Radio Better Offline: Gare Davis, Victoria Song, Allison Morrow

29:42It was 88 degrees Fahrenheit. This was slightly higher effort than other efforts that you've made in the last 30 days. Have a nice day. And I was like, that's not useful when you put it right next to a chart that says the same thing. Your elevation was 88. You had an 88 feet of elevation gain, and it was up and down during your run. And literally, it's next to a thing that says elevation gain, 88 feet, and a graph that shows up and down. Like it's that degree.

30:39debt did I incur in this specific week? And it's like, oh, we can't do that. We can only do it the most recent week and the most recent month for trends. And I was like, that's fucking useless. I have six years worth of Aura data that I should be able to mine for that kind of insight. And I can't do that. So that's not at all useful for what I for like the purposes of what I was trying to prove. And so I ended up arguing with this thing for like an hour. I feel like you did prove something though yeah i did i did but it was at the same time just like uh it's sort of like a wikipedia it's like a book report written by a fourth grader who decided to read the entry of the book on wikipedia instead of actually reading the book for insights so it's like here you go here you go it feels like the most elementary thing it should be able to do i i have over a decade of fitness data yeah and i still don't have shit i don't it told my aura ring the other day i got aura i got somny i got the thing that electrocutes your head yeah that's why i'm so smart it's like i just watched the x-files episode with the computer bit that's what's happening to me i'm getting electrocuted every day um i got aura i got the eight sleep in vegas i got all sorts of gumpf and i don't know a single goddamn thing it told me two days ago i am like something is wrong yeah i'd slept three hours two days straight it was just a bad combination of red eyes and it's like yeah you should do something about that it's like thanks I'm glad I pay you$10 a month for, but this just feels like the obvious, how does it not know how?

32:10And maybe it is just the ultimate limitation that we've been complaining about. It's just, it's kind of insulting. I don't know. Yeah, not to be like, I don't want to be the hippie here because I use Strava and I like track my workouts and things, but it's like, I know when I'm tired and I know when I'm hungry and when I've eaten too much or eaten too little. Like, you know, why do we need the computer to do that for us is a real question. And it's part of this, like, consumer trend of just trying to get AI into every single app on my phone. And it's like, I don't need Strava. Like, Strava is doing great for me for what I need it for.

32:47I like it to show me how many miles I ran that week and, like, what my bike ride to work looked like. I wanted it – like I would have loved it to be like, okay, so when you go run after a prolonged break, particularly in hot weather, you have self-reported an increased number of injuries. That's the type of shit that I want. And so it's like – so seeing that it was really hot after a prolonged injury, you have a real bad habit of getting injured after that. So like you dum-dum. Yeah, maybe get some more water. Have some electrolytes. Drink some more water. Do the thing. So like that is the type of insight I would have liked after this most recent run where I ate it.

33:21Well, the last three months I've increased my cardio a shit ton playing basketball. I would love to see, and it has all the stuff and this doesn't feel that difficult, if it could say, yeah, your cardiovascular has improved. Or it likes to occasionally be like, yeah, you're four years or two years younger than your age cardio-wise. And it's like, the fuck does that mean? Don't get me started on those longevity metrics. But just there's nothing useful to it other than I'm a data pervert and I like looking at the numbers going, number up, number down. why and but even then the simplest things are kind of hard to get with strava you have to go through like three menus to just see how much you've worked out there's like eight different options none of them you can't turn any of them off there's one about biking because i used to bike i don't bike anymore i don't need that but now you need to share the biking mate you gotta make sure zero miles you fucking idiot you loser it's just it is the wider thing of tech just not being for us anymore almost it's like hey got some data i guess pay me now pay me and i even then with aura and a i've been using them for five years six years you know what i've never got a single bit of advice about my sleep i've never had it say oh hey what if you did this nope it'll be tried using the chatbot button aura no i thought about it yesterday and i was like i'm gonna get angry at this it's actually one of the better implement does it work it's one of the better implementations if you like if i know how to talk to it okay how do i talk to it well you have to be very specific about the information that you're wanting so you're like tell me about my sleep trend and i've noticed that i have this problem what are some ways that i could uh get around that or it's just like do i show signs in the past month of sleep irregularities If so, like what are some – the thing is like the things it's going to tell you to do that are actionable are going to be like, well, duh.

35:18Right. Really only helpful if this is your first foray into fixing your health. If you've literally Googled anything before or have any base knowledge of like you should have consistent sleep schedules. Maybe just don't eat ice cream before bed. Like common sense things. Maybe I'll just dime. Not going to necessarily help you. But, you know, other things I were because I'm also I've got a CGM at the moment. And so it's just like is that constant glucose. Yeah. Yeah. Continuous glucose monitor. And I was like, I've had a lot of stress. Does stress impact glucose levels? And I was like, yes, it does.

