Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer

As Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed ze Tron. We're here in the beautiful iHeart Radio Studios in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course, Charlie Meyer, the esteem blogger and CEO of Picko. Charlie, thank you for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, yeah, you've you've gained some I would say, notoriety recently by making blogs that go against the oinking of the hogs of the Valley. And I think your scaling laws piece was the one that really got going. Yeah.

So I my blog gets some love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel, right, and so I'm trying to get off of that. We're gonna try and build it like a newsletter type thing. But yeah, I'll burst on Hacker News and every once in a while I'll go something that blows up and I'll get my get my haters in there.

So, so what is it that's pissing them off?

So, like I had to post a few weeks back that was on I called it LLLMS or the Ultimate demoware right, And so I had to find demoware as software that you make the software, and it works well in the thirty minutes that you're showing off to executives or whoever's going to buy it, right, and then it doesn't do the thing right, It doesn't do the thing day to day. And so I listed some examples and my startups in etech, right, so we do, you know? And so like there's always something that I pick on.

Crazy idea maybe, yeah. But did people know like that?

Well, yeah, so some some people, uh, you know, we can name names of for me too, But I actually don't know how to pronounce them. So uh but anyway, so people are in there and they're like, you have no idea, Like if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like you have never even tried, It's like it's a classic, Like you're missing out, Like you somehow are completely missing the point.

And you know something's really good and the innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron. You you well you have never tried it.

And it's like, well, what if I like have like what if this is like actually the thing I spend my time on is thinking about this.

You're a non AI I d E. Right, so coding.

Environment, yeah, yeah, well and that yeah, we got yeah, lots of that, lots of that. But like so the software that I make batting around a little bit here, but Replet was a copy and so Replet was a very loved by Teacher's id online and their whole thing was like we teach like we held you teach coding online because it's a way for you to run Python and Java and all your code online and you can do it and you can do it on crumb books and you can collaborate and they had like teacher tools

But what did it used to be?

So it used to be an excellent tool, just an absolutely fantastic tool. It was it was just you go on, you log on like Google Docs for coding, right, So, like you think, okay, well you back in the day you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever and that socks and you know, it's great to bring that online into the cloud. And they did that and they were

It's so listen this you probably heard me mentioned Replet in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most favorite companies. If you go on the replet reddit.

It's just the wallet inspect And so now that's kind of like I've gotten rid of most of my like doom scrolling places, but like this is I don't know what type of scrolling it is, but like I go.

On our replet Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly, and it's just so funny. It's just God being like, yeah, spend fifteen hundred dollars. It doesn't really work. Yeah, but I think if I spend five thousand more dollars it might. Well.

I mean people are like, okay, well should I spend five thousand dollars? I mean we can we can be reasonable that you can bring the numbers down to reality. It's I spent fifty dollars, which for a person who has got a bad suffare, Yeah, that's that's a big waste of money. And they're like, okay, well it seems like I might need to spend two hundred and fifty dollars more or should I go on fiver her. Yeah, and then it's just people and Reddit. I mean it's Reddit, so they're just like skill issue.

Well that and also the people who were like it am running into this problem.

And then a lot of that yeah, where it's like and but replet just just for for anyone on there on replet right now? Yeah, like what did they do to teachers? So teachers? They had a product for teachers that worked, that was great, that was well teachers. And on this November somethink twenty twenty three, this is a big day for my business because this is the only reason I have my business is to replace replet. Because they turned on AI autocomplete for kids, no way to shut it off.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning? Yeah?

So I had a I have a small YouTube channel with not you know, a million subscribers, but you know, I talked to teachers on there, and you know, we had a customer of mine on there and they were like, yeah, you know that year, it just seemed like the guy he just like he missed the fact the AI got turned on, no one sentiment announcement or an email or a warning.

All of his students were just amazing. They were.

He was like, yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody got an A that semester, Like, I wonder, you know did that actually?

So did students actually end up getting great schools? Because no one knows the AI go?

