The Man Who Calls BS On AI: They’re LYING About AI, 2027 Is When It All Breaks! | Ed Zitron
Ed Zitron, the writer behind Where's Your Ed At and the Better Offline podcast, spends two and a half hours arguing that generative AI is a financial con, and he argues it entirely in numbers. Microsoft's $34.33 billion of AI revenue against $115 billion of capex. A $200 subscription that lets you burn $14,000 of tokens. Nvidia's $215.9 billion of GPU sales supporting roughly $22 billion of outside revenue. Oracle's 7.1 gigawatts built for one Customer. Steven Bartlett pushes back on every claim with adoption data, hallucination benchmarks and The Innovator's Dilemma, and the argument is better for it.
Published Aug 27, 20262:27:50 video126 min readAdded Sep 9, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Ed Zitron sits down with Steven Bartlett for two and a half hours and makes one argument in about forty different ways: the generative AI industry is a con, and the tell is the money. His case is not that large language models do nothing. It is that a trillion dollars of capital expenditure has been spent to support roughly $22 billion of annual revenue from anyone other than OpenAI and Anthropic, that OpenAI and Anthropic are themselves funded by the same three cloud companies booking their spend as revenue, and that no company in the chain will state a profitable path out loud because none exists. He walks through Microsoft's own reported AI revenue against its own capex, Nvidia's $215.9 billion of GPU sales, the $14,000 of tokens a $200 subscription lets you burn, Oracle's 7.1 gigawatts of data centres built for a single Customer, and the moment in early 2027 when he thinks OpenAI runs out of cash.
Bartlett pushes back for the entire conversation, and the pushback is the reason the episode is worth reading. He brings adoption statistics, the Vectara hallucination leaderboard, autonomous vehicle crash rates, The Innovator's Dilemma, his own company's usage, his fiancée's business, and the observation that every transformative technology looked uneconomic at the start. Zitron answers each one with a number and a caveat about that number.
What follows is the whole conversation rebuilt in its own order, with every figure exactly as he states it, every hedge he attaches, and every counterexample Bartlett puts in front of him.
The cold open: three myths and one word
The episode opens on the sentence the title is built from. "I think generative AI is at its heart a con, and seeing these ultra rich, ultra powerful people lie through their teeth turns my stomach."
Bartlett's immediate response is the correct one. The word con is a strong word.
Zitron does not soften it. "What do you call something where from the very beginning they've sold it in the terms of magic, but it's just a halfassed answering machine? They are misleading the entire world."
Bartlett tells him he is the first person to sit in that chair with that opinion, which becomes a running thread: not the first sceptic, the first person whose scepticism is financial rather than apocalyptic. Zitron's reply sets the emotional register for the next two and a half hours. "The fact that this is happening is insane, and the fact it's not a scandal is insane. I've been in the tech industry for 16 years now and I love technology and I'm enthusiastic about it, but I don't like being misled. And this is the largest non consensual push of technology in history."
The cold open then flashes forward to the myth cards game that arrives at the halfway mark, and lands three of Zitron's one line answers before the interview has properly started.
The AI industry is creating enormous economic growth. "No it's not. All of these companies run at a horrifying loss. OpenAI lost $20.9 billion last year. None of these people can just say, yeah, we're on the path to making this profitable, because they can't."
AI will replace all human jobs. "That just isn't happening and there's no economic data to support it."
The United States needs to spend trillions to beat China in the AI race. "What's the race to do? For us to constantly piss our pants worrying about China?" And on the containment argument that usually follows: "People keep saying, what if these models fall into the wrong hands? They're already in the wrong hands. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei."
And the joke that gets used twice, aimed at Meta's stated policy of building capacity before the demand exists: "Mark Zuckerberg says we'll continue to invest aggressively in infrastructure to meet the demand. Makes me think of Shrek with Lord Farquaad. Some of you may die, but that's a risk I'm willing to accept."
Who is making this argument, and from where
Bartlett asks the credentials question early, because it is the first thing anyone throws at Zitron. Where are you drawing from. What did you study. What do you actually do.
Zitron's answer is that he has been in the technology industry for fifteen or sixteen years, in public relations, which he characterises as practical experience rather than financial training. He is aware of the standard dismissal and says it out loud: "People say he's not got finance experience, he's not going to take." He loves the industry. Then a product arrived that everyone told him was the best thing since sliced bread, "and it can't even do the basics. It can't even do search."
The observation he builds his scepticism on is not a benchmark. It is the shape of the answer he gets when he asks an enthusiast what their setup is. "They describe this Pee-wee's Playhouse thing of, well, you've got to harness here and you've got to use the right prompt. Well, you don't want to use that prompt, you want to use this prompt here with this model, but don't use this model for the beginning, but at the end you're going to want to use this model. And this is meant to be artificial intelligence. It's meant to be smart. It's meant to be autonomous. It's meant to be something that you set and forget."
That is the whole argument in miniature, and he returns to the Pee-wee's Playhouse breakfast machine three separate times over the episode.
"Their revenues are not really coming from AI"
Bartlett lays six companies on the table: Anthropic, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google. You are saying their fundamental business model is a con.
Zitron reframes it as a revenue question. Up until fairly recently, none of their revenue was coming from AI. Dribbles. And now, of the AI revenue that does exist across the three cloud companies, "70% of all AI revenues across those three companies are from OpenAI and Anthropic, two unprofitable, unsustainable companies that literally cannot afford to exist without these very same companies giving them money."
Then he lists the transfers, and the list is the point:
Amazon sent $50 billion to OpenAI this year.
Amazon sent $5 billion to Anthropic.
Google sent $10 billion to Anthropic.
And forward, on sell side analyst estimates, the ones that determine whether a stock moves after earnings: over the next three and a half years OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to generate $400 billion or more of revenue for Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which he puts at "30 or something percent of cloud growth, just from these two unprofitable companies that will need to be given the money from somewhere."
This circle is the load bearing structure of his entire thesis, so it is worth drawing.
Figure 1. Every arrow is a figure Zitron states in the interview. The claim is not that any single transfer is improper. It is that the revenue proving demand for AI is, in his account, largely the same money going around a ring: cloud companies fund the two labs, the two labs spend it back on cloud, the clouds spend it on GPUs, and the GPU vendor funds the labs and the renters buying its own chips. The dashed box is the part of the market that is not inside the ring, which he puts at roughly $22 billion a year.
He adds a second observation that he treats as almost more damning than the numbers themselves. These companies do not disclose their AI revenue. "These companies have such low respect for the average investor, for the analyst, for everyone really, that they don't even disclose their AI revenues."
The disclosure trick: annualized run rate
When they do deign to give a number, Zitron says, it arrives wrapped in a metric that means nothing.
"They use something called a run rate, an annualized run rate, which means, well, nothing. They never define it. It can mean month times 12. It can mean month 13. It can mean last 4 weeks times 13. It's different every time, and they never define it. And then they sometimes just don't mention it."
His summary of the behaviour: "You've got this big thing that is meant to be the biggest, most influential change to software ever, and whenever you ask them about it, when you say, how much are you making from this, they go, oh, I couldn't possibly say, I'm too shy. These are public companies, or at least the ones that aren't Anthropic and OpenAI. When they have good news, they'll tell you. And when they don't tell you something, well, that actually speaks volumes."
He comes back to this at the very end of the episode with a worked example. Microsoft said it had $37 billion of annualized run rate in AI. "You hear that, you go, they made $37 billion, right? Wow, that's so much. Run rate maybe month times 12. They don't even define it, but it's built to manipulate."
What a trillion dollars of capex actually buys
Bartlett asks whether he has used the tools and found no value. Zitron's answer pivots immediately to the denominator: "There's some value, but they have spent over a trillion dollars in capex."
Bartlett asks him to define capex, and the definition is worth keeping because the rest of the conversation depends on it. Operating expenses, like electricity, come off immediately. Capital expenditures are long term investments that are theoretically one off: a data centre, or the GPUs you put inside it.
Then the physical picture. AI GPUs are much bigger and much more power intensive than ordinary chips. They carry a lot of high bandwidth memory. You need thousands of them, tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands. So you need a great deal of power.
His example is Stargate Abilene, the OpenAI and Oracle data centre in Abilene, Texas. 1.2 gigawatts. Eight buildings. Within each of those eight buildings, 50,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs.
The comparison he reaches for is a city. The city of Bristol takes about 7,800 megawatts of power a year. Stargate Abilene condenses more than that, 1.2 gigawatts, into a space roughly 1,172 times smaller. Bristol is about 1.2 billion square feet. Stargate Abilene is about 998,000.
"So you're condensing all of this power, all of this money, all of this labour into this one spot. And all of these data centres cost billions of dollars. All of these companies other than Microsoft are now having to take out debt."
And the punchline: "They've spent over a trillion dollars so far and they want to spend another trillion dollars next year. And for what? To make tens of billions of dollars, most of which comes from two unprofitable companies, Anthropic and OpenAI."
Is the adoption honest?
Bartlett's first serious rebuttal is adoption. These are the fastest growing products in history. Hundreds of millions, arguably billions of people use them daily for things they have subjectively decided are problems worth solving. Money is a lagging indicator of value. One would argue the companies are simply investing ahead of monetization.
Zitron attacks the premise rather than the conclusion. Is it honest adoption when you are forced to use generative AI?
"When you load Google, when you load Google Docs, Gemini screams in your ear. When you load Word, Copilot's bugging you. When you use Amazon, whatever Rufus AI is has opinions on what socks you're buying. This is the largest non consensual push of technology in history."
Then the media layer on top of the product layer. Every outlet has spent three years telling people this will take your job, you must use this, if you do not use this you will fall behind. "So people are using it because they've been told to use it constantly."
And what are they using it for? Search, predominantly. Partly because Google fell behind on search, partly because a language model is better at ingesting a messy query. His description of generative search is one of the better images in the episode: "It's like a trawling vessel. It's not very good at specifics, but if you're like, does this thing exist, has this person ever said anything like this, it'll still probably get it wrong, but it'll scour the ocean for you."
His verdict on that use case: "Nevertheless, that's not worth a trillion dollars. None of it is. The amount of money being sunk into this is just incomparable to anything. Railways, it blows everything out of the water, because there is no post bubble story even for this. An AI GPU is not useful for other things either."
The phrase he lands on for the industry is the one that gets quoted most: "It's a directionless egregore of capitalism. This headless beast that lumbers around desperate to seek out growth everywhere, in the hopes that if it harasses people and scares people and demonizes labour enough, people will be forced to use it."
Bartlett will not let the adoption point go, and he grounds it in his own business. Enterprise surveys say 88% of organizations regularly use AI for at least one business function. In his own company he would estimate 95% of people use one of the tools every day, on a spectrum from super users who touch it hourly to executives whose jobs need it less. And when you look out at the world, the AI slop everywhere is itself evidence of adoption.
Zitron concedes the usage and disputes what it proves. "It's being used." But slop is not new. Before AI slop there was search engine optimisation slop, because Google incentivised the lowest common denominator that would rank well. "It's why, when you used to Google, oh, best washing machine, there's 11 different horrible blogs that read like somebody got a concussion. They are built to rank rather than be read by humans." AI weaponises that at scale. "We've had slop for years. We've just found a slop machine."
Tokens: the meter nobody sees
This is the section where his argument stops being rhetorical and starts being arithmetic, and Bartlett makes him define every term.
A token is around three quarters of a word. The companies charge per million tokens. You pay for input tokens, the stuff you feed in, a document or a code base. You pay for output tokens, which are both what it gives back and, crucially, what it produces while thinking. "You've asked me to give you the best restaurants in this area of New York. I should find the best restaurants in New York. All of that's output tokens as well."
Bartlett offers the analogy and Zitron takes it: "The AI companies have a currency in which they charge you. Like a taxi in New York has a meter. And they call it tokens."
Then the point. When you pay a monthly subscription, you see none of that. There is no meter on your dashboard. There are rate limits, and the companies obfuscate what those limits actually correspond to.
And then the number he leans on hardest, which he attributes to the analyst group SemiAnalysis:
On a $200 a month ChatGPT subscription, you can burn $14,000 worth of tokens.
On Anthropic's equivalent, you can burn $8,000 for $200.
Even on the $20 a month tier, you can burn $400.
"Most people don't realise that. Most people have no idea what AI costs. Most people just think, oh, it's 20 bucks a month. No. All of these companies run at a horrifying loss. OpenAI lost $20.9 billion last year, because people can burn as many tokens as they want."
Figure 2. The subsidy, drawn to scale. All three ceilings are the SemiAnalysis figures as Zitron states them, and he is careful to say the real gap per Customer is unknown: "they're probably not one for one, it might be 30 for one, we don't know." The chart shows the ceiling a heavy user can reach, not the average. That distinction is his whole point about why average revenue per user tells you nothing here.
The month the enterprise bill came due
Then the fact he treats as the natural experiment, because it is the one moment where somebody actually had to pay.
Around March of 2026, the labs tried to move enterprise Customers, meaning companies larger than 150 people, onto paying the actual cost of AI. Zitron quotes Altman's own account of how that went: "People have a big problem with it. I think it's a huge issue."
His reading: "Which is not really what the heir apparent to tech history is meant to be saying. But the point is enterprises immediately started freaking out. Uber burned through their entire annual token budget in three months."
And the conclusion he draws from that: "So suddenly, after everyone saying AI is the most productive thing ever, it's amazing, it's changing everything, the moment people actually had to pay for it, they go, I don't know actually. Obviously we all love it, it's all great, right? But it's costing too much, so we need to reduce the cost."
Bartlett, to his credit, restates the claim against himself. As a power user, he might be costing Anthropic or OpenAI $1,000 while paying $100, so they are subsidising $900 of his usage, and Zitron's assertion is that this is unsustainable.
Zitron agrees and immediately hedges the number. "Just to be clear, they're probably not one for one. It might be 30 for one. We don't know. I think it's unprofitable. These companies don't disclose them even in their audited financials. They play funny games with how they categorize things."
Then he adds the piece most people miss about inference economics. You do not simply switch inference on. You stand up the GPUs necessary to take the demand. If you buy too many, you have wasted the money, and you pay the hourly GPU cost regardless. If you buy too few, your Customers cannot use it, they get annoyed, they cancel, they go elsewhere.
And the test he keeps returning to, which is really a rhetorical trap: "The simplest way to explain it is, if they were actually profitable, if they believed these services were worthwhile and worthy of the cost, they'd charge it. Regular people wouldn't be able to get a monthly subscription. They'd just be paying what it's worth."
He closes the section on the part of the pricing model he finds genuinely offensive. "You pay when you use an LLM regardless of whether you get what you want. When these things hallucinate, say you're coding something and they go through a code base and they mess up a bunch of stuff, they break a bunch of stuff, you're paying for that. You're paying for it whether it works or not."
Microsoft's own arithmetic
Bartlett asks the fair question. Are they spending ahead of the value showing up, which is what they would argue, or are they subsidising users in a way that will never be justified? Companies lose money to grab market share all the time. And they are also working on bringing costs down.
Zitron's answer to the cost curve claim is flat: "If they were bringing the cost down, they would have brought the cost down, which they have not. It seems to be getting more expensive. Inference providers don't seem to be profitable. Even the companies renting out GPUs don't seem to be profitable."
He is careful not to claim conspiracy. "I imagine that it wasn't like they started out and they were like, this is unprofitable at the beginning, we know it, screw it, we'll keep doing it. I don't think it's some big conspiracy. They probably thought at some point, yeah, this will go profitable. The chips will catch up. Customers will pay for the overwhelming value, because you don't know in 2023 where it's going to be in 2026. You assume it's going to go up. That's the nature of venture capital."
His indictment is about when they should have stopped. "They should have stopped in like 2024 when OpenAI lost over $5 billion. They should have been like, yep, this is not going to work. But they kept going because it helped number go up so much. It helped stock values pump. It helped Nvidia pump, Microsoft, everyone. And not from the revenues."
Then he explains why everyone believed the AI bets had paid off. Google, Microsoft and Amazon refused to say how much they were making from AI, but their existing businesses continued to grow, and grew through price increases, changes to how Google and Meta sold advertising, Amazon bumping prices and building a remarkable advertising business of its own. None of that had anything to do with AI. "But because number go up, because revenue go up, everyone went, it's AI, because these companies wouldn't spend a trillion dollars for no reason, right?"
And then the counterexample, which is the single most specific set of figures in the episode. For Microsoft's fiscal year 2026, which he notes has just ended, and citing Bloomberg:
Total AI revenue: about $34.33 billion.
Of that, $24.1 billion from OpenAI.
Which leaves about $10 billion from everyone else.
In a year when Microsoft spent $115 billion on capital expenditures.
And intends to spend $175 billion next year.
"The math does not make sense."
Figure 3. Every number here is one Zitron states on air, sourced by him to Bloomberg. The blue slice is the part of Microsoft's AI business that does not come from the company Microsoft also funds. His argument is not that $10 billion is a small business. It is that $10 billion is the return being used to justify $175 billion of spending next year.
Nvidia's number, and the number it is supposed to support
He widens the same comparison to the whole industry.
"Nvidia has sold, it was $215.9 billion in the last fiscal year, worth of GPUs, mostly. And you try and go, yeah, that's to support like $22 billion of revenue total in the entire world outside of these two companies that literally require money being fed into them, sometimes by Nvidia, to keep alive."
And then the reaction he says he gets when he tells people this, which is the psychological core of his thesis: "When you tell people that, they go, well, companies just lose money, right?"
He quotes Ed Elson of Prof G Markets for the diagnosis: "We have this cult like worship of the wealthy where we think that someone wouldn't spend all this money for no reason."
Then he explains why he thinks people cling to it, and this is the most human passage in the first hour. "Reconciling with that, with this idea that the ultra wealthy, the ultra powerful didn't get there through big brains, they didn't get there through anything other than luck and opportunism and getting an MBA perhaps with the right people, that they just got there because they're regular people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, reconciling with that and realising that the world is not controlled by a meritocracy, is kind of grim. So it's easy to be like, no, they're not making a mistake, I must be missing something. And that's what they want."
The Innovator's Dilemma, and why Moore's law is not coming
Bartlett lays out the thesis. The innovation that ends up transforming an industry often starts worse, does not make economic sense, and none of your Customers are asking for it, which is exactly why incumbents ignore it. Horse and carriage in the 1800s was an amazing form of transport by the standards of the 1800s. Then cars arrived. Cars broke down constantly, which Bartlett explicitly compares to hallucination. They were more expensive. You might as well walk. There was even a law requiring a person to walk in front of the car waving a red flag, an employee whose entire job was the flag. Obviously a worse solution. But disruptive innovations have a higher ceiling of growth, so they eventually overtake the horse.
Then he asks Zitron to imagine any rate of improvement at all. Say 5% a month in capability, plus a 5% a month reduction in cost, which is roughly what happened with the internet and with cars. Moore's law.
Zitron's answer is that Moore's law is not operating on GPUs, and he explains why he thinks the analogy fails on both halves.
First, the effort argument, and he gives Nvidia genuine credit here. Nvidia released CUDA in the 2000s, the underlying software library that lets you run software on GPUs. It took them a solid decade or more to turn it into something usable for data analytics, and when AI arrived they already had the experience. "This company has got more money, more attention, more geniuses behind them, more people focused on making their things more efficient than anyone could ever ask for." The implication being that if the efficiency curve were available, this is the company that would already have found it.
Second, the historical disanalogy. "The car example: back then you didn't have pretty much every mathematician and scientist going into the car industry. You didn't have the combined world's governments never shutting up about this. And by the way, giving them credit early, since 2023 they've been saying this is inevitable."
Third, he attacks the metric itself. What is a 5% improvement? "I don't even know how you'd measure that, because a junior software engineer can still experience things and learn things from context, from how people deal with problems. And the way that people deal with problems is not as simple as looking at the code or reading some emails. It's context cues from speaking to a person. It's being in different environments."
Bartlett offers to define it as shipped code. Zitron rejects that too, with a joke aimed at himself: "That's the thing that would be like, he's the best writer in the world because his newsletter's really long. That's an insane way of evaluating it."
His preferred test is whether the software out in the world is better, and his answer is that it is uniformly not. "I would say the standard of software across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, especially, God, Meta is a monstrosity, is worse. GitHub. Someone posted on Twitter earlier today, we should get a notification when GitHub is up rather than when it's down, because that would be more reliable. Microsoft's one of the largest companies in the world, and they can barely wipe their own backside when it comes to GitHub. The quality of software is going down, weirdly enough, as more people use LLMs and more businesses demand, and I really do mean demand, that people use these services."
What a hallucination actually costs
Bartlett says something honest here that shifts the conversation. He remembers ChatGPT launching, showing it to his fiancée in Asia, watching it hallucinate. He does not have that experience any more. He has moments where he thinks the reasoning is weak, but not outright hallucinations.
Zitron disagrees and Bartlett asks for a concrete example of what he means by hallucination.
The example is a good one, because it comes from a tool built specifically to prevent hallucination. Zitron has a Bloomberg Terminal. It has a feature called Ask B. A Bloomberg query normally runs in BQL, Bloomberg's own query language. Instead of learning it, you type your question in plain English, and Ask B generates and runs the query for you, and shows you where the data came from. "It deals with hallucinations real well."
Then, in his words, he decided to get a little spicy. He asked it for the growth rate of Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon stock over the course of five years. He copied the results into Excel and was writing his newsletter when he stopped. "Microsoft stock's never been $575 a stock."
His point is about domains, not about that error. "When it's a cute little thing like, oh, it's a stock price and I kind of caught it, no harm, no foul, that's fine. But when you're talking about a transcribing tool for a doctor, or a financial model that a hedge fund is dependent on, at that point it becomes a little more dangerous."
And then the compounding version, which is the sharpest thing he says about coding. "A hallucination with a software package: you're refactoring a code base and it leaves a door open security wise, or it just breaks something. Maybe you've been vibe coding for six months. You haven't really been coding with your own hands for a while. Maybe you've forgotten a few things. You have this slop to look through. And so the problems become multiplicative. I don't really know how you train them out of that."
The leaderboard, and what "simple task" means
Bartlett brings the data. He cites the Vectara hallucination leaderboard: on simple summarization tasks, hallucination rates have fallen from around 21.8% four years ago to roughly 0.7% on today's top frontier models, Gemini and ChatGPT among them.
He also flags his own caveat honestly: these are simple tasks, which matches his own daily experience of fewer hallucinations, and if you extrapolate the trajectory, hallucinations get rarer still.
Zitron's response is to attack the definition rather than the number. He notes that a great deal of measured improvement comes from benchmarks adjusted specifically for language models, "because you can't just have them do tasks." He references METR's task length chart, the one showing models completing longer and longer tasks, and gives the caveat that gets left off the chart: "Wow, it can go for an hour. And then you look, it's like, yeah, and successfully completing them 50% of the time."
Then he turns the leaderboard question back on Bartlett. What is a simple task? How is it defined?
Bartlett says, honestly, that he does not know.
"That's the thing though, because this is actually a very illustrative thing of the AI industry. They are the whataboutist masters. They have, well look, we got this benchmark that says we're good at this and look, the number's higher. What's the number mean? And I'm not using this as a critic against you. When you can't give a direct answer, you give a side answer."
His alternative test is the one he uses for every technology: was the value obvious? "When you as the LLM industry want to prove your worth, you can't just be like, just use the product."
The intern, the editor, and the difference between a file and a memory
Bartlett makes the fairest version of the pro AI argument in the whole episode, and it is worth stating properly because Zitron takes it seriously. We should not compare AI to perfection. We should compare it to the alternative. If the alternative is my own time, or an intern who also has gaps in their knowledge and is also prone to getting things wrong, then a tool that hallucinates 0.7% of the time but knows far more and is far faster might be a good trade on a net basis.
Zitron answers with a person. Matt Hughes, his editor, who lives out of Liverpool, a decorated tech journalist.
"I don't pay Matt Hughes because he knows everything. I pay him because he has incredible context and a ton of knowledge and he's willing to expand it and work with me. He's a great editor, but he's also someone who gets into the guts of it and has the experiences of it. And on top of that, a wonderful loving being with empathy and joy in his heart for the stuff he loves and absolute venom for the people he hates. I can't get that from a large language model."
Then he attacks the intern comparison from the other side. "Are you really paying an intern for something basic? Are you really going to them and saying, yeah, can you look up what the date is? No, you're doing that on Google. The point of an intern is to train them and take them out of Pinocchio status."
Bartlett counters that an intern learns, gets context, learns your habits. Zitron says AI does not learn. "The way it learns is you create a giant CLAUDE.md file that it sometimes doesn't read, sometimes does read. You create a harness. It's Pee-wee's breakfast machine from Pee-wee's Playhouse. You have to do all these contortions to mitigate the hallucinations. And even then, at the end, how much effort have you put in?"
Bartlett offers a deliberately trivial example to establish the principle: if he asked Claude right now what his dog's name is, it would know.
Zitron's reaction is the biggest laugh line in the episode: "Jesus Christ. This company raised 95 billion."
Bartlett presses the point anyway, because the principle matters: we accept that it has memory of the past. Zitron does not accept the word. "It has files it can access that have stuff on it, but that's not the same as memory. So it remembers your dog's name. It might remember your habits. It might be able to read things you've said before. Does it know your moods? Does it know what's going on in the world around it? Does it have good days and bad days? Is it there for you? Because it's just a text machine. An intern is something that can grow. That's not something you do through feeding files and text to it. The way that we accrue experiences is a milieu of emotion and feelings and facts."
Process or output
Bartlett sharpens it into the cleanest philosophical disagreement of the conversation. There is the process by which something happens, and there is the output. The process an AI uses for memory is different from a human's. But what people care about is the output. "If I dump all of my files into Claude, I don't really care how it processes it, as long as when I ask it, what's my revenue, it has the number." You could say exactly the same about a person you trained. The processes are entirely different, but the outcome is what I care about. He extends it to creativity: the way to answer whether AI can be creative is whether the output is good, not whether the process resembles a human one.
Zitron disagrees, and does it by describing a day of work. He and Matt Hughes sat for a day long session writing 11,000 words, with Hughes having given him a bunch of notes beforehand. "Even describing that process, I feel so happy, because it was like us being like, I can't believe how these people are. Just the misanthropy of the horrible cynical people at asset managers like Blackstone, learning about them and having a back and forth with him that is fundamentally different, because we were both learning together, and the learning process was as much about creating the output as the output itself."
Then the claim about what these systems actually produce. "When you learn something, you're not creating the average, which really is what these things do, of the documents it could find. You're not getting particularly novel outputs. If I needed a generic slop output, sure. But I've used some of the higher end LLM harness machines that the hedge funds use, and they all give the same rubbish. The same generic reports, the same, oh, we noticed this analysis, things that you can find on any kind of AI slop out there."
And on trust, which Bartlett tries to define as continual delivery of a commitment made: "If I'm with Matt Hughes, I can trust he's got it right. I can trust he understood, and I can trust that I can have a back and forth with him that will inform me if I've missed something. I can read the stuff that he's read." He adds a rule about the reports themselves: "The more detailed the report, the more likely there are things to be wrong with it."
On the revenue number specifically, he refuses the premise: "If the revenue number was wrong once, you should have defined deterministic ways of knowing those numbers. You should not rely on them. Even with the terminal running BQL, which I trust, I will double, triple, treble check everything."
The iPhone test
Zitron's own standard for a real technology is not a benchmark, it is a moment. He was at Penn State when the first iPhone came out. He describes the reaction with the 2001 apes: visual voicemail, immediate. "And I showed it to tech friends. I showed it to the most normal people in the world. And everyone was like, holy hell, this is amazing. They were on Razrs. They were on Nokia 3210s. It was obvious, the value. Amazon Web Services, same deal."
Bartlett does not let that stand. It was not obvious, and he has the receipt: Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, laughing at the iPhone on camera. The clip is played in full.
"$500 fully subsidized with a plan. I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business Customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. You can get a Motorola Q phone now for $99. It's a very capable machine. It'll do music, it'll do internet, it'll do email, it'll do instant messaging. So I kind of look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot."
Zitron reads the clip as a point in his own favour rather than against it. Ballmer was mocking it because it was disruptive and expensive, but you did not have to explain to anyone why it was good. "You could just be like, look how good this is. And then once it was the iPhone 3G with the App Store, people were like, oh, this could actually change things. Mobile web, even though it was a monstrosity, it was so bad at first. Even then, you could get your emails and you could just look at them."
He concedes BlackBerries were also expensive and were actually kind of cool, but they did not work like consumer software. They did not have the classic graphical interface. "iPhones felt like that. It felt like a cell phone designed like a computer. It was obvious from the beginning."
Which sets up the contrast he wants: "That, to me, is the obvious thing with AI to this day. When you're like, okay, why is it so amazing? People still dither. People are still like, yeah, you can't run a business fully with it without this weird system of pulleys and levers."
The adoption numbers Bartlett puts on the table
Bartlett answers the "it was obvious" argument with the adoption curve, and the numbers are worth listing exactly as he gives them:
ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in the first 60 days after launching.
TikTok took 9 months to the same milestone.
Instagram took 2.5 years.
The World Wide Web took roughly 7 years.
Over 60% of US adults have integrated AI tools into their daily and regular routines within 3 years of launch.
Reaching 40% of the population took the internet 5 years and personal computers nearly 12.
Then he makes it personal, which is the strongest form of the argument. His fiancée is a solo entrepreneur. English is not her first language. She has to write a lot of copy and generate a lot of images, and she was paying a graphic designer for images she could not make herself. She would describe these tools as transformative for her business.
Zitron does not deny her experience. He prices it. "Would she pay the per million token rate? Would she pay the actual rate? Because that's the thing. If this was sold at its honest cost. If people were reacting like that and they were paying $2, $3, $4 every time they did something and they were genuinely happy, that might be an argument."
Would anyone pay the honest price?
This is the question the whole first half has been building toward, and Zitron answers it with a comparison to the early internet that cuts against the usual version.
When he first got online at 33.4 kilobits a second, the deficiency was self evident and so was the fix. "It was like, if this was faster. That was immediate. You go on Happy Puppy or something, download takes all bloody day waiting for shareware to download. If I could do this faster, it would be better. And even back then I'm like, man, you could probably do video camera stuff with this." The roadmap was legible from inside the experience.
