The AI Industry Must Stop Doom Trolling w/ Cal Newport

29:24I am spending this much money on gas for my F-150. Like, tell me like why that's worth it, right? Like, just continually bring it back to you have really three products you're selling right now. Great. Sell a product. It's interesting technology. You're making a good product out of it. sell me what are the benefits why is it worth the money and i will take for granted you better say it's not going to harm anyone because otherwise fix it so it doesn't like that should just be yeah that's your job to fix that's your job to fix and you don't and just to throw in another moral argument i put in the new york times op-ed it is not actually a moral argument to say there's this thing we want to do that's going to cause potentially a lot of harm and destruction but that guy's going to do it.

30:04And as long as he's doing it, I get to do it too. That is what my eight-year-old says, right? He's like, I know, but like he stole the cookies. Why can't I steal it too? So I do not understand this argument. It was in the latest Anthropic paper. We're building this technology. It might come alive and we might lose control of it. But how can we stop? Because China is also building the technology. And what if they build it and it comes alive and comes control? Why don't we get to do it too? What's the moral argument there? This is not like a nuclear deterrence argument that if you somehow destroy humanity first, what's the advantage there, right?

30:38What game have you won? So I don't understand that. But my bigger point here is like, yeah, I think we need to activate. I'm working on a big article now for a trade magazine for engineers, actually, where I'm making this case. It's a cry to cure. You need to stand up and say, that's nonsense. Let's talk about your real technology. I know about this because I think there's a lot of people like me who are on the wrong coast. We're not on the West coast. We don't, we haven't gone to those cold meetings who were like, there's interesting technology here. And I want to hear about the products. And this is actually where you and I maybe even differ a little bit.

31:09I end that piece by saying I'm pissed off because this should have been for a nerd like me, an exciting time. This is a cool technology. It's hard to make products out of it, but we should have been like, it kind of excited about, Oh, I never thought about doing that with this. isn't that cool? What's going on? Instead, everyone is terrified. Like you ruin this moment because of God knows why. We don't even have to get into it. So I think the right response from like actual engineers who are not part of that cult and you know, you got to swallow your pride. I get it. You were really excited to your cousin after you use cloud code.

31:40Like that's okay. Swallow your pride a little bit and say, this is doom trolling and it's embarrassing. Can we talk about the real technology like a normal product? There's cool things you can build. Some stuff isn't working. I want to know if my stock market portfolio is going to crash. Like let's just be normal. Stop the weird stuff. Just stop it. You're a real company trying to sell real things. Let's talk about products. I want to spark a revolution to bring things back to normal. I fully agree. And I even said I was on Chris Hayes' show a couple of weeks ago. And I said, I think we should legally ban boosters from using the future tense.

32:19I don't think they should be allowed to say if either. I don't think they should be able to say will. I think they should only be allowed to talk about what's coming out today. you can go two weeks in the future max yeah i think that because when you read any story about ai that's positive it always speaks in the future tense it does not speak about what's happening now and when they do speak about what's happening now it's the vaguest stuff in the world it's like it can write or it can autonomously write software is the software good no is it stable no can you rely can you even actually do anything with it if you don't know what you're doing no is the code overly verbose yes like it's like there are tons of problems with it but one sentence allows the generalities to grow.

33:00And also, I think there's a very obvious reason they don't talk about the present, because it's kind of boring. It is. Like, it's just, in comparison to a big, sexy, autonomous robot, it's incredibly boring to say, but also, the business doesn't work. The business doesn't function. If they have to talk about why it costs$1 ,000 of API tokens to do something, they have to talk about their business, and they have to talk about what it does today. And the problem is with that is, so my position on this is, I don't mind on-device models. I actually think that's all that's going to remain of LLMs. I think maybe we'll get some rag search stuff here and there, but I don't have an animus with the non-data center ones.