Yeah, I mean it took depending on who you If you're wandering around the classroom looking at students and you see them all tab completing, like because AI just.

Just for the listeners as well spelled out. So with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like auto correct decoding.

Yeah, and so so like AI for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced podcast. But AI can really well, it can solve intro to computer science for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy.

Let's call Brown from the Internet bugs. He said. It makes the easy things easier and the hard thing's hort.

Yes, and so yeah, so if you need to, if you're in ninth grade and you're writing your first program, yeah you can. You can tab complete the whole thing in one go. It'll one shot at d that's incredible. It'll one shot program.

It's this term that term just listeners is like it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly. Yeah.

So it's like count to ten and the AI can count to ten, which is incredible.

That's revolutionary. But fun fun fact if you try and make chat GPT count to a million, it freaks out if you do the voice mode. Adam Kinna told me this one. If you go like counter a million, it stops around nine or ten and then says should I continue, and it just won't do it. It's very funny. I love living in the future. Yeah.

So they they though they turn on the AI and then they were like, we're not doing education and companies have deprecated things.

Yeah, it happens actually not their main product whatever.

So that I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm an indie developer whatever. Like our software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online ide to schools. There's money, but it's not it's not a billion dollar business.

It's fine. I don't know this replet but yeah, but you can't write billions of valuations.

No, no saying hey, we're you know, kids have chromebooks and we're gonna you know, charge ten dollars a student or whatever. Like you can't of course that you're not going to raise a bill.

You're not.

That's not a billion dollar business, no, But the AI thing seems magical. And then you know, the vibe coding thing happened. And you know, as soon as the vibe coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in on this, and they deleted. They deleted every lead, so not just deprecated. Right, So it's one thing to deprecate software.

So it's like and deprecate is when you stop supporting together.

You say it's it's no longer supported. When you put up a big red scary banner on the top saying your work is read only, you cannot create anymore. Right, that is a really mean thing to do with. But it happens. Software changes, you know, repl it for what it's worth to be nice and fair to them, Like they have investors and they're under the gun to provide some returns and so whatever. The teacher thing isn't gonna make them a ton of money. But they deleted the stuff.

Just why And when you say the stuff was this like projects that schools have been working on.

It was so a teacher says, I'm going to spend two three years putting in all my curriculum, all these markdown files, all this stuff, all these tests. I'm going to configure all this stuff. No deleted, gone.

Monsters deleted actual monsters and now but they sent the warning email ed, Wow in July. When are teachers online looking at their work email in July? Yeah? Classic, classic, big month for teachers to.

Be on the well for American teachers, Yeah, it's not a huge month. So yeah, in July we say we're going to delete all your stuff and then it's gone.

Was there any way to back it up? Well there wasn't until they deleted it.

All.

That's so cool. It's awesome.

So they're an awesome Like if you're a replet developer, you know when when the next big thing comes up and Replet may decide to delete all your stuff.

Well replet they launched Asient three. Oh yeah, that was my favorite launch of product I've ever seen. Because I've mentioned this on the show before, but they it's like, oh, it's an autonomous coding thing and it's just the digital mister bean, it's just like, why don't you go off and build me a software thing? And it just fucking spends one hundred dollars and goes, I am, I don't know you like this. I don't fucking care. And then they had to release the thing where you could make

So so I will. I'll defend the vibe coder platforms. But the defense now, I mean it's it's it is. It's fraudulent, right, I mean like if you say, hey, you don't know how to code at all, and uh yeah, just sign on to this website and I mean look at their marketing page.

That's exactly what I'm loading loading. It's with a nice blue iPhone Air. Oh yeah, beautiful. I have the I have the Space Black. Hell yeah, the iPhone app Rise up. It's a great phone. It's a great phone. I'm not Apple made me pay for it. Yeah, turn your ideas into apps? What will you create? The possibilities are endless.

So I wrote a post on this and I was excited. Yeah, and I was. I was excited to end the post saying there has never been a successful thing.