Then he brings in the analyst he cites more than any other: Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs, and the 2024 report whose title he paraphrases as generative AI being too much spend for not enough return.
"He made the point that in the run up to the iPhone, there were thousands of presentations that when GSM radios get smaller, when Bluetooth radios get smaller, when Wi-Fi radios get smaller, it is inevitable that we will get something like this. And then he said that there is no such path for AI. There was no road map to AI becoming this thing that they promised."
And then the passage that explains what he actually wants, which matters because it is the answer to everyone who calls him a technology hater:
"I must be clear, if these companies had gone out there and said, yeah, this is interesting cloud software, it's generative, it's really expensive, we're not sure we can fully trust it, we're not sure this is going to be a disruptive world changing thing, it has potential but we're going to go slow, it's really expensive, this is an R and D effort, we're not going to expose consumers to it, and actually called them, I don't know, language models, and not even call it AI, because it isn't AI, it's not autonomous, it's not smart, I actually might respect it."
Instead, since 2022, the pitch has been that this is the best thing since sliced bread, it will do all your work, it will take your job, and, in the famous case, Bing will tell you to leave your wife. Zitron's complaint about that episode is not the chatbot, it is the response. When Kevin Roose took it to Kevin Scott, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer, Scott said he was glad they were having this conversation. "Instead of being like, settle down, Beavis, it's a website. The website told you something. It's just an LLM. They talked it up. Everyone is talking about what they wish this was rather than talking about what it can actually do."
He then lists the harms he thinks the mysticism buys cover for: gas turbines poisoning neighbourhoods near a data centre he places in Louisiana, the energy draw, rising power bills, and inflation across consumer electronics driven by memory prices.
The dot com comparison, done properly
Bartlett makes the analogy everyone makes, and he makes it well. The dot com bubble had huge hype, people overselling what their websites could do, investors going delusional. And in the wake of it, yes, 90% of it went to zero, but generational companies were born that changed the world. That is what bubbles do.
He also points out that bubbles always have sceptics, and that the sceptics have a bad record. Zitron, to his credit, supplies the ammunition against himself, quoting the three most famous wrong calls in full.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, in 1998: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
Krugman again: "The growth of the internet will slow drastically as it becomes apparent most people have nothing to say to each other."
And astrophysicist Clifford Stoll, writing in Newsweek in 1995, which Zitron notes he covered in his own book: "Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper. No CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. Baloney. So how come my local mall does a roaring business and the cyber mall gets zero business?"
Zitron's reaction to the second Krugman quote is one of the best asides in the episode: "That may actually be the worst one of those predictions. Hang around any bar in middle America. Honestly, the best conversation."
But he defends Stoll on the merits. Stoll's piece had, in his words, some boneheaded points, but it also argued that an overwhelming amount of bad information is bad for society, which Zitron thinks was completely right, and that online education would not be a great replacement for regular education, which he thinks we have now seen.
Then comes his actual answer to the analogy, which is that the dot com bubble was two bubbles, and people conflate them.
The first was the website bubble, "which was just trash on trash on trash." His example: Excite@Home buying a greeting card company for about a billion dollars. "It was insane crap happening that was so small."
The second, and the one people actually mean when they invoke the dot com recovery, was dark fiber. All the cable put in the ground on the assumption of enormous internet demand, along with the transmission stations to bring it to people's houses. The forecasting error was specific: the analyst estimate was that internet demand was doubling every 90 days, when it was actually doubling every 6 to 12 months, maybe longer. So there was a massive overbuild, on the assumption it would all get lit up immediately, and it did not.
Then the distinction he cares about. Yes, after the dot com bubble the demand for the internet arrived. "That's the thing though, that's very different to demand for generative AI. Right now the demand we have for generative AI is predominantly subsidized. Most people experiencing it are not paying the real cost."
Bartlett agrees with that.
And then the asymmetries, delivered in a run: "On top of that, we already have all of the possible marketing in the world. We have the largest, most disingenuous marketing campaign in the history of man pushing this up the hill. We have the apex predator of cloud software, Microsoft. They can only get single digit billions from selling AI software. Outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, we barely get $22 billion."
And the piece that kills the post bubble recovery story for him: "A data centre built today is going to be as expensive to run in 2050 as it is today, unless there's some breakthrough in electricity. Or unless there's some breakthrough in GPU technology. But we already have Broadcom, Nvidia, Etched. We have every major chip company, Arm, trying to do something about this. And no one seems to magically be able to make this profitable or indeed even less costly."
He includes Nvidia's own next generation in that. On Vera Rubin, the more expensive new system: "Even then they're like, yeah, 10x more efficient, more dollars per megawatt. They're all coy about it. They don't just say, yeah, we worked with OpenAI and Anthropic and we found it reduced our cost by 50%. Easiest thing in the world if it was true. And that's because it's not happening."
The comparison
The dot com build out
The AI build out, in his account
What got overbuilt
Dark fiber in the ground, plus the transmission stations to reach houses
GPU data centres. Stargate Abilene alone is 1.2 gigawatts across eight buildings, 50,000 GB200s each
The forecasting error
Analysts said internet demand was doubling every 90 days. It was doubling every 6 to 12 months, maybe longer off by 2x to 4x
190 gigawatts of data centres in planning against annual AI spend he puts below $130 billion off by more than 10x
Was the demand real
Yes, eventually. The fiber got lit and the internet arrived recovered
"Predominantly subsidized. Most people experiencing it are not paying the real cost" unproven
Salvage value after the crash
Fiber in the ground keeps working for decades at almost no marginal cost reusable
"An AI GPU is not useful for other things." A data centre built today costs the same to run in 2050 not reusable
The hype environment
Sceptics worried about bad information and social consequences. No professional penalty for staying off the internet
"The largest, most disingenuous marketing campaign in the history of man." People AI washing their own work to keep their jobs
Who survived
Amazon and Oracle came through it fine, which is the story everyone remembers
"I actually think Oracle could die." Oracle's future depends on OpenAI spending $300 billion over five years
190 gigawatts against $130 billion
Bartlett asks whether the demand really will not be there, and points out that there are different kinds of AI.
Zitron seizes on that, because it is one of his central complaints about the word itself. "The reason they use the term artificial intelligence is so everyone would lump everything into it. They would lump protein folding, nothing to do with LLMs. Robotics, not LLMs. Autonomous weapons, even horrible as they are, not LLMs, because you couldn't trust them. But they've mushed everything into AI, so that when you say, well, AI can't, they'll go, um, sir, you forgot, AI is working on curing cancer. When it's just like, no, that's not an LLM. Stop giving them credit."
Bartlett's counter is that all of it needs GPUs. Zitron's answer is that the data centres being built are not being built for the rest of it. "All those data centres we're building, all of them are for just generative AI. They're not for the other stuff. AI has been around for a long time. A lot of the good stuff that comes out of Google from the search side is AI, but pre generative."
Then the demand arithmetic, which is the second most important set of numbers in the episode after the Microsoft figures. Citing Sightline Climate in February:
190 gigawatts of data centres in planning, which he is careful to distinguish from under construction.
Which works out to roughly 12 million megawatts of capacity to be sold.
Which would require something on the order of $1.6 trillion to $3 trillion a year in annual demand.
"We don't even have $130 billion worth of annual demand."
And the objection he pre empts: "People say, well, it will grow. How, when most of the demand is coming from Amazon feeding money to OpenAI or Anthropic, Microsoft feeding money to OpenAI and Anthropic, Google feeding money to Anthropic?"
Bartlett does not let the "all data centres are the same" framing go unchallenged, and he is right to push. He reads out that the harder classes of AI, the ones solving concrete physics, biology and spatial problems, require some of the most intense infrastructure on the planet: AlphaFold for protein folding, genomic sequencing, climate forecasting, all running on high performance computing clusters that need immense precision and continuous heavy compute. Training the brains for self driving cars requires billions of miles of simulated physics environments, learning to navigate three dimensional space and gravity rather than generating text.
Zitron accepts every word of it and says it proves his point. "Those data centres might have GPUs in them. We had GPUs used for high performance computing before generative AI. That's how AI has been trained before. That's how Tesla did it, their own data centres for training the autopilot system, for better or worse. Again, that is not why we're building these data centres. These are being built to sell to generative AI companies, to either train systems or run inference."
His counterexample for what non generative AI actually costs is a robot vacuum. Matic makes a cleaning robot. It does not have a big GPU in it, and it may have used GPUs in training, but nowhere near as many. "When the little bugger's going around mopping my floor, Turdsley I call him, it's not burning money the whole time."
He also draws a line he thinks the industry deliberately blurs: "There's a big difference between a data centre for regular non GPU compute, for standing up a server, a content delivery system like Akamai, or how Meta runs Facebook. That is not the same. It takes way less power, mostly CPU driven, compared to these giant GPU data centres that offer one thing, one thing only."
And the illustration of the con he keeps coming back to: everyone saw Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta hand Nvidia, in his words, over call it $800 something billion. "Because everyone saw that, they went, well, they wouldn't do that for no reason. We've got to build more of these things. There must be all this demand." Even though 70% or more of that demand comes from two companies funded by the three. "The reason they don't want to break out their AI revenues is because it will become alarmingly obvious that this was the case."
On the scale of that funding, he gives the running total: OpenAI and Anthropic "have raised $217 billion just in 2026."
The man who broke Google search
Bartlett changes tack. Some of the biggest companies in the world are using generative AI to write a lot of their code. That is a productivity gain.
Zitron's response: "Have you used Google or Facebook or Instagram or GitHub recently? Because they are catastrophically worse. Amazon Web Services went down multiple times because of their AI coding tool."
Bartlett asks how Google is worse, and gets the story Zitron is best known for, which he tells at length and which is documented in his essay The Man Who Killed Google Search.
In 2019, Google declared a code yellow, an internal alarm. The problem was material weakness in query numbers, meaning the number of times people were searching. Prabhakar Raghavan, then one of the heads of advertising, pushed to get that number up. Ben Gomes, then head of Google Search, made the obvious objection: to increase queries you would have to give worse answers, because if someone gets the answer quickly, that reduces the number of queries. Another engineer, Shashi Thakur, wanted to escalate it to Sundar Pichai, because this does not seem good. Nick Fox was in the room too.
But more queries meant more ads, which meant more money.
Zitron is careful to mark where the documented record stops and his inference begins. "Sometime in early 2020, Prabhakar Raghavan takes over Google Search. And this is what I believe, can't prove it. If you go and look around the various SEO sites, Search Engine Journal, the various forums, Google stripped back a lot of the suppression of spammy sites so that people would be on Google more. And then over the course of time, Google search became much worse. It's why people always do plus Reddit or from Reddit."
Then generative AI arrives, and Raghavan is put in charge of part of Gemini. Google is having trouble keeping people on Google. "And what did they think they'd do? Well, everyone's talking about this AI thing, we'll just put it right at the top so people have to stay at Google. Instead of generating answers, by which I mean giving you search results you click through, now Google is the answer. Is it right? God knows. It might tell you to eat rocks. Might eat poisonous mushrooms."
His summary: "The ideal situation was that AI was the ultimate form of Google's evil."
Bartlett pushes back accurately: that is not AI coding making Google worse, those are human decisions. Zitron concedes the point and pivots to the instability argument. Google Docs is a bugfest and has been for a while. Google Sheets, same. And he immediately widens it to be fair: "You're right, I'm being a little unfair. This is everyone. It's the same with Microsoft. It's the same with Amazon."
Bartlett asks the right question: how do we quantify that outside of anecdotes?
Zitron admits he largely cannot. "You're right. GitHub downtime is the best example. Amazon Web Services went down two or three times this year because of AI tools. And honestly, you're right, it is kind of hard to quantify outside of anecdotes. But I challenge anyone listening to this. Go and use a website these days and tell me how well it works. Tell me how buggy it is. Even with my iPhone, the supposed best user experience in town, even the iPhone is a flipping mess these days."
Bartlett then reads his own research back, and it lands on Zitron's side: technology downtime and software outages have demonstrably increased over the last few years, and industry data points at the explosion of AI assisted coding as a primary culprit, hitting from two directions at once. The code itself is getting buggier, and the sheer volume of AI activity is crashing the underlying infrastructure.
Zitron's explanation for the second half: "That's because on GitHub people are just writing a bunch of code, pushing it, and thus there's just more code on there."
And the open source version of the problem, which he describes with some sympathy for the people causing it: "Open source has had this problem as well, because it's well meaning people. They're like, I learned a bit of code with an LLM, I'm going to go out and make this project better. And these people barely understand what they're shipping. Or maybe they understand a bit of code and they say, oh, Dunning Kruger, I can understand some of this. And now the code's all written and just push it right now."
Bartlett names the effect: this sounds like it is making humans complacent. If it wrote the last 100 lines and was broadly right, I will check the next 100 less.
Zitron agrees and puts the blame back on the marketing. "Human nature is to take shortcuts, to spend less energy on an activity if you can. But the AI's still making the mistake, and we're still making all the promises of AI. Sam Altman has been promising the world, saying this will replace software engineers. Dario Amodei has been saying 50% of white collar labour is going to go away in the next few years. If they were saying it would be smaller, and they were like, yeah, it does have issues, and none of this what if it wakes up and it's super powerful, just, yeah, it's probabilistic, it's going to make mistakes, and if you don't know what you're doing you're going to miss those mistakes and it's going to get multiplicatively worse. So yeah, human nature is part of it, but so is the marketing. So are the promises."
A word from the sponsors
The episode breaks for two reads: Fiverr Pro, pitched as vetted specialist talent for skills a company does not have in house, with Bartlett noting his own team has pulled in people for AI native strategy, no code builds and product workflows over the past year; and Saily, an eSIM app covering over 200 destinations with built in security, pitched against the physical SIM card that has not changed since the 1990s and against roaming fees. A second break later in the episode reads the show's own product, The Diary Of A CEO conversation cards, which come from a closing tradition the episode itself ends on: every guest writes a question in the diary for the next guest, not knowing who will get it.
Is the job disruption a lie?
Bartlett opens the second act with the biggest claim on the myth cards. He has sat in this chair with Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber, who said that in a couple of years Uber will not need drivers because the cars will drive themselves. Driving is one of the largest professions on earth. When CEOs say there will be job disruption, you say they are not telling the truth.
Zitron's answer is not that they are lying so much as that they are guessing in a way that happens to suit them. "Think about it from the perspective of Satya Nadella. He's not going to be like, yeah, we don't know if this is going to work, mate. Of course he's going to talk his book. Dara from Uber, of course he's going to say if this happens then that would be good for Uber, because Uber would just become an autonomous taxi service."
Then he does something the rest of the episode does not prepare you for: he says Waymo is genuinely cool. "I find Waymo fascinating. I think it's really cool. I think there are socioeconomic problems that will come from it." Chief among them, the economics of taxis falling apart in one of the largest employment sectors in the world.
But his objection is the edge cases. "The problem with pretty much every AI system, but especially driving, is not getting 95% of the way. It's those edge cases. It's raining, which is a big problem for them in San Francisco. It's a kid runs across the road but they're wearing a high vis thing. Does it even notice it's a child?"
Bartlett makes the same move he made on hallucinations, and it is the right move: the comparison should not be autonomous vehicles against perfection, it should be autonomous vehicles against human drivers. And he has the numbers:
A 68% lower overall crash involvement rate in an autonomous vehicle.
Roughly 2.1 police reported crashes per million miles for autonomous vehicles, against roughly 4.68 per million miles for humans, a 55% reduction.
An 80 to 81% reduction in crashes resulting in injuries.
85% less likely to be involved in a single vehicle crash, such as hitting a wall or a tree.
Zitron gives two answers. The first is a methodological one: what is the sample size of human drivers, given we have vastly more years of driving and vastly more years of accidents to draw on. The second is the one he actually cares about: "Does that not have anything to do with generative AI? If we were just talking about that we'd be having a different conversation."
His actual position on autonomous vehicles is more careful than his position on anything else in the episode. "I'm not saying autonomous cars are bad. I'm saying we need to be so, so, so careful and treat them as guilty until proven innocent. They actually have people monitoring the routes. It is something they cannot rush out, and it doesn't seem like they're rushing it, which is good. And they're not promising the world."
He also has anecdotes, and he flags them as anecdotes. He watched a group of Zoox vehicles in Las Vegas block a hotel exit: "They just all kind of lined up and just fell asleep." He saw the same thing outside a hotel in San Francisco when he got out of a Waymo, one stopped and a queue formed behind it.
Lawyers, associates, and who is actually talking
On white collar work, Zitron's argument is about who is doing the talking, and it is his sharpest observation about the enterprise AI conversation.
"Lawyers, for example, great example. I'm always hearing legal partners talking about AI. Never the associates. The associates are the ones that go out and find the precedent. They're the ones that go and do the grunt work. They're the ones who are pulling motions half the time. The partner is the one that might be the litigant, might be client facing. But the ones actually doing the day to day work, I'm not hearing from them. I'm not hearing associates being like, this is awesome. I'm hearing a bunch of well paid people that have sat on ChatGPT and gone, yeah, I'm the greatest lawyer ever."
His position on where disruption is actually happening is specific, and it is not the one either camp usually gives. "The people that are having their lives disrupted work wise are art directors. It's transcribers, translators, who have bosses that don't care about the output. It's what they consider cheap work. And the problem is, those people would have automated your work away anyway. They would have sold it to the global south. They would have taken the worst option they could. That is something that AI is doing." He calls it digital globalization.
OpenAI's own study
Then the piece of evidence he treats as the strongest available, because of where it comes from.
"OpenAI had a study that came out a week ago that said there was no connection between spending on AI tokens and revenue per employee."
Bartlett asks him to explain what that means. "As in, the more tokens you spend has no correlation at all with the amount of money you make."
He notes it is the second such paper from the same company, the first being the one arguing hallucinations are mathematically guaranteed, and gives them credit for it: "Kind of almost the one thing I respect about that company, that on occasion they just put out a study and it's like, yeah, kind of sucks."
He pairs it with a study that went the other way and, in his telling, did not survive contact with its own text. "There was an Oxford Economics study last year where it's like, oh, young people are finding fewer jobs because of AI. We actually read the study, which multiple journalists did not. It was a single line that said, yeah, we saw some correlation. Didn't give a number. Didn't actually say what the correlation was."
His conclusion on productivity: "There is no evidence of productivity gains. In fact, if there were, they would be screaming it from the rooftops."
And the diagnosis underneath it: "We are so conditioned to believe that the rich and powerful know what they're doing that we internalize these narratives. Well, previous booms lost a lot of money. Well, technology takes time. And they are intentionally playing on those mythologies. They are playing on these, knowing that journalists, analysts, investors will believe them. And this is partly because our realities are defined by stock prices."
Bartlett pins him with a fair objection: both of those statements are true. Previous technologies did lose money at the start, and things do get better. So what exactly is the lie?
Zitron's answer is the most precise formulation of his thesis in the episode: "What they are fundamentally misleading people about is how possible it is. How many actual signs they have, because they don't have the signs. The signs of this getting cheaper. The signs of this being able to autonomously do work without the Rube Goldberg machine, and even then in a reliable way that was making the Customer more money, being productive in a way you can say with your whole chest without a series of asterisks."
The fandom, and why he thinks it is a cult
Before the doomer question, he takes a detour into something he says he has never seen in any other industry except possibly sports fandom: the attachment people have to these companies.
"If you dare to criticize Anthropic, it's almost this religious attachment. Good example was this week. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was on track to hit $40 billion in annualized revenue. Month times 12, four weeks times 13, we don't know, they don't define it. And I saw multiple people going, actually it's 60 billion. It's actually 60 billion. I heard from someone."
His read: "It is like a cult, and it's a cult of software driven around growth, and this idea that by backing the right horse you will have some grand thing. They build this parasocial relationship with both the large language models themselves and the companies, and one's allegiance to the companies is so important. It's truly vile. If only these people gave a damn about Medicare for all, or poverty, or actual problems in the world, versus, are we buying enough GPUs."
Does his narrative help the AI companies?
This is Bartlett's most interesting challenge of the episode, and it visibly lands.
The doomers, including Geoffrey Hinton, have sat in this chair and said what these companies are building is highly dangerous and will be fundamentally disruptive to society. The CEOs said the same thing for years. And what we have seen is a slow pivot away from that, because they are getting booed and attacked. The pivot sounds, Bartlett says, a little bit like Zitron's narrative: it is not going to change anything, you are all going to be fine, it is not dangerous at all.
"I actually think there might be a couple of PR people at these big AI companies thinking, thank god for Ed."
Zitron does not dodge it. He answers with what he thinks Altman and Amodei are actually doing.
"I think Altman and Amodei are some of the most deeply corrupt and cynical people in the world. Of course they were going to say, it was early 2023, Altman said we're a little bit scared about what we're creating. Oh, shut up. I hear that and I feel so frustrated, because I've met so many of these rich liars."
Then the mechanism, which is the piece of the episode most worth carrying around: "And you know why he wants to say that? So you'll invest in his company and buy the software. So you'll be scared that if you don't use AI today, you'll be left behind in the future. By the way, every single scam and con starts with rushing you. Every single trick in history begins with saying you must do this now. And the best piece of advice I ever got was, if anyone tries to rush you and it's not literally a mortal thing, like you are bleeding or on fire or the house is on fire, slow down."
He also notes that the slowdown talk is not what it appears. "You ever notice that Amodei and Altman say, oh, maybe we should slow down progress, and then they don't. Right now Altman's saying, oh, we slow down progress because we're so delayed. No, they're out of compute."
Bartlett describes his own method, which is worth noting because it is how he built the challenge: he logs their quotes over time, from 2015 to 2026, and reads them out. The arc goes from extinction risk, with Elon Musk calling it the single most dangerous thing, to the age of abundance, unlimited stuff for everyone, and finally to the current slogan, intelligence for everyone.
Zitron's reading of the pivot is different from Bartlett's. He does not think they changed the message to calm the public. "I get your point, but I don't think they've changed to calm the public down so much as they're desperate to not get regulated, which is laughable. We don't regulate tech. America doesn't regulate. We are still trapped in the hands of Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. We're still stuck in the neoliberal hellscape, which is growth at all cost, free market capitalism."
His actual regulatory ask, when he gives it, is antitrust rather than safety: "The regulation of these companies should have been, I don't know, breaking up. Break up these companies for sure. We shouldn't have companies this big."
How dangerous is the cyber story?
Bartlett puts the strongest concrete safety case: advanced models can go out onto the open internet as agents, look at code bases, find vulnerabilities and exploit them, at scale, faster and wider than a human hacker.
Zitron splits the claim in half. On the specific incidents, including the Hugging Face attack and the OpenAI one, he says the escapes were not escapes. "Those cyber hacking things that happened were not a result of them breaking out of the sandbox. They set the sandbox up wrong. They set up the server they were on wrong. They thought they'd turn the internet off and they didn't. That's human error."
On the general risk, he agrees, and this is one of the few places he concedes danger outright. "The second part I agree with, the risks. We've had people running automated hacking scripts for a while. This is brute forcing it with a bunch of compute, and yet it is dangerous. These companies are doing something dangerous."
But he says it is not the danger the doomers have been describing. "That is not what Geoffrey Hinton and others have been warning about. They've been saying these things could destroy society, they could manipulate people. When you actually look at the underlying things, not so much." He adds a shot at Hinton's incentives: still holding Google stock, and having left Google over AI worries only to say shortly afterwards that Google is very responsible.
His remedy is the same one as everywhere else, which is compute. "These people should not have access to so much compute. They clearly don't know what to do with it. There's a really easy way of dealing with this. It's not letting them use so much compute. It's regulating that part out of existence."
And the response to the China objection, which he has already given once and gives again with more force: "What if the Chinese do it? The Chinese were able to distil the models. We let this happen because we let these companies be unregulated and use as much compute as they want. And for all of these dire warnings about AI dangers, no one seems to have done anything."
The myth cards
Bartlett brings out physical cards, each with one of Zitron's stated myths, and asks for one sentence per card. Zitron immediately fails at one sentence, which he apologises for repeatedly.
"The AI industry is creating enormous economic growth." "No, it's not. It's nowhere in the data." Then he asks permission for a second sentence and takes it: "Pretty much all of the economics is either Nvidia feeding money to companies like CoreWeave, or these three companies feeding money to these ones to spend it with them."
Bartlett asks for the evidence that it is not causing growth. Zitron's answer, with the caveat attached: other than the spend on semiconductors, meaning the speculative investment in GPUs and data centre infrastructure, actual spend on AI is "barely cracking a hundred billion. And most of that is just these two running their services and paying these three companies, Oracle, CoreWeave and others."
Bartlett: a hundred billion is a lot of money for a relatively new technology.
Zitron: "Not when you've spent $300 billion in equity funding. And if we're going with just these three, I think $600 billion in capital expenditures."
Bartlett: but the hundred billion is an expression of consumer demand.
Zitron: "When the compute is mostly driven by subsidized subscriptions? No, it's not. When you're giving someone $20 or $40 for a dollar, they're going to use it more. If this was all on a per million token basis, we'd be having a different conversation."
"The United States needs to spend trillions to beat China in the AI race." "What AI race? Is it to make big scary LLMs? They did that already, without the Nvidia GPUs. By the way, they've got Blackwell GPUs." He credits two independent semiconductor analysts he follows for having tracked this for years: China has had Nvidia GPUs it is not supposed to have for years. "But also, to do what? They already got the LLMs. What's the race to do? To make us spend more money than them? For us to constantly piss our pants worrying about China? Because they won, if that's the case."
"AI will replace all human jobs." "That just isn't happening and there's no economic data to support it." Will it replace some jobs? "It's replaced some contract labour that would otherwise be replaced with cheap labour out in the global south. It's a digital globalization in that sense. But all jobs, most jobs, a lot of jobs? No."
"AI will be conscious." This one comes later in the run but belongs with them. "Superintelligence, artificial general intelligence, these are theories. Anyone saying this stuff will become that is just guessing, and does not have proof."
Robotics, which he keeps trying to like
The robotics exchange is one of the few genuinely warm stretches of the conversation, and it is also where Zitron makes his most explicit concession.
He starts by refusing the category. "Robotics is not what we're talking about. Robotics is a very different thing." Bartlett: robotics will be powered by AI. "I mean, yes, but there are tons of different kinds of AI. We're talking explicitly about generative AI."
On Tesla's Optimus: "The one where even in the demo of the hand, they had to have a guy controlling it. It wasn't doing it autonomously."
But then: "If they can beat all these challenges, yeah, robotics would be really cool. I don't know how long that is. That's one I'd actually be willing to believe in a couple of decades." And on the Chinese humanoids, Unitree among them, which Bartlett says are mind blowing: "Robotics are cool. I'm not going to pretend I don't think robots are cool. I wish they were building robots and actually doing cool stuff. I wish the tech industry still made fun stuff and interesting stuff. Instead we get these large language models."
Bartlett supplies the argument that has moved the most capital into robotics, from the founder of a San Francisco incubator he visited. Three years earlier the building was all software startups. On his return it was all robotics. He asked why. The answer: the hardware part, the physical arm, has always been fairly cheap. The expensive part was the intelligence, and now that has come down to pennies. Robotics is a function of intelligence plus hardware.
Zitron's counter is data, and cost. "And a ton of data as well, and the data is very expensive." Then the economic objection, which is his best one on this subject: "Robocabs rolled out real slow. It's going to take a long time. Human jobs are multifaceted. Human jobs change with environments. And a lot of human jobs you might think of, like a dishwashing robot: some guy at a restaurant isn't paying 10 or 20 grand for a robot to replace the job that they're already not paying enough for."
Bartlett's honest framing of why he is asking, worth quoting because it is the spirit of the whole episode: "I ask these questions not because I'm trying to be difficult. I'm trying to form my own opinion." And his own candidate for the truth in the middle: through history there was someone whose job was to sit in an elevator and press the buttons. That is a job humans probably should not have been doing.
Agentic AI, and the era of the business idiot
Bartlett asks about agentic AI. Zitron's definition is the most quotable line in the second hour.
"Agentic AI is LLMs. Agentic AI is just a fancy way of saying an LLM talking to another LLM with a harness on top. That is still an LLM. Agentic AI is one of the bigger lies they tell. When you hear agent, you're meant to think autonomous, AI can do what you want. It's still LLMs talking to other LLMs."
Bartlett makes it concrete with his own workflow: his chief of staff used to triage his inboxes and tell him about them. Now agents do that job. The chief of staff still exists and does other things, and the company is hiring like crazy.
Zitron does not dispute that it works. He disputes what it cost. "What you were describing is fairly basic automation. Spend a trillion dollars on triaging email. That's the promise. If they'd spent $10 billion and this was much smaller, I'd go, cool software, yay."
And the observation about scripting that will annoy a lot of people who enjoy their agents: "A lot of the things people are impressed with, it's just LLMs doing Python. You should be impressed by Python code. Python's incredible. You can scrape websites. It's awesome."
He restates his actual grievance, which is not the tools: "None of this would be anywhere near as much of a problem if they didn't ask for all of the attention, all of the money, and promise the world. It's their promises that are the problem. And the journalists who went along with it, and the analysts, and the Twitter people who went along with this, saying that this would change everything and replace everything and leaving the realm of reality."
Then he lands his own theory of why bosses are the loudest voices in the room, from his essay The Era of the Business Idiot:
"We are ruled by people that don't do work, because nobody who actually does a bunch of work, who really is productive, is harassing someone who works for them for not being productive enough. They don't have the time. They're doing work. Someone who is sitting there with the ingratiation machine that's telling them that every beautiful idea out of their messy little skull is amazing, they're going, damn, this thing says I'm a genius, why are you not using the genius machine to do more work? And yeah, if you're a boss that goes to lunch, leaves lunch, and sometimes reads your emails, LLMs are magic."
He also names the coercion problem, crediting a blogger whose name the captions mangle for the phrase: businesses where, if you do not say you are more productive with AI, whether or not it is true, there are professional consequences. "There are people having to AI wash their jobs by saying AI did it, otherwise their bosses who don't do work will get mad at them. This did not happen with the internet."
Adoption versus the internet, again
Bartlett returns to speed of adoption as the killer statistic. Zitron flips it into a cost argument.