33:44But I do agree that there needs to be, like people do need to stop fighting fire with fire as far as being like, if they're going to doom her, we're going to say that all data centers are the worst which they are the water story is murky but the environmental story is very real especially with the behind the meter gas turbines but and the economic story which you've been good on too is like there's so much more money coming into building these centers and their centers being built and that's going to be its own issue but also just just fundamentally these weirdos are trying to make you scared of cloud software like that's that's my thing that i keep it's like if satan adela every two weeks is like you'll never fucking believe what microsoft word's gonna do next mate you're never gonna believe what power bi is gonna do with the dashboard i saw a dashboard on power bi and i'm pretty sure next week it's gonna it's gonna try and kill someone you'd be like you sound like a lunatic man you sound like a crazy person this is an insane uh sundar peshai yeah google search is good oh oh any any week now you just laugh at him and the two Microsoft guys are Mustafa Suleiman he's trying to use the Dario Sam playbook but he's not good at it he's like I think AI is going to it's not only going to take over all jobs it's going to create new jobs just to automate them and it's going to do it Thursday.

35:16It'll do it Thursday. How about that? Is that guys? Is that, is that, I mean, it's like, do you like it's turning a big dial? It says AI on it. It's just like, do you like this? I love it as well. Because he'll, he'll even talk and be like, yeah, 12 to 18 months away. We're going to have super intelligence, but also Anthropics too expensive. We can't pay the money more. Yeah. But also this is normal and it's not going to take jobs, but it's going to take all the jobs in two years, but not today, but not next week, but maybe in six months and it's just that yeah they're using the dario playbook with everything because they're just making the same things and they don't work particularly well it's just so these people are so weird the more now you've said it now it's all i can think about so here's the here's the logic i also want people to avoid because i came up into what you were saying there is and i feel like maybe chris did this a little bit in your interview i have to go back and listen to it but this this logic and i and i get it and i'll give an explanation for it from from a psychological perspective in a second, but there's this logic of, if there's something I can point to where AI did something that I thought was impressive or interesting or better than I thought, every prophecy is true.

36:25And I think it's, I don't know, psychological self-preservation, or I don't know what it is, but I don't under, this is, again, from a logic point of view, I teach logic to undergraduates, like propositional logic. I don't understand, And this is a, it's an argument that's missing premises, right? So they're going from the premise of, hey, and it's almost always the same thing. It's almost always a non-engineer using cloud code because it's really fun. It's like a slot machine. It, especially, you know, it just like creates code that works for simple things. And you're like, this, it's really fun.

37:04Like I've talked, I know people who are like, they're just like, this is my new hobby. Like it's all, it's really fun. if you're into that type of thing, right? We talked about this earlier. It's like model trains for engineers. You do that. You're like, that was really cool. And then you translate that experience of like, I really enjoyed that to, um, you know, I wonder what salt mine, the AI overlords are going to assign me to. And it's a weird, that, that leap of logic. Uh, how can we just keep it as like, okay, this was really cool that you built this dashboard. Like we don't have to leap from that to therefore everything Dario Amadei said must be true it's not this binary uh balancing on a fulcrum where we're just looking for like one one little piece of evidence will tip it one way or the other so i i think we need to be careful about these elaborations it's a jagged technology some things make more progress than others some things are cool some things are more narrow than uh you would think but like you know the ceo i i built a really cool web-based game in in fable 5 which actually is probably just copying the source code of a similar game.

38:06Yeah. Does that mean like recursive self-improvement is coming? So what I'm hoping we can do is stop making these leaps of logic where if you, if you encounter any sort of feature or have any sort of positive experience with an AI product that you then leap immediately to the conclusion that everything involved in the prophecy about the future of AI must be true or to put, you know, someone like you and me now it has to be put on the defensive of, I did something positive with AI. All right, Ed, doesn't that now mean everything anyone has ever said about AI is true? Convince me I'm wrong. I think that logic is backwards, that these grand proclamations of we're going to have self-improving AI, we're going to automate all jobs, used a Carl Sagan quote, those remarkable claims require a remarkable amount of evidence.

38:55Why is everyone so quick of like, this product which you're working on and putting billions of dollars on, of course you're going to keep adding new features or finding things to improve. That is a given, of course. What technology in the history of the world would you have no improvements on if you're spending$10 to$20 billion a year in R &D? Of course it's going to have improvements. Why are we leaping from that? That means that anything you say, any speculative future you give about some sci-fi future is now the default unless we can prove otherwise. So we got to stop that logic too. We should be able to discuss, enjoy, or get around the implications of particular AI features without having to have that shift to a conversation about RSI or widespread job automation?