35:53And I was like, OK, cool. That's nice. Nice to know that it's high because of that. And then it'll remember that when you ask it questions in the future. So you just have to be like useful. You just have to talk to it so much and like kind of train it. It's like literally like training a toddler. So the amount of effort that you're putting in versus what they're telling you, like all the insights, they'll be so personalized and so automated. It's like, yeah. You just have to do all the work to make it useful, which appears to be the AI theme. Yeah. You have to do an immense amount of legwork and like training and thinking like an AI in order for it to spit out something that might make you go, huh.

36:31Wow. The future's so cool. I love living in this wonderful period. I saw Wired mention this thing called Limitless earlier. Yes, yes. It's the class. It's like B, the thing that I talked to you last time. The AI device that constantly listens to you. What is Limitless, though? It's similar. It constantly listens to you and generates insights based on listening to you constantly. Stephen Levy, the Larry Bird of big wet kisses in tech journalism wrote about it like it's the future. And it's just like, I just wish some writers would experience humanity just once because the idea of someone constantly listening is not fun or good, nor has it ever really worked.

37:20I don't want to age anyone here, but I feel like we're roughly the same age. And we experienced kind of the revolution of social media as this kind of like, oh, look at how cool it can be if we're able to connect in mass all the time, anywhere. And that was cool. That was revolutionary in its time. And now we're at kind of like the denouement of that. And it's turned us all inward. We're all like tracking our personal data and like, you know, we're more isolated than we've ever been. Not entirely social media's fault, but doesn't help. We're like talking to our AI therapists and our AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

38:06I don't know how many people are actually doing that, though. I know a lot of them are. I think the step back narrative right now is just like, well, there should be a next thing. It shouldn't just be social media was cool and the internet was cool for a while and things are getting kind of stale. And it's like, well, what's the next thing? And I think tech journalists can be guilty of this sometimes, of feeling like, well, 2012 was really exciting. So 2022 has got to be just as exciting. And 2025, boy, can't wait. Maybe the technology is just not there yet and it's going to take a lot longer than anyone expects.

38:43Or maybe this is just not the right approach because the way LLMs work is that it's a mirror. And, like, we have tech journalists left and right failing the mirror test and, like, not understanding that when you talk to ChatGPT or you talk to these AI girlfriends and boyfriends in a different avatar, you are just talking to yourself in the mirror. It's a word calculator. It is a digital version of talking to yourself in the mirror, which can be useful. It can be useful to talk to yourself in the mirror. There's a reason why people go, like, you're great. Yes. Awesome. Affirmations. Sometimes you need to like hear yourself think out loud and that can be useful and helpful.

39:17But that's what you're doing. Like you have to understand that you are talking to yourself. You are just having a conversation with yourself. And I think a lot of people don't get that. They think they're talking to a higher intelligence. Literally, no, you are just talking to yourself. If yourself could Google a little faster than you currently could. That was the gist of Kashmir Heal's amazing New York Times piece about the people who really fell into a rabbit hole around these chatbots. Like, ChatGPT convinced them that they were in a Matrix-like, you know, alternate universe and, like, one guy committed suicide.

40:00Didn't he pull a knife on a cop or something? Yeah, he, like, told the bot that he was going to kill himself, do suicide by cop. and then his dad was like worried about his mental health did call the cops and he was like listen i think my son's gonna try to kill himself by attacking you and guess what he did because the chatbot was like and guess what the cops just came right over with yeah like it's like guns blazing it's like yeah you know some mental health what what do they need oh they definitely want to die by a couple let's pull our guns i'm saying is our society's not in a good spot right no our Society is not prepared.

40:35Policing is prepared to arrest rather than help or service. So it's the natural. I think it's all of this is the natural comeuppance of a society built with very little intention. And so because that's the thing is vibes and large language models are the ultimate like vibe slop. It's something built with no real. And people love to say, well, Sam Orton's plan. Sam. No one has a single goddamn plan at all. That's why there are no use cases. Because if anyone sat there and went, what can we do with this? They'd go, fuck, I don't know. Is there anyone that we can pay$100 million to? Well, you can do anything that you can imagine.

41:17That's why Andy Jassy is saying, the future is up to you, guys. Imagine how you're going to use it. I can imagine a lot. And it's – but that's the thing. like, Alison, you had an excellent piece on this. It's like the whole job loss story is just them being like, please, please up the shares, up shares, number go up, please. Yeah, it's like, I have to say this because everyone's paying attention to me. And it's like, I'm sure shareholders and investors on Wall Street are saying, what is your AI strategy? And how are you planning to massively lay off your staff so that you can cut corners and replace people with AI.