"The adoption of the internet required physical connections to your house. The adoption of generative AI involves having a web browser. It took a vast amount of effort to bring internet to people. Even with dial up connections, it still required the distribution."
Which is exactly why, he says, there was less hype for the internet: it could not be pushed on anyone. "I do agree that there's way more hype." And it is why the comparison flatters generative AI: the thing being compared on adoption speed had a distribution cost of zero and an incumbent distribution channel screaming at every user to try it.
The commoditization argument
Bartlett offers what he calls one of the most compelling arguments for the overhype of AI, and it is genuinely a good one.
In a world where everybody has access to these tools, whatever the tools can do gets commoditized. What the tools cannot do, human taste, judgment, people skills, becomes the valuable thing, because through history the scarce and the hard become the most valuable and the commoditized becomes the least valuable. "So the very nature that we're commoditizing the generation of content, or code, means that's actually not where the value will accrue."
His worked example: if you use ChatGPT or Claude to write your LinkedIn posts, they will be LinkedIn posts, because everybody else is using them too. "A great LinkedIn post now is someone who doesn't use them and makes something that's irreplaceably human. Deeper and more personal. N of one lived experience."
Zitron agrees and reframes it as a story about people, not tools. "The slopification. We've got a bunch of slop, but these people were halfassing their jobs before. It's just a halfassed answering machine. People that gave you rubbish before have now got the rubbish machine to pump out rubbish."
And he credits the best formulation of the productivity paradox to Carl Brown of Internet of Bugs: "It makes the easy things easy and the hard things harder."
His own example of the easy thing, which he offers as a genuine win: "I used Claude the other day for something useful. My kid loves Minecraft. I was trying to fix a broken mod because he loves his Wither Storm." Then the caveat: "And it still took me half an hour and kept getting things wrong."
What he actually uses it for
Bartlett asks the question every critic should be asked. What do you use generative AI for?
"I really don't. I don't use it." Except Ask B on the Bloomberg Terminal, for requesting consensus analyst estimates.
Bartlett: so how do you know it's bad?
"I've used it. I've put it through its paces. I've used it to try and do financial models and found one error and immediately been like, ah. I've never been particularly impressed."
Then the concession he makes more warmly than any other, and repeats twice: "The one thing I will defend it on is it's really good for tech support." His case is Synergy, the software that shares one mouse and keyboard between a MacBook and a PC laptop at his place in New York. "Dropping a giant troubleshooting log into this thing and going, what's wrong, and it going, this is wrong. Yeah, super useful."
Immediately followed by the pricing test: "Is that a trillion dollars? No. Is that a $2 trillion company? No."
On search, he is funnier than he means to be. He still tries Google. "I have to push the crap out of the way." Bartlett says he cannot remember the last time he did a Google search. Zitron: "Christ, I find myself using Bing sometimes. I know. I hate saying it too. But I have to scroll past the AI crap because I want the actual links to stuff."
And when Bartlett points out you can just ask the AI for the links: "Yeah, and it doesn't do a particularly good job."
He is careful to draw the line one more time: "That may be the only LLM use case I defend, the troubleshooting thing. Again, that is not what they're selling it as. They're not selling it as a useful little tool. It's not like they sold it as a quirky bit of software."
The critics who are also invested
Bartlett notes that the critics also say AI will replace everything, and names Hinton and the people who have left safety teams.
Zitron's response is that the critics he means have a stake in the same story. On the AI 2027 forecast, written by a former OpenAI researcher with the Slate Star Codex writer: "that was nothing more than badly written science fiction that he's already had to walk back."
Bartlett points out he could have made more money by staying. Zitron is unconvinced and asks the practical questions: could he? Did he lose the options?
But the substantive complaint is about what the doomers do not criticise: "They're not critical of the companies themselves. They're not critical of the stealing. They're not critical of the environmental damage. They're not critical of the fact that you cannot rely on the answers. They're critical of this big scary boogeyman out in the future. They're not saying, here are the harms today. Here are the social problems of having this automated way of spewing out slop, of filling our feeds with crap. In the tiniest words possible, they don't talk about the fact that these things are trained on stealing millions of people's work."
Has it gotten more intelligent?
Bartlett asks the direct question. Would you agree that artificial intelligence has gotten more intelligent, by any measure of intelligence one might use?
"It's got better on the tests that are rigged for the models. It's got better at tests where you can train for the test."
Bartlett draws a rising curve in the air and asks him to agree it looks like that in terms of what it is capable of doing. Zitron agrees, with a rider: "Yeah. Because it's not got new features. You'll notice that outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, when you remove the coding startups, there's basically no successful AI startup company."
Bartlett walks him one step at a time. We agree it has got more capable. If that trajectory continues, it gets more capable. At some point it crosses human intelligence. Will it not start doing some of the jobs people do today?
Zitron gives his concession list, and it is worth recording precisely because it is the shortest list of things he will grant in the entire episode:
Software engineering. "I will concede software engineering. It's got better at that."
Administrative work.
Video generation, photo generation, text generation.
Agentic workflows.
Bartlett defines an agentic workflow with a live example: pulling the back end data on his own show, ingesting it, going out to the internet, searching everything Ed has ever said, reading every interview, building a model of what people want to know from him, producing a report and sending it to his inbox. A 30 or 40 or 50 page report on Ed before Ed arrives.
Zitron: "This is all basically the same thing I think it's been doing for years. They've had web search for years. They've had report generation for years. It's not really new capabilities."
Bartlett's strongest counterexample is video. We could not previously generate high quality video that is indistinguishable from a camera. Zitron accepts they are incredible, then answers with production reality, and this is where he brings up his girlfriend's job. "Look at the amount of stuff and crew you need to get a shot. People think movies are just shot by shot by shot and they magically happen. My wonderful girlfriend is first assistant director. You've got ADs, you've got gaffers, you've got lighters, and also simulating light is insanely difficult. You could create a one minute long thing that might fool someone. How do you practically turn that into a movie?"
His example of the gap between demo and product is a film that claimed it aired at Cannes: "It didn't. It aired in the city of Cannes during the Cannes Film Festival. It was not at the film festival."
He also notes that OpenAI shut down Sora, with the API still available, and observes that video generation "is by the way far less an American concern any more."
The ceiling
Bartlett asks the question the whole argument turns on. If capability has been improving and you add more compute, what does the future look like? He says openly that the rebuttal he expected was that it will not continue.
Zitron gives exactly that rebuttal, and dates it. "We've kind of already hit the diminishing returns level." And he credits Gary Marcus for saying so in 2022.
His argument for why more of the same will not get there: "Training it to be more autonomous, that's not something that comes from training data. That's actually a Gary Marcus neurosymbolic thing. You actually need to build a structure around the AI to make it work. And even then, it doesn't fix it."
On the shape of the improvement he does accept: "The things it was doing, it's getting linearly ish better at. But there's a ceiling to that. Okay, so it gets really good at research. What does that actually mean? You've already kind of got the automation there. What is the next step of that?"
Bartlett's counter is that people extrapolate linearly and miss exponentials, and that the improvements come from hardware breakthroughs.
Zitron takes that head on: "The hardware breakthrough companies don't seem to be fixing the LLM problems, despite all the king's horses and all the king's men, with nine or ten generations of TPUs from Google now, Broadcom building custom silicon with OpenAI. And yet none of these people can just say, yeah, we're on the path to making this profitable. Because they can't."
And his own conditional, which is more generous than his reputation suggests: "If we fix the environmental problems and the profitability situation, maybe I'd be more generous with this stuff. But they don't seem to be able to."
Then the failed training run, which is the single most concrete piece of evidence he offers for diminishing returns: "GPT-5 was meant to be this panacea for the AI industry. They had at least one training run that cost half a billion dollars and did nothing."
And the promise he measures all of it against: "Sam the other week was saying it was going to be, in like six months, like a genie that you can ask wishes from. Never watched Aladdin? What's he talking about? Also, the genie was charming."
His closing formulation for this stretch: "An exponential improvement in software performance is always a result of direct hardware improvement. We have all the gifted mathematicians, all the gifted software engineers, all the gifted hardware engineers. And where are we? A trillion plus dollars in, with the future great financial crisis and the world's greatest marketing scam."
"You don't think workflows have been transformed?"
Bartlett puts the everyday version of the question. There are people listening right now whose workflows have been completely transformed by these tools.
Zitron's answer is two questions and a concession.
"Have they? First of all, every single one of them: did you pay for the tokens? And also, how many tokens did you burn? But putting all that aside, what workflows? Because if it's, yeah, I did a bunch of web scraping or web searches, I'm just not impressed. Did you make an entire movie? No, you didn't. Is it speeding up your coding? Yeah, I believe that. I've heard that from multiple people. But again, how much can you trust this?"
Bartlett then makes the broadest version of the bull case, which is not about chatbots at all: in the future all the devices and computers and physical items in our world will be more intelligent, and that will be powered by the underlying AI infrastructure, more data centres, energy costs coming down.
Zitron's answer separates the two claims completely, and it is the cleanest statement of the distinction he has been drawing all episode. "How does a GPU full data centre translate to a Nikon camera? The idea that devices will get smarter, sure, I can see that happening. It's really kind of happening. What does that have to do with the data centres? These data centres are not being built to make your consumer electronics smarter. They're not being built for anything other than speculating on the ability to capture demand for generative AI services."
Meta's fifteen basis points
Bartlett offers what he thinks is a clean counterexample of a data centre paying for itself outside generative chat. On Meta's earnings call, Zuckerberg said the big breakthrough, worth 15 basis points of increased retention on Instagram, is that they now run anything you post through an AI to get full context of what it is. If the system can see a man in a blue shirt with a coffee, it can serve that content to the users who want it, so people are retained longer.
Zitron's first move is to convert the unit. "That isn't 15 basis points, like 0.15%."
Bartlett: yes, but it makes a big difference at scale.
Zitron: "Yeah. But ten and something billion dollars in, and the best you've got is 0.15%? There's a reason he's saying basis points versus dollars."
And then the challenge he issues to every executive in the industry, which is the cleanest statement of his falsification test: "Why can't he just say with his whole chest, we've made a couple of billion? Why can't he say that? Because he isn't. Because there's not actually a way of going, I spent all this money, I spent 14 billion goddamn dollars on Scale AI and Alexandr Wang, and I made this much. They can't. It gets back to a very simple point. If it was going well, you'd tell me how well it was going, rather than doing this weird rain dance thing where you're like, well, if we move all the pieces around in three years, theoretically, this will happen."
The rot com bubble: why they are really spending
After the second ad break, the conversation reaches Zitron's actual theory of the case, and Bartlett walks into it by conceding ground: there is a lot of what he calls fugazi here, a lot of people who have spent money they should not have, like the metaverse.
Zitron agrees on the metaverse, then draws the distinction that makes this one different. AI, the dot com boom, NFTs and much of crypto are the same phenomenon: a weighing that is inflated by the media. "The difference is, the reason the metaverse and NFTs didn't escape this was there weren't stocks to speculate on. There weren't big companies you could invest in."
Then the origin story, which is his essay The Rot-Com Bubble compressed into a paragraph. Record earnings in 2021. A pile of money floating in the system from post COVID federal support flowing into the banks. Easy zero interest rate money. Then the hangover, and growth slowing dramatically.
"This is actually my rot com bubble theory, which is they don't have any hypergrowth ideas any more. So suddenly they started buying GPUs. And when they bought GPUs, people went, they're doing AI, we better buy the stock. And the stocks went on an incredible run, several hundred percent in the last few years. Despite zero proof. Because the media was just saying, yeah, Meta's revenue's growing because of AI, right? Microsoft's revenue's grown because of AI, right?"
His name for what happened next: "Everyone just gave them credit in advance."
The banana tree
Bartlett, trying to find the ground they share, offers an image, and it turns out to be the moment they actually agree.
Say you are on a desert island with 10,000 people, and someone says they have found a banana tree. They are going to stampede toward where they think the tree is. They are going to claw each other to pieces. If your essay is right that there was desperation because they had not found an innovation in a while, maybe that explains it. Maybe there is a bit of value here, and they are stampeding and making irrational decisions like hungry people would.
"I actually think we then actually agree. That is actually my point. These three companies and Meta, their main business lines are running out of growth. There's only so much they can grow."
And then the forward number that makes the stampede a systemic risk rather than a waste of money: "In the next three and a half years, analysts think that these two, OpenAI and Anthropic, are going to spend over $400 billion on Microsoft, Google and Amazon alone. And the crazy thing is that's a large part of their future growth. If this money isn't spent, their growth slows down."
He finishes the thought with the story of how the reward loop got established: "They got rewarded for buying the GPUs. When they bought these goddamn GPUs from Nvidia, all the markets went rock hard overnight. They loved it. There were stories about how they were sending armoured cars with the GPUs to Microsoft to make sure Microsoft got the GPUs. And so everyone saw all that money flowing in, and they went, well, I want to do what these people are doing."
The losses that are not comparable
Bartlett makes the historical argument one more time, and it is the right one to make: investors are used to pumping money into things that burn cash. Spotify did not make money for twenty years. Uber lost money for years. AWS lost money for years. And the total addressable market for intelligence permeates everything, so maybe the opportunity justifies the burn.
Zitron answers each with a number.
The precedent
What it actually lost, as he states it
His objection
Spotify
Unprofitable for years
"Spotify didn't lose $20.9 billion in one year. They didn't need to raise $217 billion in the space of six months."
Uber
$33 billion since inception, before becoming messily profitable
Uber's unit economics were the same as the real thing, only subsidized. "You were still getting a service from A to B and paying a much lower cost."
Amazon Web Services
$29.7 billion of total capital expenditure, normalized for inflation, across 2003 to 2015, and that figure covers the entire Amazon logistics operation, not just AWS
Founded 2003, Customer facing around 2006, profitable in 2015. Margins improved along the way because AWS was a margin heavy business
OpenAI, today
Lost $20.9 billion last year. Raised $122 billion this year, most of it already crossed. Needs at least $100 billion a year just to survive
"They have gone from being these cash machines to these cash furnaces"
The four clouds, today
More than $700 billion of new property, plant and equipment added in four years. Google and Amazon now cash flow negative
"The reason you liked software businesses was they are meant to be cash heavy, asset light"
Bartlett's rebuttal is that the opportunity is bigger, because intelligence permeates everything and the total addressable market is enormous.
Zitron names that argument as belonging to the people selling it. "What you were describing there is the argument that Satya Nadella or Sam would make. And I could have bought that in 2024 from them, when they were like, oh, we see the opportunity. We've gone way past the point at which you can rationally argue that LLMs need this much money."
And then the number that anchors the rest of the episode, reported by the Wall Street Journal and Mike Isaac: "OpenAI has said they plan to spend $750 billion on compute through 2030. I think they're going to be dead before then, but $750 billion. That is an insane amount of money."
A large chunk of that, he notes, is training. Which is the piece that makes progress itself dependent on the money continuing to flow. "To make the models better at stuff requires billions of dollars invested just in data, and also tens of billions of dollars of taking that data. Once the money tap turns off, the money won't be there to buy the data or feed the data into the GPUs."
His analogy for why training is not like training: "When I lift with Jake and Troy, my trainers, I have a defined thing, and when I do it and I eat right, muscles get bigger. When you train with an LLM, you're experimenting each time." And he explicitly declines to make that a moral failing: "This is not actually a hit on the companies, because they're still trying to work out how to do the thing. I think there are people at these companies that actually want to do something interesting. It's costing too much money."
He closes the section on Oracle, which he treats as the most exposed company in the chain: "There's a reason why Oracle's probably going to die as a result of OpenAI, because Oracle's future depends on OpenAI spending $300 billion over five years."
The CEOs' rebuttal, in their own words
Bartlett does the most useful thing an interviewer can do with a contrarian: he reads out what the people being accused actually say, verbatim, and makes him answer it.
"We're not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch. We're not going to be conservative in how we play this. We're investing to be the meaningful leader, and our future business operating income and free cash flow will be much larger because of this investment."
future tense "If they were constrained to what was happening today, they would sound like insane people." Amazon is currently cash flow negative
Mark Zuckerberg Meta
"We'll continue to invest aggressively in infrastructure to meet the demand. I'd rather risk building capacity before it's needed than being late."
no accountability "Makes me think of Shrek with Lord Farquaad. Some of you may die, but that's a risk I'm willing to accept." He notes Zuckerberg cannot be fired because of Meta's board structure
Sam Altman OpenAI
On enterprises being moved to real token pricing: "People have a big problem with it. I think it's a huge issue." On capability: in about six months it will be like a genie you can ask wishes from
contradiction The pricing complaint is the demand test failing in public. The genie line is the promise he measures every capability claim against
The general defence
We are investing ahead of the value and utility showing up, as Bartlett puts it on their behalf near the end
fair statement of their case His counter is that they have no signs: no sign of it getting cheaper, no sign of reliable autonomous work, no disclosed AI revenue to check any of it against
His broader rule for the industry, which is the sharpest thing he says about how the debate is conducted: "The big thing I always say about AI boosters is, if I could regulate them, I'd regulate them. They can't speak in the future tense any more. You've got to talk about today, mate. You get two weeks in the future, max."
He also flags the asymmetry of who gets interrogated. "When it comes to being a critic or a sceptic, you are put on the hot seat. Not the people spending a trillion dollars, not the people promising the world. The person with a blog is the one who's on the hot seat." Then, when Bartlett says they will not come on the show: "Mr Altman, go on Steven's show. Do it."
What would change his mind
Bartlett asks the question that separates a thesis from a grudge, and Zitron answers it in two parts.
The first is a number. "There would need to be a hardware breakthrough that reduced the cost by like a thousand. It would have to be just a dramatic breakthrough that is not happening, just to be clear, because they've all been trying."
Later, pressed on the same question, he expands it: it would have to be cost, and it would have to be capability. "It would have to do insane amounts of stuff. It would have to be a truly autonomous product. It would have to be a different product. It would have to be indistinguishable from magic." And the justification for the height of the bar: "The reason they have these high standards is they set them."
The second part is not economic at all, and it is the part that explains the anger. "It's the cost and it's also the data centres. I think the way they're building the data centres is reckless and damaging to communities. You have communities like in New Jersey where the residents are like, I don't want this, but the planning boards vote for it, because they're all, I assume, having chummy lunches with the people doing it. I think the use of gas turbines is disgraceful." He explicitly declines to argue about water: "I'm not super well read on that, so I'm not going to wade into it."
Then the passage that is the emotional centre of the whole interview, about who gets money in this economy and who does not:
"Generative AI is this egregious, pornographic demonstration of how unfair the world is. Regular people try and get a loan for a business. They go to a bank and the bank says, I'm not going to. You're going to make a store that sells stuff? Screw you. You want to build a data centre? Jensen Huang will back you. Jensen Huang will give you 25% residual value. You want to build a regular business that's even profitable, something that's just growing steadily? Screw that, no venture capitalist will give you the money, I need a 10 or 100x return. Try and get a mortgage, you have to give the bank a full colonic. But you want to get money for Jensen Huang to buy some GPUs? He'll give you a contract. If you want to live a regular life where you build a regular business or buy a house, highest interest rates ever. Screw you. But if you're an unprofitable neocloud, you get billions from Jensen."
The worked example of that is CoreWeave, and it is the clearest picture of circular financing in the episode. CoreWeave is a neocloud, a company that builds data centres, puts GPUs in them and rents them to people. Nvidia was one of its first investors in 2023, and signed a $1.3 billion contract to rent its own GPUs back from CoreWeave. "So that CoreWeave can go to a bank and go, I've got a Customer. Yeah, it's the guy I'm buying the GPUs from, with the debt I'm getting from you."
The blackmail stories, unwound
The last myth card is the most specific: AI systems are already blackmailing and escaping control. Zitron takes both famous cases apart.
The first is the TaskRabbit story from an OpenAI system card, which he attributes to GPT-3.5. Media outlets covered it as the model blackmailing a TaskRabbit worker into solving a CAPTCHA. "What actually happened was a user doing the experiment got it to generate things to say to a TaskRabbit to make a TaskRabbit do stuff. A TaskRabbit as in a person that you rent, not even to do a CAPTCHA. It's something you rent to nail a picture up in your apartment. It's an insane example. This was covered as if these things blackmailed someone, and they specifically said, yeah, we prompted it to do this."
The second is Anthropic's, where a model was reported as threatening to reveal an affair if it were shut down. "What actually happened was Anthropic explicitly trained a model to do this and then prompted it to blackmail."
His objection is to what the coverage does to people, and it is one of the few places where his anger is aimed at journalism rather than at executives: "This keeps happening and the media just slops it up. And it's frustrating because it scares people. Put aside the fact it's wrong. It's scary to people living their lives who have to work longer hours to make less money, and their money doesn't go far, and they turn on the news and there's someone being like, yeah, you should be terrified, it blackmailed someone."
Bartlett makes a shrewd observation: this is counterintuitive to the companies' own interest, and they have experienced it backfire. Eric Schmidt was booed at a commencement speech by 8,000 people every time he said the word AI. Executives are being attacked at home, which both of them condemn without qualification.
Zitron's explanation of why they did not see it coming is about insulation: "These tech companies have been glazed for their entire existence. Travis Kalanick was like, oh, people don't like me now. The point is, these companies are not used to pushback. They thought they'd do this scary stuff and they would just get floods of money and everyone would be like, I kneel before you." And his read on the intent behind it: "All of this blackmail stuff was an attempt to make it mystical. It was to make it seem like this unknowable, impossible to control, powerful thing, but we're the only ones, only these two angels could possibly control the beast we've created."
Bartlett makes his own position clear, and it is a genuine disagreement rather than a setup: he trusts Dario Amodei a little more than the others, because Amodei has been the most balanced in his writing about the risk profile, and consistent, and is now being attacked for it.
Zitron does not accept the consistency defence. "Amodei was doing the scare tactics thing when he worked at OpenAI, when GPT-2 came out, saying it's too scary to release. He's also gone on television and given AI psychosis to Axios, being like, 50% of jobs are going to go away because of AI." And the character argument: "If I'm Dario Amodei and I'm sitting there going, I'm scared of all things changing and I thought I had made a thing that would eliminate all jobs, I'd be terrified. I'd be walking around with a ten ton weight on my back. The fact he doesn't, the fact he wants to be this weird elder statesman, makes me believe that he's just saying it because it's convenient, and he'll wind it back whenever it's convenient for him."
He also finds Anthropic the stranger of the two culturally: "I think OpenAI and Anthropic are basically the same level of bad company. I think Anthropic is more cult like. Jack Clark over there, one of the co founders, used to be at The Register. He used to be one of the most critical journalists ever. Now it's like something took over him, because they talk of these things in these high flown terms."
Are we in a bubble, and how does it pop?
Bartlett asks the two questions the episode has been building to. Are we in an AI bubble, and what happens when it pops?
"Yes. And it depends." Then the correction that matters: "It isn't just an AI bubble. It's the rot com bubble."
His mechanism starts with one company running out of money, and he names it. OpenAI.
The sequence he lays out:
OpenAI was meant to go public this year. It has been pushed to next year, and he notes the timing: "a week and a half after I released their audited financials. Wonder where that was." Sarah Friar, the Chief Financial Officer, has said they will do it earlier than 2027, or in 2027, which he calls a great answer.
The valuation problem. The last funding round valued OpenAI at $865 billion. When they explored listing, and here he cites Mike Isaac at the New York Times, they wanted to go at a $1 trillion valuation and their advisers told them not to.
The cash problem. "OpenAI needs perpetual amounts of money. They raised $122 billion this year. Most of it's crossed. There's some left, but they are going to need to raise at least a hundred billion a year just to survive. If they can't go public, they will have to raise another funding round. The problem is it's going to be difficult to raise at even the same valuation. They're probably going to have to take a flat round." He notes Amazon sent them $35 billion that was meant to be contingent on going public early. "They did that because they need the money."
The competitive problem. "Anthropic is likely going to beat it to going public. And once Anthropic goes public, it'll be borderline impossible for OpenAI to do so, because Anthropic is an unprofitable, unsustainable AI lab, but a better business that's growing faster than OpenAI's." He gives Anthropic a ceiling too: "I believe they have a ceiling. They're eventually going to face the same thing. Sometime in 2027, things are going to start running out of steam."
Bartlett asks him to be precise. So OpenAI runs out of steam in 2027?
"I think they're already running out of steam. But I think they run out of cash."
And then the contagion, which is why he thinks this is not a technology story but a market one:
SoftBank holds on paper about $100 billion of OpenAI stock. Its business model depends on continually liquidating holdings, either by selling stock or borrowing against it. If OpenAI cannot go public, SoftBank cannot do that. "SoftBank probably won't run out of money, but we're going to see one of the largest holding companies in the world become much smaller."
Then Amazon, Google and Microsoft have to restate guidance. "They will have to say, actually, we don't think we're going to grow as fast."
And on whether a bailout is possible: "You can theoretically bail out OpenAI. I don't think it happens. You could pump these dogs full of money and keep them alive for a bit, but at some point they're going to have to stop. Between these two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, you have $1.1 trillion of commitments." Oracle alone is building 7.1 gigawatts of data centres, over $400 billion worth, just for OpenAI. "There is not a Customer on Earth. And Oracle's revenue has been flat the last 15 years when you adjust for inflation. Without OpenAI, Oracle dies."
2003Amazon Web Services is founded, mostly because Amazon itself needed serious infrastructure. Customer facing around 2006. Profitable in 2015. Total capital expenditure across those twelve years, normalized for inflation, $29.7 billion, and that number covers the whole logistics operation too
2019Google declares a code yellow over weakness in query numbers. Ben Gomes objects that raising queries means giving worse answers. Prabhakar Raghavan pushes anyway
2020Raghavan takes over Google Search. Spam suppression is pulled back, in Zitron's account, and search quality declines
2021Record earnings, post pandemic federal money in the banks, zero interest rate era money easy to find. Then growth slows and the hypergrowth ideas run out
2022Nvidia is making single digit billions. Gary Marcus says the returns are already diminishing
2023Nvidia becomes one of CoreWeave's first investors and signs a $1.3 billion contract to rent its own GPUs back. Governments begin calling the technology inevitable
2024OpenAI loses over $5 billion. Jim Covello's Goldman Sachs report asks whether this is too much spend for too little benefit. "They should have stopped"
FebSightline Climate counts 190 gigawatts of data centres in planning, which would need $1.6 trillion to $3 trillion a year in demand. Actual annual demand is under $130 billion
Mar 2026The labs move enterprises onto real token pricing. Altman: "people have a big problem with it." Uber burns its entire annual token budget in three months
FY2026Microsoft books $34.33 billion of AI revenue, $24.1 billion of it from OpenAI, against $115 billion of capex and $175 billion planned for next year. Nvidia sells $215.9 billion of GPUs in its last fiscal year
2026OpenAI loses $20.9 billion and raises $122 billion. OpenAI and Anthropic together raise $217 billion. The last round values OpenAI at $865 billion. The listing slips to next year, a week and a half after the audited financials come out
2027Zitron's call: OpenAI runs out of cash, not out of ideas. A flat round or a rushed listing with worse economics than Anthropic, which he expects to go public first
afterSoftBank cannot liquidate its roughly $100 billion of paper OpenAI stock. Amazon, Google and Microsoft restate guidance. Nvidia revenue falls 50 to 70%. Retirements contract 20 to 40%. A tech depression rather than a technology failure
2030The stated plan he does not believe survives: $750 billion of OpenAI compute spending, reported by the Wall Street Journal. Oracle's 7.1 gigawatts, over $400 billion, built for that one Customer
Figure 4. The sequence as he lays it out, built only from dates and figures he states on air. The years before 2026 are reported history. Everything from 2027 down is his forecast, and he attaches a hedge to the timing rather than the direction: "I think they're already running out of steam, but I think they run out of cash."
The tech depression
Bartlett asks what happens then, and this is where the argument stops being about technology companies.
"Well, I think we enter a tech depression. Because the rot com bubble, the core of my theory, is that they're out of hypergrowth ideas, but the market doesn't think so. The reason they're so maniacally spending is because buying AI GPUs allows them to kick the can further, allows them to say we're still doing something, we're working on AI, don't think too hard. And also their current businesses are still growing. Their current businesses will eventually slow. There's only so many price increases. There's only so many tweaks to ads. Only so many tweaks to Google search. Only so many ways that Amazon can screw merchants."
Bartlett asks about the domino effect, and Zitron lists what worries him, starting with the concentration risk.
Nvidia is the largest company on the Fortune 500 and on the NASDAQ, and roughly 7 to 8% of the S&P 500. A very large amount of ordinary American retirement money is in these companies, bought on the Magnificent Seven story that the number goes up forever. "When the bottom falls out from Nvidia, and we haven't really got into it, but Nvidia is doing the most circular of financing, feeding companies money so that they can raise debt to buy more GPUs, I think Nvidia's revenue could go 50 to 70% down. Nvidia back in 2022 was making single digit billion dollars."
Bartlett asks him to speak to Jenny and Dave, ordinary people with ordinary jobs, and the answer is blunt.
"People's retirements are going to contract severely, and I don't believe they're going to return to those values. Because so much of the value of the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 comes from these four companies and the rest of the Magnificent Seven. So Apple, Tesla, Meta as well."
Then venture capital, which he thinks is the second, quieter hole. More than half of all venture capital last year went into AI. "I think most venture capital investments in AI are going to zero, because when it comes to building a company on top of an LLM, all of those are unprofitable too."
The exit problem makes it worse. Language model companies have not really been acquired, the one exception he names being a coding company bought by Elon Musk. Meanwhile Cognition is raising at a $26 billion valuation. "That means that company has to go public, because who's buying a company at $26 billion other than Elon Musk? Is Elon Musk just going to pick off every LLM company, like going to TJ Maxx for AI?"
And the returns picture underneath all of it, which is the most under discussed number in the episode. Since 2018, venture capital has been having one of the worst runs in its history. The average total value to paid in, the amount of money you get back per dollar, is between 0.8 and 1.21. "Meaning for every dollar you invest you get 80 cents to $1.20." He specifies that these are actual returns, not paper gains, and adds that internal rate of return "isn't very happy" either. "Very simple: venture capital is not actually providing returns."
Which sets up the paper gains problem, and the best single example in the episode of how the accounting works. "Google's last quarter, they boosted their net profits on paper by $99 billion because of the increased value of their SpaceX holding and their Anthropic holding."