39:37I think what it is, it comes back to the pride thing. I think there's also something about LLMs and the way they make people feel. I'm on the spectrum, autistic. People have probably worked that out from the third 10 ,000-word article, but I don't feel anything when they're nice to me. I feel absolutely nothing. When the chatbot is like, wow, that was a great idea. I don't have, I don't respect it. I don't care what it thinks because it doesn't think. I don't see anything about what it says. If it tells me I have a good idea, I'm like, I don't care. I feel nothing. I think that a lot of people do feel something.

40:14I think when they see these things, compliment them and do an impression of brainstorming with them, which is really just talking to yourself in the mirror, which can help. That can help. I've done it. I think that it makes them feel good and also your Claude Code example I think that people feel very good about that and they feel very proficient and it makes them feel capable at something perhaps they were incapable of before and thus if you say to them well okay that's just that's fine they go no no I'm a big boy I think there's something kind of almost childish about it like no I'm special I'm special why aren't you impressed with and it's something the models are built to do the ingratiation i think is important but also i think that the tech industry has done a really good job over the years of convincing us that everything gets better and better and better even though it doesn't even though a lot of google search has got worse facebook's got worse twitter's got worse honestly argue many parts of blue sky have got worse it's less reliable at least the experience of using the computer has got worse we've hit a wall with innovation in general but this thing because it can kind of resemble anything if you want it to i think touches something dark in some people not evil but just like something very vulnerable and kind of weak and kind of gullible where they say well if i'm getting this out of this then i'm part of the future and i need someone to be impressed by this this is now a part of my identity and that's i think that that might also be the differentiator here as well I don't remember tech sure you had forum wars but about gaming consoles I'm sure you had you have android versus ios whatever not like this yeah nothing like this and I think that it touches something in people well I so I think there's a whole class of people where that's what's going on especially the sort of bro adjacent tech bro adjacent people on you know x who are who are always yelling well but what about this what about this right it and then I think the the other thing that happens for a lot of people, especially who are a little bit more tech distance is it's a way of dealing with anxiety.

42:26Right. Yeah. And if you think about this and like, we've talked about COVID before you and I, but I think it, it, it offers some good, you know, analogies here is like one of the ways when, you know, the virus was spreading, but hadn't quite got to the U S or was just coming or the hospitals were overloaded in Italy or whatever. It's like one of the ways to deal with it psychologically was to get out in front of it and be like, this is going to be really bad like i i you know i'm on it and you know you feel more prepared like i'm not i'm not going to be caught off guard i'll be the one telling people how bad this is and like somehow that does help you a little bit deal with like the anxiety of like impending dread and i think there's a lot of that going on with this as well is like i'm anxious about this doom troll and i've been doom trolled so many times i'm going to kind of get out in front of it now if i'm the one saying well wait a second i get so many i am for a lot of people now they're like stress pacifier of like, well, what about this?

43:19Go, right? Like I saw this thing that upset me. Like, doesn't that mean that means I think that means it is going to take it over. And then they're kind of hoping that me or someone else will come in and be like, you don't really, it's okay. Like that's not as big of a deal as it seems. So I think both are going on. It's either like, this gives me meaning. Like I'm a part of the future. If you're like using cloud code and if you're just using like chat GPT for natural language search, you might just be really anxious because you, you know, you hear these earnest podcasts where people are interviewing people about, you know, we'll have to eat our dogs when the jobs are gone.

43:50And you're like, well, if I get out in front of it, at least I feel like I have some autonomy in this dark thing that's happening. And so it's like common psychology, both of the psychologies equal dollar and cents for a, again, I keep going back to, remember, it's a vanishingly small number of early investors who have large equity positions in these companies. That is who benefits from all of that. They will benefit immensely because no matter what that psychology is, this company is at the fulcrum of the future and that's worthy of investing in even if their revenue story is murky even if their product story is um there's no moat and it is i mean i don't want to get into the economic weeds but this is like a clayton christensen fever dream what is happening with these companies and their products what does that mean uh so he had this idea of um you know talking about disruption from below that the problem is is you're working on a high-end version of a product and you don't want to undermine your market.