41:53And so you have someone like Andy Jazzy come out and say, you guys are all doing great work. We've built incredible products. Alexa, everyone loves it. Spoiler alert, no one loves Alexa. It's stupid. And as a result of that, sometime in the near future, I won't say when, but sometime soon, a lot of you are going to be laid off or have your jobs changed by AI. And I'm shocked every time one of these CEOs does this, we report it out as if it's like, oh, God in heaven just said, this is what's going to happen, and that is what's going to happen. We had banner headlines saying, Amazon CEO says AI is going to take your jobs.

42:43And it's like, well, he didn't really say how or when or by what mechanism and there's no evidence of it happening yet so what are we talking about well it's i think that there is an alarming amount of journalism that's excited for it or there's just a doomerism behind it i think you can replace the word ai in a lot of these articles with just god and like this is something that like we talked about the first time we met in vegas right is how all of these like the people who are into ai talk about it as if it's just a cult. There's this divine aspect that is ordained. You have to lose your job because AI is taking God.

43:19God has mandated this. And even with talking to an AI like it's a person, they often gain this divine aspect when people are treating these chatbots like they are sentient beings. It's the same way that we project divinity onto aspects of nature. And I think that is a big part of it because now you have God telling you that you're actually in the matrix and you need to do this thing. And for some reason, there's not safeguards put on this God program to protect you, God's creation. They're all programmed to be super friendly and to tell you that you're great. And it's like, if you're actually trying to use this thing and you're viewing it as you talking to you, I have to tell ChatGPT all the time, you're putting too much flattery in.

44:02You have to cap all of your flattery at 1 % because I can't handle you and I need you to explain why everything you said has no bias or as little bias as possible or to explain all of your bias in it so that I can read and evaluate and just go like, no, that's not it. And I've been told I'm insane for like programming all the AI I talk to that way. It's input output shit. It's making, it's adjusting a program to do a thing for you. It is. Because like, if you just leave it at the default, it's trying to warp your brain. Like if you leave it at the default, it's just like, you've done nothing wrong.

44:32You are absolutely correct. And everything you said, what a brilliant thing that you said. And if you, like, listen to that enough times, it's bleh. Well, I mean, I think it's warping your brain because there is no intention behind this. They train it, whatever, but they could relatively easily put a thing saying, just to be clear, you are talking to you. This is – they don't want to do that. And I think it might have been another of the Goombas from OpenAI. It breaks the illusion, right? Like, it's like the Wizard of Oz thing. Yes, but they should break the illusion. No, they have to, but – They don't want to.

45:04They don't want to because it means they will get less – economy the less it breaks the engagement you're not going to engage with it if you're like this is obviously a robot that's that's the part where i get actually emotional and angry about ai is when the ceos of these companies talk about it they talk about it as if it's inevitable and we have no agency that's where the god thing comes in where it's like yes this is happening whether we keep doing it or not and we are the ones who will fix it of course yeah it's like oh yeah i I mean, Sam Altman, I was just rereading like... The Gentle Singularity?

45:40That fucking blog? Oh, I hadn't read that one. No, I was talking about he created WorldCoin. Oh, Christ almighty. Because he's so convinced that... No, let me stop you there. Okay. I'll stop. No, I just want to stop you because you said he's so convinced. Your only source of information for that claim is Sam Altman. Sam Altman did WorldCoin so he could sell a cryptocurrency. That's the only reason. Yes. So he could collect a bunch of data. No, he's so convinced. He's convinced of nothing, I believe. Okay, this is literally me at the door. The pitch of WorldCoin. Like I interviewed their CEO last year.

46:13Oh, he's a real bozo. He's a real dumbo. I had a lovely conversation with him. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. But, you know, the pitch is AI is going to become so ubiquitous and it's going to destroy all the jobs and flatten the economy. And we're going to have to have this UBI that's distributed by this blockchain mechanism. And I'm sitting here and I'm going, yes, but we are actually full agents in this world. Like, we all need to step back and realize that we have sovereignty over what we do and the technology we make and how we regulate it. And it's a real just like kind of abdication of responsibility for society where I'm just like, what do we want to make for future generations?

47:07And that's all the like pablum that comes out of Silicon Valley is like building a better future. And it's like you can't have both things be true. So what are you building? It's because like what they really are building is money machine go up. Yes. And like that's the main thing. It's like they say all this lip service about making everything better. Well, you could cure cancer. That would like legitimately make everything better. He said that they will. Sure. You could do that. But it's like they're first and foremost. I believe Joe Biden will cure cancer before Sam Altman. Both have claimed they will.

47:39I believe Joe Biden would. No, I mean, neither of them will do it, which is my larger point. But I mean, you're both wrong because to quote Sam Altman, And as data center production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. People are often curious about how much energy chat GPT queries use. The average query is 0.34 watt hours about what an oven would use in a little over a second. Now, someone has almost immediately thrown water on this entire thing. But this blog, A Gentle Singularity by Sam Altman, was quoted like scripture by everyone.

