The Talented Mr. Altman

a total lack of technical and business acumen. I realized this sounds a little dramatic and definitely a little inflammatory, but the air around Sam Mortman has for years been that he's somehow a magical, special creature, a man who and I quote is wise beyond his years and was so at the tender age of nineteen and who to quote startup incubator why Combinators Paul Gray could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in

five years and be king. In the next two episodes, I'm going to dig into Sam Moultman's really specious success story, and it's one that was built on the back of being in the right place at the right time, definitely dodging accountability and responsibility and basically every job he's ever had, including by the way, the two that he was fired

from and the feiled startup he had. And I believe he's used his political powers leverage to scare away anyone who's going to ask any nasty questions or of course,

dare to stand against him. In a stunning in depth piece by Ellen Hewett of Bloomberg, Sam Altman is repeatedly framed by his contemporaries as some sort of genius, without anyone ever asking why or explaining why, Rather than there's this vague sense of intellectual and philosophical superiority with why Combinator founder John Cougan claiming that Altman had and I quote an uncanny ability to listen intently and diagnose problems, and that he was and this is a real quote.

I'm not kidding the Michael Jordan of listening. Sit with that for a moment, Just sit with that. These laughable and completely stupid accolades aside, there doesn't actually appear to be a single story that I can find of some genius moment of clarity ushered in by Sam Altman. There are none of these fantastical situations where his remarkable mind brilliantly delivers the exact solution to a problem or some sort of concrete accomplishment that required these descriptive, pre natural

levels of vision and clarity. No, I just found this torrent of platitudes about this man who always gets what he wants, which is, by the way, another quote from Ellen Hewitt's story. And he just appears to be this unstoppably pushy young man that excelled not necessarily at building things, because he really has not built any great companies, nor have they done any great things. It's mostly about and I quote Allan Hugh again, sam Orman, bending the world

to his will. If this all sounds familiar, by the way, it's because I've really said this before. Many CEOs, especially in take, had this amazing ability to make these bold proclamations, and that had people pretty much accept them at face value, even by the media that's meant to hold them to account. With the earliest days of Facebook's metaverse pivot, probably the best example I can give you, I really encourage you to go back to the rock Com bubble and the

Facebook episodes to look into it. But even by Mark Zuckerbian standards, Zuckerberbian now we'll get to that later. Sam Altman exists in his own pantheon of bullshit. There are many, many, many examples of him saying open AI, or I should be more specific, AI broadly will do something it cannot and likely will not do, such as think for itself or be that super smart companion I keep quoting, and the fourth estate just kind of accepts it without any pushback.

And this is really Sam Mortman's history being in the right place, saying the right thing, and even when the thing in question is kind of hollow, people saying, wow, oh, this boy is so smart, and there's just no limit.

It seems to this phenomenon. When Sam Mortman says something or does something genuinely truly insane, like how he wants to raise seven trillion dollars for futuristic chips, which is by the way, they combined GDP of Germany and France, or that he needs one hundred billion dollars from Microsoft to build a supercomputer for the future of AI, people just say, yeah, sounds about right, Yes, classic Sam Mortman's

stuff is just the smart bloke going. The response is never to dismiss it and say this is absolutely bloody stupid but to actually discuss it with a level of seriousness that just is not warranted for anyone, let alone

Sam Ortman. And that might be Aortmand's real skill collopsia, the appearance of things being more beautiful than they really are, hiding the weakness of his arguments, and indeed generative AI writ large and beguiling those around him with this nasty instinctial ability to tell them exactly what they want to hear, giving them the words to tell other people in his name, to get in exactly the room he needs to be in exactly the right time to connect with exactly the

right people, or without ever having to actually do anything or create anything. Despite the fact that his location based social network looped failed to get any traction or build any meaningful product, it appears it allowed him to get in the Dora famed Silicon Valley Incubator, y Combinator, and Dazzle.

Poor Graham It's creator who, for reasons I cannot understand, I've read so much of poor Graham's stuff now, Paul Graham became convinced that Sam Worton was the future, and in turn helped Sam Morton get in on these huge VC deals in companies like Stripe and Airbnb, making him

hundreds of millions of dollars. This is, by the way, a very Silicon valley problem and a problem with the vallee writ large, and a precursor to the growth that all costs rot economy that I talk about seemingly every minute. When you strip away Sam Morton's ability to convince people that he's smart, he doesn't appear to have done anything.

He's done very, very little. He was a college dropout with a failing then failed startup, one where employees tried to get him fired twice because he kept diverting resources to other places and focusing on his own personal products and projects. And the reason they sound so flushed that

is this is Sam Altman's entire existence. In a podcast discovered by Ellen Hewett Bloomberg, Twitch co founder Emmitt Sheer appeared from Mortman's y combinator cohort the first one and briefly his replacement at CEO of OpenAI, described his surprise that Sam Morton was able to close deals with boost Mobile without any actual product yet because Altmand fit a template. He resembled a kind of guy that got things done.

Powerful people in Silicon Valley have fallen over themselves to give him the opportunities that made him look like a king maker. And at some point, the funny thing is in the Valley is when you get to the prominence where people just feel like you should be in on these things, you are. That's why all these guys all kind of look and act the same and all get in on the same things. And honestly, I think the

truth might be a little grimmar. Almond was, from a relatively early age chosen by Silicon Valley to be their next messiah, which allowed him to wield this incredible power over the startup ecosystem without really ever meaningfully contributing to it. His ascent to the apex of the Valley and the budding flowers of a sam Ortman colt, which we see today everywhere, feels random and arbitrary, without any real force behind it. Aw there's one thing, though, Sam Boulman, he's

a master manipulator. He's incredibly adept at saying things that sound profound, like your rate of learning should always be high, and yes that's a quote, as are the rest of these, and that each unit of work you do should generate more and more results while also knowing that the self reinforcing prophecies of the tech industry are what makes someone rich and powerful, rather than achievements or founder great companies

or doing things for people. In essence, his whole vacuous platitude buffet, the kind that can be cut into ten second clips for TikTok and YouTube and Twitter. They're really good ways to feel intelligent when people already want you to be, and they're just really useful for tricking extremely disconnected and credulous morons. People that don't really participate in the grandest scheme of building software and hardware, people like Read Hoffman of LinkedIn, of Brian Cheski of Airbnb. People

that aren't coders or builders or anything. They're just people that vaguely fell into success. Perhaps they built useful companies, but they didn't really make the companies, and they didn't really do the work. Sam Altman is really good at saying the things that reinforce their biases, and in the process kind of helps them disguise their nepotism and his real superpower, which is, by the way, another form of nepotism. Sam Moorman didn't find the startups that made him so

rich and wealthy and influential. He was being shown them by other powerful people that wanted him in on these deals so that he could give them a vice based on the career of specious management bullshit. And because the valley liked how he looked and how he acted, how he talked, the things he resembled, the things they were reminded of when they heard Sam Mormon speak. And it's funny because a lot of these people, the Paul Graham's

of the world especially, they're big time meritocratic people. They love the meritocracy. Yet when you look deeper, the people seeding and not actually building the things. Ilia Suitzkaeva over Open Ai. He is the actual technolog Jesus, He's the actual guy that and by the way, no longer Open Ai the kind of deserves this. But Sam Alton's the one that got invited in early to stripe and Airbnb and all these things. And as I'll get into, kind

of rat fucked his way around a bit. And nowhere is this more obvious than in Hydrozene Capital, Aortman's venture capital fund that he created with the five million dollars he got from selling looped his failed startup by the way and backing of course from Peter Teel, Hydrozene invested seventy five percent of its funding in y Combinator companies including Reddit and instacar, even after Sam Mortman became the president of y Combinator, which is weird because the other

partners at y Combinate, like Gary Tann, they were forbidden from managing their own investment funds at the time, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. But I guess Sam Moltman just felt right. It's cool that he gets rid right, not to say Gary Tann hasn't, but the other people just didn't seem to get these opportunities for some reason, could be anything. And he became head of why Combinated, by the way, despite being one of the he was looped was one of the first companies in

y Combinator, and they to explain how this works. Why Combinate would invest a little in a few early stage startups and much larger number these days, and the first cohort was one that included Sam Altman's Looped and he was made president of y Combinator. Despite the fact that luped was terrible. It didn't have a good product, They couldn't sell it. He retasked engineers at one point to

work on a dating app somewhere else. Sam Alton was a terrible CEO, But you know what, he's capable of saying stupid shit like and I quote, competitors are one of the last monsters that haunt your dreams to New York Magazine shortly before predicting that there was absolutely no reason to believe that we would not have a computer

by twenty twenty nine that could replicate his brain. You know what, though, putting that aside, I do think Sam Mormon's right on that one, though, in the sense that chat GPT kind of seems capable of producing this kind of nonsense too. But again, because Sam Mortman's the affable, friendly,

amicable white guy who's known by the right people. He keeps going, he keeps on trucking, And I think that Sam Moltman is on some level, he's a monument to the roight at the core of the valley, and he's a product of this growing distance between the tech industry

and actually creating things of value. While why Combinator founder Paul Graham may be a decorated and successful computer scientist, by the time he made Sam Mortman, president of y Combinator in twenty fourteen, he was already more than a decade removed from selling his software startup via web to Yahoo.

As he drifted further away from actually building things on the computer, so too did Paul Graham's essays drift away from the piosophical measures of software development towards a far darker management philosophy, one where he admitted in a blog from two thousand and three that intelligence itself is not a factor in popularity because smart kids don't want to be popular, and that popularity is much more about alliances and doing things that bring you closer to other popular people. Humm,

maybe he did like Sam Wultman for real reasons then. Anyway, two years before he made Samultman president, Paul Graham would publish a piece called Startup Equal Growth, claiming that growth drives everything in this world, and that growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high

even though the risk is two. A statement that could only make sense if you believed that there will always be hyper growth companies, and indeed that the opportunities for those high growth companies would keep emerging, say for the

next forever and these people ever thought about it. It's so strange to read this stuff, to go back even five years, but especially ten and reading these things and reading these people talking about how dogged Sam Morton is and how great he is at this, and then reading their other philosophies, and it's all stuff like, well, you see, uh, intelligence comes from the mind and building businesses. It's all about growth and business. And you read them and you're like, huh,

these people smart or stupid. I can't tell. They're using smart people language, but they seem kind of stupid. Maybe that's also the problem. Maybe the problem's just a little simpler. While Sam Morton's a spacious opportunist and very much a manipulator, the time he entered Silicon Valley was this period where pretty much all you needed to do was sound smart and be in the right rooms. Companies were being created that could enter these giant markets and just dominate because

all they really needed was money and enough handshakes. Oltman is adept at using connections to make new connections, in finding new ways to make others owe him favors, in saying the right thing at the right time when he knew that nobody would think about it too hard, something

he continues to this day. Ortmand was early on Stripe and read it in Airbnb, all seemingly brilliant moments of investment in the life of a man who has had many things handed to him, who knew how to look and sound to get put in the room and to get the capital to make his next move. It's easy to conflay investment returns with intellectual capital, even though the truth is that people just liked Sam Wultman enough to give him the opportunity to be rich, and he took it.

And he had the ability to hand them money too. In two thousand and nine, when he put fifteen thousand dollars into Stripe, which I'll get to it a bit, he had fifteen grand he could pull out in the middle of founding a start up. He was working on Loop for years at this point. Where did he get the fifteen grand? I didn't have fifteen grands sitting around then, Jesus Christ, he didn't like. This is the thing. No

one digs deeper into these things. No one asks where the privilege truly comes from, and when that happens, guys like this get popular. Now, look, those who might defend Sam Altman might suggest that he may not have been a creator, but he gave his time and his energy to those he backed. Maybe he was a value creator.

Right wrong. According to the Washington Post, sam Aulman's time at y Combinat ere it ended because he developed a reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties and for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture, much as he had, as I've mentioned, once diverted engineers at lut to work on a dating app instead of working on the company he was running. To give Sam Altman credit, he really

is able to talk for hours without saying anything. Just ask LinkedIn, co founder of Reied Hoffman, an investor in open Ai and early of Sam Mortman, and a man who was critical to getting Sam Mortman returned to the helm of open Ai when he was fired, who also let Sam Mortan ramble for over an hour on his podcast Masters of Scale with all one, at one point saying that he was and I quote, he was in a developing world country shortly after the iPhone came out,

and despite their poverty, everyone had smartphones. Now, I just want to be clear. This is so obviously, completely and utterly stupidly false. It made me genuinely angry. Why because what so the iPhone comes out? So the rollout of smartphones in other countries has been incredibly useful, it's been great. It didn't happen in a goddamn year. Sam, you lying sack of shit. I'm sorry. I just really hate this stuff.

I really hate that these people who can go around getting money seemingly at will just go on each other's podcasts and jack off and wank about this nonsense, who say these patently obviously fake things. He probably saying his defense by the way, Oh it's four years later, which might have made sense. It's always vague with this goddamn guy. It's always vague with these goddamn guys. And it's just so offensive because regular people do not get these opportunities.

Regular people don't get put in these rooms. People that are undoubtedly smarter and more accomplished and harder working than Sam Aortman. But because Sam Altman fits the template, he's allowed to go and he's allowed to be rich one hundred times over. And it really shouldn't come as a surprise that Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, investor in open ai

and so much has such affection for Aortman. After all, he's the founder of LinkedIn, which is basically the one place that you know you can go to read six hundred words that mean nothing, these massive, cringe worthy paragraphs broken into a Staccato's style that hurts the brain and the mind, but makes people who don't really know why they're doing their job care about what they're doing very happy because it makes it all feel far more important

than it really is. Moving on through Aortmand's power structures.

Another of his close friends is Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who helped, by the way, also get Sam Altman put back in open AI, and he's helped Altmand pedal these vague rubbish promises about artificial intelligence, at one point, with Cheske calling it bigger than the Internet, mobile and cloud combined and saying that AI will, by the way, non specifically change Airbnb, which is a company that has and this is what kills me as well, only got worse

over time. I think Airbnb really crested about four or five years ago, and then it just became the same. But worse over time, put my gravances to the side, and as you can kind of tell what I'm getting at here, Aortmand's used his political maneuver and to become super rich. And he's grown, according to the Wall Street Journal, a portfolio of more them four hundred companies worth nearly

three billion dollars. Now what's really worrying is that he's partially funded it with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt of loans from JP Morgan Chase. Now almost anyone can see why this is insane borrowing money from a bank and putting it into an industry where the majority of companies fail. It's just completely bonkers. I don't understand

what's going on. Well, I mean I do, which is the rich reinforce the rich, and they put money with people who don't necessarily qualify for it and aren't necessarily smart or good at stuff or have done things. But because they're in the right company, it works for them. Like a regular person. They can barely get a mortgage,

let alone. What's likely I'm guessing by the way a low interest rate loan to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company that Sam Moultman put three hundred and seventy five

million dollars into in twenty twenty one. He serves as both the chairman of Helion's board and potentially one of its largest customers because open ai is now and just announced a deal with Helion, and I quote Matthew Konnittzer from the Register here to get access to Helion's not yet possible nuclear fusion driven electricity generators. Just it's so cool that that, and tons of people reported that without

Matt's necessary bile there. I love the Register because they're willing to say stuff like this nuclear fusion has not happened yet. That's that's a sci fi thing that he has put all that money into. Nevertheless, plenty of people credulously accepted this, and like Sam odd Man, aw they're doing a deal open ai, open ai and nuclear Fusion. Just to be clear, there's no deal there the nuclear fusion.

Oh my god. The Wall Street Journal also reported the open Ai is happily cutting multiple deals with other things that Sam Altman's invested in, including Reddit, which Ortmann owns hundreds of millions of dollars were stuck in thanks to an investment from hydro Seen Capital when he worked a y combat are, along with AI device companies Limitless and Humane, the latter of which Ortmand owns a fifteen percent stake in.

According to the Journal, it's just obvious, naked self dealing, the kind of stuff that should be something that disqualifies you, that gets critiqued further than of course the journal, and I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing enough of it at least, But I wanted to dig further into this investment portfolio, so I sat down with Ton Datan of the Wall Street Journal to kind of go through it. So in your story, you were talking about how Sam Ortman had this massive credit line I think from JP Morgan.

Is this standard for investment? Have you seen this before?

in privately held tech companies. Both of those things together are like not you do not see that very often in the tech industry.

justify your entire fund. But if you were to use those holdings in those kinds of companies in which a huge majority of them go under, and then a huge majority of them do go under, and suddenly you are having to use as collateral holdings in a company that is worth zero, you're in big trouble. So yes, it is not done very commonly.

open ai data centers. So these data centers, when they're built and I guess when nuclear fusion exists, you know, would be powered by clean nuclear fusion energy. And so that's something in which Sam obviously as one of the largest by far the largest investor, and he leon, you know, there's there's there's an overlap there between that and open AI's business. And then the other one that also kind of stoock out to us was Reddit, where he is

one of the largest outside shareholders in the company. And open ai announced a licensing deal with Reddit a couple of weeks ago, and you know, Reddit stock popped on announcement of this deal, and Sam, as a major shareholder, saw his net worth increase, you know, within the course of a day. I mean, that's kind of how it goes when you hold stock. But you know, notably on announcement of this deal.

to make of that. I feel like the language of Sam recused himself would have been easy enough to do, but they didn't do it. They chose not to do it.

Sam didn't recuse himself, And you know, whether it's his fault or not, or this was intentional or not, the fact of the matter is he owns a sizeable like disclosed percentage of Reddit through various holdings, and like those you know, those shares went up on announcement of the deal.

know we derive energy from the grid and whatever. But you know, aside from a couple of announcements in terms of partnerships or future purchase agreements between Helion and Microsoft and and you know the thing that we reported Helion and open AI, this is not like they have not achieved it yet. These guys are not out there selling you know, nuclear fusion energy to the mass public.

It feels like he has been self Oltman has been self dealing for years.

And like, if you are going to be running, you know, the most consequential tech company at the moment or startup at the moment and open AI, there's just bound to be overlap between a vast investment empire and an open AI. So that's like the argument to the contrary, you know, self dealing. I guess that's in the interpretation of the reader.

really do put the journal to the side here. I think the journal in the Washington Post done a very good job scrutinizing it, but it feels writ large like he's given a much rosier and easier ride than most.

being this big deal that it is. He's this figure that everyone kind of has dealt with at certain points as a tech reporter, and there's just so many opinions on him. I mean, you know, I think there are people, maybe like you, who see him as this nefarious character, self dealing, someone who isn't really above board. But you know, you report a story like this and you talk to

founders and some venture capitalists and they love him. They think he's, you know, a great investor, a brilliant business person, has incredible insights, and you know, is this also kind of futuristic thinker, who's who's kind of in that Elon musk vein thinking ten twenty years down the road and at a scale at the trillions of dollars level that

they find very you know, alluring and exciting. And so, you know, I it's always hard to know when you do these sort of story is like what you're going to get in the course of reporting, because you can talk to a certain group of people who think he's borderline criminal and to be clear, I'm not saying that, but there are.

he's slown down. I wonder how much of his success can be attributed to the fact that he just was inside of Y Combinator and had the money to play at the time. Because yeah, you've been around long, so go ahead.

which he is in. Like if you're in that inner circle of people who see these companies on the way up, and like, you know, I don't think it takes a brain genius to look at something like Uber and be like, oh, well, I bet that's probably going to be a pretty big deal one day, so I'd like to invest in that. But you know, I think to his credit, maybe his investment in Stripe was an incredibly risky one for him personally.

I think it was like fifteen thousand dollars or something, and you know, he probably didn't have a ton in his bank account at the time, so that was a pretty When when was that early early days, I mean they were they were in It was in two thousand and nine, actually, Paul Grant so before he sold Looped. Yeah, yeah, I think it was around the same time.

I don't know. I think you bring up a good question, which is like if you have access to an Airbnb in the earliest days, or or a Reddit or even a company that like Rippling, which I don't know if your you know, listeners know about. But it's this very successful now hrs art up that Sam has has invested in and also.

but whatever, you know. There was a kind of a big scandal a bunch of years back with this company called Zenefitz, which was accused of shirking regulatory requirements for training its workers on anyway, it was a big scandal a couple of years ago, and the CEO of that was was pushed out very publicly, later replaced by David Sachs for what it's worth, and he went on to start this other company that was basically a direct competitor to that, and it's called rippling, and it's done really

well in terms of building up its valuation. And Sam is one of their earliest investors. And I think you know part of his Conrad Parker. Conrad is the guy's name. Yeah, And anyway, Sam has made a bunch of money from that, or at least you know his his investment is valuable from that. And my point is basically like when you when you're in this inner circle, you have access to these companies and you can make these investments. Whether you know he is like standard Deviation is a better business

person than anyone else in tech, I don't know. It's not for me to say, but you know he is on paper, you know his his holdings are worth billions. So I guess you got to give him something for that.

going up. But here here is the real problem. I see what happens if and we mentioned this earlier, these startups go to zero and he has this these massive credit lines.

You know, I can't go into all of the details there, but yeah, there's a reason why using you know, privately held shares or private you know, you know shares and privately held companies as collateral is not commonly done. I mean I talked to someone in the course of this story who was like shocked that someone would do that

kind of thing. But you know, again, to this Silicon Valley mindset in which risk, you know, quote unquote risk is really promoted and celebrated around here, that kind of thing is seen as like an example of how aggressive and cool Sam is that he's willing to kind of take a risk on something like that in order to put more money into well, I guess you could. Some people would say, put more money into the ecosystem. Other people would be like, give himself more examples to get rich.

capital put in by LPs. Can get a bit complicated, but no, this isn't you know, one of those angel investors who's putting ten thousand dollars in a bunch of different companies. I mean when he really believes in a startup or he really thinks they're going to go somewhere. The number is in the millions and tens of millions.

you know you you you know. Crypto obviously was an interesting moment in terms of there are people who believe that the entire financial system was about to be transformed because of these you know, the blockchain, and you know, there was the on demand era, you know cloud. I didn't really cover tech at the time, and you know that sort of proved out to really be in a very specific way transformative. I don't know with this one. I mean, I think the technology as it stands right

now is very problematic in terms of its shortcomings. I think hallucinations are a major issue, Uh, if it's going to be as valuable as search, which is like the most successful product you know, tech has probably ever put out. And the other issue is the cost of training and deploying these models is tremendous. I mean, like you said, like I cover the enterprise, so part of my bead

is writing about the cloud and data centers. I mean, to me, one of the biggest things that's going on right now is this multi billion dollar build out of data centers that's happening at an unprecedented level across not even the country, but the world in order for there to be enough you know, AI warehouses, data centers you know, outfitted with Nvidia chips to train and inference, you know,

deploy all of these models. That's crazy, I mean, because that is all done in advance that they're being enough demand to justify these investments, right. I mean, like this is all because you know, for a huge portion of last year, there was more demand than supply when it came to compute, and so all of these tech companies started saying, well, we need to build out in advance

of you know, this demand being unending and increasing. And it's like, well, well, okay, that's fine for now, but if in the future it doesn't, If you know, this turns out to have been a fad, or the years that it takes for this to be a widely a

widely use technology is way longer than it is. You know, it could be one of the bigger boondoggles I think we've seen in tech, you know, like all these data centers that were built out that lay unused because there's not enough people wanting to use chat ept or any of the kind of similar similar products.

Who you know, who was who was you know, the lead on this Sam Altman piece about you know, with crypto mining, there were a lot of companies at the height of and specifically ethereum mining that were building up these rigs, these these mining rigs that were had GPUs at the heart of them that were necessary when people thought that was going to be profitable basically.

energy traders. I shouldn't actually don't know if it was energy, but but people with like a very financial background who realized like this amazing arbitrage that was happening in crypto and ethereum mining, which was that like the like the value of mining when theoreum prices were high, is greater than the electricity it takes to consume to do the mining.

And so when that was at its peak, they were, you know, they were doing pretty well, and then they read the writing on the wall that you know, ethereum mining was probably gonna decrease in value, and they made an early switch to like retrofit all of their mining rigs into AI compute. And that was before chat GPT

and you know, open ai became a household name. But anyway, I bring up that whole story because what a lot of ethereum miners started to realize when there was this kind of shift in the nature of ethereum mining that basically meant they didn't need GPUs, like these very powerful GPU rigs to do the mining is they were stuck with these kind of useless machines. And so a lot of them have tried to like jump over into AI

compute and providing you know, training and inferencing. And so it was an interesting example of like one trend jumping into another. And so I don't know what that could mean because the theory of mining is just not even close to the scale that we're talking at here with AI,

but you know, tech seems to find a way. I don't know, I don't have a good answer for it, but it would be a crazy outcome, honestly, if you know, we're talking thirty billion dollars a year of investment in infrastructure from a single company alone in building up data centers, So if that ended up not being necessary, yeah, I don't I don't know what to do with those things.

But it almost feels like it could cause I think Nvidia feels like they would be or a MD to an extent Micron, I guess, but would be most at risk from this because if there's just thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of black Wells or what have you sitting around unused, it feels like it could be catastrophic.

valuable than Apple. I mean that's just crazy. Yeah, there's a lot going on in terms of the expectation of this sort of not stopping anytime soon.

even catch on with AI. But yeah, I mean you're seeing money. And my colleague Berber wrote actually a good story about this a couple of weeks ago. I mean, you're seeing startups that have no you know, no revenue really or not even a product raising at valuations in the billions. I mean that's the very definition of a bubble. So yeah, I don't. I don't even feel like I'm going out on a limb saying that.

level in the media right now. The I have literally only seen since on the metaverse, where it was just this concept, not saying AI is useless generally if AI has uses, But it feels like everybody is giving Sunda Pshai, for example, the benefit of the doubt about Google Search, or at least they were until it told you to eat rocks, but especially with chat GPT, they're just kind of assuming these things will happen.

be part of the hype. I mean, that's not our job, but at least say, like, well, this is why Anthropic is getting billions of dollars of investments, or obviously open Ai or anything like that. I think if I had to just personally guess on a lot of this stuff, you know, it's been a bit slow in terms of transformational technologies in a while. I mean, honestly, you could maybe look back to probably the iPhone as the last thing that like fundamentally upended the way we live our lives,

you know, in the enterprise. I guess you could look to the cloud, although most people don't care about that, but you know, with AI and you know these kind of seemingly magical interactions that you've had with chat, GPT or it can you know, write poems and you know, create images and and you know Sora and the video stuff and you know whatever you want to call that. You know, her like demonstration from open Ai, like it

it demos very well. It sounds like the kind of promise of AI of creating something that approximates human intelligence.

of capitalism. I've called them before, people like Fidjisimos, CEO of Instacart, which is a company that Sam Mormon invested in, to a board that also already included Dan Adam DeAngelo of Cora, which is another company that Sam Mortman invested in. Oh oh, sorry, sorry, I forgot. There's one other guy that Sam Ortman added back to the board when he became CEO. He's a guy you might know. He's called Sam Altman. It's so good watching all this happen. It's

so fun. It's so great watching all of this naked self dealing, corrupt nonsense happen, and everyone's just like, this guy is the future. Sam Mortman's the man. And I think the frustrating part of watching the Sam Mortman story unfold is that at no point anybody appears to interrogated who this person was and whether they might be fit to task. There are credible allegations of abuse from his

sister Annie Altman. There are real things happening here, business things, social things, horrible things, and no one's god dwn doing anything.

And maybe that's it. Maybe Ortmand's skill isn't so much creating things or any real legacy, but it's just a result of the momentum one gets when you've made enough money for people and enough money yourself that people no longer bother to check and would rather just find convenient platitudes and stories about the clever things you've said, rather than think about it for too long, because maybe the

truth's just a little disgusting. And the problem with someone like Sam Orman is that they'll eventually get to the point where they can do real damage. I don't know, like today, like becoming the figurehead for the entirety of Silicon Valley and the entire artificial intelligence boom and the CEO of its largest player. Aortman is a marketer at best, kind of a management consultant, but let's be honest, history shows he doesn't really manage it anything.

even those not making generative AI. So everyone is putting the expectations of Sam Altman, who is building and by which I mean having other people build a technology that doesn't do the things he's promising on the entirety of the AI industry, so that the people buying AI who don't really know what they're talking about go and use generative AI and then they say, wait, this doesn't do the thing. Do you not see the problem here? Do you not see that Sam Altman is leading tech to ruin.

He's promising these things that generative AI cannot do. He is making these statements that are boosting stocks that are honest to god impressive here tricking fortune one hundred CEOs into investing money in take that will not do what it says. And when the ruination begins, it's going to be terrible for the valley. Funding will be even harder

to get. And in the next episode, I'm gonna explore Sam a little bit more and I'm gonna really look at what happens to an industry when they so doggedly follow and support and appreciate such an obvious false prophet. 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 youread dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline

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