44:45So you try to keep it expensive and high-end. And then someone comes in from below with a different way of doing it this much cheaper and you're screwed because you ignored that market. All of the use cases that are useful now that people are spending money on, like software development tools and natural language search, here's the problem. You don't need a 10 trillion parameter language model to do this. And this is why these companies are so screwed and I think are trying to IPO as fast as they can is that like someone's going to come along and say we're using a 20 billion parameter open source model with a really smart coding harness that we just coded ourselves on top of it and tweaked for the last two years and you know what people like it better than cloud code and it's a hundredth of the price right or natural language search you don't need cloud fable five to summarize google search results right and the economics make no sense but a small model could a non-chip model could.

45:37That is why they're in trouble economically.

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49:01I also think that there is, and I do think there is a deeply cynical thing here, well, let me reframe that. I think that people have to find ways to rationalize capitalism. I think that the only way that they could, the amount of times I hear a week of, just like Amazon Web Services, just like Uber, just like this, I have restated that point a hundred times, people sometimes listen, people sometimes don't, but people need to find a way i think to rationalize the massive expenditures and the current products do not provide that rationalization nothing about chat gpt or claude or claude code or fable or whatever actually rationalizes this doesn't make a trillion dollars is too much money for anything outside of like universal health care and housing in fact probably could have taken care of that really easily but nevertheless people see that and they don't want to deal with the natural kind of dissonance they get which is wow are all the companies run by people who don't know what's going on and the answer is yes like i don't think that there's actually a grand conspiracy oh my god the emails i get every week people being like it's surveillance it's a secret surveillance state it's secret it's yeah it's so secret it's on cnbc every day oh they're all they're doing secret data centers yeah it's called oracle yeah it's being it's called oracle that's what oracle does oracle has a huge class like that's very well known what do you like i think people need there to be a conspiracy because otherwise the answer is which is what i believe which is none of these companies had a plan i think sam altman and darry amity thought we're going to throw a bunch of money at this and then god will come out yeah money money so much money and then they will have asi agi whatever they call it and then it happened and then that didn't they hit the diminishing returns at the end 2024 and since then they've been kind of harnessing non-llm stuff on top of llms in an attempt to make them do stuff but that's been so successful by the way think about the doom trolling this is another advantage of it they've completely obfuscated exactly that point that you just made which is that pre-training scaling again had we've talked about this on the show but it's had diminishing returns you know uh starting after 2024 and so all of the improvements that have come since then has been post-training, pre-trained models and building hand-coding harnesses with more and more special cases plugged into it to find more places for them to be useful, which is a completely different trajectory than 2023, where they were like, no, we'll just keep pre-trained, scaling these things till we have AGI.

51:35And they've created a sense of like, well, AI has been drastically improving, hasn't it? And you say, well, wait a second. Like if you told me in 2022, you know, when you're like, we're going to scale our way to AGI and our vision of agi is software development tools yeah like it's just dreadfully boring in comparison that's boring or natural language google but you're like but it's not just like a feature that like google will just kind of otherwise would have just kept adding and tweaking in a very like economically uh reasonable way saying forever it's like yeah i thought like the reason that people like llm search is pretty simple that it responds to search how people have always used search which is questions you're like hey what about this and this i've used ai mode with google maybe three times and i always use it as like a trawling expedition to say like has anyone ever said anything like this and then it would give me a bunch of fake citations like just that happens every time but then i'll find one weird pdf and it'll be like oh cool but isn't that if you didn't if llms didn't exist i would expect google search to do that by now like that would that feels like a natural progression but it's just normal kind of boring so i always say it's like oh if they called it library models it wouldn't be that big a deal but it would be a more accurate like you just choose a regular name this people weren't freaking out about platform as a service tools didn't hear all this bullshit about kubernetes which is way more fun to say than large language models people have taken this and the thing is i don't think that the strategy was always we're a doom troll like i don't think they sat and thought about it very much i think they just kind of oaf max their way they just bumbled into it and like it's scary and then they saw how well it worked yeah i think i genuinely think on an ethical level it's one of the most disgraceful things anyone's ever done technology technologically i think it's just on top of the obfuscation of what these things actually do it's horrible it's a it's a cruel thing to do i hear from people all the time just being like am i gonna lose my job to this am i good why is my boss telling me i'm gonna lose my job to this why what is this why is it different why am and i think when they hear all the doomerism and they use the product and they use claw code and they go oh it buffed out an open source crm they're like oh god they're right imagine what someone who kind of knew what they were doing could do oh i'm scared i don't think that i think that that i they shouldn't be able to sleep at night.