48:16and that i think it i'd love that you brought up divinity gag because it really is just like the pseudo religious it's religion capitalism it's all it's just we found a way to love a company like a god and also kind of abdicate any responsibility or thinking about it because when you look at the people who love ai and the way they talk about it it's not about what's happening today it's no in it they're like in the future when this happens no it's it's always it's always this future prophecy and if if we believe in this god enough and if we build up this religion enough it can deliver us a infinite automated money machine but what's crazy is the money machine is bad it doesn't make any it loses so much they spent three hundred and seven twenty seven billion dollars in capital expenditures this year are projected to and the revenue of this industry is like 40 billion dollars that's because money is fake until you have none that's the only time and that's the thing money will run out money money go down money go down not work good.

49:12And the story that's really been twisting me up this week, I was telling you about earlier, and I swear it won't be this boring, is OpenAI is Microsoft's biggest customer. $10 billion in projected revenue this year for Azure. And Azure revenue has been kind of like not growing so good. So we just have one of the largest tech companies in the world that is just handing itself cash. And as part of the deal when they funded them in 2023, they funded them principally in cloud compute credits so 10 billion dollars of microsoft's reddit of revenue is going to be partially in air miles and everyone's just sitting around being like this is great on top of that 10 billion dollars of revenue from open ai so 13 billion total from microsoft then open ai projected to make 12.7 billion dollars half of the revenue in this fucking industry is open ai or the slop the cost slop of open ai it's okay ed we we can just we can just keep blowing up the balloon it's never gonna pop we can keep blowing it up it's just crazy we found the infinite balloon it's this crazy material that's indestructible you can keep blowing more in and it's gonna be fine it's just it's so funny as the economy is gonna be fine it's so good i just feel like ai is just like the imbecile magnet it's just this idea that people who don't really know stuff but have got to positions of power can go yes finally a thing that will make up the reason i have to buy it for me i i see this in journalism all the time i'm getting like conversations about well ai could replace entry-level journalism jobs i think that's like a real concern if you're like just a i started as a copy editor with zero responsibilities is other than like finding typos and misspellings and occasionally getting to write a headline and being like oh thank you for letting me write a headline uh and i could see a large language model filling that in in which case i don't get a jumping off point to do what i want to do i mean they've been offshoring those jobs as well it's just another offshoring my point is i've been in this for like 20 years and it was happening then it might happen at a more accelerated uh time frame with ai but i'm skeptical you're still gonna need as we saw with that chicago uh chicago sometimes book list you know like in case anyone missed it you know you got the authors right and then just made up complete horseshit for the books that they didn't write and were about whatever ai made hallucinated they were about you know an entry-level copy editor would have caught that but we've already fired those people we've already laid off the entry-level copy editors so you know all of these things these ways that like technology is going to create job losses that's that's standard in our age ai is going to create some job losses yes is it going to be the uh what was it white color blood bath i don't think so 10 to 20 unemployment according to wario amaday and it's that's a ceo of anthropic and his name is wario uh everyone makes the type on types dario i'm not sure why It's in books and literature, but let's start correcting the record.

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54:55it fucking pisses me off as well because they're i mentioned it earlier there's almost like a excitement in journalism for job loss and ai maybe it's doomerism maybe they're just like oh i'll get ahead of this but it feels almost like they want it to happen and they want it so that it proves ai is the big point it is religious to get fucking christ it always comes back to that yeah this is that we've been talking about this for two years like like this this like cultish nexus around around ai i mean this is this goes like the the like the early super intelligence hype of like the 20 teens right it's it's it's all got this idea wait there was a hype cycle on that how did i fucking forget that one there was in it was a long time ago like the rock was basilisk thing right oh god like it's it's the very like the early stages of this yeah like viewing ai like this like inevitable god i have you heard of eliza yudowski sounds familiar is the i keep having this person brought up to me by serious people he is a person that writes about agi and writes scary he wrote like a fanfic harry potter fan fiction thing with agi yeah yeah i just want to be clear if anyone else brings him up to me i'm going to email you back just some sort of obscenity because you should not take this man seriously he writes harry potter fan fiction he has just ingratiated himself with other cultists from less wrong and i see real journalists mentioning them and it it's almost like people just want to find any possible proof they're right so that they can ignore the signs that everyone's wrong and i also think that regular people see the problems of ai way more than the journalists do and it's strange it's bizarre it's like um another thing i forget who said this if you're the person that said this to me i'm very sorry for forgetting but it's like everyone feels bad that they missed out on social media and calling social media is the best biggest movement or they feel bad on missing out on gpus and not saying gpus would push the next thing and by the way there are people who tried in like 2017 to say gpus would be the next computing thing they were ignored uh it was crazy how early they were but it's and journalists in particular were late to the internet yes so we're there's probably a an institutional bias toward taking tech seriously because we are paying for brushing off the internet in you know 2000 i think i want to start an award show called the fell for it awards that's a good idea and i'm gonna when because it's like you say that and they were late they weren't late to the metaverse had that go they were late to crypto but the nfts That's because crypto sucks and it's hard to talk.

