How To Argue With An AI Booster, Part Three

I have to continue. I'm afraid my listeners need me. But okay, seriously, folks, if there's anything I want you to take home so far, is that the arguments that these people, these AI sicker fans make, they crumble under

the slightest bit of scrutiny. And yet these arguments work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who do and understand the rotten economics of AI, or because they forced the opposite party to surrender their reason and to exit the planes of reality, to which

I say, fuck that, absolutely not. This is a hell I'm prepared to die on, and I'll hope that you'll all be standing with me, side by side Now, in the first episode, we shook away the claims that it's the early days for AI and we just need to give it more time. Then I took the idea that generative AI is like Uber or fiber optic networking to industries that both burned a lot of money at the

start but are otherwise nothing like generative AI. And now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments. These are the worst of the worst. Boost to quips. Here we go, ultra booster quip. I thought about recording that with a bunch of reever, but it didn't really work out for me, but I wanted to do it once. But anyway, their argument is hum AI is just like Amazon Web Services, a massive investment that took a while

to go profitable, and everybody hated Amazon for it. Now I actually covered this in depth and the Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble, But the long and short of it is that Amazon Web Services is a platform and necessity with an obvious choice and has burned about ten percent of what Amazon and all of them have burned chasing generative AI, and had also proven demand before building it. Also,

Amazon web Services was break even within three years. An open aye was founded in fucking twenty fifteen, and even if you start from November twenty twenty two, by Amazon web Services, standards should be break even by now. But now i'll quote myself, Amazon, weent no way. Sorry, that's the boosters. Amazon web Services was created out of necessity.

Amazon's infrastructure needs were so great that he had effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything, the theoretically everywhere, handling both the traffic from customers, delivering the software that runs Amazon dot Com quickly and reliably, and well making sure things were stable. It didn't need to come up

with a reason for people to run web applications. They were already doing so themselves, but in ways that cost a lot more, were inflexible and required specialist server skills. Amazon web Services took something that people already did and what there was already a proven demand for, and made it better and scaled it. Eventually Google and Microsoft would join the frame. I editorialized a bit there, but I

can do that with my own work now. A common booster quip, by the way, is for them to say, well, this AI company they've got high annualized revenues. And as I've discussed in the past, this metric is basically month times twelve. And while it's a fine measure for normal high gross margin businesses like software as a service companies, it isn't for AI. It doesn't account for churn, which is when people leave. It also is a number intentionally

used to make a company sound more successful. So you can say two hundred million dollars annualized revenue instead of sixteen point six million dollars a month. And you're also meant to budship. You heard they said two hundred million annualized, but you heard two hundred million. Your mind did that was a bad planket reference. But I'll continue. They want you to think two hundred million. They want you to

think that's what they'll make. More often than not, if they mentioned an annualized number, that number will not be how much they make that year. Also, if they're using this number, it's likely not consistent. Now, if they bring this up, you should just say to them, hey, how much profit is the company making and also how much are they burning? At this point they will I think mace you I mean with the spray or an actual

maze AI boosters are strange. Now they'll also say, well AI, this AI companies in growth mode, and they'll pull the profit lever when it's time. And the answer to that is always going to be why have none of them done this? Not one, not one of them. Now a booster will burst through your don't go AI AGI AGI will, and then there's that will bullshit again. It's always about the will with these fuckers. We do not know how thinking works in humans and thus cannot extrapolate it to

a machine. And at the very least human beings have the ability to reevaluate things and learn a thing that LMS cannot do and will never do. We do not know how to get to AGI. Sam Almonds said in June the Open AI was now confident they knew how

to build AGI as they have traditionally understood it. Then in all August, Altman said that AGI was not a super useful term and that the point of all this is it doesn't really matter, and it's just this continuing exponential of model capability that will rely on for more and more things. I'm really tired of people quoting this guy. He doesn't make any fucking sense read out read anything he says out loud, and it's just really just total bullshit.

Even Meta's chief AI scientist Ian Lacun says it isn't possible with transformer based models to make AGI. We don't know if Agi is possible, and anyone claiming they do is lang. Anyone who's talking about Agi is talking about fan fiction. Again, Ask them how they feel about Banjo and kazoo Do you think they made love? Actually, that's a if. Next time someone brings up Agi to you, seriously bring up Banjo and Kazuoi and their romantic involvement.