Ever.

Unfortunately, Replet has added a set of case studies, and I think that they use it. And so the case studies are we sold to enterprises and we're going to do prototypes of internal dev tools, not dev tools, internal like you know, management software for inside your back office software.

So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August, and one of them is how Zinus says one hundred and forty thousand dollars with replet and it but it also cuts development time by fifty percent.

But so then The question is did the person typing stuff into uplet did they know how to code?

Exactly? See, that's if they know how to code whatever the stuff, it's not vibe coding. It's just you could have used custom you could use stuff. You could have used any vs code or was it what's the free one Amazon's doing now? Kiro? Maybe Kiro. And then there's the I like the one that came out from China and everyone was like, that's gonna send information to that Chinese It's like will it? I don't know, but I don't think they're going to Your clone of Flappy Bird has got to be taken up. Yeah.

The way that the word vibe coding has the meaning that it has today I believe is you do not know how to code. You type prompt and you get app out. And I'm not going to dock this person because they were nice to me once, but like there's a person online like they just do like, oh, here's one hundred days of AI and I'm going to make a fully functional software as a service company fully and I don't know how to code. And then you look

Cool, Like they know how things work and it's still broken.

Yeah, so I mean whatever, this person was like a product manager or something, so like they know what an API is, and they know what a web server is, and they know the names of the different technologies, and like that's going to get them part of the way there. But the idea that you can end to end create a software product that has some value.

Yeah, it's crazy. We would have heard about it. No, that's kind of your demo. Workpost was really good about this because it was kind of like, look, you can do the proof of concept. You can do this, but we've never seen the next stage. And someone else did a really good one was like shovel weear. They said, where's the shovelwear? Where's the crap software? They I remember the first times I was on the Internet, the amount

Yeah, I mean so you'll see, Okay, I made flappy Bird, I made a weird thing I made like you can make little small pieces of software for yourself that maybe have a little bit of value. It is fun, it is an novel, yes if you know like.

But then it then it doesn't work like it's so, I do not know.

I'm a web developer, so I know how to do web apps. I call it code for shits though, yeah whatever, but like it's that, that's what I know. That's that's what I've been doing. I've been coding for whatever, and I know how to do that. I do not know how to make iPhone apps. So I was like, okay, you know what I'm gonna do. They just announced Claude whatever because I'm interested in this stuff. I'm an early adopter.

I don't And also, if it did, what however I may feel about AI If it actually did well, if Vibe coding was real, that would actually be a huge dal. That would be a huge fucking dal. I wouldn't I would have all my ethical concerns. If I could actually build software without knowing anything, Wow, that would be great. Never been the case.

But you tried, though, well, so I tried. So so my idea was like, Okay, I use my phone too much. I'm gonna make an app called app snooze. It takes. So you say I want Gmail, I want it snooze for a half hour. Got it so that when I open up the Gmail app, it used this screen time thing and it says blocked, and then thirty minutes is up. I get it back, right. That is impossible to make using iOS essentially without like a substantial amount of work. It's it's based on like the limitations of how Apple

I haven't told any of those, Okay, well, oh no, no, I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan. Yeah, and I try not to watch. If I needed to watch a poorly conceived product, I could just use my season tickets, but I solved them, so wait, but keep going.

Though, okay, well but see so it's like you got this, but then it's this is the whatever. So they have Haiku, and they've sonn It, and they have Opus. Yes, so whatever awesome names. But so they have son It, which is the really good one. You know, it's very well respected. It's supposed to be it's supposed to be the cloud is supposed to be a good one for coding. And so I was like, I'm gonna pay. I'm gonna pay

Well, the app you couldn't build the Apple though it sounds.

But because because of like literal limitations in how iOS works in terms of like you can't have a timer that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just not a thing that Apple was.

This thing called Brick, whether it's a physical device as well, but that feels like a Bluetooth. Something's going on with Brick. I don't know. But here's here's the thing as well. With all of this, you just made me think it is weird that the app doesn't just go yeah, I can't build that NTE.