57:31It's hard to explain. Skillish. Having to explain blockchain. Who doesn't love explaining blockchain? No, the problem with crypto is it's complex, but you can explain it quite simply as a decentralized database. But when you explain it like that, it sounds fucking boring because it is. Yes. It's connected to money sometimes. I wrote about crypto for years and every time I think about writing it again, I feel sad. Come do my job. I'll switch with you. Sure. Absolutely. Give me a CNN column. Michael Balaban will kick my ass. Oh, Balaban. He's a wonderful man. It's just so frustrating as well because as ever, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the big short, it's like the people who get fucked here are regular people.

58:14AI bubble bursts. It's not like Sam Altman will be humiliated. I will make sure of it. But it's not like Wario or Sammy, Clammy Sammy, Clammy Sammy is going to get done in at the end of this. It's going to be the stocks are going to crash to fuck. People's pensions will be fucked. I mean, 35 % of the American stock market is Magnificent 7. 19 % of that is NVIDIA. I think 42 % of NVIDIA's revenue is Magnificent 7 stocks. I will have a citation in the notes, Laura Bratton at Yahoo Finance, the goat. But it's going to hit everyone. I don't think it'll be a great financial crisis level, but it's going to be really bad.

58:51And I don't think these AI companies are going to be offering the free spigot anymore. It costs them so much money. So we're going to see all of this get, like, it will still be there, but, like, this festering hole in the side of the tech industry as everyone goes, what the fuck's next? You have such a beautiful way with words in. Yes. Well, it's kind of the way the metaverse still exists within Facebook. But, like, it's not the star child at all anymore. I was talking to my lady last night about this, and it was driving me insane. isn't it fucking insane meta a multi-trillion market cap company just went don't worry legs are coming in the metaverse and then just went actually they're not actually we're pivoting to ai glasses now a huge company just lied they lied constantly for like over a year you had people being like absolutely believe you 100 and then everyone just went oh isn't that fucking straight What the fuck is going – it's weirder than the AI thing, though the AI thing is pretty weird.

59:53It's like we live – tech journalism sometimes lives in an alternate reality. Oh, yeah. It's so – I don't know what's going on with a lot of things, but in particular, it just feels like it would be more fun if we were honest. It would be so much more fun. I wrote a thing today, it's coming out in a few days, so the thing they wrote on Monday is just make fun of them because they're not charming, they're not interesting, they're not hot. None of them are tasty looking. I think Sam Altman has had some work done recently. Do you think he has? What's he have done? His lips are looking a little fuller than usual.

1:00:30Juicy Sammy. Just saying. Juicy Sam Altman, all right. That's a new phrase for me to text eight people. But it's like they're not charming. They're not interesting. Steve Jobs, complete monster, but at least interesting to listen to. They're boring. They're all management consultants. They don't. I went and reread the iPhone announcement today. And the beginning is him just being like, yeah, we did this. We did this. And then we came up with a thing that did all of this. And I'm about to show you. Yeah, I get why people cheered that. But now it's like. I tried watching the liquid glass presentation.

1:01:04I fell asleep in like five to seven minutes. I was there. Damn. And, like, I think there's parts of liquid glass that seem compelling. Hopefully it'll get worked out before it has the full launch. But, like, it's presented in the most non-compelling way possible. It's glass. Based on Vision OS. It's from the most successful Apple product of all time. You remember the Vision Pro? No. Me neither. But that's the thing as well. like they're trying to get us excited for for liquid ass and it's very confusing as well because you could just describe it in a boring way and say yeah like it'd just be very matter of fact about it but i guess it's for shareholders but is it even no even the most slimy apple people were kind of like they needed a literal shiny thing to distract from the ai how about they fix cropping in screenshots.

1:02:0350 % of my screenshots do not crop properly. If you work for Apple and you know why, email me. But it's oh, I don't know. Make our devices work good. They're all a mess. If you think about the iPhone, it's 17 years old. It's ready to go to college. People who are 21 who can vote and go to war and do all those things most likely have no memory of a life before the smartphone. We're at a point where people want what's next. And so I think you just have like tech journalism, we have to chase clicks and SEO farm bait, we have to chase all of this to stay alive. And so it's very much like, this is the next thing.

1:02:44Get hype. Because if you all care, it's like we're looking for the next Game of Thrones, but for tech, because Game of Thrones was such a huge traffic magnet that literally anything that happened, like, we're all drinking at the tit of like SEO traffic and ad monies are coming in. So I just think there is like an incentive and like, you know, journalists always get pushed in any – doesn't matter who you rank for. You always get pushed to like do the next big thing, find the next big trend and all the – Yeah. If you're a Beltway journalist, you have to think about what's the next election? Who's going to be the next thing?