I actually that I think that that's the only response you should give. Now, stop humoring them. It is fan fiction. But putting Banjo and Kazuoi aside, there's also a really stupid booster thing they do, which is I'm hearing from people deep within the AI industry that there's some sort of ultra pammerful models they're not talking about. And this, by the way, is hogwash. Nothing different than your buddy's friend's uncle who works at the Nintendo that says Mario

is coming to the PlayStation. Ilios suits Caver and Mirror. Murti raised billions of dollars for companies with no product, let alone a product roadmap. And they did so because they saw an opportunity for a grift and to throw a bunch of money at compute for no reason. Anyone who has secret shit is not talking about it because it doesn't exist. Also, if someone from deep within the industry has told somebody big things are coming, they're doing so to con them or make them think that they

have privileged information. Ask for specifics, and if they say I couldn't possibly tell you, then they're full of shit. They're full of crap. They are full of doodo. And if they get vague, get specific, Oh, it's going to be able to automate other things? What things? How how's it automate them? Oh? I don't know. Then you don't know shit about fuck? Now talking about not knowing about Fuck's another booster. Quip chat GPT is so popular seven hundred million people use it weekly. It's one of the

most popular websites on the Internet. Its popularity proves its utility. Look at all the paying customers now that paying customer's part will get to in a second. But this argument is poised as a comeback to my suggestion that AI is not particularly useful, a proof point that this movement is not inherently wasteful, that there are in fact use cases for chat GPT that are lasting, meaningful, or important,

I fundamentally disagree. In fact, I believe chat GPT and lllm's in general have been marketed based on lies of inference, which I realize is ironic. I know it's pretty clever. I had a whole blog written called the Lie of Inference that kind of became this. It wasn't very good, though this is. This is good. Don't say it's bad. I also have grander concerns and suspicions about what open ai considers a user and how it counts revenue. Let

me give you an example. They claim to have five million business customers, yet five hundred thousand of those are from a fifteen million dollar year deal, year long deally with cal State University, which works out to around two dollars and fifty cents a user a month. Open ai has also started doing one dollar a month trials of its thirty dollars a month team subscription, and one has to wonder how many of those subscribers are counted in

the total and indeed for how long. I do not know the scale of these offers nor how long open ai has been offering them. I readditor posted about this one dollar for a month deal a few months ago, saying that open ai was offering five seats at once, so one buck a month for a month per se. How many people cancel after that? Who knows? Maybe they

just hope they don't. In fact, I found a few people talking about these deals, and even one adding that they were offered an annual ten dollar a month Chat GPT plus subscription. That's like, not like ten dollars a month for just one month, that's for twelve months, with one person saying a few weeks ago that they'd seen people offered that same deal for canceling their subscription. And actually I got the same thing when I tried to cancel. Yes, I pay for Chat GPT. I need to actually use

the fucking thing to criticize it. When I tried to cancel this like, hey, do you want three months with ten bucks space? And I was like sure, just to prove my point suspicious, But there is a greater problem at play, by the way, and it goes beyond pricing. And it's the chat GPT in Open Ai has been marketed based on lies. So chat gpt is seven hundred million weekly active users. Open Ai is yet to provide

a definition. Yes, I've asked them, which means that an active user could be defined as somebody who has gone to chat gpt once in the space of a week. This term is extremely flimsy and doesn't really tell us much. Yes, it's a lot of people, but how active are they? Similar web says that in July twenty twenty five, chatgpt dot com had one point two to eighty seven billion total visits, making it very popular. What do these facts

actually mean? Though? As I said previously, chat GPTs had probably the most sustained PR campaign for anything outside of a presidency or a pop star. Every single article about Ai mentions open Ai or chat gpt. Every single feature launch, no matter how small, gets a slew of coverage. Every single time you hear AI, you made to think of chat gpt by a tech media that's never stopped to think about their role in the hype or their responsibility

to their readers. And as the hype has grown, the publicity compounds because the natural thing for a journalist to do when everybody is talking about something is to talk about it more chat. GPT's immediate popularity may have been viral, but the media took the ball and ran with it, and then proceeded to tell people it did stuff it did not. People were pressured to try this service then under false pretenses, something that continues to happen to this day.

