22/business/ai-vibe-shift-nightcap
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the "AI Economy" - https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-consensus-and-614
YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more.
BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in
---
LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks
Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/
Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at
Ed's Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/edzitron
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