It'd be nice if it did say that, and it was this was weird. I had never observe this behavior before. And again I've posted online like okay, you know this, you know three bees in Blueberry that thing?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Whatever, and people I posted that on LinkedIn and someone was like, you are lying, and I post my link. Yeah, I post the link to the chat and they're like, you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid.

Yeah, it's prompt injection. Yeah.

Yeah, like you have a system prompt that says like it's like stupid as ship did.

Yeah a piece of ship. Dude.

I messed up. I put be stupid in my system. I should have put I should have put be smart. If I put smart, it would have worked.

So on this. You just reminded me when I was dicking around with clode code. So I did the story a few months ago about how you know, I don't know if you've seen like vibrank where it's got like people in cloth spend fifty thousand dollars. I love those people. I think that's awesome. Well to try this myself, I went on. I was like, what is the most token intensive software you could build me. It's like, oh yeah, an autonomous car and a bet of us. I'm like, cool,

Well, I mean it certainly, well you could have a trillion dollars start up on your hands, but it's just you should check out that code.

It's so sick that these things don't even go like, yeah, we can't do that, Like I can't do an autonomous car starts up. I don't have any training data. Very basic.

But if it was, if it was, if that thing was smart or useful, right, it has the ability to look things up online. Yeah, you should have looked through the documentation, and it sort of said, well, what can we do with timers? What can we do a screen time? Can you hook up a timer to screen time. I will let you do this in the background and get the half hour time incorrectly, And it's like it's it's it's demoware and it allows you to build demoware.

But it didn't even build a demo of this. Well, so now it.

Built me something I was kind of excited about because it it let me pick the app. So I picked Gmail, and I picked thirty minutes and then it it it worked. Gmail's turned off, right, thirty minutes elapse?

Right? Gmail is not back on? Oh so you just cut Gmail? Well, I mean it's not been in your email since.

No, exactly, Sorry customers, if you have been emailing me, it's messed up. No, but it it was like it's just lied, right, I mean, And so like that's imagine being someone I'm a software developer. Okay, whatever, I'm gonna I don't know iOS, but like I'm gonna go on the Apple pages and see what's up, and I'm gonna ask some meaningful follow ups and determine that this didn't work. And Okay, I lost my hundred bucks in the developer

Well, there's nothing you can do, because the reason I read the replic pages and the cursor pages and the Curse of One, it's people that can code a little be at least a little bit. But replet is just it's fifty percent and same with lovables. Read it as well, Lovables and other listeners. It's another AI coding platform sold, a survived coding thing, and it's all it's fifty percent people being like I've spent three hundred dollars, and then like ten percent people just lying. People be like I

It's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to do that, but yeah, we don't need them. We can just we talk into the thing and turn your app into reality except you.

It's just it is really crazy how much vibe coding is proliferate considering how fucking it's nothing.

Well so, but so if you need, like if you need a prototype, So if like this whole thing boils down to if if the expectations were real, if it was like, yeah, turn your app, turn your sentence into a prototype of an application in minutes. Okay, yeah, like an MVP. MVP is like, oh yeah, used to work, but well okay, oh sorry, I thought you were saying.

Hypothetical world where it works.

Well no, yeah, sorry, Well now in a hypothetical world and where it does what it does today, you can get like a mock up. If it's a build a semi functional wireframe mockup of your application that you could show to kind of validate your idea to your friends in minutes. Yeah, for thirty dollars or whoever it's your credits and up being. That's fine, But does that happen?

Doesn't it? You could kind of do that. You're lucky, it's you roll the dice. That's the thing. It's always if you're lucky. There's enough asterisks on this. It's just insane that it's got this far because I've read a lot of vibe coding articles and if you read like Kevin Ruce of course in the Times and people like that, you read these articles and you'd think, Wow, you can just do this, you can just go and do this. This is the future is today. But it's not really not really the case at all.

But I think that the thing that's so like pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue.