54:03I think it's an evil way to market things. I would say the way I would think of it, I put on my Bentham hat here, right? Let's use like utilitarian calculus. The net harm that doom trolling as a communication strategy has caused in terms of mental health, right? Just like people feeling bad. The net harm caused by doom trolling far, far, far, far, far exceeds any the grand total of benefits that this AI technology has produced so far. Like I don't see any other way for that calculus to work out. I was just reading one of the many papers that are actually now surveying and studying AI in the workforce.

54:39And they looked at this paper and they asked people, these software developers, like estimate how much time you've saved or whatever. And it was 11 hours a week we're saving. And then they asked them, is your company performing better at all? Like, has this made any impact on your bottom line? And it was like a vanishingly small percent that was like, yeah, there's anything different on the performance. Was that worth, or making like software developers, maybe by some measures, 1.2 times more efficient, worth causing, I think the negative toll of this psychologically is like getting close to like COVID territory.

55:17It's like population-wide, you are stressing out everybody day after day. They've made the last two years for anyone who's following the news psychologically miserable. that is a real harm. That is a real measurable harm. Like I really hate that I have to deal with this like time. And again, uh, it reminds me of having to deal with the pandemic, which was like a, a, like a psychologically fraught time because every day you were being bombarded, but at this time, you know, a, there's not a virus that's infecting a lot of people and be the people who are like warning about all the doom in this analogy.

55:55It would be as if like they were the ones in the lab doing the research that was producing the virus like that's the craziest thing about it right i mean imagine if in like 2019 someone was like these viruses coronaviruses doing gain-of-function research could really really like infect the whole world like of course they're going to get out we can't contain them oh by the way we are curiously doing this gain-of-function research on these viruses and we're not going to stop because you know the well in this case but whatever yeah someone else might go a different direction there yeah someone else might do it.

56:26So like, what can we do? He'd be like, stop building the viruses then. Anyways. So, so I think we have to account for the net psychological harm. And I think, I mean, I don't think our current government can do this, but I think that that's something where the government should in an abstract world be involved. Like, Oh, there's a small number of people who are causing a huge amount of distress and anxiety around our entire country. Of course, we're going to get in the game and we're going to pause all your model deployments until like you either convince us that that's not the case and you admit like, yeah, we were kind of making that up.

56:57Or if you don't want to say that, then like, no, you don't get to release this product. You're causing mass, mass unhappiness and damage, right? To our entire country. You have to account for that. You don't get to just do that. So it is, I think the harms so far have exponentially outweighed the tangible benefits. I'm just also going to be honest. Yeah. The mobile AI companies are terrible. I also think the media has categorically failed here and should feel fucking ashamed of themselves. I think the media is as much to blame. I think I'm going to put a fundamental blame on venture capital. I'll give you my quick pitch on that.

57:33Yes, absolutely. I mean, you have to understand the economics of especially high tech venture capital coming out of Silicon Valley. The whole model, and again, this is all just because you have some institutional investors and rich people that you want to make richer. That's Like that's the whole underlying goal, right? And their whole model is we have to find new areas where there's something to be monetized in which there's possibilities for unicorns. So we have to find new territories where you have the possibility of getting in early and having an investment turn out to be a multi-billion dollar company, right?

58:07The web, that's what started in the 90s with the web. And most of those bets failed because of the first dot-com crash. A couple paid off like Amazon. Then you had Web2. It turned out attention was a resource you could monetize. So it's like discovering a new mineral or oil. There was a huge fortune to be had. The venture capitalists could get in there early. They had massive returns, betting on Meta, betting on the social media companies, right? Then they're like, we need another because you have to keep finding. Every time you raise a new fund, you need a giant new resource that you can monetize to get to early.