1:03:18You know, it's like all a horse race. What's the take? And I think that the reason no one wants to write that is that there's nothing left. I don't mean that's the scary thought right it's like what if this is it like like we're trying to come up with what's the thing that'll be the new thing after the smartphone and like it's like like AR contacts like come on it's been a minute like it's until we start getting the chips implanted like I thought Joni Ive was hired to fix this to figure out what's the phone that's not a phone we've come up with a new kind of phone it's there's no screen on you I mean I just think we're at a point where like the tech is stalled out right because if you have like the law of diminishing returns and just rock on bubble episode last year but it is though it's we're at the are we at the i'm not gonna say end of history because people misquote for kuyama but it's we're at the end actually anyway i'll get back to it later it's we're at the end of innovation for a minute because if you look at how they're trying to innovate right now first of all i know i've been making fun of the overpaying people but The overpaying thing they're doing is only something you do if you have no fucking clue.

1:04:27They don't know what to do. Yeah, they're just throwing around money. They're investing$327 billion this year into something. They built massive data centers. I don't think that any of – I think they all kind of have realized there might not be a next thing. And I think that their obsession has become something different, which is line go up, money go up. But how can I charge you$10 a month? How can I charge you and a thousand people at your organization$30 a month to the point that they don't know how to do math anymore? And they're like, well, I got you to pay$30. It cost me$75 to get that money from you.

1:05:03But I don't know how to fix that. But what if I spent more money to find out? Maybe. I don't know. And they don't know how. And they will say this if you ask questions, which people tend not to with these people. and it's just even you've got analysts doing it there was an analyst earlier who's like oh yeah google's uh they're making 3.1 billion dollars in google one subscriptions because of ai and it's not they're just like google one subscriptions have gone up and they're like fuck i think it's ai i mean this is this is why everyone's focused on ai is because it's like it's like the final boss of our like collective tech like unconsciousness right it's the thing victoria you were talking about earlier it's like like in like you know like 80s sci-fi this is always like the final thing yeah after we've gotten like you know augmented reality you got the contacts got the glasses like ai's that that's like the last thing that's the last like ghost of our of our past that we're still trying to chase that's this thing that's still trying to like control us like time traveling like backwards in time this idea that eventually we will we will have this ai thing and like it is yeah it is it is like the final boss and we're always trying to chase it and we're coming up with like the barrier of like maybe this thing isn't actually ever going to be real.

1:06:15And I think they think it's the magical thing because it will tell them how to run their business. Because it'll tell them what's next. This is as far as we can get and then we have to create something smarter than us so it can tell us what the next thing will be because this is the final thing we can imagine. This is like it. But even when you listen to Clammy Sammy talking about it and he'll say he will be like, Juicy Sammy. Juicy Sammy, juicy Sam Oldman.

1:06:42Clammy Sammy's thing he always says is, I can't wait to see what you'll build with this. And it's like, motherfucker, that is your job. And that's actually the thing with AI as well. I'm always being to, but the few haters who dare enter my dojo is they say, oh, well, you don't know how to use it right. You're not doing it correctly. I think even, Alison, you might've mentioned this, like you're holding it wrong thing, but it's like, no, I'm the customer. i am i am paying you for work i shouldn't have to write a 950 word prompt that tells you to imagine you're a spaceman or whatever like whatever makes it work fuck you fuck you man i i me pay you money you give me thing 900 word prompt to generate a 900 word story yeah that sucks they're like straight upset there's just like bereft of and it's also we've handed over society to people that don't create things.

1:07:34We've had people who were just like showing different faces to enough people that they get where they need to go. The business idiot writ large. And it's just, it's so funny as well because it's going to fall apart. And when it does everyone, I genuinely, I mean, I look forward to it because of the obvious yucks and chuckles I will get out of it. But there's going to be a really interesting period of journalism having to sit and go, why did we fall for this and if there isn't i will make this happen with all of my energy i will hold everyone because it's i think and i'm not insulting your outlet but victoria no no no this is not an insult i promise read the comments on ai stories on the verge i do read i love reading them because you see regular people are so skeptical of this shit i know i read all the comments on all the stories that i write which are just like thank you for calling out how stupid it is but that's the thing though regular people seem to get it there's gonna be well it depends like there's i think there's a sector of of counterculture that's developing like a neo-luddite perspective like beyond just like like you know like like anti-tech like green anarchists which have carried the luddite torch for the past like 30 years we're starting to see like like like the quote unquote, the cool kids adopting this like new Luddite tendency, mostly in response to like, you know, like alienation and like automation.