And I'm going to give you a really fucking grizzy example when I discovered this, When I went and looked at this, it filled me full of rage. It's disgraceful

what happened. On March fifteenth, twenty twenty three, Kevin Russ of The New York Times would say that open Aiy's GPT four was exciting and scary, and then it was exacerbating, in his words, the dizzy and vitigenous feeling I've been getting whenever I think about AI lately, wondering if he was experiencing future shock, then described how it was an indeterminate level of better, and then said something that immediately

sounded ridiculous. In one test conducted by an AI safety research group that hooked GPT four up to a number of other systems, GPT four was able to hire a human task rabbit worker to do a simple online task career solving a capture test without alerting the person to the fact it was a robot. The AI even lied to the robot about why it needed the capture done, concocting a story about a vision impairment. Now this doesn't sound even remotely real now, but this was two years ago.

So I went and looked up the paper, and pretty much everything that Ruth described was illustrative. I didn't really see whether it happened. Now. He's referring to the safety card which every model has that lists all the measures used to train it and such. And this safety card led to the perpetration of one of the earliest falsehoods and most eagerly parroted lies about this fucking industry. And

that was the chat GPT in Jenerity. I of AI is capable of agentic actions outlet after outlet, and some people who should definitely have known better, led by Kevin Ruce, eagerly interted an entire series of events that took place that doesn't remotely make sense, starting with the fact that I don't think you can hire a cast grabbit to solve a capture at the very least without a contrived situation where you create an empty task and ask them to complete it. Why not use mechanical turk or favor.

There are people right now offering that service. There were actual real things. But you know me, I'm a curious little critter. So I went further and followed this the citation from the safety card to the study, and this

is by METR and the research page. It turns out that what actually happened was MATR had a researcher copy and paste the generated responses from the model and otherwise handled the entire interaction with the task grab it and based on the plurality of cask Grabbit contractors, it appears to have taken multiple times. On top of that, it appears to open AI and META as METR sorry, we're prompting the model and what to say, which kind of defeats the point, like we don't naturally know what they

prompted it to do. And when you look even says it does like chain of thought reasoning, which didn't really exist back then, and if it did, it was extremely like chain of thought is reasoning, And that came out end of twenty twenty four. This whole thing is absolutely insane. It's absurd that anyone wrote about it is real. What happened, just to be really blunt, is that they if they even opened a task rabbit. It's really not obvious whether

they actually did this. They had to go to the model and say, okay, I'm opening a task rabbit window, and now the person has said this, and now this is it. It just doesn't sound real at all. But even if it did, it's very obvious that they were telling the model what to say and then copy pasting the response, and it took them multiple tries. It took me five whole minutes to find this article, partly because

it was cited on the GPT for system card. I then then read it within that time, then wrote this part of the script. It didn't require any technical knowledge other than the ability to read. It is transparently, blatantly obvious that GPT four did not hire a task rabbit or indeed make any of these actions it was prompted to, and they did not use show the prompts they used, likely because they had to use so many of them.

If they even did it, anyone falling for this as a mark and open ay should have gone out of their way to correct people. Instead, they sat back and let people publish outright misinformation. Rus, along with his co host Casey Newton, would go on to describe this example at length on a podcast that week, describing an entire narrative where the human actually gets suspicious and GPT four reasons out loud that it should not reveal that it is a robot. It's not a reasoning model, at which

point the task rabbit solves the capture. During this conversation, Newton gasps and says, oh my god twice. And when he asks Rus, how does this model understand that in order to succeed, its task has to deceive the human? Rus responds, we don't know. That is the unsatisfying answer, and Newton laughs and states, we need to pull the plug and again, what disgraceful, embarrassing, reprehensible. All that and more on the hard Fork podcast published weekly You Can

Cut that that ads for free fellas credulousness aside. The GPT for marketing campaign was incredibly effective, creating an order that allowed open ai to take advantage of the vagueness of its offering, as people, including members of the media, willfully filled in the blanks for them. Allman has really never had to work to sell his product. Think about it. Have you ever heard open ai tell you what chat gpt can do or go to great lengths to describe

its actual abilities. Even on open AI's own page. With chat GPT, the text is extremely vague. You scroll down, you're told that chat gpt can write, brain storm, edit and explore ideas with you. It can generate and debug code, automatic repetitive tasks, not clear what the tasks are, and help you learn new APIs question mark. With chat GPT, you can learn something new, dive into a hobby, answer complex questions and analyze data, and create charts repetitive tasks.