58:38So the next thing they tried was crypto. Crypto was just Andreessen Horowitz saying, there's no more unicorns left in social. We're going to try to create a new field in which we can create unicorns. And they really flogged crypto. This is the future. This is the future. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it wasn't, especially for software. And I got yelled at for saying this, but I'm literally an expert on this. My doctorate's in the theory of distributed systems. It's a stupid way to build a distributed system. And I was right. And no one built the systems that way. So that kind of failed. This was the next territory.

59:09And it doesn't say this technology is not interesting or potentially useful. But as you said, it's not trillion dollar useful. Not yet. So why did all that money come in is because we're talking about one street in one city. We're talking like Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. Like the people on that one street are like, we need to find a new territory that can produce $100 billion companies so that we can get the returns that we expect to keep our lifestyle up. And that's it. I've been saying this for years. It's the rock con bubble. It's they're out of big ideas. And AI was the panacea. it was the it was the api would be the way to build new startups it would be the way for enterprise companies to sell more software with new add-ons it would be the way for business software to take off consumer software it was meant to be the solution because they're doing exactly the same thing as the ai companies are doing saying yeah the ai will just fix this what are we going to build with this or the ai will work out what's the product ai will work it out it's honestly a kind of a pathetic culture i don't think they even care about that i like they're like okay if we put the money in this now what's the strike price going to be at the ipo that's what yeah but that's why i'm i'm getting at that they don't care if it works in the end or not they're they're like we we want to spacex look at that but the theoretical that i'm saying is that the idea of large language models as an api or a consumer product was what they're excited about because you can just extrapolate the various things but i must i must get back to it i think the media is responsible i 100 believe the media is responsible they are the ones that at the times Ezra Klein how much AGI bullshit is that guy shoveled how many times Bernie Sanders going out there and talking to Claude I realize that's politics but they put it on YouTube for a reason how many different outlets have talked about the jobpocalypse that does not exist or the sasspocalypse claiming that software companies are being sold off because of AI disruption that doesn't exist the media bought and sold this in 2023 there was Guardian headline that said Sam was a little bit scared it's just without that none of this was possible and perhaps they were just being a megaphone for real anxieties from these companies or perhaps they were just looking for a narrative that would get clicks i just think yeah i don't think it's clicks i think they underestimated the weirdness of these people and they took them at face this is my you know having many feet within the world of media.

1:01:35What I really think happened is it didn't cross their minds that these people are super strange cultist weirdos. They don't know about Yukowski. They don't know about the rationalist. They don't know about the exorist community that came out of the rationalist and then merged with the technological singularities and that they also think they're going to live forever by harvesting the blood of children. They were just like, these are engineers. I don't know about technology they do. They're telling me this. Why would they lie? I, I've heard that word for word from multiple early on, multiple journalists.

1:02:08And I think it was all being seen through the frame of COVID where that was in the recent history. If the virus, I don't know anything about viruses, but the virologists were like, trust me, like, this is something I can't directly observe, right? Because there's not very many people sick, but like, trust us, this is going to spread and this is a really big deal. And like, well, trucks, the virologists know what they talk about. Why would they lie? And I don't want to miss that story. I think there was a lot of that going on of these are the people building the tech because I heard this phrase from so many people.

1:02:38These are the people building the technology. They know about it best. I'm not a computer scientist. I mean, I am. But like if I'm being the journalist and this is why like the people who were not like, where is the resistance is coming from is computer scientists like me who don't live near Silicon Valley. And we're like, well, I do understand this technology. And what the hell are you talking about? but i think for the journalist it was and now they're just this is why i'm wrote that op-ed i'm trying to spread the word more these guys are weird they're weird and by the way they're mainly guys too because i think women are going to put up with this weird you know i'm going to go in my room and play with my star war toys nonsense right uh i don't want to who knows what that tells us about our our gender ed but it's not great that it's all men doing this craziness yeah it's like tim tim rey gabrie isn't particularly sold on this for example like i don't think emily bender like a lot of the like hardcore skeptics are like you boys with your star wars what are you up to lads yeah what do you mean you don't have friends do you is this is this related to fantasy football like what guys what is this right which is what's that the funny thing is though there is something to that where it's it is a very male technology and i do want it like it's not not something i think two white guys can necessarily get into in any depth without a woman present so that we could actually have a rounded conversation but it is interesting that pretty much everyone running this stuff is a guy and the majority of them are white fellas and they're all claiming that everything they build is amazing I don't know perhaps there's something going on there too is there something white guys are good at is thinking everything we do is amazing we are pretty well trained we are pretty well trained at that but this is why I do think it's important why I wrote that op-ed is like I want to name what they're doing this is doom trolling I think you need to understand these people are weird and we can't take what they're saying at face value we just can't because they're too weird they've proven time and again but the key message I would also want like if you're listening to this pod if you're listening to this podcast now do not interpret this conversation as oh I'm going to categorize this in a claim that AI doesn't work and therefore if I see something cool that AI does because this conversation isn't relevant.