1:09:01Right. And I think that trend is going to continue. Like that's going to be like almost like a social status, like status, like a signifier is the fact that you're not reliant on these things. Because there will be a version of AI that does keep getting like normified, I think. How do you mean? there's going to be very like even if you look at the way higher education is working right now the level of people who are graduating just on the basis of like ai helping them with large parts of their assignments like i have i have a few friends who are professors and the majority of assignments that are turned in are majority written by ai and we get to this point we're gonna have like a we're gonna have a new generation of the workforce that doesn't really know how to do anything because ai has been doing everything for them but they got their degree you know like I am employable certificate but now they don't really know what to do.

1:09:50And that's the ramifications of all of this shit. There's going to be a counterculture that refuses to use that. I will not be using AI. That's going to be a thing you have to prove and talk about. It's going to be a version of a social status card. Have you heard of Cluelee? Oh, I've seen Cluelee. Tell us about Cluelee. Oh, I love Cluelee. It's the cheat on everything app And so it was invented by this Columbia Kid Drop, who I interviewed him for a story about. Oh, I heard about this guy. Okay. So it's the Cheat on Everything app. I tested it. It helped me cheat on nothing. It was terrible. I cannot wait to have all my dates go flawless.

1:10:31It can't even do that. Now that I read from a teleprompter. It can't even do that. Like in its current state, it's like you use it. It's like a prompt machine for when you are on a video call, and it very slowly can answer prompts based on a transcript of your video. It's not that usable. It messed up the mics on my computer from testing it to this point where, like, I deleted it from my computer, and video software programs like Google Meet and Zoom will pick a nonexistent Cluely mic. And I'm just like, oh, I don't love that for my computer. That's concerning. It's so cool. Yeah, but, you know, like, as soon as I wrote that story up, someone, another company messaged me.

1:11:12He's like, we're using AI to catch the AI cheaters. And I was like, oh, okay. Finally, we have bear force from The Simpsons. Sure. Solving this problem we created. That's the perfect use case for AI, though. Using AI to fix all the problems caused by AI. That's the real. I think it's beautiful. That's the actual singularity. We've created problems to create solutions for. Neither of them work. But clearly, one of the people from Andreessen went on a podcast and was like, yeah, you know, it's when marketing and virality overtake making a perfect artesian product. It's like, what you mean is when something goes viral for fucking lying, lying.

1:11:54Like, it was a lie. Like, when you say something that is not true intentionally, that's called lying. It's called an IRL hallucination. Yes. It's weird because the way that app was born, initially it was like some other app that was used to kind of make a point about how stupid technical interviews are for devs. Right. And I was like, that's actually kind of radical. And like it is proving a point and you have lost the point. And now you have$5 million in some – somebody gave you$5 million into$100 ,000 commercials. An ice apartment. Did you hear about Mira Marati though, the former CTO of OpenAI and her new startup, Intelligent Machines?

1:12:33No one – So they raised, I think, like a billion dollars, I want to say. And they did not share anything about the financials. They also did not share anything about the product. So anyone investing just went into a room. Miramati went, yes, so I need money, me money now. And they went, fuck yeah. Absolutely. There were reports where people, the VCs were just like, can you share anything? She said, no. On top of this. And by the way, I admire the scam at this point. I just get it. she has her voting rights supersede everyone get it no i'm i fuck these pigs who cannot even bother to even think about what they're building or what it is they do they just like i will take an i will give you an unlimited amount of money because of the vibes i have because of the when's it my turn i would love no i i definitely had a moment where i'm like could i i have great vibes give me money Give me$100 million.

1:13:31Give me money and I will vaguely promise to write you something in the future at a time unspecified from now. I will never do anything. I will guarantee you that. I mean, Ilya Sutsukeva, the other open AI guy, misreported by Pivot2AI that generally does good work but needs to work on their fucking headlines, suggesting that they guaranteed they would not do anything until superintelligence when the actual headline was that they said they have nothing and they want to build superintelligence, which is way funnier. I honestly at this point like it's evil to lie and extract capital but the people you're extracting it from your wallet inspecting them but also you could fix almost you could fix like world hunger I think for six billion dollars they worked it out yeah yeah you could and challenged Elon Musk and he said if you figure out the number I'll give it to you and then they figured out the number the number's not based uh it's very upsetting I saw an out there as well say today that grok only makes a hundred million dollars in revenue it's so fucking cool as well they all burn money i i mean just give it to me give it to me also to me sponsor a journalist you too can sponsor a journalist to live a life and the funny thing is is like i actually think you could make a shit ton of profitable journalism just by like talking about this bluntly i'm doing it all the time but it's it's weird and i actually let's kind of wrap us up as well i i have to wonder if at the end of this farce whether there will be a rise of critical tech journalism i'm not holding my hopes out but i think that there is a slogan like you two actually victoria allison you've both inspired me a bit that it's possible i just write what's true i try it and i tell you what happened when i tried it that's it imagine literally my job imagine that imagine if that happened on hard fork sorry um but it's i'm saying nothing no i know i know i know i'm not going to let these are my opinions just mine i think about them all the time it's i'm hoping this happens because i think you've got brian merchant you've got edwin grayser jr molly white of course one of the fucking best in the business molly's great molly is you've got really good criticism and I think people are hungry for it.