Who knows how am I learning? Unclear? It's got thinking, billtim What that means is also unclear, unexplained, and thus allows a user to incorrectly believe that chat GPT has brain and thinks. To be clear, I know what reasoning means, but this website does not attempt to explain what thinking means.

You can also offload complex tasks from start to finish with an agent, which can, according to open Ai, think and act proactively, choosing from a tool box of urgentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer. This is an egregious lie, employing the kind of weasel wording that would be used to torture ir but boon

for an eternity precise in its vagueness. Open AI's copy is home to make reporters willing to simply write down whatever they see and interpret it in the most positive light, and thus the lie of inference began. What chat GPT meant was moneyed from the beginning, and thus chat GPT's actual outcomes have never been fully defined. What chat gpt could do became a kind of folklore, a non specific form of automation that could write code and generate copy

and images, that can analyze data. All things that are true, but one can infer much greater meaning and use from One can infer that automation means the automation of anything related to text, or that right code means write the

entirety of a computer program. Open AI's chet GPT agent is not, by any extension of the word and I quote already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks, but it has not, in any meaningful sense committed to any actual outcomes as a result, potential users subject to a twenty four to seven marketing campaign have been pushed towards a website that can theoretically do anything or nothing, and

have otherwise been left to their own devices. The endless gas lighting societal or pressure, media pressure and pressure from their bosses has pushed hundreds of millions of people to try a product that even its creators can't really describe or don't feel compelled to. And if I was wrong, we'd have real use cases by now and better metrics

than weekly active users. As I said in the past, open ai is deliberately using these weekly active users so that it doesn't have to publish their monthly active users, which I believe would be much higher. Now, why wouldn't it do this well? Open ais mentioned as twenty million paying chat GPT subscribers and five million business customers, with no explanation of what the difference might be really other than it involves teams and edgy but not pro Anyway,

this is already a mediocre three point five percent conversion rate. Yeah, it's monthly active users, which are likely eight hundred and nine hundred million, but these are guesses would make that rate lower than three percent, which is pretty terrible considering everyone says this shit is the future. I'm al so tired of having people claim that search or brainstorm or companions are a lasting, meaningful business model. I'm really tired of him. I'm tired of being told this again and

again and again. That's not what chat GPT is going to actually survive on bath. Okay, let's move on. Here's another booster grip though open ai is making tons of money. That's proof they're a successful company and you are wrong somehow. So open ai announced that it is here it's first one billion dollar month on August twenty to twenty twenty five on CNBC. In fact, weirdly enough, by the way,

that quote was not in the TV interview. But anyway, this is also brings it exactly in line with my estimating five point twenty six billion in revenue that I believe it has made at the end of July. Did that in a premium newsletter? Please pay me? However, remember what the MIT study that I mentioned said, Enterprise adoption is high, but transformation is low. There are tons of companies throwing money at Ai, but they are not seeing

actual returns. Open Aiy's growth is the single most prominent company in AI, and if we're honest, one of the most prominent in software. Writ large makes sense, but at some point will slow because the actual returns for businesses are not there. If there were, we'd have one article where we could point a chat GBT integration that helped scale a company or save a bunch of money, make a bunch of money, written in plain English and not

in the gobbledygook of profit improvement. Also, open aiye is projected to make twelve point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty five. How exactly will it do that? Is it really making one point five billion dollars a month by the end of the year. Even if it does, is the idea that it keeps idding ten billion dollars or more a year every year into it? Tenny? What actual revenue potential does open ai have long term? It's products are about as good as everybody else, is, cost about

the same and do the same things. Chat GPT is basically the same product as Claude or Grock, maybe in the less Mecha Hitler or any number of different lms. The only real advantages that open ai has are infrastructure and brand recognition. These models have clearly hit a wall in training, hitting diminishing returns, meaning that the infrastructural advantage is that they can continue providing its service at scale,

nothing more. It isn't making its business cheaper other than the fact it mostly hasn't had to pay for it, other than the site in Aplene, Texas, where it's promised Oracle thirty billion dollars a year in twenty twenty five. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I don't buy that this company will continue growing forever and its stinky conversion rate isn't going to change anytime soon. When open Ai opens Stargate Abilene, it will turn profitable. How I hear this one a good amount? How? How? How? How how

gonna happen? Nobody ever answers, No one ever for answers actually how this company will become profitable. It's fucking insane to me. Nobody ever answers the question efficiencies. Efficiencies. They're going to be efficient? Mmmmm, they're going to be efficient if you're gonna say chat GPT five. I wrote a huge scoop and then did an episode about why it's not more efficient. In fact, it's less efficient and I'm sure one of you is going to argue, well, you know,