Bartlett names it: they are celebrating paper gains, and raising off paper gains.
Zitron agrees and quotes Ed Elson one more time for the image that closes the section: "They're all doing Botox right now. They're sinking money into it to make themselves feel young again, and the market believes them."
And the endgame, which is not a crash so much as a repricing: "When the market doesn't, we're not just talking about a depression. I'm talking about the market valuing them like airlines and saying, yeah, you're real big and you make money off your existing products, but guess what, you don't have new stuff. You're just going to be doing this forever and we're going to value you as such."
Bartlett reads out the standard mechanism of a contraction, and Zitron agrees with all of it: falling demand as consumers and businesses spend less, margin compression as revenue drops against fixed overheads like rent and debt, then hiring freezes, reduced hours and layoffs. "Yes, that would all happen. But the thing is, we're talking about equity values dropping and there not really being a home for that value or that money." He adds the tens of thousands of tech sector layoffs on top.
And on the comfort people take from the last one: "The thing people want to believe is the dot com thing. It worked out afterwards, because Amazon and Oracle didn't die after the dot com bubble, they're actually fine. This isn't like that. They're bigger companies. They have bigger promises. I actually think Oracle could die."
What Jenny and Dave should do
Bartlett asks the practical question, and Zitron gives the most personally revealing answer of the episode before immediately disclaiming it.
"I don't have money in the market. I think it's a casino. A casino pumped up by the media." And then: "I live in cash right now. I live in cash. I don't trust the market, man."
He is careful to say he is not comfortable giving financial advice. What he offers instead is a posture rather than a trade. Act as you would with volatility. Take the gains when you have them. Do not sell everything.
"But be suspicious of tech. That's actually the biggest thing. Be suspicious of what they're promising. If you're acting based on their promises, don't trust the promises. Trust that they are going to say what will make the stock run rather than what's actually happening, and that they will find every dodgy way to make you think something is happening rather than it actually happening."
The worked example is the run rate again. Microsoft said it had $37 billion of annualized run rate in AI. "You hear that and you go, they made $37 billion, right? Wow, that's so much. Run rate, maybe month times 12. They don't even define it, but it's built to manipulate."
And the reason he thinks nobody stops them: "They do that because we don't have a functional SEC, and we don't have a media environment where scepticism is the priority and protecting the readers is necessary."
Bartlett, fairly, gives the companies the last word in their own voice: they would say this technology is going to be so great and so transformative that we are investing a ton of money in advance of the value and utility showing up. He says explicitly that he is not defending them, he is trying to dance between the two perspectives.
Zitron's answer is that even inside their own framing, someone has to lose. Bartlett agrees: they cannot all win big in the way they are describing, and when one of them starts to lose big, the domino effect begins.
Why he has a bone to pick
Bartlett asks the personal question at the end, prefacing it carefully: not because he agrees or disagrees, but because he wants an answer. Why don't you like these people?
The answer is the most straightforward thing Zitron says all episode.
"I don't like being misled, and I don't think regular people like being misled either. And I really don't think that the average person can get away with bullshitting as much as these companies do. And I don't think the average person gets anywhere near the level of affordance for failure and lying as these companies do. And I think there is a real economic and human cost to allowing these companies to run rampant and promise the world and never really get called up on it."
Then the part about the craft, which explains the length of his newsletters better than anything else he says: "The tepid nature of criticism these days is so frustrating. Seeing these ultra rich, ultra wealthy, ultra powerful people lie through their teeth, or misstate, or whatever people want to call it, it turns my stomach. And I hate seeing people being misled. I feel like I write at such length because I really want people to see why I've come to a conclusion. Am I right? Am I wrong? I think I am. Of course I do."
And the closing verdict on the industry as an industry: "I find these companies don't make good products any more. They don't care about their Customers, and they treat their Customers with contempt."
For anyone who wants the longer version, Bartlett points at the newsletter and the podcast. Zitron corrects one detail with visible pleasure: it is not on Substack. "Ghost, actually. It looks exactly like it. I moved off Substack in 2024." The newsletter is Where's Your Ed At, and the podcast is Better Offline.
Bartlett closes the argument with his own position, which is worth quoting because it is neither agreement nor dismissal: "I love watching your work because it provides a different opinion, and that challenges me to think beyond my current opinion about what might be possible. When I've heard you talking about how this is an economic bubble, and I've heard you talk about the capex spend with these big frontier AI labs, it really did make me pause for a second, and it really did make me consider that there could be a bit of fugazi going on here." His advice to the audience is to never believe one person and never believe one particular perspective religiously. Collect a body of evidence and follow the evidence yourself.
The closing question
The show's tradition is that the previous guest leaves a question for the next one, not knowing who they are leaving it for. The question left for Zitron: given that high quality relationships are important for health and longevity, what should we be doing to improve our relationships and social connection?
He connects it back to the argument, and the shift in register is abrupt and genuine.
"So this is actually connected to the AI bubble. I am a critic. I'm a sceptic. What I have found is that showing and appreciating and loving the people around you and uplifting them, and raising them up as you succeed, is the way we do that. Your success should be everyone around you. It's not economic."
He says talking about Matt Hughes earlier in the conversation made him really happy. "This whole thing has been at times quite gruelling and quite negative and quite brutal. But the love I found and the joy I found from community and the people around, even in the small groups of haters, even like Gary Marcus, Edward Ongweso Jr, Molly White, Brian Merchant, there are so many people who have been loving and caring."
And the point about perspective, which he flags himself as being all over the place and which is better for it: "Within these very critical moments, when you're very much dialling in on how negative things are, find the people who maybe find it repulsive too. Find your people who will talk to you about it. Even Troy and Jake, my trainers, talking to them about it as normal people, knowing that there are people going through their own struggles, but also just to give you the perspective and remind you that you are human too. It's really easy to get hard locked on everything in life and get away from why you do things and focus too much on the work, when the most important thing at times is just to know there are other people feeling the way you do."
He ends on the thing he says readers tell him most often: that they feel like they have a voice, and that someone is there for them.
"I don't think it can be understated how much it means when you just reach out to someone you love and tell them you love them. Tell them they rock. Tell everyone, when you like an artist or a writer or a podcast like this, tell them you love it. We don't do this enough and we need to do it more."
Key takeaways
The argument is about the denominator, not the tool. He concedes real uses: software engineering, tech support with a log file, transcription, image generation, basic automation. His claim is that over a trillion dollars of capital expenditure has been committed against roughly $22 billion a year of AI revenue from anyone outside OpenAI and Anthropic.
Roughly 70% of the three clouds' AI revenue comes from two companies those same clouds fund. Amazon sent $50 billion to OpenAI and $5 billion to Anthropic. Google sent $10 billion to Anthropic. Analysts expect over $400 billion of cloud revenue from the two over the next three and a half years.
Nobody discloses AI revenue, and the metric they do use is undefined. Annualized run rate can mean a month times twelve, or four weeks times thirteen. It changes every time. "When they have good news, they'll tell you."
Consumer subscriptions hide the meter. SemiAnalysis found a $200 ChatGPT subscription lets you burn $14,000 of tokens, and Anthropic's $8,000. When enterprises were moved to real pricing in March 2026, Uber burned its annual token budget in three months.
Microsoft is his cleanest worked example. $34.33 billion of AI revenue in fiscal 2026, $24.1 billion of it from OpenAI, against $115 billion of capex and $175 billion planned.
His falsification test is a hardware breakthrough, and it is specific. Costs would have to fall by something like a factor of a thousand, and the product would have to become genuinely autonomous. He says the reason the bar is that high is that the companies set it.
He thinks the dot com recovery story does not transfer. Dark fiber kept working for decades at almost no marginal cost. A GPU data centre costs the same to run in 2050, and the demand for AI today is, in his account, predominantly subsidized.
His prediction is a cash event, not a technology failure. OpenAI runs out of money in 2027, cannot list at a valuation anyone will take, SoftBank cannot liquidate roughly $100 billion of paper stock, the clouds restate guidance, and Nvidia revenue falls 50 to 70%.
He is more careful than his reputation. He hedges the subsidy ratio, declines to argue about data centre water use, credits Nvidia's engineering, calls Waymo genuinely cool and carefully deployed, and concedes coding.
Bartlett's pushback is the reason to watch. Adoption speed, the Vectara leaderboard, autonomous vehicle crash rates, The Innovator's Dilemma, his own company's usage and his fiancée's business are all put in front of Zitron and none of them are waved away.
Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:02:36 AI Is A Con
0:06:15 How Much Power Data Centres Really Need
0:08:02 Is Widespread AI Adoption Manipulation Or Do People Actually Like Using It?
0:12:00 The Actual Cost Of AI And How Tokens Actually Work
0:16:09 Is The Spending Of AI Companies Justifiable?
0:20:07 Will The Rate Of Improvement Of AI Go Up, Like Previous Innovations?
0:24:23 How Bad Are AI Mistakes?
0:26:54 Comparing Human Error To AI Hallucinations
0:31:31 If The Output Is The Same, Does It Matter If Humans Or AI Created It?
0:34:18 Can We Trust AI Like We Trust Humans?
0:38:37 Would People Use AI If They Paid The Honest Cost?
0:42:35 How Does The AI Bubble Compare To The Dot-Com Bubble?
0:47:42 Does AI Demand Match The Cost And Risk Of Data Centres?
0:52:46 Is AI Making Websites Like Google Worse?
0:58:46 Ads
1:00:51 Is AI Job Disruption A Lie?
1:10:22 Could Your Narrative Be Helping AI Companies?
1:14:22 How Dangerous Is AI Cyberhacking?
1:17:30 Is The AI Industry Creating Economic Growth?
1:19:14 How Would The US Beat China In The AI Race?
1:19:53 Is Robotics A Threat To Jobs?
1:23:23 What Do You Think About Agentic AI?
1:25:03 Is The Adoption Of AI The Same As The Rise Of The Internet?
1:28:06 The Overhype Of AI
1:30:23 What Do You Use Generative AI For?
1:33:41 Has AI Gotten More Intelligent?
1:34:29 Will AI Start To Do More Jobs As It Gets More Capable?
1:36:27 What Does The Future Look Like As AI Grows?
1:38:28 You Don't Think People's Workflows Have Been Transformed By AI?
1:40:41 Will All AI Be Powered By Data Centres?
1:43:41 Ads
1:45:12 Is Overspending On AI Due To Demand Or Something Else?
1:55:22 Tech CEOs Rebuttal
1:57:31 What Would It Take For You To Change Your Mind About AI?
2:00:50 Are AI Systems Already Blackmailing?
2:08:28 Are We In An AI Bubble And What Happens When It Pops?
2:13:26 The Tech Depression Is Coming
2:19:08 What Should The Public Do?
2:21:45 Why Do You Have A Bone To Pick With AI CEOs?
2:25:06 Last Question: What Should We Be Doing To Improve Our Relationships And Social Connection?
Notable quotes
"I think generative AI is at its heart a con, and seeing these ultra rich, ultra powerful people lie through their teeth turns my stomach." Ed Zitron, 0:00:00
"What do you call something where from the very beginning they've sold it in the terms of magic, but it's just a halfassed answering machine? They are misleading the entire world." Ed Zitron, 0:02:36
"This is the largest non consensual push of technology in history." Ed Zitron, 0:08:02
"It's a directionless egregore of capitalism. This headless beast that lumbers around desperate to seek out growth everywhere." Ed Zitron, 0:08:02
"If they were actually profitable, if they believed these services were worthwhile and worthy of the cost, they'd charge it. Regular people wouldn't be able to get a monthly subscription." Ed Zitron, 0:12:00
"You pay when you use an LLM regardless of whether you get what you want." Ed Zitron, 0:12:00
"The math does not make sense." Ed Zitron on Microsoft's fiscal 2026 AI revenue against its capex, 0:16:09
"We have this cult like worship of the wealthy where we think that someone wouldn't spend all this money for no reason." Ed Elson of Prof G Markets, quoted by Zitron, 0:16:09
"Wow, it can go for an hour. And then you look, it's like, yeah, and successfully completing them 50% of the time." Ed Zitron on task length benchmarks, 0:24:23
"It has files it can access that have stuff on it, but that's not the same as memory." Ed Zitron, 0:26:54
"Jesus Christ. This company raised 95 billion." Ed Zitron, on being told a chatbot can remember a dog's name, 0:26:54
"$500 fully subsidized with a plan. That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard." Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, played on air, 0:34:18
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." Paul Krugman, 1998, quoted by Zitron against himself, 0:42:35
"A data centre built today is going to be as expensive to run in 2050 as it is today." Ed Zitron, 0:42:35
"The reason they use the term artificial intelligence is so everyone would lump everything into it." Ed Zitron, 0:47:42
"It might tell you to eat rocks." Ed Zitron on AI overviews in search, 0:52:46
"I'm always hearing legal partners talking about AI. Never the associates." Ed Zitron, 1:00:51
"Every single scam and con starts with rushing you. Every single trick in history begins with saying you must do this now." Ed Zitron, 1:10:22
"They're already in the wrong hands." Ed Zitron on the argument that models must not fall into the wrong hands, 1:14:22
"Agentic AI is just a fancy way of saying an LLM talking to another LLM with a harness on top." Ed Zitron, 1:23:23
"It makes the easy things easy and the hard things harder." Carl Brown of Internet of Bugs, quoted by Zitron, 1:28:06
"It's got better on the tests that are rigged for the models." Ed Zitron, 1:33:41
"GPT-5 was meant to be this panacea for the AI industry. They had at least one training run that cost half a billion dollars and did nothing." Ed Zitron, 1:36:27
"Ten and something billion dollars in, and the best you've got is 0.15%?" Ed Zitron on Meta's stated retention gain, 1:40:41
"They can't speak in the future tense any more. You get two weeks in the future, max." Ed Zitron on AI boosters, 1:55:22
"Generative AI is this egregious, pornographic demonstration of how unfair the world is." Ed Zitron, 1:57:31
"Only these two angels could possibly control the beast we've created." Ed Zitron on the purpose of the blackmail stories, 2:00:50
"I think they're already running out of steam. But I think they run out of cash." Ed Zitron on OpenAI in 2027, 2:08:28
"They're all doing Botox right now. They're sinking money into it to make themselves feel young again, and the market believes them." Ed Elson, quoted by Zitron, 2:13:26
"I live in cash right now." Ed Zitron, 2:19:08
"I don't like being misled, and I don't think regular people like being misled either." Ed Zitron, 2:21:45
"Your success should be everyone around you. It's not economic." Ed Zitron, 2:25:06
Where it stands: what is checkable, what is contested
Every figure on this page is stated by Zitron on air, in a conversation recorded in 2026, and reproduced here with the caveats he attached. That is the standard of this reconstruction. It is not the same as the standard of proof, so here is an honest account of where his case is strongest, where the numbers do more work than they can bear, and what the best version of the other side sounds like.
Where he is on firm ground. The disclosure gap is a fact rather than an interpretation. None of the large cloud companies break out AI revenue as a segment, and annualized run rate genuinely is an undefined, non standard metric that no accounting body requires or specifies. His inference from that silence is an inference, but the silence itself is real, and it is the reason nobody in the debate can settle the revenue question by citing a filing. The circular arrangements he describes are also documented rather than alleged: a chip vendor investing in a Customer that buys its chips, and cloud providers investing in labs whose spend they then book as revenue, are structures that show up in public disclosures and analyst notes. Whether that is fraud, prudence or ordinary strategic investment is the argument. That it is circular is not.
Where the figures are doing more work than they can bear. Three deserve a flag. The first is the demand conversion: 190 gigawatts in planning is not 190 gigawatts under construction, and planning pipelines routinely shed most of their volume. Converting installed capacity into required annual revenue also mixes a capital number with an operating one, and he moves between the two quickly. The second is the SemiAnalysis token figure. It is a ceiling for a maximal user, not an average, which he says clearly once and then uses loosely afterwards. Most subscribers do not come close to burning $14,000 of tokens, and the blended unit economics of a subscription business depend on the average, not the ceiling. The third is software quality. He asserts that shipped software has got worse, Bartlett asks how you would quantify that outside anecdotes, and Zitron concedes he largely cannot. The research Bartlett reads back supports him, but it is a correlation across a period when many things changed at once.
The strongest case against him, stated fairly. Bartlett makes most of it himself. Prices below cost today are evidence about pricing strategy, not about whether costs can fall, and inference cost per unit of capability has in fact fallen sharply over the period in question even as frontier training costs rose. The claim that there is no roadmap is a claim about the absence of evidence, and it is exactly the claim Clifford Stoll and Paul Krugman were making in the quotes Zitron himself reads out. Adoption at effectively zero distribution cost is still adoption, and dismissing it as coerced explains the top of the funnel but not the retention. And the dark fiber precedent cuts both ways: a financing bubble and a durable technology are not mutually exclusive, which is the whole lesson of 1999. His answer to that, that a GPU data centre has no salvage value the way buried fiber does, is his best counter and it is genuinely contested, because it turns on GPU useful life and depreciation schedules that the companies themselves report inconsistently.
Two details worth correcting for the record. The TaskRabbit CAPTCHA episode he attributes to a GPT-3.5 system card is from the GPT-4 system card, where an external red team ran the test under explicit instruction. That correction reinforces his point rather than undermining it: the model was directed, the coverage implied autonomy. Similarly, Anthropic's blackmail result came from a deliberately constructed evaluation scenario, which is what he says. On Krugman, the fax machine line is real and from 1998, and Krugman has since described it as a throwaway written for a piece about the limits of forecasting, which is a fairer framing than the way it usually circulates, including here.
What would settle it. Zitron names his own falsification conditions, which is more than most participants in this argument do: a hardware breakthrough that cuts cost by roughly a factor of a thousand, and a product that becomes genuinely autonomous rather than requiring the harness. There is a cheaper test available to the other side, and he names that too. Any one of these companies could publish audited AI segment revenue and gross margin. Until one does, the argument stays where this episode leaves it, which is a fight between an inference drawn from silence and a promise made in the future tense.
Full transcript
========================================
I think generative AI is at its heart
con and seeing these ultra rich ultra
powerful people lie through their teeth
turns my stomach. The word con is a
strong word.
>> Well, what do you call something where
from the very beginning they've sold
[music] it in the terms of magic but
it's just a halfass arcery machine. They
are misleading the entire world.
>> You are the first person that I've
spoken to that has that opinion.
>> Well, the fact that this is happening is
insane and the fact it's not a scandal
is insane. And I've been in the tech
industry for 16 years now and I love
technology and I'm enthusiastic about
it, but I don't like being misled. And
this is the largest non-consensual push
of technology in history.
>> So, we're going to play a game, Ed. I
have the things that you consider to be
myths about the AI industry.
>> Let's play it. The AI industry is
creating enormous economic growth. No,
it's not. All of these companies run at
a horrifying loss. Open AI lost $20.9
billion last year. None of these people
can just say, "Yeah, we're on the path
to making this profitable." because they
can't.
>> Next one.
>> AI will replace all human jobs. That
just isn't happening and there's no
economic data to support it. Next, the
United States need to spend trillions to
beat China in the AI race. What's the
race to do for us to constantly piss our
pants worrying about China? But people
keep saying, "What if these models fall
into the wrong hands? They're already in
the wrong hands." Mark Zuckerberg, Sam
Olman, Dario Amade.
>> Mark Zuckerberg says, "We'll continue to
invest aggressively in infrastructure to
meet the demand." God met as a
monstrosity. Makes me think of Shrek
with L fogquad. Some of you may die, but
that's a risk I'm willing to accept. If
only these people gave a about
poverty or actual problems in the world
versus are we buying enough GPUs. If
this continues, [music] what does the
future look like?
This is super interesting to me. My team
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Please help us. Really appreciate it.
Let's get on with the show.
[music]
>> Ed Zitron,
there are a number of things that you
believe that a lot of other people don't
believe, right? You have, I think, a
couple of controversial opinions and
opinions that are in contrast to the
other guests that I've sat here with.
What exactly are those opinions, Ed? I
think generative AI is at its heart con.
I don't think it is sold as honest
software. I think that they overstate
both what it can do, what it will do,
and the underlying financials to the
point that they are misleading the
entire world. And they're actively
exploiting the weaknesses in journalism,
in our economies, and indeed within the
responsible parties with sellside
analysts, governments, and all over the
shop.
>> The word con is a strong word.
>> Yeah. I mean, what do you call something
where from the very beginning they've
sold it in the terms of magic as this
thing that will replace all jobs, that
will cure cancer, and all of these
things? And when you look at it, it's
boring cloud software that's extremely
expensive and unprofitable and also
unreliable at its core.
>> People will be asking where are you
drawing from in terms of your
references, your personal experiences?
Where were you educate? What you study?
What you write about? What do you do Ed?
>> So that's the funny thing is people say
he's not got a finance experience. He's
not going to take. I've been in the tech
industry 15 16 years now in PR but still
had practical experience and I love
it. And this thing just comes along that
everyone is telling me is the best thing
since sliced bread. And it can't even do
the basics. It can't even do search.
Well, whenever you ask an AI person,
well, what's your setup? They describe
this PeeWee's Playhouse thing of like,
well, you got to harness here and you
got to use the right prompt. Well, you
don't want to use that prompt. You want
to use this prompt here with this model,
but don't use this model for the
beginning, but at the end, you're going
to want to use this model. And this is
meant to be artificial intelligence.
It's meant to be smart. It's meant to be
autonomous. It's meant to be something
that you set and forget.
>> We have the sort of six leading AI
companies on the table here. Anthropic
Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI,
Google. You're saying that their
fundamental business model is a con.
>> Well, their revenues are not really
coming from AI. Up until fairly
recently, none of their revenues were
coming from AI. Like dribbles a bit.
Right now, 70% of all AI revenues across
those three companies are from OpenAI
and Anthropic to unprofitable,
unsustainable companies that literally
cannot afford to exist without these
very same companies giving them money.
Amazon sent $50 billion to OpenAI this
year. They sent $5 billion to Anthropic.
Google sent $10 billion to Anthropic.
And in the next three and a half years,
OpenAI and Anthropic based on actual
sellside analyst evaluations, their
estimates that inform whether stock is
going to go up or down after earnings,
they are expecting 400 or more billion
dollar of revenue, 30 or something% of
cloud growth just from these two
unprofitable companies that will need to
be given the money from somewhere. And
on top of that, these companies have
such low respect for the average
investor, for the analyst, for everyone
really that they don't even disclose
their AI revenues. The few times they
dain us worthy, they use something
called a run rate, an annualized run
rate, which means well, nothing. They
never define it. It can mean months 12.
It can mean month 13. It can mean last 4
weeks time 13. It's different every
time, and they never define it. And then
they sometimes just don't mention it.
So, you've got this big thing that is
meant to be the biggest, most
influential change to software ever. And
whenever you ask them about it, when you
say, "What? How much you making from
this?" They go, "Oh, I couldn't possibly
say. I'm too shy." These are public
companies, or at least the ones that
aren't anthropic and open AI. When they
have good news, they'll tell you. And
when they don't tell you something,
well, that actually speaks volumes.
>> Have you you used these tools, the AI
tools, Gemini, Anthropic, Chat, GBT,
etc., and you found no value in them?
There's some value, but it's not there's
they have spent over a trillion dollars
in capex. What
>> does capex mean for you?
>> Capital expenditures. So, when you are a
business and you have operating expenses
like electricity, for example, those
come right off immediately. Capital
expenditures are long-term investments
that are theoretically one-off. So, a
data center or indeed the GPUs you put
inside an AI data center.
>> Okay? So, you've got a data center
>> and then you have these GPUs which are
like computer chips. So AI GPUs are much
bigger, much more power intensive. They
take a bunch of high bandwidth memory
and they because of how many of them you
need. You need thousands of them, tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands in
some case. You need a bunch of power. So
an example, OpenAI and Oracle are
building a data center in Texas in
Abalene, Texas. 1.2 GW called Stargate
Abene. Within that, with each one of the
eight buildings, there'll be 50,000
Nvidia GB200 GPUs. So, city of Bristol
takes about 7800 megawatt of power a
year, right? Well, Stargate Abene is
condensing more power than that, 1.2
gawatt into a space around 1,172
times smaller. City of Bristol is about
1.2 billion square ft. Star Evelyn is
about 998,000.
So, you're condensing all of this power,
all of this money, all of this labor
into this one spot. And all of these
data centers cost billions of dollars.
All of these companies other than
Microsoft are now to take out debt. And
the thing is they've spent over a
trillion dollars so far and they want to
spend another trillion dollars next
year. And for what? To make tens of
billions of dollars, most of which comes
from two unprofitable companies,
Anthropic and Open AI. One of the
rebuttals to that would be that the
adoption, the customer adoption of
people using Open AI and Enthropic has
been absolutely insane. These are the
fastest growing products in all of
history, especially as it relates to
sort of technology. If we just focus in
on technology, they are, you know,
hundreds and hundreds of millions of
people, billions of people are using
these tools every single day for things
that they have subjectively decided are
problems they need solving. So, you
know, money is a lagging indicator of
value. So, one would argue that they're
just investing ahead of the monetization
options.
>> The first let's start with this
adoption. Is it honest adoption when you
are forced to use generative AI when you
load Google? When you load Google Docs,
Gemini screams in your ear. When you
load Word, co-pilot's bugging you. When
you use Amazon, whatever rofus AI is
wants has opinions on what socks you're
buying. This is the largest
non-consensual push of technology in
history. Chat GPD for example, every
single media outlet has been screaming
about this for 3 years. They've been
saying, "This will take your job. You
must use this. If you don't use this,
you're going to be falling behind." So
people are using it because they've been
told to use it constantly and they're
using it like search predominantly and
that's partly because Google fell behind
search and also because it's better at
ingesting queries sometimes. Sometimes
if you use a generative search it's like
a trolling vessel. It's not very good at
specifics but if you're like does this
thing exist? Has this person ever said
anything like this? It'll still probably
get it wrong but it'll scour the ocean
for you. Nevertheless, that's not worth
a trillion dollars. None of it is. The
amount of money being sunk into this is
just incomparable to anything. Railways,
it blows everything out of the water
because there is no postbubble story
even for this. AIG GPU is not useful for
other things either. There's it's a
directionless egregor of capitalism.
this headless beast that lumbers around
desperate to seek out growth everywhere
in the hopes that if it harasses people
and scares people and demonizes labor
enough, people will be forced to use it.
>> The the reason I I pause is because I
just I think about my own company.
Obviously, everybody thinks about their
own personal situation. So, you have
people listening now that don't use any
AI tools. Then you'll have people that
are using it for everything from coding
new software tools to everything they
write to, you know, images, whatever.
And when you look at the the stats
around enterprise adoption, it says 88%
of organizations regularly use AI at
least once for one particular business
function. And I'd say in our company,
95% of people use a one of these AI
tools like anthropical chatbt or Gemini
every day,
>> right? And that exists on some kind of
spectrum of like the super users that
are using it probably, you know, every
hour of every day for almost everything
to, you know, someone maybe hiring the
executive team that's using it less
because their job doesn't require of it
as much,
>> right?
>> And when you look out into the world,
you know, at how the world is changing
from a content perspective, if we're
looking at generative AI, it is obvious
that these tools are being widely
adopted. Part of the symptom is the AI
slop you see all over the internet,
So, I I don't know this this this idea
that it's not being used. I struggle
with
>> it's being used. Here's the thing with
the slop. Before we had AI slop, we had
SEO slop because Google incentivized
doing the lowest common denominator that
would rank well in search. There's a
whole story about how they pulled back
spam guards thanks to Bravagar Ragavan,
which we can get into,
>> where they made the internet worse by
allowing worse content to rank higher.
It's why we have when you used to
Google, oh, best washing machine,
there's 11 different horrible blogs that
read like somebody got a concussion.
They are built to rank rather than be
read by humans or built to be good made
good. So AI helps weaponize that at
scale. Yeah, you can make a bunch of
generic slop. We've had slop for years.
We've just found a slop machine. But
then also there's the problem of cost.
So when you use AI services, you burn
tokens and it's per million tokens. So
>> what's a token? So it's around 3/4 of a
word. So it's characters.
>> So the AI companies have a currency in
which they charge you. Like a taxi in
New York has a meter.
>> Yeah.
>> And they call it tokens.
>> And every word, let's just say for ease
it's a word. You're paying per word.
>> About a word. Yeah. And it's per million
tokens. So you'll be charged per million
input tokens. The stuff you feed into it
like a document or a bunch a code base.
And the output tokens are both the stuff
it spits out at the end but also when it
thinks. So, okay, you've asked me to
give you the best restaurants in this
area of New York. I should find the best
restaurants in New York. All of that's
output tokens as well.
>> However, when you're paying for a
monthly service, you don't see any of
that. Put all that crap to the side.
They just have rate limits. So, you can
use them a certain amount and then when
you run out, but they kind of offiscate
what that was. Now, someone recently
found, semi analysis actually found
this, a big analyst group. They found
that on a $200 a month chat GPD
subscription, you can burn $14,000
worth of tokens and on anthropics you
can burn $8,000 for 200 bucks. That is
how most and even on the 20 buck a month
service you can burn $400.
Now most people don't realize that. Most
people have no idea what AI costs. Most
people just think, "Oh, it's 20 bucks a
month." No. All of these companies run
at a horrifying loss. OpenAI lost $20.9
billion last year because people can
burn as many tokens as they want. And
when they tried to move everybody on the
enterprise side, so companies bigger
than 150 onto actually paying the cost
of AI in around March of 2026, to quote
Sam Orman, they said, uh, people have a
big problem with it. I think it's a huge
issue, which is not really what the air
apparent text history is meant to be
saying, but the point is enterprises
immediately started freaking out. Uber
burned through their entire annual token
budget in three months. So suddenly
after everyone saying AI is the most
productive thing ever. It's amazing.
It's changing everything. The moment
people actually had to pay for it, they
go, [snorts]
I don't know actually. Um maybe it's
obviously we all love it. It's all
great, right? But it's costing too much.
So we need to reduce the cost because
people are just dumping stuff into it
being like what do I do here and getting
whatever the median is out because
that's what these things do. they
provide the median answer.