You just two words. You're prompt you're prompting it wrong, David devait Yer old thing. But now it's yeah, you're prompting it wrong.

You're prompting it wrong. And so and there's no real way to disprove that because can we go back in time and like, because it's all this probabilistic stuff. And so, so I have a post that I've put up and it's it's code doesn't happen to you, that's my thing is So it's it's my because you know top programming for a while, and so if you're teaching a new programmer, sometimes if they have like if they've kind of gotten

Programming like code is instructions.

Code is instructions, and the code like happens de terministically and maybe if you're, you know, developing a game, maybe there's some random elements to the software that you're developing, but there's no randomness, like the randomness is under your control.

Yeah, so it's true. It's the difference between treating it as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions.

It's instructions and so like if you're if you're a really good programmer and maybe you're whatever, maybe you use AI to save you some typing and you still have that good attitude whatever, like you can use to say typing, that's fine.

I mean, that's the only real vapp like that that feels like the only consistent thing is just filling in blanks that you know you code yourself. Like it feels in it's also correct, and I'm like, I'm which may be useful. I'm not gonna lie like I use it.

Yeah, yeah, like I but I used to have a paid GPT account, but I don't trust it to do like the models. And this is one of the things that I brought up in my post is the models like aren't better now right that Well, GPT three was okay and GPT four was like much genera and then GBT five is trash. Yeah, I mean right, relatively speaking, maybe it's a little bit better, and maybe it costs open a eye more, which is a big development.

It was very very great for them and whatever you had to cost them less, but it costs more, costs.

More, but so stop getting better. So that there was a time where I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna buy into this. IM an earlier after.

I'm kind of I'm kind of a booster, Like I I was cured going to where's your head? Dot at? That's is it? Dot com? It's just where's your adult at? Oh, where's your Okay, well, where's your head? Dot At?

Cured me a little bit of this because I'm like, and I've just had some situations where it's just failed me so poorly. Like there was a confluence of events this summer where I was just like, no, what happened? I'm done with this. First of all, I got a strong recommendation from uh GPT to buy a software called a script, which is like editing, because I have I have a YouTube channel and I want to like I say a lot of ums and ohs, and maybe I'm

Descript kind of like a Google search.

Yeah, yeah, yeah or whatever. It's an okay Google search ye whatever. And so he said you got to use the script, and I was like cool. And so I put in my credit card twenty bucks or thirty bucks or whatever whatever it was, just I put it in a recording and just completely mangled it.

Yep.

And it's just like the audio was unusable. It was it was off by an eighth of a second off my voice, and it's just like there's no way there's I have no recourse and I'm not an audio engineer, and so I just okay, like I vibe, I vibe edited my my video and just ruined it.

It's almost like every promise they make is it's going to automate everything. It's like, ah, not really, as long as you know what you're doing.

But this was like a meta level thing where the AI recommended me either AI also screwed me over, and so I'm like, okay, this is like this may this is like because I was using it a search, right yeah, and so but it failed me a search because it's just emphatically And then you look, because then I was like, well, what's wrong?

Am I? Is it a skill issue? Am I stupid? And so I look and Reddit is just filled with like this is the worst software, this is the worst I used the script very briefly, and all I wanted to do was take a bit of audio and turn it into a video with the text happening. That's the way you read their marketing material. You would look at it and think it would take two seconds. Took me about forty five minutes, and it was just by the end of it, I'm like, I don't even want to

Well, so there's that, and so there's that, and then it's like, so I'm also I'm a web developer, right, and so I'm not very good. I can't program mobile apps. That's a thing that I can't do, don't know how. I'm also not a very good like infrastructure systems programmer whatever that's you know, cloud stuff whatever. I'm not great at that, but that is an aspect of my job that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure

Whatever, yeah, be in offensive. It would be like.