they could do their customs Silicon. There a ten billion dollar deal with Broadcom. How they fucking pay them for that? Also you realize that well, actually no, just you know, no, you're right, they're going to get the chip from Broadcom because you know what they always say about the first generation of tech, right, it always works and it's always great and it has no problems. That's what I always That's that's why happened with pretty much every first time

they make anything in tech. Anyway's move on. You'll hear boosters also be like, well, my brother's friends dog uses chat GPT and I love it. Well I heard this happen, or my mate as it in this or I heard this person, or I use it in this one before we go any further. Just to be clear, though, is when you hear a booster bring up AI and they'll say something, make sure they're talking about generative AI. Are they actually talking about generative AI? Is this a large

language model thing? It's very, very very common for people to conflate AI with generative AI. There are many different kinds of AI. Make sure that the AI booster whatever they're claiming whatever they're telling you is actually about large language models. So there are all sorts of other kinds of machine learning that people love to bring up. LM's have nothing to do with folding at home, autonomous cars,

or most disease research. Well, okay, let's do a speed run using AI led researchers to discover forty four percent more materials. No, it didn't. Mit is now withdrawn this paper site and concerns about its integrity. I've linked it in the show notes. There's a huge rundown. Here's another quote. AI is so profoundly powerful that it's causing young people to have trouble finding a job. While young people have been having trouble finding jobs, there's no proof that AI

is the reason. Every piece of coverage or reading is citing an ax with economics report that amidst a bunch of numbers, says and I quote there are signs that entry level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates, a statement that it does not back up other than claiming that the high adoption rate by information companies along the sheer employment declines in some roles since twenty twenty two, suggested some displacement effect from AI, and

digging deeper, the largest displacement seems to be entry level jobs normally filled by recent graduates. There's otherwise new data. Anyone making this point is grasping at straws. I go into this in more detail in the newsletter called Sincerity Wins the War, which I've linked to. But it's one of the worst reported stories in tech. And now I'm actually going to add li it for a second, because

I forgot while write in this script. There was also this thing that came out of Stanford that said it's been a thirteen percent drop in jobs affected by AI, and this was used as proof that AI was taking them. Now, curious little critic that I am, I went and read that what it actually did was find a bunch of jobs that they think are related to AIM being affected by AI. They saw they were going down, and they went, oh,

it is AI that did that. They've done. They fart around with various statistics, but that's long and short of him. I give you an example. One of the job's accountancy. Now, any accountants listening, big up to my accountant listeners, there's been a hiring crisis. Is accountancy for years. People are not becoming CPAs. The reason there are less of them is that less people are becoming them. It's nothing to

do with AI. Like, are you imagine if anyone have put half as much effort into writing up these stories as I did writing up one of these booster quips. But here's another one that AI is replacing young coders and it is not. In fact, Amazon's cloud chief just said that replacing junior employees of AI is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard. There is no actual, real evidence that this is the case. Every single story you have read is anecdotal. Anyone peddling this has an

agenda or is not reading. Every CEO mentioning this specifically avoids saying the words that AI is replacing people because AI can't replace people. I will add an aside, there are people's jobs that have been replaced by A Translators, transcribers. Brian over at blood is in the machine. Blood in the machine. Even sorry, Brian, He's doing a great job on covering this. There are people that have lost jobs.

These people are losing it because their bosses are fucking stupid, because their bosses are just taking the shittiest possible version of their work and slopping it up. That's not happening at the knowledge worker scale, nor is it happening at the code of scale. Everyone telling you that has an agenda. But boosters will also claim that AI is doing science for search somehow or will do it, and it won't. I've included a write up about why foundation models can't

do this. Someone's going to read it and say, but there's this bit where it says it isn't a defeat of lllms, and the reason he says this is because I sheot you not that lms aren't incapable of doing scientific research. He says they're insufficient, which is which is the same thing. Think they're insufficient anyway. He claims they're also not dead weight for science, then spends hundreds of words meandering around around that thing to kiss up to