>> So essentially, someone like me who's a
power user of these tools,
>> I could be costing Anthropic or OpenAI
$1,000, but they're only charging me
$100, let's say. So they are having to
subsidize $900 of my usage because of
the electricity costs and the costs at
their data centers. And so your
assertion here is that that is
unsustainable.
>> Yes. And just to be clear, they're
probably not one for$1. It might be 30
for. We don't we don't know. I think
it's unprofitable. These companies don't
disclose them even in their auditive
financials. They play funny games with
how they categorize things. But
nevertheless, yes. And on top of that,
the way that you stand up inference,
which is the thing that creates the
output within these data centers, you're
not just saying, "Okay, turn the
inference machine on. Let's go." You are
standing up the GPUs necessary to take
in the demand, and if you buy too much,
you've wasted the money. You You have to
pay for the hourly GPU use regardless.
If you buy too few, your customers can't
use it. They get pissed off at you. They
cancel. They go with someone else. But
nevertheless, yeah, they would get
demand selling $20 or $40 for a dollar.
And that's what these services do. And
really, the simplest way to explain it
is they were actually profitable if they
were actually just they believed that
these services were worthwhile and that
they were worthy of the cost, they'd
charge it. Regular people wouldn't be
able to get a monthly subscription.
They'd just be paying what it's worth,
unless, of course, there was an economic
problem. And it's very simple. You pay
when you use an LLM regardless of
whether you get what you want. When
these things hallucinate, say you're
doing something, you're coding something
and they go through a code base and they
up a bunch of stuff, they break a
bunch of stuff, you're paying for that.
You're paying for it whether it works or
not, unless of course you're using one
of these subscriptions. I think the the
really interesting point is are they
spending ahead of the value showing up
which is I imagine what they would argue
or are they spending all of this money
and subsidizing all of their users in a
way that's unsustainable and that will
never be justified like does it you know
because you think back through the
history of technology you often get
people
losing money to grab market share
>> right
>> and they're also focusing on bringing
the costs down and making it more
profitable for them as well. But they
can't afford to underinvest.
>> If they were bringing the cost down,
they would have brought the cost down,
which they have not. It seems to be
getting more expensive. In fact,
everyone inference providers don't seem
to be profitable. Even the companies
renting out GPUs don't seem to be
profitable. I imagine that it wasn't
like they started out and they were
like, "Shit, this is unprofitable at the
beginning. We know it. Screw it. We'll
keep doing it any screw." I don't think
it's some big conspiracy. They probably
thought at some point, yeah, this will
go profitable. The chips will catch up.
Customers will pay for the overwhelming
value because you don't know in 2023
where it's going to be in 2026. You
assume it's going to go up. That's the
nature of venture capital. They should
have stopped in like 2024 when OpenAI
lost over $5 billion. They should have
been like, "Yep, this is not going to
work." But they kept going because it
helped number go up so much. It helped
stock values pump. It helped everyone
pump. It helped Nvidia pump, Microsoft,
everyone. and not from the revenues.
Because here's the funny thing about
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. People
for years have been saying their AI bets
have paid off. Wow, their AI bets have
paid off. As these companies refused to
say how much they're making from AI, but
because their existing businesses
continued to grow and did so, by the
way, through price increases, changes to
how Google and Meta uh did advertising.
Amazon bumped up prices and changed how
they did actually Amazon started a
remarkable ad business during this whole
time as well. and the selling through
Amazon platform anyway nothing to do
with AI but because number go up because
revenue go up everyone went it's AI
because these companies wouldn't spend a
trillion dollars for for no reason right
except in fiscal year 2026 which just
ended for Microsoft annoying I know they
made total according to Bloomberg about
$34.33 billion $24.1 billion of that was
from OpenAI so that leaves them with
about $10 billion in a year when they
spent 115 billion on capital
expenditures just intend to spend 175
billion next year. The math does not
make sense. I imagine their plan was
okay, this is just going to get
exponentially more valuable and at some
point the costs will be outpaced by the
return. Problem is that large language
models need a bunch of money to train
them. They need constant data flow. They
need customized data. It's just this big
expensive monster. And when you try and
talk to people about it and you try and
say, "Hey, look, this is really bad.
Nvidia has sold it was $215.9 billion in
the last fiscal year worth of GPUs
mostly. And you try and go, yeah, that's
to support like $22 billion of revenue
total in the entire world outside of
these two companies that literally
require money being fed into them
sometimes by Nvidia to keep alive. When
you tell people that, they go, "Well,
companies just lose money, right?
Companies because we have this quote
Edson from Prophy Markets. We have this
cult-like worship of the wealthy where
we think that someone wouldn't spend all
this money for no reason. Right? Because
reconciling with that with this idea
that the ultra wealthy, the ultra
powerful didn't get there through big
brains. They didn't get there through
anything other than luck and opportunism
and getting an MBA perhaps with the
right people. That they just got there
because they're regular people and they
just happen to be in the right place at
the right time. reconciling with that
and realizing that the world is not
controlled by people like a meritocracy
is kind of grim. So it's easy to be like
no they're not making a mistake I must
be missing something and that's what
they want. So you know I think back
through the history of technological
breakthroughs and I think about I mean
you can look at different industries and
one of my favorite books on this subject
is the innovator's dilemma. not read it.
>> And one of the things it talks about is
how the the innovation that ends up
taking out or transforming an industry
often starts worse, doesn't make
economic sense, none of your customers
are asking for it. And this is typically
why we end up ignoring it. So like
you've got horse and carriages in the
1800s.
>> Amazing form of transport according to
the 1800s, you know, people of the
1800s. And then you have this thing
called cars come along. Now the problem
with cars is they broke down all the
time. It's kind of like AI hallucinates
now. um they were more expensive and the
the economics of it didn't make sense.
You might as well walk than buy a car.
There was a law at the time that meant
you had to walk in front of it with a
red flag and wave and someone had you
had to employ someone to walk in front
of it waving a red flag. Obviously, it's
worse. It's like a worse solution.
However, these things that are
disruptive innovations, they have a
higher ceiling of growth and so they
eventually overtake the horse. And I
when I think about that analogy in the
context of all of this, I go, okay, it's
imperfect at the at the moment. the
economic models aren't perfectly ironed
out. They're still figuring out how to
make it cheaper, the infrastructure,
etc. But as if you think about the rate
of improvement versus other you know
let's say coding how much could I train
a human coder to improve and to increase
their output versus an AI agent one
would go if you just imagine any rate of
improvement in these AI tools at some
point if you just imagine a 5% rate of
improvement per month at some point it's
you know and then you imagine a 5%
reduction in cost which is what we did
with the internet what we did with cars
but Mo's law
>> mos law is a mos law is not with GPUs.
So let me let me actually explain. So
Nvidia Nvidia invented I think it was in
the 2000s they put out something called
CUDA which is the underlying software
library and the way to run software on
GPUs. took them solid decade or more to
make it something where they could do
data analytics, one of the early things,
mapper and such. And then when AI came
along, they'd had lots of experience
with it. But nevertheless, this company
has got more money, more attention, more
geniuses behind them, more people
focused on making their things more
efficient than anyone could ever ask
for.
>> And Nvidia, for anyone that doesn't
know, makes the chips.
>> They So, and that CUDA thing I
mentioned, they were the ones with CUDA
and CUDA allowed generative AI to grow.
Okay, so they're chips.
>> Chips and chips are needed. Those are
the things that go into the data
centers.
>> And there specific chips are the ones
where you can run AI software on it. So
the training runs and also the
inference. Now, here's the thing. The
the car example back then you didn't
have pretty much every mathematician and
scientist going into the car industry.
You didn't have the combined world's
governments never shutting up about
this. And by the way, giving them credit
early since 2023, they've been saying
this is inevitable. Even in what you
said, 5% improvement. I don't even know
how you'd measure that because a junior
software engineer can still experience
things and learn things from context,
from how people deal with problems. And
the way that people deal with problems
is not as simple as looking at the code
or reading some emails. It's context
cues from speaking to a person. It's
being in different environments. And
there may there are uses for LLM's
encoding. I don't dispute that. But even
saying 5% uh what does that mean? Is it
better at Rust? Is it better at C++?
>> I'd say productivity just like yeah
shipped. If we did it in the context of
coding, it would be like shipped code.
>> That's the thing that would be like he's
the best writer in the world cuz his
newsletter's really long. That's an
insane way of evaluing it. With coding,
it would be I mean it's even difficult
to evaluate because it's is the software
out there better is actually a great way
of evaluating it. And I would say
uniformly not. I would say the standard
of software across Google, Microsoft,
Amazon, Meta, especially God, Meta is a
monstrosity, is worse. GitHub, GitHub,
someone posted on Twitter earlier today,
we should get a notification when GitHub
is up rather than when it's down because
that would be more reliable. Microsoft's
one of the largest companies in the
world, and they can barely wipe their
own ass when it comes to GitHub. The
quality of software is going down
weirdly enough as more people use LLMs
and more businesses demand and I really
do mean demand that people use these
services. So on this point of if we go
back to this horse and carriage and car
analogy say that we're at whatever point
today if you imagine any rate of
improvement in the technology which we
have seen since tragedy came out
>> I remember when tragy came out and I was
in Asia and I was there showing it to my
fiance I was like look it can do this
and it was hallucinating once in a while
and getting things wrong. I actually
don't have that experience anymore. I
have moments where I believe it's
reasoning is weak, but I don't have
outright hallucinations anymore. See
that? I I disagree. So,
>> give me an example of what you define as
a hallucination.
>> Okay, great one. So, I have a Bloomberg
terminal. Yeah. The very useful thing
they have on there is ask B. So, when
you do a Bloomberg inquiry to like look
up what we think Nvidia's revenue is
going to be next quarter, it runs
something called BQL, which is its own
programming language. Now, instead of
having to learn that, you can just type
into RSB and it will generate it and run
it for you. And so, you get it pulled up
and you know where the data is coming
from. It deals with hallucinations real
well. The other day, I was like, you
know what, get a little spicy. I'm going
to look up the growth rate of stocks of
Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon over
the course of 5 years, I think it was.
>> And I was about to I was copy pasted it
over to something looked at in Excel. I
was about to was writing the newsletter.
I went, Microsoft stocks never been $575
a stock.
You know what? When it's a cute little
thing like, oh, it's a stock price and I
kind of call it was no harm, no foul.
That's fine. But when you're talking
about, I don't know, like a transcribing
tool for a doctor or a financial model
that a hedge fund is dependent on, at
that point it becomes a little more
dangerous. And the thing is a
hallucination with a software package.
For example, you're refactoring a code
base and it leaves a door open
security-wise or it just breaks
something and you I don't know maybe
you've been vibe coding for 6 months.
You haven't really been coding with your
own hands for a while. Maybe you've
forgotten a few things. You had this
slop to look for. I'm not doing
it. And so the problems become
multiplicative. And I don't really know
how you train them out of that. And
they've certainly not succeeded. So on
one hand they have got better but one of
the main ways they evaluate them getting
better are benchmarks that are adjusted
specifically for large language models
because you can't just have them do
tasks. They've got better at that. They
found some tasks they can have them do
on them like meter me they have this
thing where it's like check out this
chart look how much better it's getting
at running tasks. Wow it can go for an
hour and then you look it's like yeah
and successfully completing them 50% of
the time. They they have a hallucination
leaderboard and it really focuses on
basic tasks and it shows that the
four-year trend according to historical
data from the Victaria hallucination
leaderboard shows that hallucination
rates on simple summarization tasks have
plummeted from around 21% 21.8% 4 years
ago down to 0.7%
roughly on today's top frontier models
like Gemini and Chat GPT. Again the
point of nuance here is that these are
on simple tasks which is kind of what
I've experienced. I've experienced that
on day-to-day things that hallucinates
less again rate of improvement thinking.
So if I just imagine the trajectory to
continue there is going to become a time
where hallucinations become rarer than
they are today increasingly and also
what I would say is when I think about
other technologies there's two more
points other technologies at their
inception when they first came to the
world like the internet also had
technical difficulties. I remember
growing up with dialup modems and I
couldn't go on the phone at the same
time as going on the internet. I'd have
to stop Runescape upstairs to go on the
phone. And you thought this is crap.
This is technology crap. All the
>> I I don't know, mate. I loved it.
>> Yeah, I know. You It felt like magic.
And then in hindsight, you go, "Wow, I
now have Starink and 5G internet from my
phone. It's unbelievable." You couldn't
leave the house with internet before.
And that's what I mean by the rate of
improvement thinking. I'd say the last
point is we often compare AI to
perfection,
>> Whereas that's not actually the
alternative in the working world. Like
if I wanted to do let's say a simple
writing task, I should compare AI to my
alternative alternative way of doing
that simple writing task which is both
measured in my time right and my ability
to hallucinate as a person who doesn't
know everything
or if I'm hiring someone an intern who
might also be prone to hallucination or
have gaps in their knowledge.
>> So it's not actually like we're
comparing we should compare AI to
perfection. It's AI to the other
alternatives. And if someone
hallucinates 0.7% of the time, but knows
way more and is faster, maybe on a net
basis, that's a good trade. Maybe I
should use AI. So, let's start with an
example. Someone I love dearly, Matt
Hughes, my editor, lives out of
Liverpool. Wonderful guy. I don't pay
Matt Hughes because he knows everything.
I pay him because he has incredible
context and a ton of knowledge and he's
willing to expand it and work with me
and moral sport and he's a great editor,
but he's also someone who gets into the
guts of it and has the experiences of
it. He's a decorated tech journalist and
on top of that a wonderful loving being
with empathy and joy in his heart for
the stuff he loves and absolute
venom for the people he hates. That's I
can't get that from a large language
model. But on top of that, I don't I
push back on just the assumption there.
>> When you say knows everything, what good
is something that knows everything when
it sometimes doesn't know anything when
it's sometimes? And on the thing is, are
you really paying an intern for
something basic? Are you really going to
them and saying, "Yeah, can you look up
what the date is?" No, you're doing that
on Google. Whatever the task is, you are
trying to also train an intern. The
point of an intern is to train them and
turn them in, take them out of Pinocchio
status,
>> but it's also an intern learns. And in
turn gets context and in turn learns
your habits. Learns
>> AI gets context and learns.
>> No, it doesn't. It
>> doesn't learn.
>> I mean, it doesn't. The way it learns is
you create a giant claw. MD file that it
sometimes doesn't read, sometimes does
read. You create a harness. You put it's
like it's Pee-Wee's breakfast machine
from PeeWee's Playhouse. You have to do
all these controversies to mitigate the
hallucinations. And even then at the
end, how much effort have you put in?
>> But so, okay, this is an extreme
simplified example. If I went on my
Claude now and said, "What's my dog? my
dog's name.
>> Uhhuh.
>> It would know my dog's name.
>> Jesus Christ. This this company raised
95 billion.
>> I'm saying I'm I'm using an extreme
simplified example to show that it can
remember things from the past.
Obviously, it knows much more complex
things as well, but I just use that as
an example. So, we we we accept the fact
that it can it does have memory of the
past.
>> It has files it can access that have
stuff on it, but that's not the same as
memory. And it's also just okay. So, it
remembers your dog's name. It might
remember your habits. It might be able
to read things you've said before.
>> Does it know your moods? Does it know
what's going on in the world around it?
Does it have good days and bad days? Is
it there for you? Because it's just a
text machine. And the thing is
the intern example. An intern is
something that can grow. It's something
that you invest in. That's not something
you do through feeding files and text to
it. The way that we store memories
ourselves, the way in which we acrue
experiences is a a milerum of emotion
and feelings and facts
>> completely different. So I think there's
two things here. There's the process in
which something happens and then there's
the output.
>> So the process you're describing the
process of how a human does memory,
>> The way that an AI does memory is
different. But the thing that people
care about is there value in the output.
I.e. You know, if I dump all of my files
into Claude, I don't really care how it
processes it as long as when I ask it,
what's my revenue? It has the number.
And one could say the same thing about
training someone. You could say, you
teach them, you put lots of effort into
them. You give them lots of context. You
you educate them and give them
experiences. And then you might come and
say to them, by the way, what's my
revenue? Now, the processes are entirely
different, but the outcome is what I
care about. Do they know the revenue
number when I ask them? And so, I think
that's the part that we sometimes get
lost. we get, you know, cuz I have I've
heard this debate about like can AI be
creative,
>> I think like the way to answer that
question is like it's about the output
when I ask it to do a creative thing
does it give me the answer not is the
process the same as a human process cuz
actually no who cares what the people
care about they pay for the outcome the
product.
>> I actually disagree about the process
because Matt Hughes for example
>> your editor
>> Yeah. watching him go down a rabbit hole
and being there with him and actually
vice versa him doing the same thing. We
wrote these well I mean we were working
on the research I ended up sitting there
for like the dayong session of writing
11,000 words and he he had given me a
bunch of notes. It was actually just
even describing that process, I feel so
happy cuz it was like us being like I
can't believe how these Jesus
Christ they can't do like just like the
misanthropy of just the horrible cynical
people of asset managers like Blackstone
just learning about them and being like
it can't be this and having a back and
forth with him that is fundamentally
different because we were both learning
together and the learning process was as
much about creating the output as the
output itself. When you learn something,
you're not creating the average, which
really is what these things do, of the
documents it could find. You're not
getting particularly novel outputs. If I
needed a generic slop output, sure, but
I've I've used some of the higherend LLM
harness machines that the hedge funds
use, and they all give the same shite.
It's all the same the same generic
reports, the same, oh, we noticed this
analysis, things that you can find on
any kind of AI slop out there. what you
described to me there, what I heard
anyway is there's two points of value
you're getting from your time with that.
I mean, I mean, there's many more, but
you said you're you're learning and then
you're getting this book edited blog
blog. You're getting a blog edited,
which is the output, and you're getting
learning and you're also really getting
connection and all these other things.
But when I come to when people sort of
think about the value of AI, of course,
they could use it to learn. But in the
example I gave of like repeat my revenue
number back to me or do this number, I I
just care about the output. I could use
it to learn. I could say what if the
revenue number was wrong once you should
have defined deterministic ways of
knowing those numbers you should not
rely on them even with the terminal
running BQL which I trust I will double
triple treble check everything just to
be sure partly because also the process
of learning for me I don't want just a
report I go like that I want something
that I fully understand and also
understand the context around it I don't
think that LLM do that and I just don't
see them getting
in a way that does that because it's
it's just not what they do. And also
there's the other problem of the more
detailed the report, the more likely
there are things to be wrong with it. If
you are with Matt Hughes, for example, I
can trust he's got it right. I can trust
he understood and I can trust that I can
have a back and forth with him that will
inform me if I've missed something. I
can read the stuff that he's read and
actually trust him because there's a big
trust part as well. What is the basis of
your trust in Matt? Could it be his
historical performance?
>> I mean, yes.
>> Okay.
>> And also the fact we've learned half of
this stuff together,
>> but but tenure tenure doesn't
necessarily There's probably people, you
know, for 15 years who you also don't
trust. Yes.
>> So, I think I was trying to figure out
like what is the what is the thing
that's causing humans to trust another
thing. And I guess it would be continual
delivery of a commitment made of sorts.
And so with Claude for example on simple
tasks as we've seen from this
hallucination leaderboard it continually
delivers for people and that's why we've
seen the fast
>> I mean is that what that board says
>> well it's it's saying like is it getting
it wrong is it hallucinating
>> simple task how are those defined
>> I I don't know
>> that's the thing though because this is
actually a very very illustrative thing
of the AI industry they are the what
aboutist masters they have like well
look we got this we got this benchmark
that says we're good at this and look
the numbers higher What's the number
mean? No. What does that mean? And I'm
not using this as a critic against you.
It's
>> when you can't give a direct answer, you
give a side answer. When you as the LLM
industry want to prove your worth, you
can't just be like just use the product.
When the first iPhone came out, go was
Penn State at the time. Oh, I felt like
the uh apes at the beginning of 2001.
official voicemail. It was
immediate. And I showed it to tech
friends. I showed it to the most normal
people in the world. And everyone was
like, "Holy this is They were on
razors. They were on Nokia 3210s. It was
obvious the value." Amazon Web Services,
same deal.
>> It wasn't obvious though.
>> Yes, it was. I mean, I bought it
>> to you. To you, it was.
>> It was. And I also showed it to a bunch
of people because I'm aware that I had
bias when I just love gadgets.
>> But but I remember the famous Steve
Balmer who was the CEO of Microsoft
interview where he was told about the
iPhone and he bursts out laughing.
[laughter]
$500 fully subsidized with a plan. I
said that is the most expensive phone in
the world and it doesn't appeal to
business customers because it doesn't
have a keyboard which makes it not a
very good email machine. You can get a
Motorola Q phone now for $99. It's a
very capable machine. It'll do music.
It'll do internet. It'll do email. It'll
do instant messaging. So, I I kind of
look at that and I say, "Well, I like
our strategy. I like it a lot.
>> He burst out laughing, mocking it
because it was so disruptive. It was way
more expensive
>> and it was way different. No keyboard.
>> Well, phones used to be insanely
expensive and the carriers would cover
them, but you had to sign a long
contract. You were still spending 500
bucks. But the thing I'm getting at is
you didn't have to explain to someone
why perhaps you'd have to get past the
cost part, but you could just be like,
"Look how good this is." And then once
the app was the iPhone 3G with the App
Store, people were like, "Oh this
could actually change things." mobile
web. Even though it was a monstrosity,
it was so bad at first. Even then, you
could get your emails and you could just
look at them. Point is, Blackberries
were also expensive and were still
actually kind of cool, but the way they
worked was not like consumer software.
They didn't have the classic GUI.
iPhones felt like that. It felt like an
a cell phone designed even like a
computer. It was obvious. It was obvious
from the beginning. Everyone I was I was
dating a girl in the center of
Pennsylvania at the time and everyone I
showed it to was like, "Wow, this is
incredible." That to me is the obvious
thing with AI to this day when you're
like, "Okay, why is it so amazing?"
People still dither. People are still
like, "Yeah, you can't run a business
fully with it without this weird system
of pulleys and levers and such."
>> But how come then when you look at the
stats around ChachiBT's growth,
>> 100 million active users in just the
first 60 days after launching? For
comparison, Tik Tok took 9 months.
Instagram took 2.5 years. And the
internet itself for the worldwide web
took roughly 7 years to reach that
scale. Over 60% of the US adults are
integrated into AI tools in their daily
and regular routines within 3 years of
the launch, reaching a 40% of the
population. And that same milestone took
the internet 5 years and personal
computers nearly 12.
>> Okay. So like this is the I think this
is the part that's giving me dissonance
is like when I showed my fiance chachi
okay it was didn't [clears throat]
really work
>> but as a sole entrepreneur who English
isn't her first language
>> who has to write lots of text lots of
copy and generate lots of images and was
paying a graphic designer to help her
make um certain images that she you know
couldn't make herself because she
doesn't have the skills.
>> She would describe it as being
transformative for her business. What
I'm hearing from you is that it's not
transformative and there's no value in
it for people. But she if she was sat
here transformative,
would she pay the per million token
rate? Would she pay the actual rate? Cuz
that's the thing. If this was sold at
its honest cost. Yeah.
>> I would actually if and people were
reacting like that and they were paying
23 $4 every time they did something and
they were genuinely happy. That might be
an argument.
>> What is the what would be the honest
cost if they weren't sub
>> the actual per million token cost? The
actual API cost they should char.
>> Do you know how much that is relative to
God? Depends on it depends on the model.
But there's actually kind of a point I
want to make about the thing you said
with the internet earlier. So when I
first got on the internet 33.4 kilobits
a second modem even back then I was like
if this was faster and that was
like immediate just like if this was
faster cuz it was slow. You go on like
happy puppy or something download take
all bloody day waiting for share word to
download immediately like if I could do
this faster it would be better. And even
back then I'm like, man, you could
probably do video camera stuff with this
stuff that eventually happened. And
actually, there's this guy called Jim
Cavell from Goldman Sachs in a report he
did in 2024 that was geni too much spend
for not enough return. Paraphrasing
there. And he made the point that in the
run-up to the iPhone, there was
thousands of presentations that when GSM
radios get smaller, when Bluetooth
radios get smaller, when Wi-Fi radios
get smaller, it is inevitable that we
will get something like this. And then
he said that there is no such path for
AI. There was no road map to AI becoming
this thing that they promised. And I
must be clear, if these companies had
gone out there and are like, "Yeah, this
is interesting cloud software. It's
generative. It's really expensive. We're
not sure if we can fully not trust it.
Not in the I'm scared way. I mean, just
like we're not sure that this is going
to be a disruptive world changing thing.
It has potential, but we're going to go
slow. It's really expensive. This is an
R&D effort. We're not going to expose
consumers to it." and actually being
like called them like I don't know
language models and no no generative AI
stuff just being not even call it
because it isn't AI it's not autonomous
it's not smart I actually might respect
it but this is not they've gone out
there since 2023 and said it was 2022
this is the best thing since sliced
bread this is changing everything this
is going to do all your work this is
going to take your job you're going to
talk to Bing and it's going to tell you
to leave your wife all of these crazy
things and what's funny is when the
writer uh Kevin Roose I think it was
He was speaking to Kevin Scott, the CTO
of Microsoft, about it. And Kevin Scott
goes, you know, I'm just glad we're
having this conversation. Instead of
being like, "Settle down, Beas. It's a
website. The website told you something.
It's just LLM." They talked it up. And
that's because everyone is talking about
what they wish this was. Rather than
talking about what it can actually do.
This makes it scary to people
deliberately. So, it makes it
environmentally destructive. Look at the
gas turbines poisoning black
neighborhoods. I think it's in
Louisiana. It's one of Musk's data
centers. Look at the incredible energy
draws. It is raising power bills and
also it is creating inflation across all
consumer electronics because of the
massive RAM.
>> You know what's interesting? I almost
feel like so much of what you're saying
is true and also it can be true that
this technology is going to profoundly
change the world. And I think like you
know I think back to the early days of
the internet is maybe the closest
analogy we have of you know in the com
bubble. you know, you wrote this great
essay.
>> Yes. Yes.
>> Which I found really funny um especially
the name the rot economy and you talked
about the rotcom bubble.
>> Yes.
>> Talking about how AI is of less value
than people think.
>> And in that in the sort of com bubble,
what you saw is huge hype, people
overselling the capabilities of their
websites and what they were building.
But in the wake of the dotcom bubble,
yes, 90% of stuff went to zero,
>> but you had generational companies born
that changed the world,
>> And so I I do I kind of and that's what
bubbles do, right? Huge hype,
overinvestment, investors get crazy,
delusional. They think it's everything's
going to change. At the same time, you
do have skeptics
>> in these moments. The the dot bubble had
I mean the internet itself had the
biggest skeptics in 1998. Nobel Prize
winning economist Paul Krugman said by
2005 or so it will become clear that the
internet's impact on the economy has
been no greater than the fax machine. In
1995 astrophysicist Clifford stool
famously I wrote about this in my book
wrote famously in Newsweek. Do our
computer pundits lack all common sense?
The truth is no online database will
replace your daily newspaper. No CDROM
can take the place of a competent
teacher. Commerce and businesses will
shift from offices and malls to networks
and modems. Bologoney. So, how come my
local mall does a roaring business and
the cyber mall gets zero business? And
then I'll give you one more from
Krueger, who was the award-winning
economist. He said, "The growth of the
internet will slow drastically as it
becomes apparent most people have
nothing to say to each other."
That's that that that may actually be
the worst one of those predict like hang
around any bar in middle America.
Honestly, the best conversation,
>> but it's just all the same thing.
>> I actually So, Clifford Stall actually
his piece was interesting cuz that there
were some boner points in it, but he
made points about how like an
overwhelming amount of bad information
out there is bad for society. He's
completely right saying how online
education would not be a great
replacement for regular education. I
think we've seen that. But there is an
economic difference that's vastly it's
just completely different. So.com bubble
was actually two bubbles. There was the
website bubble which was just trash on
trash on trash. It was just like I think
what was it? Excite at home bought a
eury incard company for like a billion
dollars. It was insane crap happening
that was so small. The big thing that
people are thinking about is the dark
fiber.
>> Dark fiber. dark fiber was all of the
wires that put in the ground thinking
we're going to have all this demand for
internet and it turned out that demand
for internet I think the analyst
estimate was it was doubling every 90
days when it was doing that every 6 to
12 months maybe maybe longer and just
thus there was a massive overbuild of
fiber optic cable and indeed the
transmission stations and such just
simplifying to bring that to people's
houses and there was the assumption that
well that would all get lit up and
people would want it immediately didn't
really
Now the post.com bubble thing people say
is well but after that there was demand
from the internet. That's the thing
though that's very different to demand
for generative AI. Right now the demand
we have for generative AI is
predominantly subsidized. Just let's
start there.
>> Yeah
>> predominantly subsidized and most people
experience it are not paying the real
cost.
>> I agree.
>> On top of that we already have all of
the possible marketing in the world. We
have the largest, most disingenuous
marketing campaign in the history of
man, pushing this up the hill. We have
the apex predator of cloud software,
Microsoft. They can only get singledigit
billions from selling AI software. And
Christ almighty, outside of OpenAI and
Anthropic, we barely get $22 billion.
And the thing is, $22 billion is a large
amount to you and me. It's not a large
amount of money when you spent a
trillion plus dollars. When you have
anthropic and open AI with $1.1 trillion
worth of cloud commitments and on top of
that, how does this turn into a post.com
bubble thing? A data center built today
is going to be as expensive to run in
2050 as it is today unless there's some
breakthrough in electricity. But again,
that's not happening with AI. AI is not
doing that unless there's some
breakthrough in GPU technology. But we
already have Broadcom, Nvidia, etched.
We have every major chip company ARM
trying to do something about this. And
no one seems to magically be able to
make this profitable or indeed even less
costly. Even Nvidia with Vera Rubin,
their more expensive new GPU system.
Even then, they're like, "Yeah, 10x more
efficient. It's uh more dollars per
megawatt." They're all koi about it.
They don't just say, "Yeah, we worked
with OpenAI and Anthropic and we found
it reduced our cost by 50%." Easiest
thing in the world if it was true. And
that's because it's not happening. And
this isn't a case where
>> So are you saying there's not going to
be the demand for let's say let's you
know there's different types of AI
generative AI we
>> Yeah. And actually that's a good point
to make. The reason they use the term
artificial intelligence is so everyone
would lump everything into it.
>> They [clears throat] would lump uh
protein folding nothing to do with LLMs.
Robotics not LLM.
>> Autonomous weapons even horrible as they
are not LLMs because you couldn't trust
them. But they've mushed everything into
AI so that when you say, "Well, AI
can't," they'll go, "Um, um, sir, you
forgot to give us homework and also AI
it's working on curing cancer." When
it's just like, "No, that's not LLM.
Stop giving them credit."
>> The similarity though is they all need
GPUs, all these.
>> And that's the funny thing. All those
data centers that we're building, all of
them are for just generative AI. They're
not for all of the other stuff. They're
not for the cool AI has been
around for a long time. Google. A lot of
the good stuff that comes out of Google
from the search side is AI but
pre-generative.
>> How would you run the the type of AI
that sits in a robot? Let's say one of
the Optimus robots if you didn't have a
GPU.
>> So Matic Matic has this cleaning robot
for example. That thing is not got a
little GPU in it. What it has and may
indeed have used some GPUs but no year
as many as they need for generative AI
to run the data feed training data into
it so it's able to clean a house. But
when the little buggers going around
cleaning my floor, turdsly I call him,
it goes around mopping my floor, it's
not like burning money the whole time.
But when it comes to these massive
amount of data center, sighteline
climate said in February there's 190
gawatts of data centers under in
planning. Don't know about under
construction that works out if about 12
million megawatt that's what like $1.6
trillion to3 trillion a year in annual
demand you'd need for that. We don't
even have $130 billion worth of annual
demand. And people say, well, it will
grow. how when most of the demand is
coming from Amazon feeding money to open
AAI or anthropic, Microsoft feeding
money to OpenAI and Anthropic, Google
feeding money to Open AI and anthrop
well hasn't fed it to Open AI yet, but
they're a pretty big customer, billions
of dollars. The conside is that we are
building these effiges to capitalism,
these giant GPU data centers, and people
are being told, well, it's for AI, you
know, the thing that's done all this
other stuff that's unrelated. Or the
worst thing I've seen is like, oh, you
don't like you like online banking.
Well, you do like data centers. There's
a big difference between a data center
for regular nonGPU compute for standing
up a server, a content delivery system
like Akami or something that brings the
website to you or how Meta runs
Facebook. That is not the same. It takes
way less power, mostly CPUdriven
compared to these giant GPU data centers
that offer one thing, one thing only.
>> But I was doing the the research and
looking at some of these notes here. It
does say that for tougher types of AI
systems designed to solve concrete
physics, biology, and spatial problems,
they require some of the most intense
data center infrastructure on the
planet.
>> AI systems like Deep Mind's AlphaFold,
the protein folding company
>> used for genomic sequencing and climate
forecasting, etc. run on high
performance computing clusters. These
require immense precision and continuous
heavy computing data centers.
>> Yeah. Training the brains for
self-driving cars requires billions of
miles of simulated physics environments.
The AI isn't generating text. It's
learning to navigate 3D spaces and
gravity and relies on data centers,
>> right? And the thing is those data
centers, they might have GPUs in them.
We had GPUs used for this HPC, the high
performance computing before generative
AI. And yeah, that's how AI has been
trained before. That's how Tesla did.
believe they've had their own data
centers when it comes to training the
autopilot system for better or for
worse. That's how we've done it before.
Again, that is not why we're building
these data centers. These data centers
are being built to sell to AI generative
AI companies to either train systems or
run inference. These things are being
built in this brainless way where it's
just well actually maybe this is a good
way of illustrating the con because
everyone saw Google, Microsoft, Amazon
and Meta give Nvidia over call it 800
something billion dollars
because everyone saw that they went well
they wouldn't do that for no reason.
They went we got to build more of these
things. There must be all this demand.
Even though the demand 70% or more of
all that demand comes from these two
companies who were funded by these three
companies and that's the funny thing.
The reason that they don't want to break
out their AI revenues is because it will
become alarmingly obvious that this was
the case. It turns out that the only
real big customers cuz it's not like
they're building a few data centers.
They're building trillion plus revenue
potential. They believe they'll get
speculative. It's entirely speculative.
They're building it because they saw the
biggest companies in the world buy a
bunch of GPUs and they said, "I want in
on that." They must have diverse
customers, right? They wouldn't just
have two unprofitable fail sons that
they're propping up with. Christ,
they've raised $217 billion just in
2026.
>> So, we know that some of the biggest
companies in the world are using AI,
generative AI to write a lot of their
code.
>> Mhm.
>> That is a great productivity gain for
those companies, right? I mean, have you
used Google or Facebook or Instagram or
GitHub recently because they are
catastrophically worse? Amazon Web
Services went down multiple times
because of their AI coding tool. How
>> how is how is Google worse?
>> Well, I'll tell the story of a real
guy called Preaggo Ragavan.
Previously, one of the heads of ads at
Google in 2019, Google called something
called a code yellow, which is when they
said, "We've got a problem." And it was
material weakness in query numbers which
means the amount of times that people
were searching on Google search. Guy
called Ben Gomes internal at Google then
the head of Google search says wait a
minute to increase this number of using
Google more.
>> Mhm. We're going to have to I mean you
what you're suggesting would mean we
give worse answers because if someone
got the answer quickly that would reduce
the amount of queries right and people
at Google Shashi Tako was another
engineer was saying yeah can we please
tell Sunda this because this doesn't
seem good. We can't just increase the
amount of queries. That would just mean
that people would have to search more
which would make the product worse.
>> But but it would make them more money.
You saying you'd show them more ads. So
if you're spending more time on Google
because Google's work,
>> but is this linked to AI doing code?
>> Oh, I'll get there. So
>> this is the problem is is that this guy
called Pragar Ragavan who's the head of
ads at the time was pushing pushing and
saying, "No, we need to make more
queries happen. Got to make it happen."
and Nick Fox who was there as well I
believe was actually taking over Google
search got to make them go up this is
our new reality sometime in early 2020
propagar ragavan takes over Google
search from then and this is this is
what I believe can't prove it if you go
and look around the various SEO sites
such journal and the various forums
Google stripped back a lot of the
suppression of spammy sites so that
people would be on Google more and then
over the course of time Google wanted to
create more queries and Google search
became much worse. It's why people
always do like plus Reddit or from
Reddit or what have you. It's because
the actual underlying search results of
Google had got worse. And then
Generative AI came along and Praagar,
wouldn't you know, it gets put to run
part of Gemini. And Google also was
having trouble getting people back on
Google. And what did they think they'd
do? Well, everyone's talking about
this AI thing. We'll just put it right
at the top so people have to stay at
Google. And actually, they'll use it
more because instead of searching
websites and doing that annoying thing
where they click away from Google,
they'll just only use Google. Instead of
generating answers, by which I mean
giving you search results you click
through, now Google is the answer. Is it
right? God know. It might tell you to
eat rocks, might eat poisonous
mushrooms. Maybe it'll give you a little
few links you could click through. But
the ideal situation was that AI was the
ultimate form of Google's evil which was
>> But I'm saying here I'm saying here but
that's not the fact that coders could
code on Google that's made Google worse.
That's human decisions have made it
worse.
>> Yes. And then there's the instability of
Google's platform which is actually I
should have probably led with that a
problem across the whole tech industry.
>> Okay. So you're saying that you're
saying Google is going down more.
>> Yes. Google is less stable. Google Docs
is a bugfest right now and has been for
a while. Google Sheets, same deal. And
the thing is, you're right, I'm being a
little unfair. This is everyone. It's
the same with Microsoft. It's the same
with Amazon. It's the same across.
>> How do we quantify that outside of
anecdotes? Like, is there a way to
>> You're right. I mean, GitHub downtime is
the best example. Amazon Web Services
went down two or three times this year
because of AI tools. And honestly,
you're right. It is kind of hard to
quantify outside of anecdotes. But I
challenge anyone listening to this. Go
and use a website these days and tell me
how well it works. Tell me how buggy it
is. Tell me how many problems even with
my iPhone. The supposed best UX in town.
Even the iPhone is a flipping mess these
days.
>> Okay, so the research says the short
answer is yes. Tech downtime and
software outages have demonstrabably
increased over the last few years and
industry data points directly to the
explosion of AI assisted coding as a
primary culprit. The problem is hitting
the tech industry from two entirely
different directions. The code itself is
getting buggier and the sheer volume of
AI activity is literally crashing the
underlying infrastructure. Interesting.
>> Yeah, that's because GitHub people are
just writing a bunch of code, pushing
it, and thus there's just more code on
there.
>> That's interesting.
>> Yeah, it's it's a real mess as well
because
open source has had this problem as well
because it's well-meaning people.
They're like, I learned a bit of code
with an LLM. I'm going to go out and do
some stuff. I'm going to make this
project better. And these people barely
understand what they're shipping. Or
maybe they understand a bit of code and
they say, "Oh, Dunning Krueger, this
I'm going to I'm just
like, I can understand some of this."
And now the code's all written and just
push it right now. So GitHub is flooded
with AI code.
>> This sounds like it's making humans
complacent.
>> It is
>> because we're going, "Okay, look, I let
it write the the code for the last 100
lines and it was broadly right. So the
next 100 lines, I won't check them as
much."
>> Yeah. Yeah. And that's human nature is
to get sort of to take shortcuts to
spend less energy on an activity if you
can right but the AI's still making the
mistake and we're still making all the
promises of AI that's the thing this
thing is meant to be this autonomous per
you say it can't be perfect I don't know
based on what Samman has been saying for
the last few years clammy Sammy has been
promising the world saying this will
replace software engineers Dario
Ammedday Wario himself has been saying
oh yeah 50% of white collar labor is
going to go away in the next few years.
These people are promising the world.
Again, if they were saying it would be
smaller and they were like, yeah, it
does have issues and we must be none of
this, oh, what if it wakes up and it's
super powerful. Just like, yeah, it's
probabilistic. It's going to make
mistakes and if you don't know what
you're doing, you don't really know what
you're looking at, you're going to miss
those mistakes and it's going to get
multiplicatively worse as you go when
you don't know what you're doing. So
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>> I sat here with Dra from Uber and he was
saying that I think in a couple of years
time
we won't need drivers um for Uber
because the cars will drive themselves
like they'll be fully autonomous.
>> And I think if I'm not mistaken
driving is one of the biggest
professions on planet earth. So when you
hear people when you hear these CEOs
saying that there will be job disruption
>> you say that they are not telling the
truth.
>> Yes. Or they're guessing in a way that's
very good for them. Think about it from
perspective of Microsoft Sachin Nadella.
He's not going to be like yeah we don't
know if this is going to work mate. Of
course he's going to talk his book and
he's going to say yeah this is going to
replace all workers. It's going to be
amazing. He it's going to be so
powerful. And then he'll change his tune
and say actually it's not going to
replace workers. that make him more
powerful because the things aren't
catching up. Dor from Uber for example,
of course he's going to say if this
happens then that would be good for Uber
because Uber would just become an
autonomous taxi service. There's a
reason that Whimo's taken I I find Whimo
fascinating. I think that it's
really cool. I think there are
socioeconomic problems that will come
from it. I think there are actual real
problems that will emerge and also
>> what kind of problems?
>> Well, I mean socioeconomically there are
like you said one of the largest
employment centers in the world. I mean
just the economics of cabs will fall
apart but again we are nowhere nowhere
nowhere near that. We're not even close.
Whimo has had to do the smallest
rollouts and the most control things
because the problem with pretty much
every AI system but especially driving
is not the getting 95% of the way. It's
those edge cases. It's raining which is
a big problem for them in San Francisco.
It's a kid runs across the road but
they're wearing a high viz thing. Does
it even notice it's a child? Again, this
is a really interesting but very very
applicable example of uh the right
comparison to be made shouldn't be
autonomous vehicles versus perfection.
It should be autonomous vehicles versus
human drivers. I mean, I don't know if I
agree because a human driver might make
mistakes, sure, but again, not an expert
in autonomous cars. Just want to be
clear. But if we're pushing autonomous
cars out there willy-nilly and we're not
doing so in extremely controlled
environments, those edge cases will
multiply and be dangerous. Yeah, they
might be better at human drivers in some
ways, but they might also I was in Vegas
the other day and I was in a hotel and I
watched a bunch of Zuk's cars just get
stuck.
>> They're autonomous cars.
>> Yeah, they these weird boxy things. They
just blocked the exit. They just all
kind of lined up and just fell asleep. I
saw the same thing actually happen
outside of a hotel when I got out of a
Whimo in San Francisco. Just stopped at
the and then a bunch of cars and another
Whimo got stuck behind it. And these are
kind of
>> I've seen some human bad drivers as
well. I I agree, but it's just we have
control over deploying these bad or good
drivers. We have an ability to roll them
out slowly, which is exactly what we
should do. I'm not saying autonomous
cars are bad. I'm saying we need to be
so so so careful and treat them as
guilty and pro till proven innocent
because we can prove and also they have
people overlooking them. They actually
have people monitoring the roots. It is
something they cannot rush out and it
doesn't seem like they're rushing it,
which is good. and they're not promising
the world.
>> I do agree. Listen, I I'm a big fan of a
big fan of taxi drivers generally in
part because I spend a lot of time in
taxis and I think I'm not just getting
in there because I want to get to from A
to B. I'm getting in there for lots of
other reasons.
>> However, when I look at the stats
>> around what is more dangerous
>> driving myself or having an autonomous
vehicle drive me, there's an 68% lower
overall crash involvement rate when
you're in an an autonomous vehicle. Mhm.
>> Autonomous vehicles experience roughly
2.1 police reported crashes per million
miles compared to humans that are at
roughly 4.68 per million miles. So, a
55% reduction when you get in an
autonomous vehicle. And autonomous
vehicles show an 80 to 81% reduction in
crashes resulting in injuries versus
human drivers.
>> So, you're 85% less likely to be
involved in a single vehicle crash like
hitting a wall or a tree if you're an
autonomous vehicle
>> versus being driven by I agree. But
>> so it's safer
>> in also that data is what's the sample
size of human drivers? I mean we've got
many many many many many many more years
of drivers and many many many more years
of accidents and also man does that not
have anything to do with generative AI.
If we were just talking about that be
having a different conversation.
>> I guess the question here was really
around job disruption. Like you know we
we look across industries and we go
driving is a massive profession. Is
there going to be job disruption because
cars can now drive themselves? If we
think about white collar, you know,
jobs, you know, lawyers and accountants,
people sit here and they tell me that
lawyers and accountants would the
profession, right? I should say some of
the skills within the profession will be
relegated to AIS to do.
>> Here's the thing. Lawyers, for example,
great example. Always hearing
legal partners talking about AI. Never
the associates. The associates are the
ones that go out and find the president.
They're the ones that go and do the
grunt work. They're the ones who are
pulling motions half the time. The
partner is the one that might be the
litigant. It may be the client facing,
but the ones that are actually doing the
day-to-day work. I'm not hearing from
them. I'm not hearing associates being
like, "This is awesome." I'm
hearing a bunch of well- paid people
that have sat on Chat GPT and gone,
"Yeah, yeah, I'm the greatest lawyer
ever." They're not the ones that I want
to hear from the actual workers. White
collar labor disruption is not
happening. Open AAI had a study that
came out I think like a week ago that
said there was no corre connection
between spending on AI tokens and
revenue per employee. Like this is open
and that's
>> what does that mean? Could you explain
that to me?
>> As in the more tokens you spend has no
no correlation at all with the amount of
money you make. It's the second report
they've put out. The other one was like
hallucinations are mathematically
guaranteed kind of almost the one thing
I respect about that company that
occasion they just put out a study. It's
like, yeah, kind of sucks.
[clears throat] But the people that are
having their lives disrupted work-wise
are art directors. It's people, art
directors, transcribers, translators,
who have bosses that don't care about
the output. It's what they consider
cheap work. And the problem is is those
people would have automated your work
away anyway. They would have sold it.
They would have taken the cheapest for
they would have sold it to the global
self. They would have taken the
shittiest option they could. That is
something that AI is doing. And again,
those people are not paying the actual
cost of AI. They're using a
subscription. The actual white collar
labor force might have some things that
are slightly changing, but there is no
evidence of like productivity gains. In
fact, if there were, they would be
screaming it from the rooftops. There
was an Oxford economics study last year
where it's like, oh, young people are
finding less jobs because of AI. We
actually read the study, which multiple
journalists did not. It was a single
line that said, "Yeah, we saw some
correlation." Didn't give a number.
Didn't actually say what the correlation
was. We are so conditioned to believe
that the rich and powerful know what
they're doing that we internalize these
narratives about like, well, previous
booms lost a lot of money. Well,
technology takes time to do stuff. And
they are intentionally playing on those
mythologies. They are playing on these
knowing that journalists, analysts,
investors will believe them. And this is
partly because our our realities are
defined by stock prices. Because the
stock prices of these companies went up,
we're like, "Oh, look, it must be
working, right?"
>> Both of those things you said were true,
though, right? Like that previous
technologies didn't make money at the
start and you The other one you said was
um they'll get better.
>> But that's the thing. Okay. Because
another thing got better, this will get
better.
>> No, but there's there's got to be
something that they're saying that is
fundamentally not true because those are
two true statements that okay,
technology often starts
>> I know. I get what you mean. What they
are fundamentally misleading people
about is how possible it is. How many
actual signs they have because they
don't have the signs. If they had the
signs as in the signs of this getting
cheaper as in the signs of this being
able to autonomously do work without the
Rub Goldberg machine and even then in a
reliable way that was making the
customer more money being productive in
a way you can say with your whole chest
without a series of asterisks and that's
how it is across the board. The people
that are most excited about this,
psychopaths on Twitter in many cases are
people that I believe there really are
some I'm sorry, there are some people on
Twitter because the other thing about
this is this is really unique to the AI
industry. I've never seen it any other
industry outside of maybe like sports
teams. The attachment that some people
online have to these companies. If you
dare dare to criticize anthropic, it's
almost this religious attachment. Good
example was this week Bloomberg reported
that OpenAI was on track to hit $40
billion in annualized revenue. Month
times 12, four weeks times 13, we don't
know. They don't define it. I saw
multiple people and I going actually
it's 60 billion. It's actually 60
billion. I heard from someone it is like
a cult and it's a cult of software
driven around growth and this idea that
by backing the right horse you will have
some grand thing and open AI in
particular in particular Mr. Baltman
they have been fermenting this that Tibo
as well the Tibbo the one of the guys at
uh OpenAI they ferment this thing online
they build this kind of parasocial
relationship with both the large
language model themselves and the
companies and one's allegiance to the
companies is so important it's truly
vile if only these people gave a
about I don't know Medicare for all or
poverty or thing like actual problems in
the world versus are we buying enough
GPUs Do you know what's interesting is
some of what your narrative
one would argue actually helps them.
How? Because you know the AI doomers
that have come here and told you know
some of the original founding fathers of
AI like Jeffrey Hinton have told me that
what they're building is highly highly
dangerous and that it will be
fundamentally disruptive to society. And
it's interesting because some of the
CEOs who you've mentioned, their
historical narrative was also, by the
way, this is really dangerous
and there is a significant chance it
could f we could up the planet.
>> And what we've seen is this slow pivot
away from it because now they're getting
booed and they're being attacked.
There've been this slow pivot away from
it. And the pivot almost sounds a little
bit like your narrative.
>> It now sounds like actually no, it's not
going to change anything and you're all
going to be fine. And it's now there's
just not it's nah it's not dangerous at
all.
>> But that's the funny thing
>> and that's why I'm saying like you're
you're not they I actually think there
might be a couple PR people at these big
AI companies thinking thank god for Ed
some [laughter] of it because you're
like you're saying actually don't worry
everything's going to be fine. It's not
going to take your job. It's not going
to disrupt the economy. It's just a fad.
There's no technology. And I think they
don't think that.
>> Here's the thing. I think Alman and
Amday are some of the most deeply
corrupt and cynical people in the world.
I don't think of course they were going
to say from the it was early 2023 or man
said we're a little bit scared about
what we're creating. Oh, shut up. I'm
just I hear that and I feel so
frustrated because I've met so many of
these rich liars, these people.
And you know why he wants to say that?
So you'll invest in his company and buy
the software. So you'll be scared that
if you don't use AI today, you'll be
left behind in the future, which is
their continual narrative that if you
don't get on the train today,
then you'll be left behind. By the way,
every single scam and con starts with
rushing you. Every single trick in
history begins with saying you must do
this now. And best piece of advice I
ever got was if anyone tries to rush you
and it's not literally a mortal thing
like you are bleeding or on fire or the
house is on fire, slow down. And yet all
of these companies saying it's so scary.
And now they're talking about slowdowns.
But you ever noticed that Amade and
Ortman, they say, "Oh, maybe we should
slow down progress." And then they
don't. Right now, Orman's saying, "Oh,
we slow down progress because we're so
delayed." No, they're out of compute.
Now, they're doing it. I can guarantee
you, by the way, their PR people do not
like me. I know for I know I don't think
OpenAI's PR people are super fond of me.
>> But I bet there's elements of what
you're saying because you're calming
people. You You are theoretically
calming down the general public.
>> And you know what? I hope I am because
>> the fear based tactics is horrible.
These companies don't want that. These
companies want people scared. I'm 100%
sure.
>> Uh I don't I just fundamentally
disagree. I think it
>> can I so the timelines there and I sit
here and what I do is I log their quotes
over time
>> and I read them out from 2015
>> to 2026 and the change you see is them
going from there could be extinction
that's the narrative the early narrative
Elon said it himself he says it's the
single most dangerous thing in
>> Elon and then you track it over time and
it evolves to this age of abundance
we're all going to have unlimited stuff
and then um the the new slogan at
trackbt is intelligence for everyone.
It's suddenly and all the and and
whenever Daario comes out and says, "By
the way, it's really dangerous."
They attack Daario. Yeah. They hate him.
>> That man [laughter] Daario is
>> They're like, "Dario, shut the up."
>> Honestly, I I've been saying Dario, shut
the up for years. But it's But the
thing is, I get your point where it's
like I don't think they've changed to
calm the public down so much as they're
desperate to not get regulated, which is
laughable. We don't regulate tech. We
don't regulate America doesn't
regulate We are in the We are
still trapped in the hands of Milton
Freriedman, Margaret Thatcher, and
Ronald Reagan. We're still stuck
in the neoliberalistic hellscape, which
is growth at all cost, free market
capitalism. So, no, no one's regulating
the regulation of these companies should
have been, I don't know, breaking up.
Put these bastards to the side. Break up
these for sure. We shouldn't
have companies this big. It makes things
>> But these technologies are dangerous.
>> I mean, they're dangerous, but not in
the ways they've been warning about.
Let's if we think about cyber hacking,
>> right? And just to be clear, those cyber
hacking things that happened were not a
result of they were like break out of
the sandbox and then they set the
sandbox up wrong. They set up the server
they were on wrong. But I mean, you
know, advanced AI models could very
easily cuz they can go out onto the open
internet as agents. They could very
easily go and look at code bases of
different websites, find vulnerabilities
and exploit those vulnerabilities.
>> Yeah. in at scale and arguably um at a
higher intelligence and faster and wider
than humans a human hacker could
theoretically. So that's dangerous.
>> Well, here's the funny thing. We don't
know how much compute was spent to do
the hugging face attack, the open AI
one. We also do know that they
improperly set up the server to keep it
in. They thought they'd turn the
internet off and they didn't. That's
human error. And that's human error in a
sense that yeah, they threw about an
indeterminately large amount of compute.
This is dangerous, but people keep
saying we can't let the the Chinese get
a hold of these models. We couldn't
possibly because what if these models
fall into the wrong hands? They're
already in the wrong hands. Mark
Zuckerberg, Sam Olman, Dario Amade. The
wrong hands are the hands of those who
are running these companies. We should
not be training these models to do these
things. I don't know why the we're
doing it other than they've run out of
other things they can train on. There's
a ton. And the fact that they can do it,
it's kind of interesting. But you do
would you agree that it's an
intelligence and I'll call it that you
know you might disagree with that
terminology but an intelligence that can
go out onto the internet and click
around and take actions is inherently
there's risks associated with that. Well
the second part I agree with the risks
we've had people running automated
scripts hacking scripts for a while
we've had hackers doing that for years
and years and years. This is brute
forcing it with a bunch of compute and
yet it is dangerous. These companies are
doing something dangerous. That is not
what Jeffrey Hinton at have been warning
about. They've been saying, "Oh, these
things could destroy society. They could
manipulate people." When you actually
look at the underlying things, not so
much. Jeffrey Hinton as well talking his
book still got his Google stock, I
think. And weirdly enough, he left
Google because he was worried about the
AI there, but then immediately made a
comment being like, "Yeah, actually
though, Google's very responsible."
Strange thing. But let's get back to the
the cyber security side. I agree this is
dangerous. These people should not have
access to so much comput. They clearly
don't know what to do with it. There's a
really easy way of dealing with this.
It's not letting them use so much
compute. It's regulating that part out
of existence. What if the Chinese do it?
The Chinese were able to distill the
models. And also,
I don't know, regulate it and stop I I
feel like with this particular thing as
well, we got to this point and let the
genie out of the bottle to use an
annoying Samman term. We let this happen
because we let these companies be
unregulated and use as much computers we
want. We had these enablers
allowing them to burn as much computers
as they want. And also we for all of
these dire warnings about AI dangers, no
one seems to have done anything.
>> Okay, we're going to play a game, Ed.
>> Let's play it.
>> On these cards here,
>> I have the things that you consider to
be myths about the AI industry.
>> The challenge is I want you to give me
one sentence.
on each myth.
>> Oh, Christ.
>> So, just your first reaction. You're
going to pick it up, you're going to
read it,
>> and then you're going to give me one
sentence on your opinion of that
>> um belief.
>> Okay, let's go.
>> So, let's do this.
>> What does it say in your says the the AI
industry is creating enormous economic
growth?
>> No, it's not. It's nowhere in the data.
>> Okay. [laughter] Like, it's just May I
do a second sentence?
>> Go ahead. pretty much all of the
economics is either Nvidia feeding money
to it companies like Corewave or these
three companies feeding money to these
ones to spend it with the them.
>> Okay. And what evidence do you have that
there's it's not causing economic
>> Just to be clear, other than the spend
on semiconductors, so the speculative
investment in GPUs and data center
infrastructure that's happening, but as
far as like spend on AI goes, barely
cracking hundred billion. And most of
that is just these two running their
services and paying these three
companies, Oracle, Core, and others.
>> But a hundred billion is a lot of money
for a relatively new technology.
>> Not when you've spent $300 billion in
equity funding. And it if we're going
with just these three, I think $600
billion in capital expenditures.
>> Yeah, I get that. That means it's not
profitable. But the hundred billion is
an expression of consumer demand
>> when the compute is mostly driven by
subscriptions that subsidized. No, it's
not. When you're giving someone $20 or
$40 for a dollar, they're going to use
it more. If this was all on a per
million token basis, we'd be having a
different conversation.
>> Okay, fair. Fine. Cool. Next one.
>> The United States need to spend
trillions to beat China in the AI race.
Let's see.
What AI race?
That's actually That's actually my
point. It's what AI race is there. Is it
to make big scary LLMs? They they did
that already without the Nvidia GPUs. By
the way, they've got Blackwell GPUs.
Kakashi and Jastario, two amazing
analysts I love. They've been on this
for years. It's like China's already had
Nvidia GPUs that they're not meant to
have for years. But also to do what?
They already got the LMS. What What's
the race to do? To make us spend more
money than them? For us to constantly
piss our pants worrying about China?
Because u they won if that's the case.
Myth number three, AI will replace all
human jobs.
that just isn't happening and there's no
economic data to support it.
>> Will it replace some jobs?
>> I mean, it's replaced some contract
labor that would otherwise be replaced
with cheap labor out in the global
south. It's a digital globalization in
that sense, but all jobs, most jobs, a
lot of jobs. No.
>> What about robotics?
>> Robotics is not what we're talking
about. Robotics is a very different
thing. And even then,
>> robotics will be powered by AI.
>> I mean, yes, but there are tons of
different kinds of AI. We're talking
explicitly about generative AI. And
that's what I this mythbusters piece
that was definitely about generative AI.
>> Okay. But what about robotics? Like the
thing is the Optimus robot that Elon's
working on at Tesla.
>> The one where even in the demo of the
hand he like they had to have a guy
controlling it. Wasn't doing it
autonomously. Here's the thing. If they
can beat all these challenges, yeah,
robotics would be really cool. I don't
know how long that's that's one I'd
actually be willing to believe in a
couple decades.
>> Have you seen them ch them Chinese
robots? I know you've seen them. the
uni, what's it called? The one that can
dance and that, but they can't really do
human things.
>> Well, it's just it is pretty
mindblowing.
>> Robotics are cool. I like I'm
not going to pretend. I don't think
robots are cool. I wish they were
building robots and actually doing cool
I wish the tech industry still
made fun stuff and interesting stuff.
Instead, we get these large
language models. But with AI plus
robotics is, you know, I was in San
Francisco and I went to this massive um
incubator there. And when I'd gone there
three years earlier, it was all software
startups, right? And when I went back
three years later, it was all these
robot startups. And I remember saying to
the founder of the incubator, I was
like, "Why is everything robots now?"
There was this one robot where it was
just the arm and it had a frying pan on
it. Yeah.
>> And it whole thing is it cooks for you.
>> So it was he was showing me it cooking
whatever. And he goes, "Well, you know
the arm." He goes, "The the hardware
part, the physical parts,
>> that's always been fairly cheap." Yeah.
>> He goes, "The expensive part was the
intelligence. And now that's come down
to pennies." So what you're seeing is
this explosion in the robotics industry
because robotics is a function of
intelligence plus hardware. We've always
had the
>> and a ton of data though as well and the
data is very expensive.
>> The thing is cyber cabs rolled out real
slow. It's going to take a long time. It
could be a threat if they do a robot
that could replace a human job. Sure it
could. But that human jobs are
multifaceted. Human jobs change with
environments. And also a lot of human
jobs that you might think of like I
don't know dishwashing robot for
example.
some guy at a restaurant isn't paying 10
20 grand for a robot to replace the job
that they're already not paying enough
for. The point is, yeah, it could if you
can replace the jobs. That is not what
we're talking about with this.