1:04:54You know, Cal was wrong. This is, it's really not about that is not what I'm talking about right now. I am talking about the way that we actually talk about AI, how we treat it as a business, what is morally appropriate and what is morally not. And these are normal products. And I don't, I don't, to me, this isn't, it's not vaporware. I mean, I think the ability to parse natural language like a language model can do is like, it's fascinating. And I'm also surprised by how hard it's been to come up with a lot of good, useful, economically viable products off of that ability. Like we're still with software development tools and rewriting Google search results.

1:05:34I actually thought we would have a lot more interesting tools that we were using in our everyday life right now. And it's because there's been some problems that we didn't think about. So this whole conversation is about stop treating this like a demon that's been summoned, make fun of doom trolling because it's kind of embarrassing. This is the, you know, this is the, the, the magic, the gathering club at the high school table. Um, and just treat this like a normal product. And like, I don't want to hear, let's just, what are the products you're selling? What are the benefits? How much do they cost?

1:06:05Is it worth the money? And, uh, what other products are you working on? Like, let's just have normal conversations. So do not, as a listener, categorize this in this, in this, in this sort of, uh, light first dark is like, okay, this means AI doesn't work. and this team says it does work. And then I'm going to try to assess in my mind is AI useful or not. And if it is, then I have to be ready to mate with machines. And if it doesn't, then stop all that sort of extreme thinking. I just want us to talk about this like a normal, interesting, but normal technology. And normal people should look at the way that these companies are doom trolling us and say, that's strange.

1:06:41Please stop. And in the meantime, I am going to have to really make fun of you. I think that's where we need to be. I fully agree. And I think all of this, large language models in a vacuum, very interesting technology. The problem is they tried to scale them like a giant multi-trillion dollar industry, which I don't think they fit into. The future of LLMs in whatever form they have is on device. They never should have been scaled at this scale. Like it never made sense. Never once. And in the end, it is normal technology. And that is the thing to always take away from this, which is you wouldn't freak out about kubernetes you wouldn't microsoft word doing autocomplete shouldn't scare you grammarly shouldn't scare you this is be the actual technology itself is not scaring you it's the people around it and the people's extrapolations and also like you said the willingness we have to believe people who are working on something who have supposed expertise as if expertise guarantees that you're correct or indeed guarantees that you know what you're talking about or indeed that you can see the future yeah so there we go i mean i think that's yeah yeah i mean i don't know who knows no no i'm already seeing like the comments on my new york times piece is just falling into the like uh-oh you you you said somewhere in there there could be a benefit of ai you apostate ai is terrible or like the other side is is like well well how do you explain the fact, you know, I'm, oh my God, it's just written by AI, these comments, I get sent this all the time.

1:08:14These, these comments that are like, I work for a such and such company and what used to take me three weeks, I now do in like six seconds. And, you know, it's just like falling, people are just falling into their camps about like, either you're one of the, the priest of the new religion or, you know, you're the, you're the, the, the, the Canaanites who were, who were kicked out of the land or something. Right. Like, it's like, you got to be in like one of these two like extremes and don't do that just say like treat it like a normal technology stop doom trolling is is stupid stop it like treat it like a normal technology either stop if you really think you're destroying the world or start talking about it like pickup trucks right we don't need this in between so hopefully hopefully we can convince a few more people about that i hope so cal thank you so much for joining me always a pleasure

1:09:09Thank 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 matosowski.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.

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