Make Fun Of Them, Pt. 1

the CEO of open Ai, a company allegedly worth three hundred billion dollars to venture capitalists and soft bank, can he kind of sounds like a huge fucking idiot. But head you cry, you can't just call Sam Altman an idiot. He isn't stupid. He runs a big company, he's super successful. My counter to that is, firstest I can, I'm actually doing it right now. And second, if Altman didn't want

to be called stupid, he wouldn't say stupid shit with a straight face to a massive global audience now when he's rather Jack asked, so reasoning will lead to science going faster or just new stuff or both? And by the way, that is the question, Sam Oltman said.

is so good and so phenomenal. Let's give this man forty billion dollars or more every year until he creates super intelligence.

is really important. But like you know, to us, our jobs feel incredibly important and stressful and satisfying, and if we're all just making better entertainment for each other in the future, maybe that's kind of what at least one of us is doing right now.

with Sam Oltman is like this, every single one ever since he became a prominent tech investor and founder, without fail every time. And the sad part is that so Mortman is alone in this sunda. Pishai, when asked one of Neli Patel's patented one hundred word plus questions about Jonie Ivan Sam Wultman's new and likely heavily delayed hardware stop, had this the same.

future looks exciting. I think there's a lot of opportunity to innovate around, innovate around hardware form factors at this moment with this platform shift, So I'm looking forward to seeing what they do you know we are going to be doing a lot as well, and I think you know, it's an exciting time to be a consumer, it's an exciting time to be a developer, So I think looking forward to it.

triever is smarter than the chiuahua. Well, that said, none of these men are superintelligences, nor when pressed, do they appear to have any actual answers or regular intelligences. Now, if you've read the newsletter version of this episode, you'll come across a multi paragraph answer from satching Adella when asked on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast how Microsoft will reach one hundred and thirty billion dollars in revenue from AGI. I'm not going to read it out here, and I don't

hate you enough to include a clip. But the question was, how do you get Microsoft to one hundred and thirty billion dollars in revenue and such? In this the dello's answer is like one hundred and fifty words, and it's like abundance explosion. GDP will grow industrial revolution inflation adjusted percentages. The winners will be the people who do stuff, and then productivity will go up. I will link to this in of you in the episode notes because it's fucking nonsense, just like the rest of them.

It means actually knowing the sheet you're talking about. And look, really, a truly smart person should be able to speak clearly enough that their intent is obvious and clear. Now it's tempting to believe that there's some sort of intellectual barrier between you and the powerful, that these confusing and obtuse things they say, that's the sound of genius, rather than somebody who has learned a lot of smart sounding words without ever learning what they mean, but ed they're trained

to do this. I am someone who has media trained hundreds of people, and there's only so much you can do to steer someone's language. You can't say to one, hey, man, can you sound more confusing? You can, however, tell them what not to talk about and hope for the best. Sure you can make them practice, Sure you can give them feedback. But people past a certain stage of power or popularity, you're going to talk or whatever they want. And if they're big stupid idiots pretending to be smart,

they're going to sound exactly like this. Why because nobody in the media ever asked them to explain themselves. When you've spent your entire career being asked friendly or friendly adjacent questions and never having someone say, wait, what does that mean, you'll continue to mutate into a pseudo communicator that spits out information adjacent bullshit. I am to be clear, being very specific about the question what does that mean?

Powerful CEOs and founders never ever, ever get asked to explain what they're saying, even when what they're saying barely resembles a sentence, let alone an answer. But let's get clear here. Let's think about a hypothetical scenario where your friend just said the dog died. You'd say something like, oh, no, what happened? And they, let's say, they responded with, well, my dog had a tragic yet on ultimately final distinction between their ideal and non ideal stage due to the

involvement of a kind of automatic mechanical device. And when that happened, we realized we'd have to move on from the current paradigm of dog ownership and into a new era which we both feel a great deal of emotion about, and see the opportunities With them. You'd probably be a little confused and ask them to explain what they meant. You'd ask, what do you mean by an automatic mechanical device? What does that mean? They then reply with yeah, exactly,

And that was part of the challenge. You see, like the various interactions we have in our day that are challenging. We see a lot of opportunities in their sailing those challenges. But part of the road to getting around them is facing them head on, which is ultimately what happened here.

is they meant? Look, Pajai Altman, Nadella, They've always given this kind of empty brained, intellectual slop in response to questions because the media coddles them. These people are product managers or management consultants, and, in Altman's case, a savvy negotiator and manipulator known for and I quote and absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture as an investor at y Combinator.

According to The Washington Post and by Coddle, I mean that these people are deliberately engaging in a combination of detective work and amnesia, where the reader or the listener is forced to simultaneously try and divine the meaning of their answer while also not thinking too hard about the question the interviewer asked. Most importantly, because the interviewer forgot already.

Look at most modern business interviews. They involve a journalist asking a question, somebody giving an answer, and the journalists saying okay and moving on to the next question. Occasionally he's saying, but what about this, when the appropriate response to many of the answers is to ask them to simplify them so that their meaning is clearer. Look at

to them, Listen to them now. A common response to all of this stuff is to say that interviewers can't be antagonistic, and I just don't think a lot of people understand what that actually means. It isn't antagonistic to say that you don't understand what someone said, or that they didn't answer the question you asked. If this is antagonistic to you, you are intellectually speaking a giant, fucking coward, because what you're suggesting is that somebody cannot ask somebody

to explain themselves, which is what an interview is. And I imagine nobody really wants to do this because if you actually put these people on the spot, you'd realize the dark truth that I spoke of a few weeks ago, that the reason the powerful sound like idiots is because they're idiots. They sound like business idiots and create products to sell to business idiots, because business idiots run most companies and by solutions based on what the last business

idiot told them. Now, I know some of you might hear this and say, these people can't be stupid. These people run companies, they make big deals, they read all these books. And my answer is that some of the stupidest people I have met in my life, I have read more books than you or I will read in a lifetime. Well, they might sound smart, or they might be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or

saying this product category should do this. None of these men, not Altman Pshire on the Della, actually has a hand

in the design of the creation of the things that their companies make, and they never ever, ever, ever, ever ever have Regardless, though I have a larger point, I believe it's high time we started mocking these people and tearing down their legends as geniuses. They're not better than us, nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build other than their share price, which is a meaningless figure,

and the accumulation of power and resources. These men are neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start treating them as such. These people are powerful because they have names that are protected by the press. They are powerful because it is seen as a kind of unseemly to mock them because they're rich and running a company, a kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming of an adult. We are, at most customers. We do

not owe these people anything. We are long past the point when any of the people running these companies actually invented anything they sell, if anything, they owe us something because they're selling us a product, even if said product

is free and monetized by advertising. While reporters, as anyone, should have some degree of professionalism in interviews or covering subjects, there's no reason to treat these people as special, even if they have managed to raise a lot of money or their popular product is used by a lot of people. Because if that were the case, we'd have far more

coverage of defense contract to Lockheed Martin. They made one point seventy one billion dollars in profit last quarter and haven't had a single quarter under a billion dollars in

the last year. I realize them being a little glib, but the logic behind covering open ai is at this point they make a lot of money and they have a popular product, which is also a fitting description of Lockheed Martin. The difference is that open ai has a conceiverer product that loses billions of dollars and Lockheed Martinis products that make billions of dollars by removing consumers from

the earth. Both of them are environmentally destructive. Covering open ai doesn't seem to be about the tech, because if you looked at the tech, you'dn't to understand the tech.

You'd see that the user numbers weren't there outside of the five hundred million people using chat GPT and of course referring to the general AI industry, and of those five hundred million people, very few are actually paying for the product, and that the term user encompasses everything from the most occasional person who looks at chatgpt dot com out of curiosity or the people using it as part

of their daily lives. If covering Open Eye was about the tech, you'd read about how the tech itself doesn't seem to have a ton of mass market use cases, and that those use cases aren't really the kind of things.

obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves. Sadly, this is all the result of the halo effect of being a guy who raised money or

a guy who runs big company. We must, as human beings, assume these people are smart, that they've never mislead us, because if we accept that they aren't smart and they will willingly mislead us, we'd have to accept that the powerful are well bad and possibly unremarkable assholes, And if they're untrustworthy people that don't seem to be smart, we have to accept that the world is deeply unfair and caters to people like them far more than it kates

to people like us. We do not oh Saturn and Della any respect just because he's the CEO of Microsoft. If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the state of Microsoft's products. Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess that only sometimes works, leaving workers spending fifty seven percent of their time either in teams, chat teams, meetings, or

sending emails, according to a Microsoft study. Mis dot com is an abomination read by hundreds of millions of people a month, bloated with intrusive advertisements, attempts to trick you into downloading an app, and course ey content that may

or may not be AI generated. There are few products on the modern Internet that show more contempt for the user, other than, of course, the former Skype, a product that Microsoft languished for more than a decade, so thoroughly in gorged with spam that leaving it unattended for more than a month left you with one hundred undread messages from Eastern European romance scammers, and Microsoft has finally killed it

in May. Great jobs, sature your fucking platt Anyway, products like Word and Excel don't need improving, but that doesn't stop Microsoft from trying to bloat them with odd user interface choices and forcing users to fight with prop ups that use an AI powered copilot that most of them hate. Why exactly am I meant to show these people respect because they run a company that provides a continually disintegrating service.

Because that service is such a powerful monopoly that it is difficult to leave it if you're interacting with other people or businesses. I think it's because we live in hell. The mong tech ecosystem is utterly vile. Every single day, our tech breaks in new and inventive ways. Our iPhones resetting at random, random apps not accepting button presses, our Bluetooth disconnecting our word process is harassing us to try and use AI while no longer offering us suggestions for

typos and I'm referring to Google Docs. You're not insane, it's happening, and our useful products replaced with useless shit,

like how Google's previously functional assistance were replaced with generative AI that makes them tangibly worse, so that Google can claim that they have three hundred and fifty million monthly active users on fucking Gemini. Yet the tech and the business media acts like everything is fine. It isn't fine. It's all really fucked. You can call me a cynic or a pessimist, or throw trash at me, or throw tomatoes, or try and hose me down when I go outside,

or call me every name under the sun. But the steaks have never been higher and the damage never more widespread. Everything feels broken and covering these companies as if it is, and these insulting to your readers and your own intelligence. Look at the state of your computer or phone and tell me anything feels concruent or intentional rather than an

endless battle of incentives. Look at the notifications on your phone and count the number of them that have absolutely nothing to do with information you actively need.

I don't know zero Cam, an app that brands itself as the first anti AI camera app where you capture moments, not megapixels, and got a ton of press about being this stripped down append notification asking if I took a photo today. Amazon notified me that there's a deal pick just for me a battery pack that I bought several months ago. Every single company that sends notifications like these should be mocked and possibly put in prison. But if we have accepted such vile conditions as the norm, I

just believe that society is kind of lost. Apple should be target and feathered for allowing companies to send spam notifications, Yet they're not because by and large, Apple is less vile and exploitative than Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, who also get pretty much a free ride. Now, if you're listening to this as a member of the tech press, seriously, please look at your daily experience with tech.

it's happening to you. Look, I'm not trying to call anyone out, which is why I'm not using specific names, but there are people responsible here and the tech media writes about them every day? I realize it seems weird to constantly vent that a company is releasing broken, convoluted software.

But hey, if you can write three hundred thousand stories about how crime ridden New York City is, why can't we write three of them about how fucked Microsoft Office is or Google searches, or even just one like one a month one?

or pleasantries? These people have crapped up our digital lives at scale, and they deserve contempt, or at least earn fucking reception. Harry doesn't repeating myself again and again and again. But why is there such a halo around these fucking bozos?

of the greatest living business writers in Alesson Morrow. I believe that tech criticism is a barely explored and hugely profitable industry if we treat tech journalism less like the society pages and more like a force to hold the most powerful people in the world accountable as they continually

harm billions of people in subtle ways. People are angry, and they aren't stupid, and they want to see that anger reflected in the stories they read, and the meek deference we show to the dumb, fucking tech assholes is the opposite of that.

Put aside, however you feel about generative AI for a second and face one very simple point.

But I am telling you your readers and viewers are waking up to it, and they feel like you have contempt for them and contempt for the truth. It's easy and common to try and dismiss my work as some sort of hater's bullshit, a cynical approach to a technustry that's trying brave new things, or some other such shit.

In my opinion, there's nothing more cynical than watching billions of people get shipped increasingly shitty and expensive solutions and then get defensive of the people shipping them and hostile to the people who are complaining that the products they

use suck. I'm angry at these companies because they have at scale torn down a tech industry that allowed me to be who I am today, and their intentional disgrace will moves film me for the disgust I've watched the tech media move away from covering technology and more toward covering the people behind technology, to the point that the actual outputs, the software and the hardware we use every day have taken a backseat to stories about whether or

not Elon Musk's used as a computer, which is meaningless, empty gossip journalism built to be shared by peers and nothing else. And please please do not talk to me about optimism. If you are blindly saying that everything open ai does is cool and awesome and interesting, you want being optimistic, you're telling other people to be optimistic about a company's success. It isn't optimistic to believe that a company is going to build powerful AI despite it failed

to do so. It's propaganda. And yes, this is also the case if you simply don't do the research to form a real opinion. I am not a pessimist because I criticize these companies, and framing me as one is cowardly and ignorant. If you're so weak willed and speciously informed it you can't see somebody criticizing a company without outright dismissing them as a hater or a pessimist. You're an insult to journalism or analysis, and you know it

in your wretched little heart. My art sings with a firm belief in the things I think, founded on rigorous structures of knowledge that I've gained from reading things and talking to people, because something in me is incapable of

being swayed by something just because everybody else's. You're assuming people are right because it's inconvenient and uncomfortable to accept that they may not be, because doing so requires you to reckon with a market wide hysteria founded on desperation and a lack of hypergrowth markets left in the tech industry, we're still in engaging with faux optimism. You're failing to protect your readers in the general public. And if that's what you want to do, ask yourself, why why do

you want these companies to win? What is it you want them to win? Do you want them to be rich? Do you want to be the person that told people they would be first? What is it that you want? What is the world you want and what does it look like? And how does doing your job in this way work towards creating that world? This is an optimism.

It's horse trading or strategic alignment behind powerful entities. It is choosing a side because your side isn't the reader of the truth if it was, even if you believe Generati, if AI was powerful, and that they simply didn't understand, your duty would be to educate the reader in a clear, certain, obvious way, and if you can't find a way to

do so, acknowledging that and explaining why. True optimism requires you to have a deep, meaningful understanding of things so that you can engage in real hope, a magical feeling, one that could bore you through the most challenging times. What many claim is optimism is actually blind faith, the likes of which you'll see at a roulette or a crab's table, or of course, knowingly peddling propaganda.