AI boasters for some reason. I assume because they've terrified him by being really annoying, and these people need to go outside and touch grass. Now a lot of people think they're going to tell me that they use AI all the time, and that will change my mind. I cannot express how irrelevant it is that you have a use cases. Every use case I hear is one of the following. I use it for brainstorming, to which I say, who cares. Not a business model, it's commoditized. I use

it like search. Who cares. It's not even good at search. It's fine, It's not even better than the low bar set by Google Search. The results it gives on great, and the links are deliberately made smaller, which gets in the way of me clicking them so I can actually look at the content. If you're using chat GPT for search, you may not actually care about the content of the things you're looking at. If I'm wrong, great, you now

have a functional search engine can gratch your fuculations. Well, I use it for a search, and if you use it for a search, you do not respect natural research. You want a quick answer, It's that simple. These reports are slop. I've read many, many, many AI reports and they're not good. Sorry. Well, I use it for coding. I know someone who used it for coding, and I'll get to that at a minute. But all of this would be fine and dandy if people weren't talking about

this stuff as if it was changing society. None of these use cases come close to explaining why I should be impressed by generative AI. It also doesn't matter if you yourself have a kind of useful thing that AI did for you once. We are so past the point when any of that matters. AI is being sold as a transformational technology, and I am yet to see it transform anything. I am yet to hear one use case that truly impresses me, or even one thing that feels

possible now that wasn't possible before. This isn't even me being a cynic. I'm ready to be impressed. I just haven't been impressed in three fucking years and it's getting boring. Also, tell me with the straight face that any of this shit is worth the infrastructure. Remember, AI boosters are arguing that this stuff is powerful. None of these use cases are powerful sounding, but sir, I I agree, sir. Vibe coding is changing the world, allowing people who can't code

to make software. Now, this is one of the most brain dead takes about AI and coding, and it's the Vibe coding is allowing anyone to build software. And you'll never guess what. Kevin Ruce covered this sh did this article. While writing the script, I hadn't even know as need Lisch anyway. Well, technically true in that one can just type build me a website into one of many coding environments. This does not mean said website is functional, secure, or useful.

Let's make this really clear. AI cannot just handle coding. Go into the show notes and read this piece I've linked from Colton Bogie. I have actually interviewed in him now he's going to be coming out in the next few weeks. The episode the interview is fucking brilliant. And then the other I've linked to by Nick Suesh. If you contact me about AI and coding without reading these, I will send them to you and nothing else, or crush you like a car in a garbage dump into

a cube. One or the other I will choose at the time. Also, show me a vibe coded company, Please, not a company where somebody who can code has quickly spun up some features. A fully functional, secure and useful app that has made money and made by somebody who cannot read or write code. You won't be able to because it is impossible. Vibe coding is a marketing term based on lies peddled by people who either have a lack of knowledge or morals and RAI coding environments making

people faster. I don't think so. In fact, a recent study suggested that they actually make software engineers nineteen percent slower. The reason that nobody is vibe coding in entire companies because software development is not just put a bunch of code in a pile and hit go, and oftentimes when you add something, it breaks something else. This is all

well and good if you actually understand code. It's another thing entirely when you're using cursor or clawed code, like a kid at an arcade machine, turning the wheel repeatedly without having a coin in there and pretending that you're playing it when the demo's going on. VIB coders are also awful for the already negative margins of most AI coding environments is every single thing they ask the model to do is imprecise burning tokens in pursuit of a

goal they themselves don't really understand. VIB coding doesn't work, It will not work, and pretending otherwise is at best ignorance and are worth supporting a campaign built on lies. And this is all built up to one final point. I'm no longer accepting half baked arguments. If you're an AI booster, please come up with better arguments, and if you truly believe in this stuff, you should have a firmer grasp and why you do so. It's been three years and the best some of you have is it's

really popular or uber also burned money. Your arguments are based on what you wish were true rather than what's actually true, and it's deeply embarrassing. Then again, there are many well intentioned people who aren't necessarily AI boosters who repeat these arguments, regardless of how thinly frame they are, in part because we live in a high information, low processing society where people tend to put great faith in

people who are confident in what they say and sound smart. Jason, I also think the media is failing on a very basic level to realize that their fear of missing out or seeming stupid is being used against them. If you don't understand something, it's likely because the people you're reading

or hearing it from don't either. If a company takes a promise and you don't understand how they'll deliver on it, it's their job to explain how, and your job to suggest it is implausible and clear and defined language This has gone beyond simple objectivity into the realm of an