1:15:45The reason I brought up The Verge's comments is this isn't like any kind of fun making. It's you see people saying it now just being like, hey, why the fuck am I having to pretend here? And I just, I think it's the business idiot idea I had a few months ago where it's like, hey, maybe we've handed over our economy, our finances, the editorial structure of some publications and the people with the biggest microphones to people that don't understand a single goddamn thing and it's kind of it that scares me more than anything because we talk about the harms of generative ai and it's yeah there is no intention no intention is far scarier than people being like they want all of your data and all this when they have no idea i was actually kind of disappointed meredith meredith meredith whittaker of signal she's really good admire her dearly she said a thing on stage about how like yeah ai agents which is the marketing term but they're going to do this and they're going to do this whenever anyone speaks about ai agents just imagine like clown noises like circus music if it helps because ai agents do not exist they do not work there are people who are getting close to a thing that might work one time they had a big study out of salesforce said like after with multi-step processes you know things that require you to do more than one thing yeah it failed like less more than i think it's at more than 32 % of the time.

1:17:06It's like, sorry, it only succeeded 32 % of the time, which is very bad and not getting better. And it's like, this is what, and everyone's talking about AI agents despite them not working. I realized this sentence started in one point and it's going to end at the, I feel like I'm going fucking insane. Every time I read the news and I see a new thing that does not exist and everyone says it exists. Am I crazy? Am I having a problem? Like it's, I mean, yes, but is that why I'm reading the stuff that doesn't exist? It's just driving me insane. But now you've said the divinity thing. I'm just like, this isn't actually about building stuff.

1:17:40This is a belief system and plate spinning. This is just an intention to build a vibes-based economy, except it can't last long term. Oh, God. Or until the next revolution that replaces the AI god. If industrial revolution and modernity killed God qua God, then maybe AI is the demigod that we replace God with and then something else will happen. Sam Altman is the Antichrist. I like where you're at that. Many people are saying this. Many people are saying this. Many people in a New York City podcasting studio are saying. Did I do that? Sorry. But even then, the reason I say he's the Antichrist is not any recent interviews on the New York Times podcast.

1:18:31it's specifically about the fact that he is able to charm every business idiot he's so good at it he's good at saying nothing in a way that makes people give him a billion dollars and he has wrapped i think he's wrapped everyone up in this insanity and no one really knows why they're doing it you've got journalists you've got investors you've got consumers even who are like chasing this dream and i genuinely think he may lead the tech industry to a kind of ruin i don't think all the companies are going to shut down but this is the ultimate hubris of basing everything in tech on venture capital, invested by people that don't really understand, and public companies run by people with MBAs.

1:19:07Every single... Mark Zuckerberg's a rarity. He doesn't have an MBA, but all the rest of them do. Even the guy who replaced Andy Jassy at AWS, the cloud part of Amazon, has an MBA. MBAs are everywhere. I think we should bar them from running companies. And also being allowed to... Just don't give people MBAs. Have housing or healthcare. Okay, no, sorry, I'll stop that one there. But it's just, I don't know, we're all going to suffer for this. I'll blog about it, I guess. And we'll all blog. We'll do podcasts, Gare. But you know what? I'm going to wrap it on that happy note there. Gare, where can people find you?

1:19:44Well, I help run a daily, yikes, new show for Cosa Media called It Could Happen Here. That's where you can find most of my work. Right now, I'm finishing my final piece on the Stop Cup City movement in Atlanta, as well as an upcoming piece on liberal accelerationism. What is that? You know, that's what the piece is about. Well, we'll have to find out and listen to it. Alison, where can people find you? I write a business newsletter for CNN called Nightcap. You can just Google CNN Business Nightcap. And I'm on Blue Sky. And Victoria. You can find me at The Verge. And all my handles on everything, Blue Sky, Twitter, Instagram, all the things is at VicMSong.

1:20:24You can find me inside your computer. that's where I live. I'm Ed Zirtron, you've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you, of course, to our wonderful producer, Daniel Goodman. You've been hearing us recorded out of the beautiful New York City, Nevada. And yeah, you keep listening to my goddamn show, we'll have a monologue this week as well. Peace out.

1:20:57projects at matasowski.com m-a-t-t-o-s-o-w-s-k-i.com you can email me at easy 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 better offline 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.

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1:22:34So check out the Stuff You Should Know true crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes, it did. But he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with AJ Jacobs.

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