It's fine whatever. There's a company they offered me this eight this thing and it didn't work, and you know it happens. Yeah, but it's like in the context of a world in which this is the future, this is magic in a click of a button you get perfect audio out if that's the promise in the midst of all this and an AI is recommending to it, this is like meta leveled like off like dog shits a situation and then it's and then it's the dressed disastrously expensive. Yeah,

The point is we need to sell GPUs every and literally in the car here they announced a seven years, thirty eight billion dollar a day between open ai and Amazon Web Services. It's just like, why so that we can so that they can do sora to more so they can generate more copyright infringement. It's and have do you have you in the past used these coding models a lot or is it just kind of like on the side.

I have so even like I will say, even like two weeks ago, I had a very discreete task where it's like, in this one situation, I want to do this one little thing. Yeah, and I knew exactly what it was, and I was lazy, and so I said, right, write the code, and so I put in and then this is a joke comment and people should do this more often. I put in a I paste it in the code, and I said, this code comes courtesy of chatch ebt. If you have any issues with this software,

I should did and it worked great. Whatever. Okay, that's cool. It's saved me twenty minutes. That's that's good. And that's the thing that's the whole AI bubble. It's like, but I'm not a paying subscriber anymore. Oh, that's even worse for them.

Yeah, I know, I just you know, because it's it's the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with that code because it was so easy, you know, it was it was finicky, it was annoying. There are bit situations where I f saying, you know, I say, oh there's a bug in this code. I paste it in and it looks it over and it saved me in aggregate tens of hours in the last three years.

That's fine. It's like, if it was regular sass, I'd be like cool, yeah.

I if it was I think that's kind of part of why I canceled the subscription, because if it was you know, whatever you needed value your time, you know, I could if it was twenty bucks a month and it saved me an hour a month, hey, you know yeah, it's like.

Like trip it or flighty, like it's a little bit of software we pay for it does a thing. And if it was it was ceiling from everyone and burn down like it's just it. It only makes sense if it was cheap, and it's the literal opposite. If this was like cheap, like cheap CPU driven shit, and fine, sure, but it's like I one day, I think we're going to find out how expensive this is and it's going to scare the shit out of people. But you know what, that that actually makes me want to move to a

You talked to it and it was just like this. I would ask it coding problems that I found. So I was still a teacher at the time, and I was like, oh, man, like I have the APE Computer Science exam coming up, and I need to like come up with practice problems. And I was like generators out of thirty practice problems, I obviously read them over it to my due diligence, and I, you know, I tried

Will also give you, so the read the listeners don't get mad. To be clear, GPT four was twenty twenty three. Yeah, we had we were very early in understanding. I mean the environmental damage was there, really sure, but they were also promisingly effects. But it took a full year until June twenty twenty four when they it came out the Open Eye would burn five billion dollars. So like early on,

Well.

So I was I was pumped up because I saw GPT three, was I I you know, I'm a tech person, and so I remember seeing early demos a GPT three and it was like interesting novelty. It would say stupid things and it was kind of cool that it could even generate sentences. That was awesome. Three point five came out and GPT whatever chat GPT. It's like, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I can use it as a search thing and it says that I'm good, which I like when people say

Ed doesn't happen very much, but I think, I, you know what, I'll be honest, I knit that there's something I think mentally about me where all of the anthwerpomorphization pisses not even pissed milf. I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut up. Yeah, it was bullied too much as a kid that like, confidences don't work on me anymore. I do want to write a.

I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't chat GPT, if it was like box get text yeah, and there was no inn promorphization, if it was just like this is a thing that can generate usable or interesting or like code for you, but there's no chat element to it, that would actually make it a lot better to me, like the answer pomorphization of like, oh you're talking to a person that really makes me mad.

Yes, And also I find every time it goes you got it, you got to just shut up, shut up, shut there.

So in one of these NFL ads, literally I don't know if they're like doing a nod to the haters or what, but they like, take, we're going, we're going a.

Couple, make sure the link is in the world.

Well yeah, no, there's like four of them. Hopefully they aren't know you. But uh, it's like a guy doing he's trying to do pull ups and it's like here's your pull up plan, Like you need to do one pull up and then you should do two pull ups, and then you should do four or five pull ups, and like, I'm actually you will be able to do several pull ups and then at the end it's like you got this.