>> Yeah. I I just I just I ask these
questions not because I'm trying to be
like I actually I'm trying to form my
own opinion on these things and
>> I I do think, you know, as it's written
there, it says AI will replace all human
jobs. Obviously not. Obviously, that's
Yeah.
>> But um I'm trying to figure out if the
truth is somewhere in the middle that
there's a certain type of job which
actually humans probably shouldn't have
ever been doing really.
>> Um if you think back through history,
there was someone's job just to sit in
an elevator and press the buttons.
>> That's an example of a job that humans
probably shouldn't have been doing. And
as technology gets more advanced, it
takes on a lot of that
>> sort of automated monotonous stuff.
>> Right? The thing is with this particular
thing that I know that this is from,
it's a specific blog I wrote. I was
explicitly talking about generative AI
though. I was explicitly [clears throat]
talking about people when they say this
they are referring to that.
>> So you're not talking about agentic AI
which is
>> agentic AI is LLMs. Agentic AI is just a
fancy way of saying an LLM talking to
another LLM with a harness on top. That
is still LLM. Agentic AI is one of the
big the bigger lies they to tell. It's
like when you hear agent you're meant to
think autonomous AI can do what you
want. It's still LLMs. It's still LM
talking to other LMLs
>> taking screenshots and putting them in
LLM and stuff.
>> Oh god. Yeah.
>> Okay. But but you know I could I could
make the case that
I'm just thinking about my personal
usage. I definitely use agents to do
things that I would have previously
asked people to do. It's not to say that
I didn't I still don't hire cuz we're
hiring like crazy.
>> And I still in that particular function.
I'm thinking about like the chief of
staff role. So my chief of staff would
have triaged all of my inboxes
previously and put them somewhere and
told me about them or maybe once upon a
time shown me a piece of paper back in
the day. I guess now my chief of staff
is no longer doing that job. You still
have a chief of staff though.
>> This is what I'm saying. They're doing
other things,
>> right? But the thing is again what you
were describing is
fairly basic automation. I don't know
what the tasks are triaging.
>> Basic spend a trillion dollars on
triaging email. Like that's the the
promise. If they'd spent $10 billion and
this was much smaller and you I go cool
software. Yay. A lot of the things that
people are impressed with like script
stuff as well. It's just LM's doing
Python. You should be impressed by
Python code. Python's incredible. You
can scrape websites. You can download
It's awesome. But the point I'm
making is none of this would be anywhere
near as much of a problem if they didn't
ask for all of the attention, all of the
money, and promise the world. It's their
promises that are the problem. And the
journalists who went along with it, and
the analysts and the Twitter people who
went along with this, saying that this
would change everything and replace
everything and leaving the realm of
reality. Is there any technological
innovation through history that was
really, really game-changing where that
didn't happen?
I mean
the internet
>> I mean people overpromised that
>> I mean they overpromised on the
businesses but I've read through a great
many pieces about the early internet a
lot of people were excited but hesitant
they were worried that there was not
enough demand but they were still like
oh yeah this could have potential
ramifications if it happened. People
were not super negative about the
internet. A lot of the skeptics were
saying we're worried about an overload
of bad information. Look at where we
are. A lot of people were worried about
the social consequences of everyone
talking online, which they were correct
about. With the economic things, they
were specifically talking about like the
globe, which I think made hundreds of
thousands of dollars and had like a I
think a billion dollar market cap, but
they were talking.
>> Yeah, there was massive hype in the com
era.
>> I read a lot of those stories. The hype
was nowhere in it. You didn't have
articles everywhere that were saying if
you don't get online, you'll be left
behind. You didn't have professional
consequences. Nick Sesh mentioned his
blog earlier. He described this thing
global uh AI sisterating global
decision-m where he said that you have
businesses you work at where if you
don't say that you're more productive
with AI whether or not it's true is
irrelevant you have professional
consequences you can get fired there are
people having to AI wash their jobs by
saying AI did it otherwise their bosses
who don't do will get mad at them
this did not happen with the internet it
was not present and part of the thing is
social media was not like it is today
the kind of uh was it decentralization
of media in general has caused this as
well and also the fact of day trading
there's so many different things that
are different it's crazy
>> I I do think AI is different from the
internet in part if you just measured it
on the speed of adoption especially if
we just think about generative AI AI
>> but the this adoption of the internet
required physical connections to your
house the adoption of generative AI
involves having a web browser it took a
vast amount of effort to bring internet
to people Even with dialup connections,
it still required the distribution
>> and that's why it was so slow and there
was less, you know, there was less hype
than AI. I do agree that there's way
more hype and we again going back to
this point that we're clustering AI in
this big category of lots of different
things.
>> There's generative AI.
>> There's generative AI. There's like real
world AI.
>> Generative AI is explicitly what I'm
talking about here. When bosses are
saying you need to use AI, they're not
saying I need you to go and buy a
Unibeam robot. They're saying use LLM so
that I and that's the thing. They have
this theory, the era of the business
idiot where it's like we are ruled by
people that don't do work because nobody
who actually does a bunch of work who
really is productive is harassing
someone who works for them for not being
productive enough.
>> They're not they don't have the time.
They're doing work. Someone who is
sitting there with the ingratiation
machine that's telling them that every
beautiful idea out of their messy little
skull is amazing. Yeah. They're going,
"Damn, this thing says I'm a genius. Why
are you not using the genius machine to
do more work?" And yeah, if you're a
boss that goes to lunch, leaves lunch,
and sometimes reads your emails, LM are
magic.
>> I, you know, one of the most compelling
arguments I have for the overhype of AI
>> in a world where everybody has access to
these tools, whatever the
[clears throat] tools can do, would
largely be commoditized. What the tools
can't do, which one could say is the
human taste, judgment, you could say
it's people, skills, whatever you want
to say, is now going to be the valuable
thing because the scarce and the hard
becomes the most valuable through
history and the commoditized becomes the
least valuable. So the very nature that
we're commoditizing, the generation of
content or whatever you want to call it,
code means that's actually not where the
value will acrue as for the user. And
actually if you think about what it
takes to now make something that is
objectively great if an AI can do it
then it's not the the great thing is not
of value.
>> So so I think a lot I've been thinking a
lot actually about how
>> how do you um avoid the temptation of
sloppification of the things you make
the value you put into the world. It's
very simple example that people will be
able to relate to. If you use chat GBT
or anthropic, you know, Claude to make
your LinkedIn posts, let's say,
>> they will be LinkedIn posts because
everybody else is using them. And
actually, a great LinkedIn post now is
someone who doesn't use them and makes
something that's like irreplaceably
human,
>> And deeper and more personal N of one
lived experience.
>> All these things that AI can't do. And I
think that's a compelling argument that
actually the commodity tools produce
commodity outcomes. So everyone has
access to these things and what's
changed? Like really like what
>> the slopification we've we've got a
bunch of slop but these people were
halfassing their jobs before. It's just
a halfass arcery machine and it's just
it's it's the thing. It's what I'm
talking about with the slot blogs. It's
like it's it yeah people that gave you
dog before have now got the dog
machine to pump out dog It's
so there's a guy called Carl Brown uh
internet bucks. Awesome guy. Great
software engineer. He he said I might
have said this earlier. So, it makes the
easy things easy, the hard things
harder. When you know you're doing a
really distinct small script for
something and it can plop that out. It's
awesome. I used Claude the other day for
something useful. My kid loves
Minecraft. I was trying to fix a
broken mod cuz he loves his wither
storm. It's awesome.
>> And it still took me half an hour and
kept getting things wrong. What do you
use AI for? Generative.
>> I really don't. I don't use it
>> with Bloomberg terminal. I use AskB,
which is just when it's like requesting
the consensus analyst estimates for
Nvidia,
>> but otherwise you don't use it.
>> No. So, how do you know it's bad? I've
used it. I've put it through its paces.
I've used it to try and do financial
models and found one error and
immediately be like, "Ah, I've never
been particularly impressed." The one
thing I will defend it on is it's really
good for like tech support. Like I have
this thing called Synergy in my New York
New York place I go to. I have this
monitor where I have a MacBook and a PC
laptop and this thing Synergy for using
the same mouse and keyboard.
>> Dropping a giant
troubleshooting log into this thing and
going, "What's wrong?" And it going,
"This is wrong." Yeah, super useful. Is
that trillion dollars? No. Is that a $2
trillion company? No. Pretty use.
>> Better than Google though, right? Better
than Google search.
>> I know. I mean, yeah. Remember,
>> do you use Google search still?
>> I try. I have to push the crap
out of the way. And
>> I can't remember the last time I did a
Google search.
>> Christ, I find myself using Bing
sometimes. I know. I hate saying it,
too. But I have to scroll past the AI
crap cuz I want the good stuff. I want
the I want the actual links to stuff so
that I can read the thing and go. But
you can ask the AI to give you the
links.
>> Yeah. And it doesn't do a particularly
good job. Like my
>> So say that the other day my iPad wasn't
turning on and it was doing this funny
little thing on the screen. You think
that it's better to type that into
Google than
>> Oh, no. I must be clear that may be the
only LLM use case I defend. The
troubleshooting thing is awesome for it.
I It's the the one weakness I have. It's
like genuinely being able to drop a log
into it. That's awesome. Again, that is
not what they're selling it as. They're
not selling it as a useful little tool.
They're selling it as the uh software as
the thing that will change everything
that will replace all jobs that will do
this and that. It's not like they sold
it as a quirky bit of software.
>> No, you are right. They are, you know,
telling us that it is going to replace
everything. But funnily enough, the
critics are saying that as well.
>> Which one I mean I mean
>> they are like the Jeffrey Hintons of the
world. you know, even people that have
left the safety team in chat who who
I've sat here with the these are critics
that are that are warning of the impacts
it's going to have on the world. It's
weird how all these critics also have
vested interest in AI doing well though.
Daniel, former open AI guy, AI 2027
written with the Star Codeex guy that
was nothing more than badly written
science fiction that he's already had to
walk back.
>> You know, he could have made more money
by staying at chat.
>> Could he?
>> I mean, looks like he lost
>> if he had options early. it sticking
around.
>> Did he lose the options? How much do
they
>> You're not saying that they're they're
being critical. They're not critical of
the companies themselves. They're not
critical of the stealing. They're not
critical of the environmental damage.
They're not critical of the fact that
you cannot rely on the answers. They're
critical of this big scary boogeyman out
in the future where it's like, "Oh, I'm
scared of when this becomes so powerful
and everyone should talk to me about how
scary and powerful it is." They're not
saying, "Hey, here are the harms today.
Here are the things we're actually
looking at today. Here are the social
problems of having this automated way of
spewing out slop, of filling our feeds
with crap, of having information that
will pop up that is presented even with
the little disclaimer thing of saying,
"Yeah, sometimes this gets wrong."
So, in the tiniest words possible, they
don't talk about the fact that these
things are trained on stealing millions
of people's work. But on that last point
where you say that it's going to get
progressively more intelligent and when
it does, it will be a danger.
>> Yeah. Would you agree with the statement
that artificial intelligence has gotten
more intelligent
if you measure it based on any sort of
measure of intelligence one might use?
>> It's got better on the tests that are
rigged for the models. It's got better
at tests where you can train for the
test.
>> Okay, so it's got better at
>> it's got better at tests that they're
intentionally trained for.
>> So if you logged the rate of improvement
on a graph, it would look something like
this,
>> You agree? in terms of what it's capable
of doing.
There we go. Yeah,
>> cuz it's not it's not got new features.
You'll notice that outside of OpenAI and
Anthropic the VA when you remove the
coding startups, there's basically no
successful AI startup company.
>> So, we agree that it's got better. It's
got more capable
at doing things.
>> Yeah. Okay. Over time, AI's got more
capable. If we imagine that trajectory
will continue, it will get more capable.
Then at some point it does cross you
know this is what they say to me it
crosses human intelligence and at such
>> will it not start to do some of the jobs
that people are doing today
>> outside of software engineering remove
software because I will concede software
engineering it's got better at that
outside of software engineering where
>> so the chief of staff things that admin
>> okay so it's got better admin video
generation photo generation
>> text generation theoretically coding
>> and then I'd say agentic workflows. So
>> what is an agentic workflow?
>> So automated workflows where you're
doing the same I mean a good example is
looking at the backend data of the dire
of a CEO
>> summarizing
>> looking at all of the data ingesting all
of it going out into the internet and
searching who Ed is
>> looking at every interview you've ever
done ever.
>> This is summarizing and generating
>> making a little model on you know the
things people want to know from Ed.
>> Producing a report sending that to my
inbox.
>> Me getting a 20 30 40 50page report on
Ed before he arrives.
>> This is all basically the same thing. I
think it's been doing for years though.
It's It's not really new capabilities.
>> Research. It's It's
>> still the same things. They've had web
search for years. They've had report
generation for years.
>> Well, we couldn't generate
highquality videos that are like
indistinguishable from cameras. Seed
dance and these ones that look like
movies.
>> I mean, they
>> are incredible.
>> So, I'm saying the point I'm trying to
make is that if we imagine that over the
last 10 years there has been a rate of
improvement in terms of capabilities and
output and quality. We've seen
hallucinations drop. We've seen the
models get more quote unquote
intelligent, get better at, you know, if
you did give it an IQ test, it's getting
higher scores than it was 10 years ago.
We agree that there's been a upward
motion of improvement.
>> This is pretty much how machine learning
goes when you feed it more data.
>> Exactly. And you put more compute behind
it. So if this continues,
what does the future look like? So the
rebuttal I was expecting to hear is that
it won't continue. And actually,
>> I actually don't think it I think that
there are hard limits that we're going
to hit. So you do believe in that
there's a hard limit somewhere.
>> We've kind of already hit the
diminishing returns level because for
example video generation which is by the
way far less an American concern
anymore. OpenAI shut down Sora. I think
you can still use the API but
nevertheless look at the look around you
with the amount of stuff in the crew you
need to get a shot. People think the
movies are just shot by shot by shot and
they just magically happen. When you've
got my my wonderful girlfriend of first
ads, assistant directors, you've got
gaffers, you've got lighters, and also
simulating light is insanely difficult.
There are so many magical things that
happen in creating visual images that
yeah, you could create a one minute long
thing that might fool someone. How do
you practically turn that into a movie?
Because that movie, I forget what the
name is. There was a movie that claimed
it aired at Can. It didn't. No one. It
aired in the city of Can during the Can
Film Festival. It was not at the film
festival. When it comes to the practical
creation of actual things at the end of
it versus magic tricks, the actual
practical outcomes are not there. The
reason I keep coming back to the
capabilities thing for the example is
yeah, they can do better at tests, do
better number go up. When it comes to
can this actually do distinct tasks you
can rely on it, you can rely on it for
summaries. You can rely on it for
generations. The things it was doing,
it's getting linearlyish better at. But
again, there's a ceiling to that. Like,
okay, so it gets really good at
research. What does that actually mean?
you've already kind of got the
automation there. What is the next step
of that? Because training it to be more
autonomous for example, that's not
something that comes from training data.
That is actually a new Gary Marcus a
neuros symbolic. You actually need to
build a structure around the AI to make
it work. And even then, it doesn't fix
the
>> So you're saying that there will become
a point where the rate of improvement
will plateau.
>> We're already there and stop.
>> We've already hit that diminishing. Gary
Marcus said this in 2022 as well. Do you
know there's lots of people listening
now that like they've had their
workflows completely transformed by
these tools? Have they?
>> There'll be people. Yeah, there are.
Yeah. The thing is, first of all, every
single one of them, did you pay for the
tokens? That's the thing. Did you pay
for the tokens? And also, how many
tokens did you burn? But putting all
that aside, what workflows? Because if
it's, yeah, I did a bunch of web
scraping or web searches. I'm just not
impressed. Did you make an entire
movie? No, you didn't. Is it
speeding up your coding? Yeah, I believe
that. I've heard that from multiple
people. But again, how much can you
trust this?
>> I think I'm I was getting at is, you
know, when in the moment of any
technological innovation, people they
extrapolate linearly or they view it as
a static state, i.e. they think today is
going to look like tomorrow or they
think it's going to get better in this
sort of straight line. But what we end
up seeing a lot of the time is this
exponential improvement. All of the
innovations we're talking about with you
with like with compute and all that with
fast processes, those are hardware
breakthroughs. The hardware breakthrough
companies don't seem to be fixing the
LLM problems despite the all the king's
horses, all the king's men with what
nine 10 generations of TPUs from Google
now. Broadcoms building stuff with open
AI, their halapeno chip. And yet none of
these people can just say, "Yeah, we're
on the path to making this profitable."
Because they can't. If we fix the
environmental problems and the
profitability situation, maybe I'd be
more generous with this stuff. But they
don't seem to be able to. And you talk
about these improvements and
capabilities. There's a certain point at
which I'm saying, "Okay, can it do even
a tenth of the stuff they're promising?"
Sam the other week was saying it
was going to be in like 6 months will be
like a genie that you can ask wishes for
from like never watched
Aladdin. What's he talking about? Like
also the the genie was charming. Anyway,
long story short, the promises do not
line up with the capabilities or the
capability improvements. An exponential
improvement
in software and software performance is
always a result of direct hardware
improvement. We have all the gifted
mathematicians, all the gifted software
engineers, all the gifted hardware
engineers. And where are we? Trillion
plus dollars in with the future great
financial crisis and the world's
greatest marketing scop.
>> I just think in the future I do think
that all of the devices and the
computers we use and the physical items
in our world will be more intelligent. I
mean sure but is that LLMs
>> and that will be powered by the
underlying AI infrastructure. It will be
the more data data centers. It will be
energy coming down.
>> How does a GPU full data center
translate to a Nikon camera that can I
don't know even what you'd think think
like because what is the thing we're
talking about here? Because the idea
that devices will get smarter. Sure, I
can see that. It's a very broad
statement. I could see it happening.
It's really kind of happening. What does
that have to do with the data centers?
Cuz these data centers again are not
being built to make your consumer
electronics smarter. They're not being
built for anything other than
speculating on the ability to capture
demand for generative AI services.
>> But it's not just generative AI. We went
through that earlier.
>> Yes. No, but those data centers, they
are being built for generative AI. They
are not being built for anything else.
Would you consider generative AI to be
the fact that on Meta's earnings call
like a couple of weeks ago, Mark
Zuckerberg said, "The big breakthrough
we've had, which has resulted in 15
basis points of increased retention, I
believe he was referring to Instagram,
is that we now take anything you post on
social media and we run it through an AI
to get full context of what it is." And
because we can see guy sat in front of
me called Ed with blue shirt and coffee,
we now can train the AI to serve whoever
wants blue shirt, Ed, and with coffee to
the right user, which means people are
retained longer because
>> it'sn't 15 basis points, like 0.15%.
>> Yeah, it's cool. But it makes a
difference at scale. It makes a big
difference at scale.
>> Yeah. But 10 and something billion
dollars in and the best you've got is
0.15%. If if he could be fight I mean
how much of a difference because
>> there's a reason he's saying basis
points versus dollars
>> because think about it like this if Mark
Zuckerberg was
>> I take your point about scale. No, I'm
saying the point I was making was that
that is another application of these
data centers because it needs a data
center that is driving revenues, but
also that's not out that's outside of us
thinking about just generating
>> and that's generative
model. Muse was it? Oh, Muse Spark is
their LLM. Gem is their generative ad
model. Well, Muse then then that's them
doing the weird thing where it's like on
Instagram and it's like Dave the cat.
Why is Dave the cat suffering? Like it's
the weird popup things. Meta is
god damn that company sucks. Like every
time I think about how they've ruined
that product. But that's the thing
though, again, why can't he just say
with his whole chest, we've made a
couple billion. Why can't he say that?
Because he isn't. Because there's not
actually a way of going, I spent all
this money. I spent 14 billion goddamn
dollars on scale Alexander Wong and I
made this much. They can't. It gets back
to a very simple point of, hey, if it
was going well, you'd tell me how well
it was going rather than, I don't know,
doing this weird rain dance thing where
you're like, well, if we move all the
pieces around in 3 years, theoretically,
this will happen.
I've done almost 700 interviews with
some of the most interesting people in
the world. And one of the things you
learn, which is unexpected, is that
vulnerability is the doorway to
connection. And after sitting here for 2
three hours with a guest, I feel a deep
sense of connection to them. And as they
leave, what I get them to do is to write
a question in the diary of a CEO. We've
taken all of the questions from the
diary of a CEO. We have put the question
here on this card with the name of the
person that wrote it. So you can sit at
home as I do with my fiance and my
colleagues at work and other people in
my life. Whenever we get a minute, we
play the diio conversation cards and it
is incredible what happens. These are
great if you're in a romantic
relationship and you want to connect
your partner more. These are also great
if you're in a team and you want to bond
your team together. And I have to say
they're also great for families that
want to learn more about each other and
that need a good excuse to spend some
time in a digital world in the analog
environment connecting human to human.
It is remarkable what the right question
at the right time can do. Go to the
diary.com
and you can get these conversation cards
right now. There should be a button just
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subscribed, you're already subscribed.
If it says subscriber, that means you're
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you know. And according to the
algorithm, you're someone that watches
our show, but you haven't yet hit that
button. Thank you so much. I do think
you're accurate and right when you talk
about the fact that there's a lot of
like is the word for gazy?
>> Where like there's a lot of people that
have spent a lot of money and they kind
of shouldn't have spent it and they
up and now they're thinking
like we've spent all this invested money
kind of like the metaverse was a bit of
a
>> oh my god that was a bit of a joke.
>> That's so weird.
>> A lot of money spent. We kind of thought
this dream was coming of this well I
shouldn't say dream cuz it's not a dream
I've had but
>> dream that they had.
>> Yeah. This sort of virtual world and
actually it never transpired and there's
no sign that it will in the near term.
AI and the dotcom boom in this regard
are the same. NFTTS were the same,
>> you know. So crypto, one could argue
that a lot of the crypto industry was
the same. It's weighing that is inflated
by the media. The difference is the
reason the metaverse and NFTs didn't
escape this was there weren't stocks to
speculate on. There weren't big
companies that you could invest in. They
had re record earnings in 2021. There's
a bunch of money floating in the system
thanks to postcoid uh the PDC that
basically government federal money
flowed in to the banks. There was a
bunch of easy money zero interest free
era money was easy to find. Then after
that there was the hangover. Growth
started to slow down dramatically. This
is actually my rockcom bubble theory
which is they don't have any hyperrowth
ideas anymore. So suddenly they started
buying GPUs. And when they bought GPUs
people went they're doing AI. Oh we
better buy the stock. And the stocks
went on an incredible run. may like
several hundred percent grow in the last
few years. the stock has grown by
hundreds of percent. Despite zero proof
and because the media was just saying,
"Yeah, Meta's revenues growing because
of AI, right? Microsoft's revenue is
grown because of AI, right? The fugazi
you're talking about was the fact that
everyone just gave them credit in
advance and now we're kind of getting to
the point where it's like, hey, you
didn't spend that trillion dollars for
no reason, did you? Satcha Amy Amy Hood
just going to take him out back, send
him to the glue factory or something?"
Like,
>> I do think there's overspending. I I
want to concede that but I doic
>> yeah no I do think there is and I think
the reason why there's overspending Ed
is I think there is something here
>> and what
>> in terms of like I think there is pra p
p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p
practical uses for this technology and I
think when people realize that through
history they go crazy because they want
to be the person that owns the
opportunity.
>> I'm going to be honest I just I
fundamentally don't agree.
>> You don't agree with which part you
>> I don't agree that this that the
speculation is a result of actual
demand. I don't believe it's suspect. I
don't think private credit is sinking
hundreds of billions of dollars into AI
because of actual demand. They are doing
it because they saw the biggest
companies in the world building data
centers making a ton of money from two
companies they feed money and went I
want some of that money.
>> I am saying that I do think there is
value in the underlying technology. I
think that and so I think I'm not saying
how much value
>> right okay I actually I get your meaning
that's fair.
>> I'm not saying it's proportionate to the
investment. All I'm saying is that do
you know what it's like? It's like if I
take your example, the rot economy essay
that you wrote.
>> Say that you're on a desert island and
then someone says they found a banana
tree,
>> And there's there's 10,000 people on the
island.
>> They are going to stam peed
towards where they think the banana tree
is. They are going to claw each
other to pieces. And if if your essay
here is right that there was desperation
cuz they hadn't found an innovation in a
while,
>> maybe that explains it. Maybe there is a
bit of value here,
>> And they're stam peeding and
killing each other and making irrational
decisions like hungry people would.
>> I actually think we're then we actually
agree. That is actually my point, which
is these three companies in Meta, their
main business lines are running out of
growth. There's only so much they can
grow. And indeed, in the next three and
a half years, analysts think that these
two bastards, these two, OpenAI and
Anthropic are going to spend over $400
billion on these people alone,
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. And the
crazy thing is is that's a large part of
their future growth. And if this money
isn't spent, their growth slows down.
Okay,
>> so your point about a bananas, I
actually agree. That is the rockcom
bubble, it's they don't have a new thing
and they're desperate. And indeed, they
got rewarded for buying the GPUs. They
got when they bought these goddamn GPUs
from Nvidia, all the markets went
rockard overnight. They loved it. There
were stories about how they were sending
armored cars with the GPUs to Microsoft
to make sure Microsoft got the GPUs. And
so everyone saw all that money flowing
in. Even though they never disclosed AI
revenues, they saw the expenditures and
they went, "Well, I want to do what
these people are doing. I want to get a
little of that money, don't I?"
>> I think the area where we have a slight
disagreement is that I think the
underlying technology has a lot more
promise over the long term than you do.
So the thing I want to push back on
there is
to have progress with AI just on a
taking it in a vacuum to have progress
for these two companies to keep going
and to keep progressing they need to
spend tens of billions of dollars a year
on training.
>> The only way that that can happen is if
these companies and venture capitalists
and private credit firms and Nvidia
>> keep circulating money to them. So the
progress
>> that we've got so far is entirely a
result of this circular system. So it
means that
>> circular you talked about VCs there
>> venture capitalists who are by the way
the majority of the funding that open
AAI got in the last 6 months came from
SoftBank Nvidia and Amazon
>> okay yeah
>> so just the point is is you're talking
about progress continuing progress in
LLM can only continue as long as the
money keeps flowing once the money keep
once the money stops flowing the
progress stops which
>> but isn't that most like early like
Spotify didn't make money for 20 years
>> Spotify didn't lose 20.9 9 billion in
one year. They didn't need to raise $217
billion in the space of 6 months.
>> Yeah. And Uber is another example.
>> $33 billion since inception before it
became a messy kind of profitable.
Amazon Web Services between 2003 and
2015 when it became profitable. $29.7
billion the scale. Yeah. That's the
total capital expenditures and that's
not just Amazon Web Services. That's the
entire logistics operation normalized
for inflation.
>> So they all lost money for a long period
of time is the TLDDR.
>> Yes. But the amount of money they lost
is
completely
just magnitudes different on a level
where these three
>> Can I argue then that the that's because
the potential of intelligence permeates
everything whereas Amazon at the time
was like selling books
>> no
>> that was that was bringing retail online
>> when Amazon web services grew it was
>> oh so cloud with Amazon web services the
reason I bring that up going to repeat
something but it's really important 2003
it was founded
>> and it was founded mostly because Amazon
as a growing online store needed
hardcore infrastructure. 2006, I think,
is when they turned it client-f facing.
I may be wrong on the dates there, but
2015 was the year it became profitable.
>> The total capital expenditures
normalized for inflation with $29.7
billion across that 12-year period.
>> And yeah, it lost money, but
>> if we speak cold economics here, Amazon
didn't have to go into the they were
unprofitable in in a way, but their
margins actually started improving
because AWS was a very margin heavy
business. It was great.
>> Yeah,
>> these these two Google cash flow
negative, Amazon cash flow negative.
These businesses, the reason you liked
software businesses was they are meant
to be cash heavy asset light. These
companies along with Meta have added
more than $700 billion of new property,
plants and equipment. So assets, data
centers, GPUs in the last four years.
They have gone from being these cash
machines to these cash furnaces.
>> You said a second ago, this can only
continue if if investors continue to
invest.
>> And I was saying I I think that
investors are used to pumping money into
things that are burning cash. Your
rebuttal to me sounds like well this is
burning more cash than ever. And then so
I would say well is the opportunity
bigger than those other case studies you
referenced like AWS? And one would say
that the opportunity of intelligence
permeates everything. So the TAM the
total addressable market is enormous.
Maybe the revival back to me is about
open source and all these kind of
>> No, no, no. I I actually know what
you're getting at. So what you were
describing there is the argument that
Sachinadella or Sam would make that the
theoretical opportunity of large
language models and I could have bought
that into any 24 from them when
they were like, "Oh, we see the
opportunity. We've gone way past the
point at which you can rationally argue
that LLMs need this much money. And when
I say the money needs to keep flowing, I
am talking these two compan Open AI just
open AI Clammy Sam has said Wall Street
Journal and Isaagi reported a few weeks
ago they plan to spend $750 billion on
compute through 2030. I think they're
going to be dead before then, but $750
billion.
That is an insane amount of money. That
is crazy
>> and [laughter]
a large chunk of that is training. So
when I say progress, I mean literally to
make the models better at stuff requires
billions of dollars invested just in
data
and also tens of billions of dollars of
taking that data. And so training
training is actually a really
interesting thing because when you think
of like for Jake and Troy my trainers
when I train with them when I lift with
them I have a defined thing and when I
do it and I eat right muscles get bigger
they would. And here's the thing. When
you train with an LLM, you're
experimenting each and this is not
actually a hit on the companies because
they're still trying to work out how to
do the thing because putting aside how I
feel like they're trying to innovate. I
think there are people at these
companies that actually want to do
something interesting. It's costing too
much money. So once the money tap turns
off, the money won't be there to buy the
data or feed the data into the GPUs. Put
aside all the thoughts I have, just the
raw capital to get them this far has
cost increasingly larger amounts of
money and increasingly larger amounts of
training money for training runs that
sometimes can fail. GPT5 was meant to be
this panacea for the AI industry. They
had at least one training run that cost
half a billion dollars and did nothing.
And that's the thing. If we are thinking
about progress in a in a vacuum, they
need so much more money just to maybe
get somewhere. There's no guarantee.
There's never any guarantee, but there's
a reason that Google and Amazon are cash
flow negative now. There's a reason why
Oracle's probably going to die as a
result of OpenAI because Oracle's future
depends on OpenAI spending $300 billion
over 5 years.
>> It's absolutely fascinating because I
was just reading through a list of
quotes from the big CEOs of AI companies
to see what they would rebuttle you.
>> And they're all basically saying the
same thing. They're all saying, this is
actual an exact quote from Sundar who is
the CEO of Google. He says the risk of
underinvesting is dramatically greater
than the risk of overinvesting.
And you go down, you go through this,
you know, Andy Jasse, CEO of Amazon,
we're not investing approximately 200
billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch.
We're not going to be conservative in
how we play this. We're investing to be
the meaningful leader and our future
business operating income and free cash
flow will be much larger because of this
investment. Then Mark Zuckerberg, CE of
Meta, says we'll continue to invest
aggressively in infrastructure to meet
the demand. I'd rather risk building
capacity before it's needed than being
late. Makes me think of Shrek with L
Farquad. Some of you may die, but that's
a risk I'm willing to accept. It's like,
you know, I'm just going to spend all
this money. You can't fire me cuz Mark
Zuckerberg can't be fired due to the
unique board situation he's got going.
So yeah, he's just going to piss the
money away and hope he's right. And I
know from the people who know it matter,
he's not right. The thing is, why might
you be wrong?
>> I mean, this is the thing. The AI people
who claim this is going to be the
biggest, strongest thing in the world,
did they ever get that? I I mean this
like
>> it's a good question because it's like
they don't. And the thing is, what would
it take for me to be wrong? A bunch of
hardware breakthroughs to make this
profitable. A bunch of
>> question new mathemat because the thing
>> when it comes to being a critic or a
skeptic,
>> you are put on the hot seat. Not the
people spending a trillion dollars, not
the people promising the world. The
person the the with a blog is
the one who's like me. Trust me. If they
came here, they'd be on the hot seat,
too. Trust me.
>> Oh, I Oh, they they won't talk to me.
Don't know why, Steve. They don't know.
It's cuz I call him Clammy Sammy. Um
>> I think it's cuz my guests are quite
quite critical that I don't think Solman
wants to come here.
>> Mr. Orman, go on Steve show. Do it. But
this is the thing like of course they're
going to say that. And also, if they
thought they were right, I don't think
they do anymore. If I was in their shoes
and I thought that this was an
existential thing, sure. But it gets
back to the rocom bubble which is yeah
this is the last thing they've got.
>> But I really want to know that question.
It was one of the questions I was really
excited to ask you which is you have a
different opinion. We said this at the
top. You have a very different opinion
from a lot of people. I would categorize
the the two most popular opinions as
>> uh AI is going to hurt everybody and
it's going to be catastrophic and we
need to stop.
>> The other opinion is age of abundance is
going to be amazing. Let us crack on.
yours is different from both of those
which is as you said in your words it's
a con and it's and there's no real
underlying value in the technology and
it's overhyped.
>> And there's way too much spending. I
mean a few people agree on the spending
part but the other part. So with you
it's one of probably the first person
that I've spoken to that's had this
opinion.
>> So how what would it take for you to
change your mind about what you believe
here? There would need to be a hardware
breakthrough that reduced the cost by
like a thousand but it would have to be
just a dramatic breakthrough that is not
happening just to be clear because
they've all been trying. So it's the
cost for you that would have to change.
>> It's the cost and it's also the data
centers. I think the way they're
building the data centers is reckless
and damaging to communities. The fact
that you have communities like in
violent New Jersey where the residents
like I don't want this but the planning
boards vote for it because they're all I
assume having chummy lunches with the
people doing it. I think the use of gas
turbines is disgraceful. I the
water situation I'm not super well read
on, so I'm not going to wait into it,
but the use of gas turbines and behind
the meter power is reckless and damaging
to communities. The noise that these
things make and also generative AI is
this egregious pornographic
demonstration of how unfair the world
is. Regular people try and get a loan
for a business, a random business. They
want I have a good idea. They go to a
bank, a bank of town, go
themselves. They'll say, "I'm not g you
going to make a store that sells stuff.
Screw you. You want to build a data
center? You Jensen Hang will back you.
Jensen Hong will give you 25% residual
value. You want to build a regular
business that's even profitable?
you. No, a venture capitalist won't give
you the money. Something that's just
growing steadily, but it's profitable.
Screw that. No, I need 10 100x return.
Try and get a mortgage. You have to give
the bank a full colonic. But you want to
get money for Jensen Hong to buy some
GPUs? He'll give you a contract.
Corewave is a great example. C Neocloud,
which is just a company that builds data
centers and puts GPUs and rent them to
people. Nvidia, one of their first
investors in 2023, signed a $1.3 billion
contract to rent back their GPUs from
Core. So that Core go to a bank and go,
I got a customer. Yeah, it's the guy I'm
buying the GPUs from with the debt I'm
getting from you. If you want to buy
GPUs, it's open season. If you want to
live a regular life where you build a
regular business or buy a house, highest
interest rates ever. Screw you. Up
yours. Yeah, you need to show us way
more than that. I don't trust you
regular folks. But if you're an
unprofitable Neocloud, you get billions
from Jensen. It doesn't matter.
>> It's so interesting. You It's
interesting because you are the first
person that I've spoken to that has that
>> I am prouser. Let's take another myth.
AI will be conscious. Mhm. So
super intelligence, artificial general
intelligence, these are theories. Anyone
saying this stuff will become this is
just guessing and does not have proof.
>> And like that's really it.
>> Okay. Let's take another myth.
AI systems are already blackmailing and
escaping control. So this is a really
specific one. Anthropic. There's
actually two. Open AAI's GPT 3.5. I
realize this is more than the sentence.
I apologize.
In their system card, and a bunch of
media outlets covered this, saying that
OpenAI's model blackmailed a task rabbit
into solving a capture. What actually
happened was a user of GPT doing the
experiment
got it to generate things to say to a
task rabbit to make a task rabbit do
stuff.
>> A task rabbit
>> as in a person that you rent, not even
to do a capture. It's something you rent
to like nail a picture up in your
apartment. It's an insane example. This
was covered as if these things
blackmailed someone and and it and they
specifically said, "Yeah, we prompted it
to do this." And also the other note was
that yeah, AI systems can't do
autonomous stuff like this. Then there
was this other one where Anthropic said,
"Oh yeah, a model was blackmailing
someone saying that if you don't do
this, I'll email proof that you slept
with someone else other than your wife."
I think it was what actually happened
was Anthropic explicitly trained a model
to do this and then prompted it to
blackmail.
This keeps happening and the media just
slop slot me up. I don't need no
thoughts. Put the story in the bag. And
it's frustrating because it scares
people. Put aside the fact it's wrong.
It's scary. It's scary to people. people
living their lives who have to work
longer hours to make less money and
their money doesn't go far and they turn
on the news and there's some
being like, "Yeah, you should be
terrified it blackmailed someone."
>> But this is this is so counterintuitive
of their interest to some degree and
they've experienced it backfire.
>> Well, they have now like it's it's
literally backfired.
>> It's backfired. Eric Schmidt getting
booed at a commencement speech by 8,000
people every time he said the word AI.
But I mean this is this is I mean these
serious are being attacked at home.
>> Yeah. Which sucks. Which is
>> terrible. I must be clear like you
dislike the don't hurt people.
>> Yeah. Don't don't attack people at home.
But but the point here is that that
narrative is backfiring in a big big way
for them. I don't think they saw it
coming because you have to remember you
mentioned regulation earlier. These tech
companies have been glazed for their
entire existence. Travis Kick's like oh
what? People don't like me now. And it's
because Uber was a horribly run place
and he was kind of a monster. Also tons
of articles about how great Uber was at
the time. The point I'm making is these
companies are not used to push back.
They thought what would happen I believe
just guessing. They thought they do this
scary stuff and they would just get
floods of money and everyone would just
be like I kneel before you. I'll do
whatever you want. They didn't expect I
think what has I I agree this has
backfired on them because they were in
articulate. They're disconnected from
regular people. Samman drives a $5
million car around San Francisco. So
that that man's doing it like 9 miles an
hour. It's hilarious. But these people
are disconnected from everyone else. So
they don't they don't experience real
problems, so they can't build the
solutions for them. And they think,
well, if we scare people into doing what
we want, that'll work, right? It didn't.
They was all of this blackmail stuff was
an attempt to make it mystic. It was a
mysticism attempt. It was to make it
seem like this unknowable, impossible to
control, just this powerful thing. But
we're the only ones. We are the o only
us only these two angels could possibly
control the beast we've created.
>> This is this is quite a controversial
statement but I think that for some
reason I trust Dario a little bit more
because I think he's been the most
balanced in his writing about the risk
profile.
>> I
>> whereas the others they they seem to
kind of move with the wind.
>> I I do you know
>> I get what you mean. The reason I don't
like Dario is Daario was doing the scare
tactics thing when he worked at OpenAI
when GPT2 came out say it's too scary to
release. He's also gone on television
and given AI psychosis to Axios being
like 50% of jobs are going to go away
because of AI.
>> What I respect is the consistency. He's
now being attacked by them.
>> Good.
>> Um but the thing is sorry I mean let me
clarify the word attack. Darian is being
verbally attacked by Silicon Valley and
you know if Silicon Valley if powerful
people in Silicon Valley are attacking
someone.
>> Four months ago he wasn't though. They
were all saying he was the smartest boy
ever.
>> The point I want to make there as well
is again wow you're so scared of how
powerful this is. You're so scared of
it. It's so scary. What are you doing
about it? Oh nothing. Like it's just
like what are you doing? Well we have an
alignment team. So does every AI lab.
Well I guess open AI cycles through
those really quickly. Here's the thing.
If I'm Dario Amade, I'm sitting there
going, I'm scared of all things changing
and I thought I had made a thing that
would eliminate all jobs, I'd be
terrified. I'd be walking around with
like like a 10 ton weight on my back.
The show, the responsibility, the fact
he doesn't, the fact he wants to be this
weird elder statesman that's too scared
to hold Sam Orman's hand at an event
just makes me believe that he's just
saying it because it's convenient and
he'll wind that back as he kind of
already has whenever it's convenient for
him. I think Open AAI and Anthropic are
basically the same level of Bad Company.
I think Anthropic is more cultlike. I
think it's so weird like Jack Clark over
there, one of the co-founders. That fell
used to be at the register. He used to
be one of the most critical journalists
ever. Now he's it's like like something
took over him because they talk of these
things in these high fluent terms. But
then again, maybe the people at
anthropic buy their Maybe some of
the people at OpenAI buy their I
don't know. So going back to the central
question we asked at the top here was
what would have to be the case for you
to look back and say do you know what I
was wrong in 2026 and you said to me it
would be mainly that the cost of
production around AI drops dramatically
>> and it would have to also do insane
amounts of stuff it does it would have
to be a truly autonomous
>> it would have to continue its
improvement in terms of capability.
>> It would have to be a different product.
It would have to be it would have to be
indistinguishable from magic. And the
reason they have these high standards is
they set them.
>> Okay. Fair. It's interesting as well
because all these myths and all these
conversations, it's about technology,
but it's also it's an information war.
It's literally
narrative versus narrative. Everyone
trying to escape the financials,
everyone trying to actually escape what
the models can do. And the big thing I
always say about AI boosters is if I
could regulate them, I'd regulate them.
They can't speak in the future tense
anymore. Just you got to talk about
today, mate. You get two weeks in the
future, Max. Because if they were
constrained to what was happening today,
it they would sound like insane people.
>> Yeah. No, I think yeah, most I guess
most technology companies would at the
time. Like Uber would sound insane.
Amazon was
>> Uber was basically the difference.
>> They were pissing money though, weren't
they?
>> They were pissing money away, but the
unit economics were the same just
subsidized. So you were still getting a
service from A to B and paying a much
lower cost. It wasn't like you paid Uber
200 sorry 20 bucks a month and you could
get 500 miles of Uber and then one day
you started paying by the mile cuz
that's what's happening with this.
>> Have they they've changed their business
model for customers like me now so that
I have to buy credits.
>> No. So you well kind of with
>> they asked me the other day. So with the
anthropics fable model with some
accounts you have to pay for usage and
also adoption of fable has been pretty
low because of this because of the cost
but with enterprises so companies over
150 people you have to pay by the token
now or per million token.
>> Oh so they are moving to a token.
>> Yeah. But when they did that everyone
went from being like this is the most
impressive thing ever to being like
>> it's always we got to control these
costs. Uber's COO said as Andrew
McDonald I think he said that it's
getting hard to justify cuz it's hard to
connect spending money on tokens to
actual useful outcomes.
>> He said the thing like he said the
actual thing I've been saying and it's
so we're in an AI bubble.
>> And when will when this AI bubble
collapses so much of the economy is
resting upon it.
>> It's going to have downstream
consequences. So I got two questions for
you. I guess the first question is are
we in an AI bubble and what happens when
the bubble pops?
>> Yes. And it's it depends. So the big
thing that people say is, "Oh, we'll get
bailed out. Donald Trump scared of
Donald Trump." Here's the problem with
this.
It isn't just an AI bubble. It's the
rockcom bubble. So the AI bubble
collapsing will probably be this company
running out of money. Open AI.
>> And the thing is with Open AI is they
were meant to go public this year and
now it's been pushed to next year a week
and a half after I released their
auditive financials. Wonder where that
was. Um, but they've delayed to next
year. Sarah Frier, the CFO, has now
said, "Well, they'll do it earlier than
2027 or 2027." Great answer there.
>> For anyone that doesn't understand what
going public means, that means joining
the stock market. And at such a time
when you join the stock market, your
investors can finally sell their equity
that they got for investing in the
company when it was private. So often
times companies will flirt with the idea
of we'll go public someday soon because
investors will have a moment in their
head where they'll get their money back
at a return. So you kind of need to if
you're in these guys shoes, you kind of
need to be flirting with going public or
investors won't want to invest.
>> Open AAI up until this point has been a
private company and their last funding
round they were valued at $865 billion.
Now when they tried to go public, New
York Times Mike Isaac reported this.
They tried to list well they wanted to
go at a set a 1 trillion valuation.
Apparently their advisor said no don't
do that. That is very bad for a number
of reasons. One open AI needs perpetual
amounts of money. They raised $122
billion this year. Most of it's crossed.
There's some left but they are going to
need to raise at least hundred billion a
year just to survive. If they can't go
public they will have to raise another
funding round. The problem is it's going
to be difficult to raise at even the
same one they raise that. They're
probably going to have to take a flat.
So the same amount. Exactly. But they
need money. They need money so bad.
Amazon sent them $35 billion that was
meant to be contingent on them going
public early.
>> They did that because they need the
money. Now, OpenAI is the kind of
catastrophe center here because
Anthropic is likely going to beat it to
go public. And once Anthropic goes
public, it'll be borderline impossible
for Open AI to do so because Anthropic,
an unprofitable, unsustainable AI lab,
but a better business that's growing
faster than Open AI's. I believe they
have a ceiling. They're eventually going
to face predition, too. I think sometime
in 2027, things are going to start
running out of steam. Because the thing
I said earlier, the only way these
models get better is if you feed more
money, tens of billions of dollars into
them.
>> So, you think OpenAI runs out of steam
in 2027?
>> I think they're already running out of
steam. Yeah. But I think they run out of
cash. You think they run out of cash?
Yes. And the sequence of events here
will be they they go out and try and
raise
>> and they have trouble raising another
round. I think maybe Invidia props them
up a little. Maybe Private Credit,
Blackstone, Black Rockck and the like
the ones and the reason that Private
Credit is getting involved. So asset
managers is because they're investing in
the data centers and they know this
company's most of the data center
demand.
>> Okay. So they run out of steam in 2027
according to you.
>> Yep. And maybe they try if they bum rush
to go public they're going to have worse
economics than anthropic. They're going
to get savage. it. We work was a great
example. Another SoftBank classic. Now,
I think Open AI collapses, there are
many different ways it could happen.
There are many different ways it could
end. But the crucial thing is is that
there are multiple companies that are
existentially tied to OpenAI. SoftBank,
Japanese stock market, a holding company
with lots of investments. They have on
paper about hundred billion worth of
OpenAI stock. If they can't go public,
they can't do diddly squat with that.
And so Soft Bank's future, their ability
to continue paying the people around
them and existing as a business relies
on their ability to continually
liquidate funds to be to take the things
they've invested in and have value from
them either by selling the stock or
taking loans out on the stock. If OpenAI
can't go public, SoftBank can't do that.
SoftBank probably won't run out of
money, but we're going to see one of the
largest holding companies in the world
become much smaller. We will also see
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have to
restate guidance. they will have to say
actually we don't think we're going to
grow as fast
>> and what happens then
>> well I think we enter a tech depression
because the rockcom bubble the core of
my theory is that they're out of
hyperrowth ideas but the market doesn't
think so the reason they're so
maniacally spending is because buying AI
GPUs allows them to kick the can further
allows them to say we're still doing
something we're working on AI don't
think too hard and also their current
businesses are still growing their
current businesses will eventually slow
there's only so many price increases.
There's only so many tweaks to ads. Only
so many tweaks to Google search. Only so
only so many ways that Amazon can screw
merchants. So in that tech depression,
which you think it might be triggered in
2027, is that a cascading downstream
economic depression? Because the stock
market is heavily dependent on these
companies. The stock market sees a
pullback, investors stop investing, they
get panicked.
>> Yes. I think that because
>> what's the sort of downstream
consequence the sort of domino effect
>> there's so much to imagine that it's
difficult to capture everything but
there are a few things that worry me
first of all a ton of American money
just regular people's money retail
investors are in these companies and
they bought into the magnificent 7
thinking the number go up forever is the
largest company on the Fortune 500 and
NASDAQ as well and like 7 to 8% of the
S&P 500 that company when in when the
bottom falls out from Nvidia and we
haven't really got into it but Nvidia is
doing the most circular of financing,
feeding companies money so that they can
raise debt to buy more GPUs. I think
Nvidia's revenue could go 50 to 70%
down. I think that Nvidia could put
Nvidia back in 2022 was making
singledigit billion dollars.
>> And what happens though, I'm thinking
about like Jenny and Dave that are
watching this right now and they are
just normal people
>> with normal jobs.
>> People's retirements are going to
contract severely and I don't believe
they're going to return to those values.
And I think that because so much of the
value of the S&P 500 and Russell 1000
index comes from these four companies
and the rest of the magnificent 7. So
Apple, Tesla, Meta as well. And the
thing is I don't know what happens after
that because venture capital has also
more than half of venture capital last
year went into AI. I think most venture
capital investments in AI are going to
zero because when it comes to building a
company on top of an LLM, all of those
are unprofitable too. And the thing is
LLM companies have not really been
acquired. The exception being Cursible
by Elon Musk for the coding side, but
you have Cognition, which is just
another LLM company raising a $26
billion valuation. That means that
company has to go public cuz who's
buying a company at $26 billion other
than Elon Musk. And there were rumors
that Elon Musk was trying to buy them as
well. Is Elon Musk just going to pick
off every like LLM company like going to
TJ Maxx for AI? Like Jesus
Christ.
>> So is that a recession you're
describing? It is a recession, but it's
also a depression within people's
retirements. Like I'm talking about 20,
30, 40% off the top of these companies
stock value.
>> Economic contractions, recessions
consistently lead to job losses and
rising unemployment. When an economy
contracts, the mechanism driving job
losses typically follows a predictable
sequence. Falling demand, consumers and
businesses spend less money, causing
revenues across most industries to drop.
margin compression. With lower revenue
and often fixed overhead costs like rent
or debt, corporate profit shrink, and
lastly, cost cutting measures to survive
or protect profit margins, businesses
freeze hiring, reduce hours, and resort
to layoffs. Yes, that's that would all
happen. But the thing is, we're talking
about equity values dropping and we're
talking about there not really being a
home for that value or that money.
[snorts] So much is riding on these
companies, but you can't bail it out.
You can theoretically bail out OpenAI. I
don't think it happens. You could pump
these dogs full of money and keep them
alive for a bit, but at some point
they're going to have to start. They
have between these two companies,
Anthropic and Open AI, you have $1.1
trillion of commitments.
>> Just OpenAI.
>> Oracle is building 7.1 gawatt of data
centers. So over $400 billion worth just
for OpenAI. There is not a customer on
Earth. And Oracle's revenue has been
flat the last 15 years when you adjust
for inflation. Without Open AI, Oracle
dies. So you think open AAI is going to
crash and run out of money and that's
going to cause this domino effect across
these other big tech companies which is
going to impact the stock market and
impact the broader economy.
>> Yes. And also the tens of thousands of
people that will be laid off from the
tech sector. But also the venture
capital thing is significant because
venture capital has been having one of
the most historic
bad runs in history since 2018. The
average return from venture capital
total value put in. So the amount of
money you get back for your dollar is
between8 and 1.21 meaning for every
dollar you invest you get 80 cents to
$120
>> paper gains.
>> Well no that's just actual g like actual
returns. Paper gains they'll give you
but even then internal rate return which
is a whole separate thing even that's
not very happy. But long story short
very simple venture capital is not
making money come out. Venture capital
is not actually providing returns.
>> They're celebrating paper gains.
>> They're celebrating paper gains
>> and they're raising off paper gains.
>> Mhm. And actually paper gains I mean
just being able to say oh look the
valuation of anthropic went up. So
that's
>> but that's that's what Google and Amazon
were doing. Google's last quarter they
boosted their net profits profits on
paper by $99 billion because of the
increased value of their SpaceX holding
and their anthropic holding. And again
the fact that this is happening is
is insane but we live in this culture I
guess. But everyone is really benefiting
right now. Oh, it's really that it's
that great tweet. It's like when you're
reaping, it's like, "Yeah, yeah,
this rocks." Sewing. Ah, This
sucks. Because right now, they're all
like, "Yeah, all the speculative gains
are awesome. The paper gains are
awesome. The theoreticals of anthropic
being worth $2 trillion. Wow. The
articles we can write, the promises we
can make. Then when the rubber meets the
road, it's going to be pretty rough on
them because the valuation of Amazon,
Google, Microsoft, and Meta is based on
this idea that they will grow eternally,
that they will grow forever. If that
changes, to quote Ed Elson from ProfitG
Markets again, it's this. They're all
doing Botox right now. They're sinking
money into it to make themselves feel
young again and the market believes
them. When the market doesn't, we're not
just talking about a depression. I'm
talking about the market valuing them
like airlines and saying, "Yeah, you're
real big and you make money off your
existing products, but guess what? You
don't have new You're just going
to be doing this forever and we're going
to value you as such."
>> So, if it's Jenny and Dave, should they
do anything differently? Should they be
conserving money? If there's a recession
or depression coming, should they be a
little bit more conservative? Should
>> I Yes. I actually I actually think it's
I don't know. I don't have money in the
market. I think it's a casino. Casino
pumped up by the media.
>> Should they invest in the S&P 500?
Should they invest in Open AI?
Unfortunately,
>> oh god, no. I honestly I live in cash
right now. I live in cash. Yeah. I don't
trust the market, man. Try and
get some gains here. I'm like I'm not
comfortable giving financial
>> advice, but it's like if you like it's
like you're gambling.
>> Okay. be conservative. Things might get
volatile.
>> Yeah, it really is. It's going to be act
as you would with volatility. Take the
gains when you've got them.
>> Don't sell everything, but be suspicious
of tech. Like, that's actually the
biggest thing. It's like be suspicious
of what they're promising. If you're
acting based on their promises, don't
trust the promises. Trust that they are
going to say what will make the stock
run rather than what's actually
happening. and that they will find every
dodgy way to make you think something is
happening rather than it's actually
happening. Annualized run rate, great
example. Microsoft said that they had 38
$37 billion of annualized run rate in
AI. You hear that, you go, they made 38
$37 billion, right? Wow, that's so much
run rate maybe month times 12. They
don't even define it, but it's built to
manipulate. And they do that because we
don't have a functional SEC and we don't
have a media environment that actually
where skepticism is the priority and
where protecting the readers is
necessary.
>> What would they say? They would say Ed
this technology is going to be so great
and so transformative that we are
investing a ton of money
>> um in advance of the value and utility
showing up. That's what they would say,
>> And I've heard your rebuttal, but I just
wanted to express I think that's their
sentiment. I'm not defending them or
anything. I'm just I'm trying to provide
enough like balance to we see if we can
dance between these these two
perspectives.
>> And a lot of people would say that
there's going to be a blood bath because
they can't all win big in the way that
they're kind of describing. So,
someone's going to have to lose. And
>> when one of these players starts to lose
big, I think it could, as you say, there
could be some kind of domino effect or
contraction.
>> Yeah. And I think the thing that people
want to believe is they the com bubble
thing. It's like it worked out
afterwards because Amazon, Oracle, they
didn't die after the com bubble. They're
actually fine. This isn't like that.
They're bigger companies. They're have
bigger promises. And even I'm not like
Oracle I actually think could die. I RIP
Larry. What couldn't happen to a nastier
man? They'll probably
>> You don't like these people, do you?
>> No, I No. Again, I asked this question
purely because I want an answer, not
because I agree or disagree. But um why
don't you like these these people? I
don't like being misled and I don't
think regular people like being misled
either. And I really don't think that
the average person can get away with
bullshitting as much these companies do.
And I don't think the average person
gets anywhere near the level of
affordance for failure and lying as
these companies do. And I think there is
a real economic and human cost to
allowing these companies to run rampant
and promise the world and never really
get called up on it. The tepid nature of
criticism these days is so frustrating.
There are some really great critics out
there that really great people, but it's
seeing these ultra rich, ultra wealthy,
ultra powerful people lie through their
teeth or misstate or whatever
people want to call it, it turns my
stomach. And I hate seeing people being
misled. And I feel like I write at such
length because I really want people to
see why I've come to a conclusion. Am I
right? Am I wrong? I think I am. Of
course I do. But I also
I just find it loathome. I find these
companies don't make good products
anymore. They don't care about their
customers and and they treat their
customers with contempt.
>> If people want to go read more about
your work, um you have a great Substack
>> Ghost actually. It looks exactly like I
moved off of Substack in 2024.
>> Oh, okay. And you also have a podcast
you do.
>> Yeah, Better of Flame.
>> Um I'm going to link both of them below.
So, if anyone wants to read more, get
more detail and and follow Ed. I think
it's
>> I would highly recommend. It's it is
fascinating. And you know what? One of
the things people um sometimes struggle
with when they listen to podcasts is you
get lots of different opinions. And
weirdly, I think they think of some
people assume podcasts are going to be
like one person saying the same thing as
the next person and then the next
person. That is just not the nature of
information in the world and opinions
and progress and discussion. What what
happens is people have different
opinions. And I think my job, but also
the listener's job is to try and pass
through it and over time collect more of
these reference points from different
people and and do your own research.
>> Yeah. whether it's on your health or
whether it's on something like this is
to watch endear and research and to
learn and I would say also never believe
one person never believe one particular
perspective religiously you know collect
a body of evidence and follow follow the
evidence yourself but I love watching
your YouTube um because it provides a
different opinion and that challenges me
to think beyond my current opinion about
what might be possible so when I've
heard you talking about how this is an
economic bubble and I've heard you talk
about the capex spend on with these big
sort of frontier AI labs. It really did
make me pause for a second and it really
did make me consider
that there could be a bit of fazy going
on here.
>> And then it made me reflect on history
and go, you know, through history
there's always a bit of fazy in these
moments and oh that's an interesting
take on what's going to happen in 2027
2028 when there's a bit of a market
pullback and so I highly recommend
people go watch because you do you
challenge me to think differently. Um,
>> yeah.
>> And we need some of those contrarian
voices to to have honest discussions.
So, thank you for doing what you do.
Really appreciate it. And I find you to
be a very compelling, captivating
communicator. And I've I feel like I've
learned a lot today. So, I appreciate
that. We have a closing tradition.
>> Where the last guest leaves a question
for the next guest not knowing who
they're leaving it for. And the question
left for you is given that high quality
relationships are important for health
and longevity, what should we be doing
to improve our relationships and social
connection? So this is actually
connected to the AI bubble. So I am a
critic. I'm a skeptic. What quote I have
found that showing and appreciating and
loving the people around you and
uplifting them and me and and raising
them up as you succeed is the way we do
that. Your success should be everyone
around you. It's not economic. It's
talking about Matt Hughes for a while
made me really happy. This whole thing
has been at times quite grueling and
quite negative and quite brutal. But the
love I found and the joy I found from
community and the people around because
even in the in the small groups of
haters even like Gary Marcus and sort of
the people I talked to Edward on Grao
Jr. Molly White, Brian Merchant, there
are so many people who have been loving
and caring. And I think within
especially these very critical moments
when you're like very much dialing in on
how negative things are, how bad things
are, finding the people who maybe find
it repulsive, too. Finding the people,
>> finding your people who can be and the
people who will talk to you about it.
Even like Troy and Jake, my my trainers
who's so excited about this. um even
talking to them about the as normal
people knowing that there are people
there going through their own struggles
but also to just give you the
perspective and also remind you that you
are human to and focus I know this is
kind of a all over the place point but
it's just it's really easy to get hard
locked on everything in life and to
>> kind of get away from why you do things
and focus too much on the work when the
most important thing at times is just to
know there are other people feeling the
way you do and when I hear from my
listeners and my readers a lot the most
common thing they feel is they feel like
they have a voice and they feel like
someone is there for you.
>> And I don't think it can be understated
how much it means when you just reach
out to someone you love and tell them
you love them. Tell them their
rocks. Say that their bangs. Tell
everyone you when you like an artist or
a writer they were a podcast like this.
Tell them you love it. We don't
do this enough and we need to do it
more. Well, that's a good closing
message. So, if you do have you have
enjoyed the conversation today with Ed,
please do let Ed know that you love it
down below. Um, but please do leave your
opinions down below and I shall read all
of them. Ed, thank you so much. I'll
link to your website, but also to your
YouTube channel where people can learn
more and I would highly recommend you do
because it is truly fascinating and I
think we need more voices that are
demystifying a lot of the fugazi and the
narrative in this moment in time and you
are certainly one of them. I really
enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so
much.
>> YouTube have this new crazy algorithm
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