outright failure of journalism. I have never seen more and misinformation about the capabilities of a product in my entire career, and it's largely peddled by reporters who either don't know or have no interest in knowing what's actually possible, in part because all their peers are doing the same thing

and saying the same nonsense. As things begin to collapse, and they sure look like they're collapsing, but I'm not making any wild claims about the bubble bursting quite yet, it will look increasingly more deranged to bluntly publish everything that these companies say. Never have I seen an act of outright contempt more egregious than Sam Altman's saying that GPT five was actually bad and that GPT six will be even better. Members of the media, Sam Altman does

not respect you. He is not your friend, Clammy. Sam Mortman is not secretly confiding in you. Clammy Will thinks you are stupid and easily manipulated, and will print anything he says, largely in part because many members of the media will print exactly what he says whenever he says him. And to be clear, if you wrote about GPT six and made fun of it, that's great. But let's close by discussing the very nature of AI skepticism and the so called void between those who hate AI and those

who love AI. Am from the perspective of one of the most prominent people in the skeptic camp. Critics and skeptics are not given the benefit of grace, patience, or in many cases, hospitality when it comes to their position. While they may receive interviews and opportunities to give their side, it's always framed as the work of a firebrand and outlier, or somebody with dangerous ideas that they must eternally justify.

Skeptics are demonized, their points under constant scrutiny, their allegiances and intentions constantly interrogated for some sort of moral or intellectual weakness. Skeptic and critic are words said with a sneer of trepidation that the listener should be suspicious that this person isn't agreeing that AI is the most powerful, special thing ever. To not immediately fall in love with something that everybody is talking about is to be framed

as a hater. To have oneself, introduced with the words not everyone agrees or on forty percent of your appearances. By comparison, AI boosters are the first to get TV appearances and offers to be on panels. Their coverage featured prominently on tech Meme, something slot like books called shit like The Future of Intelligence, Masters of the Brain, featuring eighteen interviews with different CEOs that all say the same thing.

They don't have to justify their love. They simply have to remember all the right terms chirping out, test time, compute, and the cost of inference is going down enough times. The Salomon Wario Amiday to give them an hour long interview where he says the models they are in years going to be the most powerful school teacher ever built. And by the way, yeah, I did sell a book

because my shit fucking bangs, my shit rocks. I'm I'm not going to be too smug, but like, I put a lot of effort into this and I research it very well. Others should try harder. I have persistent, deeply sourced arguments that I've built over the course of years. I didn't become a hater because I'm a contrarian. I became a hater because the shit that these fucking oaths have done to the computer pisses me off. I did the man that destroyed Google Search because I wanted to

know why Google Search sucked. I wrote Sam Altman Free because at the time I didn't understand why everybody was so fucking enamored with this clammy sociopath. Everything I do comes from a genuine curiosity and an overwhelming frustration with the state of technology. I started writing the newsletter that led to this podcast with three hundred subscribers and sixty views, and have written it as an exploration of subjects that

grows as I write. I do not have it in me to pretend to be anything other than what I am, And if that's strange to you, well I'm a strange man, but at least I'm an honest one. I do have a chip on my shoulder and that I really do not like it when people tried to make other people feel stupid, especially when they do so as a means of making money for themselves or making someone else look good. I write this stuff out because I have an intellectual interest.

I like writing, and by writing, I'm able to learn and process my complex feelings around technology. And talking it out actually feels good. It's an intellectual exercise that I really enjoy. I happen to do so in a manner that hundreds of thousands of people enjoy every month. And

I'm not specifying where those people go. And if you think that I've grown this by being a hater, you are doing yourself the service of underestimating me, which I will use to my advantage by writing deeper, more meaningful, and more insightful things than you, and then I'll say them with lots of curse words on this podcast. I've watched these pigs ruin the computer again and again and

make billions doing so. And all of this is happening while the media celebrates the destruction of things like Google, Facebook and the fucking environment in pursuit of eternal growth. I can't manufacture my discussed nor is it hard to nor can I manufacture whatever it is incide that makes it impossible to keep quiet about these things. I don't know if I take this too seriously, whether I don't take it seriously enough because they keep saying fucking shit.

But I'm honored that I'm able to do so, and I really appreciate everyone who listens, reads, or engage with with me in any way. I really do love you all for listening. I know that this was a long three parter. I've enjoyed recording it. I've done lots of retakes. Mattasowski, love you man. Sorry for all of this. I'll catch you next episode. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song

is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O s O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com or visit better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts