The Subprime AI Crisis

24:34And we're back. So I think now is a good time to get back to the root of the generative AI problem. Generative AI is being sold to you on multiple lives. That it's AI. It's actually artificial intelligence. That it's going to get better. That this will become artificial general intelligence. That this will become the thinking computer. And that all of this is inevitable. Putting aside terms like performance, as they largely use as a means of generating things accurately or faster rather than being good at anything, large language models have effectively plateaued. More powerful never seems to mean does more.

25:10And more powerful often means more expensive to run, or more expensive for you as the user to access, meaning that you've just made something that doesn't do more and does cost more to run. If the combined forces of every venture capitalist and big tech hyperscaler have yet to come up with a meaningful use case that lots of people will actually pay for, I just don't see one coming. Large language models, and yes, that's where all of these billions of dollars are going, are not going to magically sprout new capabilities if big tech and open AI burn another$150 billion. dollars. And yes, that number isn't hyperbole.

25:42It's actually pretty close to the amount being plowed into these companies when you include things like investments in companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, and the genuinely insane amount of capex from the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft going into expanding data centers and buying GPUs. Nobody seems to be trying to make these things more efficient, or at the very least nobody's succeeded in doing so, because I think if they had, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops. And as an aside, by the way, the biggest sign that no one's actually making money from this is that no one's talking about how much money they're making microsoft and all of these companies they love talking about making profit they love doing that beyond earnings they love talking about it instead whenever they're asked to go oh hey i will do some things in the future i need to take a phone call and then they kind of disappear from the room amy hood cfo of microsoft classic bullshit artists dancing around Yeah, net, net revenue increase, checking a watch.

26:39It's just really sad. It's really sad because what we have here is a shared delusion. A shared delusion about a dead-end technology that runs on copyright theft, one that requires a continual supply of capital to keep running, as it provides services that are at best in essential, sold to us dressed up as a kind of automation that does not exist, and it doesn't provide, costing billions and billions of dollars, and continuing to do so in perpetuity. Generative AI doesn't run on money or cloud credits so much as it does on faith. And the problem is that faith, like investor capital, is actually a finite resource.

27:12And that's where I bring you one of my biggest anxieties about this industry. Because I think we're in the midst of a subprime AI crisis, where thousands of companies have integrated this stuff into their software at prices that are far from stable and even further from profitable for the services providing them. This concern, by the way, isn't unfounded. At the latest OpenAI Dev Day, they said that they'd slashed prices for their APIs by 99 % over the previous two years, largely, as TechCrunch's MaxF theorized, due to price pressure from Meta and Google, both of whom want to take that API access for, I assume, some reason?

27:48Anyway, almost every AI-powered startup that uses large language model features is based on some combination of GPT or CLAWD, so OpenAI or Anthropics models. These models are built by two companies that are deeply unprofitable. OpenAI, they're going to lose$5 billion this year. Anthropic is on course to lose$2.7 billion this year on much less revenue. And they all have pricing designed to get more customers through the door than make any kind of profit. OpenAI, as mentioned, is subsidized by Microsoft, both in cloud credits they received in the 2023 investment and the preferential pricing Microsoft offers for their cloud services, about a quarter of the price of what everyone else pays.

28:26And these companies, while they're OpenAI and Anthropic, their pricing is entirely dependent on the support of big tech. In the case of OpenAI, Microsoft's continued support. In the case of Anthropic, Amazon and Google, both as investors and service providers. Based on how unprofitable these companies are, I hypothesize that if OpenAI or Anthropic charge prices closer to their actual costs, there'd be a 10 to 100 times increase in the price of API calls, though it's impossible to say how much without the actual numbers of direct burn from these companies. However, let's consider for a moment that the numbers reported by the information estimate that OpenAI's server costs with Microsoft will be$4 billion in 2024, which I add are over two and a half times cheaper than what Microsoft charges others.

29:10It's like about$4 and something and they pay about$1 something per GPU per hour. And then consider, after knowing that they're getting this massive discount, that OpenAI still loses over$5 billion a year. OpenAI is more than likely charging only a small percentage of what it likely costs to run its models, and can only continue to do so if it's able to continually raise more venture funding than has ever been raised, ever, and continue to receive preferential pricing from Microsoft, a company that recently mentioned that it considers OpenAI a competitor and has complete access to its IP and research.

29:44While I can't say for certain, I would think it's reasonable to believe that Anthropic receives a similarly preferential pricing package from both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Both of those companies, by the way, put billions into them. Assuming that Microsoft gave OpenAI$10 billion of cloud credits, and it spent$4 billion on server costs, and let's say$2-3 billion on training, costs that are both sure to increase with new models, OpenAI will either need more credits or will have to pay actual cash to Microsoft sometime in 2025. And Microsoft did participate in their latest round, by the way, But it's not obvious how much, and it was much less than last time, which was, I believe,$10 billion mostly in cloud credits.

30:23While it might be possible that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google extend their preferred pricing indefinitely, the question is whether these transactions are profitable for them in any way. As we saw following Microsoft's most recent quarterly earnings, there's growing investor concern over how CapEx is being spent, and the amount that's being required to build the infrastructure for generative AI, with many voicing skepticism about the potential profitability of the technology, including Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs. And what we really don't know is how unprofitable generative AI is for hyperscalers, because they bake those costs into other parts of their earnings.

30:55What we can't know for sure, I imagine this stuff is... If this stuff was in any way profitable, they'd be talking about it all the time. They would never shut up. This would be their new golden goose. And they're not. In fact, the most concrete information we have about OpenAI's balance sheet It comes from leaked reports, well-sourced reporters at places like the New York Times and the Information, and investor prospectuses that found a wider audience than Altman perhaps would have liked. So you may remember from a few months ago that the markets have become a little skeptical of the generative AI boom, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had no real answers about AI's return on investment from his latest earnings, which led to a historic$279 billion drop in NVIDIA's market cap in a single day.

31:37This, by the way, was the largest drought in US market histories. The total value lost is equivalent of nearly five Lehman Brothers at its peak value. They've recovered some of it. But nevertheless, that's what we in the business call not so good. At the beginning of August, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all took a similar beating for the markets for their massive capital expenditures related to AI. And all three of them will face the wheel next quarter, in a couple weeks in fact, if they can't show a significant increase in revenue from the combined$150 billion or more in CapEx that they put into new data centers and NVIDIA GPUs.

32:09What's important to remember here is that other than AI, big tech really doesn't have any other ideas. There are no more hyper-growth markets left, and as firms like Microsoft and Amazon begin to show signs of declining growth, so too does their desperation to show the markets that they've still got it. Google, a company almost entirely sustained by multiple at-risk monopolies in search and advertising, also needs something new and sexy to wave in front of the street. Except none of this is working because the products aren't that useful, and it appears most of its revenue comes from companies trying out AI and then realizing it wasn't worth it.

32:41And if you think back to what I was saying about OpenAI's cloud costs, they're making what? $800 to a billion on this? How much is Google making? Probably much less, considering there are multiple stories about people not really caring about Gemini. But at this point, there are really two eventualities. Big Tech realizes they've gone in way too deep into this, and out of a deep fear of pissing off the street, chooses to reduce capital expenditures related to AI. Or the second one, big tech, desperate to find a new growth hog, decides instead to cut costs to sustain their stupid fucking ideas, laying off workers and reallocating capital from other operations as a means of sustaining this death march from nowhere.

33:21It's unclear which will happen. If big tech accepts that generative AI isn't the future, they don't really have anything else to wave at Wall Street. But they could do their own version of from 2022, Meta did this year of efficiency thing, which involved reducing capital expenditures and laying off thousands of people, while also promising to slow down a little with investment. This, by the way, is the most likely path for Amazon and Google, who, while desperate to make Wall Street happy, they still kind of have their profitable monopolies, for now at least. Nevertheless, there really needs to be some kind of revenue growth from AI in the next few quarters.

33:56There has to be material. It can't just be this thing about AI being a maturing market or how annualized run rates have improved. And said material contribution will have to be magnitudes higher if CapEx has increased along with it. I just don't think it's going to be there. Whether it's Q4 2024 or Q1 2025 or maybe a little later, Wall Street's going to punish big tech for this. The sin of lust. And the punishment is going to be to savage these companies even more harshly than Nvidia, which, despite Jensen Huang's bluster and empty platitudes, is pretty much the only company that's actually making money on AI, and that's because you do need their chips to do all this.

34:35But I worry more than anything that option two is more possible. I think these companies are really capable of committing to AI as the future, and their cultures are so disconnected from the creation of actual value or software or solving problems that actual people face that they'll willingly start laying people off if it means bankrolling these operations. I really, really worry about that, by the way. The mass layoffs that could come from this will be horrifying, because otherwise it's just going to be feeding profit into this. And at this point, they're feeding in pretty much all their profits.

35:09And all of this, by the way, could have been stopped if the media had actually held the leaders of tech companies accountable. This narrative was sold through the same con as the previous hype cycles, and the media assumed that these companies would just work it out like they did with crypto and the metaverse, despite the fact that it was blatantly obvious that they wouldn't work this out. You think I'm a doomer? Well, answer me this. What's the plan? What does generative AI do next? If your answer is that they'll work it out or that they have something behind the scenes that is incredible, you're an absolute mark.

35:41You're a participant in a marketing scheme. It's time to wake up. It is time to wake up to how stupid this is. And I'm sure some of you will say, oh, oh, you're going to look so stupid in six months. People were telling me that six months ago and I still don't look stupid other than the ways I do and they're unrelated to the podcast. But let's get back to the real problem and let's get back to the really worrying stuff because I believe at the very least Microsoft will begin reducing costs in other areas of its business as a means of sustaining the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team requested, in a plan that was eventually scrapped, reducing power requirements from multiple areas within the company as a means of freeing up power for GPUs, including moving other services compute to other countries as a means of freeing up said capacity, specifically for AI.

36:34On the Microsoft section of Anonymous Social Network Blind, where you're required to verify that you have a corporate email of the company in question, one Microsoft worker complained in mid-December 2023 that AI was taking their money, saying, that the cost of AI is so much that it is eating up pay raises and that things will not get better. In mid-July 2024, another shared their anxiety about how it was apparent to them that Microsoft had, and I quote, a borderline addiction to cut costs in order to fund NVIDIA's stock price with operational cash flows, and that doing so had, and I quote, damaged Microsoft's culture deeply.

37:08Another added that they believe that Copilot is going to ruin Microsoft's FY25, referring of course, to their financial year 2025, adding that the FY25 co-pilot focus is going to massively fall in FY25. And they knew of big co-pilot deals in their country that have less than 20 % usage after almost a year of integration, adding that corporate risk too much and that Microsoft's huge AI investments are not going to be realized. While blind is anonymous, it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that there are many, many posts that tell a tale of a kind of cultural all cancer in Microsoft, with disconnected senior leadership that only funds projects if they have AI taped onto the side.

37:49Many posts lament Sachin Adela's word salad approach and complain of a lack of bonuses or upward mobility in an organization focused on chasing an AI boom that may not exist. And at the very least, there's a deep cultural sadness there, with the many posts I've seen oscillating between, I don't like working at Microsoft, and I don't know where we're putting so much into AI, and then someone replying with, get used to it, Sajid doesn't give a shit. And it all feels so ridiculous, because there's so many signs that these products don't have a product market fit. At the start of this episode, I mentioned an article from The Information about a lack of adoption of Microsoft's AI features.

38:24Buried within that one was a particularly worrying thought about the actual utilization of their data centers for this AI, and it said, and I quote, Around March of this year, Microsoft had set aside enough server capacity in its data centers for 365 Copilot to handle daily users of the AI Assistant in the low millions, according to someone with direct knowledge of those plans. It couldn't be learned how much of that capacity was used at the time. Based on the information's estimates elsewhere, Microsoft has somewhere between 400 ,000 and 4 million users of its Office Copilot features, meaning that there's a decent chance that Microsoft has built out capacity that isn't getting used.

39:00Now, one could argue that it's building with the belief that the product category will grow, but here's another idea. What if it doesn't. Huh? Huh? What do you think? What if, and this is crazy, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon built out these massive data centers to capture demand that may never arrive? I realize I sound a little crazy saying this, but back in March I made the point that I could find no companies that had integrated generative AI in a way that was truly benefited their bottom line, and just under six months later, I'm still looking. The best that I can find is that big companies appear to have done is stapled AI onto existing products and hoping that that helps them shift them.

39:40Something that does not seem to be working either. It doesn't work for Microsoft, doesn't work for Box, doesn't seem to be working anywhere, as I'm not sure any of these AI upgrades give any kind of significant business value. Now, while there may be companies integrating AI that are driving some degree of spend on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, I don't know how much it is, considering the last episode saying about how OpenAI was only making about a billion dollars licensing out their models. And I hypothesize that any of this demand is driven by investor sentiment, because companies are right now, everywhere in the economy, being pushed to invest in AI, without really knowing if it will work, or whether it's useful, or whether their users will like it.

40:23Nevertheless, these companies have spent a great deal of time and money baking generative AI features into their products. And I think they're going to face one of a few different scenarios. Scenario the first. After developing and launching these features, these companies are going to find customers don't want to pay for them, as Microsoft's finding with 365 Copilot. And if they can't find a way to make them pay for it now, they're going to be really hard-pressed when nobody's telling them to get in on AI. And there's the second scenario. After developing and launching these features, these companies can't find a way to get users to pay for them, or at least pay extra for them, which means that everyone is going to have to bake the same thing into their products.

41:01Everyone's going to have to do this because none of these companies are able to function without copying their competitors, which will turn generative AI into a kind of parasite. Now, just to broaden out what I mean here, I looked across most of the software as a service industry in a previous newsletter, and I was looking and most of them are doing much the same thing. Document summarization, document search, generation of stuff, so emails and the like, and summarization. Summarization could be emails, it could be documents. For the most part, that's what everyone is doing. The problem is that everyone doing the same thing means that no one can really make money off of it.

41:42And Jim Covello out of Goldman Sachs made the same worrying, well, he had the same thought as me, which makes probably him smarter than me. I shouldn't think about that too much. Anyway, I mentioned previously in the last episode, the commoditization effect of these large language models. And I think there's going to be a further commoditization of these effects themselves, of these features. If everyone summarizes email, now you have to do it too, because otherwise the customer can go, there's another feature. I'm not, I don't, I'm going to pay for this one because it's got more stuff in it. Except the feature in question is more expensive.

42:15It's very worrying. But in general, all what I fear is a kind of cascade effect. I believe that a lot of businesses right now are trying AI, and once those trials end and Gartner predicts that 30 % of generative AI projects will be abandoned after the proof of concept by the end of 2025, these companies are going to stop paying for the extra features or stop integrating generative AI into their products. If this happens, it will reduce the already kind of shitty revenue flowing to the hyperscalers, providing cloud compute or access to models for generative AI, which in turn could create more price pressure on these companies, they're already negative margins sour.

42:49At that point, OpenAI and Anthropic will almost certainly have to raise prices. And what's fun is they're already not making that much money from this. So we're in this weird situation where it isn't obvious which it's going to be. Is it that they're going to have to raise prices or that no one wants to pay them or some combination of both? It's also important to note that the hyperscalers are also terrified of pissing off Wall Street. I really mean that. One of them will eventually blink. And while they could theoretically do the layoffs and cost-cutting measures I've mentioned, these are short-term solutions that don't really work against burning billions, tens of billions, like more than half, more than 50 billion a year for each of them.

43:31How are you going to cut enough to bankroll that? But in any case, putting aside the amount of money they're having to invest, it might be time to accept that there really isn't money here in generative ai might be time to stop and take stock of the fact that we're in the midst of what our third delusional epoch our third stupid idea that everyone claims the future but unlike cryptocurrency in the metaverse everyone seems to have joined this party and everyone's decided to burn as much money as humanely possible on this unsustainable unreliable unprofitable environmentally destructive bullshit sold to customers and businesses is artificial intelligence that will automate everything without ever having a path to do so because that's the thing none of this is even ai this isn't automation it's generation generation in different hats and it burns the world around us to provide it but you know i don't think the following is going to burn the world.

44:31In fact, I think it could really make your life better. And I need you to directly and vociferously engage with the following advertisements.

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48:11And we're back. So you might ask, why does this keep happening? Why do we keep getting these stupid movements? Why did they tell us that cryptocurrency was the future? Why did they tell us the metaverse was the future? Why are they telling us that generative AI is the future? when none of these things from the very beginning looked like the future. There were signs from GPT-3 like, oh, cool, you can generate entire things in like a minute. Wow, that's crazy. But past that point, past that moment of, oh, you can do that, I guess, what was that? And why does this keep happening? It's the natural result of a tech industry that's become entirely focused on making each customer more valuable rather than providing more value to the customer in exchange for, I don't know, money or attention.

48:57The products you're being sold today almost certainly try to wedge you to a particular ecosystem, one owned by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, or Google, as a consumer at least, and in turn increase the burden of leading said ecosystem. Imagine trying to move all of your subscribe and save shit off of Amazon. Imagine trying, I mean, moving iOS to Android. It's not that easy, and that's by design. Everything is about further monetization, about increasing the dollar per head value of each customer, be it through keeping them doing stuff on the platform to show them more advertising, upselling them new features that are only kind of useful or previously were free, or creating some new monopoly or oligopoly where only those with massive war chests of big tech can really play.

49:41And very, very little about this is about delivering any kind of real value or utility or thing that you, the customer, might like. Generative AI might not be super useful, but it's really easy to integrate into stuff and make new things happen, creating all sorts of new things that the company could theoretically charge for, both for a customer and an enterprise customer. Sam Altman was smart enough to realize that the tech industry needed a new thing, a new technology that everybody could take a piece of and sell. And while he might not really understand technology, Altman understands growth and the lust that the economy has for growth.

50:15And he's productized transformer-based architecture as something that everybody could sell, a magical tool that could plug into things and kind of connect to an ephemeral concept like AI. The problem is that the desperation to integrate generative AI everywhere has shown a pretty nasty light on how disconnected these companies are from actual consumer needs, or even running good companies. Like really, I'm not even being facetious. I would genuinely like it if this stuff was useful. I like useful things. There would be ethical concerns about the copyright theft and such, but I would at least tip my hat to them if I could find something, anything that I looked at and could say, wow, that's really useful in my daily life.

50:59I got nothing and I've really looked. You can email me easy. That's echo, Zeta, better, offline.com if you have one, but I've yet to be impressed by one of those emails. So please try harder. And the really worrying part is that other than AI, why many of these companies don't seem to have any other new products. What else is there? What other things do they have to grow their companies? No, really, what do they have? The new iPhone. I bought the new iPhone. I'm a little pig. Oink, oink, oink. I bought the iPhone. I bought the new one. And I've bought it every year. I am that guy. I sell the old one, I buy the new one.

51:37This is the first year, I think from the beginning, where I bought it and be like, why did I do that, man? What does this do? And that's because I think we're hitting a wall. This is the rock-on bubble I talked about a few months ago. They've not got anything. There's nothing. They've got nothing. And that really is the problem. Because when everything falls, when everyone realizes, when the markets look at tech and say, wow, you're not going to grow forever. You're not going to come up with a new whiz-bang that you can market to everyone and make billions in returns? You're not going to do that?

52:10No. They're not going to react well at all. Because when you take away the massive growth that tech has, you have a very annoying industry full of annoying young people that will piss off the markets, that will piss off those with the money. The tech industry has a terrible rep with the government and a terrible rep with society. the re-evaluation of these companies will be merciless and there are very few friends left and i think there will be a cascade down to the other companies in the tech space just in the same way that it will hit workers who will get laid off when all of this falls apart despite none of these people doing anything wrong other than the people up top having no creativity no real innovation and no understanding of real people's problems i hypothesize a kind of subprime crisis is brewing, where almost the entire tech industry is bought in on a technology sold at this insanely discounted rate, heavily centralized and subsidized by big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

53:12At some point, this incredible toxic burn rate is going to burn through generative AI and it's going to catch up with them. And when the price increases come or companies realize that these features are not that useful and they see the lack of user adoption, they're going to start getting nervous. But right now we're in the piss-take section of the economy. Right now we're seeing the egregious share, like Salesforce charging$2 a conversation for their new AgentForce product. But eventually the markets will catch up, because the money isn't there. And when these prices go up, I'm not confident that we'll have much of a generative AI industry left.

53:52And that's assuming that these companies still have enough money. it's assuming that open ai is able to raise another six and a half billion dollar round in the next six to eight months how long can they do that for how many times how many years are vcs willing to prop up open ai how many years is microsoft ready to burn capital to make what a billion or two on generative ai this is embarrassing it's bad business and it's bad product. Sachin Adela, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, the whole lot of them, they should be absolutely fucking ashamed of themselves. They're an insult to innovation and insult to Silicon Valley, an insult to their consumers.

54:35And what happens, you tell me this, when the tech industry, the entire tech industry relies on the success of a kind of software that only loses money and doesn't create much value when it does so. And what happens when the heat gets too hot and these products become impossible to reconcile with, and that everyone realizes that none of these companies have anything else to sell. I really don't know. I'm scared. I'm not trying to do FUD. I'm doing a FUD. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I've been told to spell these things out. But I am worried. Because really, the only other alternative to what I'm saying is that they magically make this profitable.

55:17That they just keep doing this until it goes into the green, despite no one appearing to know how, despite there not being a path there. How willing are you to believe them after they've lied to you for so many years? How ridiculous is this really? How ridiculous have you been thinking this is? How much can you let them coast on, they'll work it out? Because they haven't. They haven't worked it out for a while. It's been over a decade since the last significant consumer tech innovation. It's been a ton on the chip side. But what is there for you and I? Not really much. I don't think there's much in this industry either.

55:54And I worry that the tech industry is building towards a really grotesque reckoning with a total lack of creativity enabled by an economy that rewards growth over innovation and monopolization over loyalty and management over those who actually build things. The people in control of the tech industry are not the ones who built it. These people are management consultants. Even Sam Altman is one of them. These people are superficially interesting and superficially smart, just like JetGPT. And I worry, I worry so much, so promise me, dear listener, that the next time someone tells you they'll work it out, that this stuff is the future, tell them some of this shit.

56:33Send them the podcast or just yell at them at the top of your voice. You don't even need to use words. But I'm so grateful to have you as listeners.

56:48Thank 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 matasowski.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 CoolZone 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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58:35Bring the boom. XBoom. 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 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. Every day has a to-do list, but adding Enjoy Velveeta to yours can help you knock out the rest of it.

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