Okay. If so the plan is you do more pull ups of a time, you could probably just work that out by doing doing pull ups with text in it. Mate, I nobody said you got this, but yeah, exactly. Actually no, my friend Mac, when I text him about pull ups, he says much, He's like, you fucking got this. I think he may have. Literally, it's just that's the commercial. That's the commercial. That's the commercial. But it's the commercial. People watching the NFL and they're like, oh shit, why

I mean maybe I did not pause the commercial, but I it could it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle. I don't know, but the bullet, because it has to have a bullet of the list, I am pretty sure and I might be lying, and so whatever, you know, send me some hate mail, but like I'm pretty sure it said like do a couple wait a week, you know, drink a protein shake and like, you know, do a couple more.

It's just Google Search, except it makes up the results. That's all three fucking years.

So I have a new idea, which is that it's Yahoo Answers but the person has a lobotomy and was like, it just did cocaine.

That's who answers. Yeah, I want it. That's just Yah or Cora. But it's like but it's like light speed, yeah, like the fast. Well Cora now is GPT like they did because Adam DeAngelo is on the board of open Ai. So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now. So cool. But early on it was exciting and there were these scaling laws walk me through through the listeners who might not understand.

So yeah, so the post that I wrote, which very nicely called eloquence. So if I could pay you twenty hours a month to kind of just send me stuff like you've got this.

I'll just I'll email those you got.

This, Okay, that's great, I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah, if you could just do that, I'll pay you twenty bucks a month. No, but so so there was an idea that if you increase the size of the models. I'm not an AI that's right, I'm an AI scientist, and so in this post I said, I'm not an AI expert or an economist. But like, you look at this chart, this chart that they had and you can link the thing. And I actually think I cited my sources,

I mean there's a.

Number of they have smart people over there, yeah, Like I mean, we can be honest that like they're doing clever stuff.

Small is also a very subjective. Sure, these are people who want experts in mathematics.

Yeah, they're doing hard, real math and they're getting results. Like the fact that it can do what it does is incredible.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it.

If that was all they were saying, If that was all they were saying, if they were just like, we did research, We've created this incredible piece of technology that feels almost alien at this point, I mean, or at the point when we discovered it. Now it feels like, you know, just we take it for granted that it's kind of this trash thing. But like at the moment when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh,

Oh that was that was released.

And sam Altman was just like, uh, yeah, well we made a big model.

It was the best announcement ever. I'm actually gonna put it, but from what I remember, miss miss Clammy Sammy was like, yeah, you know, it's I'm just gonna do it from memory. I it's it was like, yeah, good news. It's really good for writing bad news. It's really compute intensive. And I was like yay.

And in that announcement I did quote this in the post because I don't want to make stuff up and like whatever, but they literally said, with each ten x, with each order of magnitude, you know, ten x increase in model size, we will get an improvement in performance.

Yes, but like, where's the like worth the big improvement? Like it's gone? I don't.

I think that was them. I think that was the moment. I don't know what day they announced four point five, but I think every into twenty that was the that was a game over. Yeah, and then they did the reasoning stuff, and the reasoning stuff was the reasoning.

Thing was September twenty twenty four. And my favorite thing about that was reading all the tech press writing about it and being like, can any of you tell me what this does? Can any of you tell me why this matters to this day? And I'm, by the way, I'm not. Actually, it took a minute for me to work out what the fuck? And it's just a hat on a hat thing. It's like, instead of spitting out

Mantle and I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out where because I was.

Like, okay, it was still the height of the fever, though.

I know, but I so I asked it a hard question. So I did a maths degree and a computer science degree in right, So I was like, take this topic from sophomore year abstract algebra and do this like visualization of the thing, right, And I took one of the early reasoning models, which everyone is like, oh, oh one, so sure, because it's like you have a PhD level thing in the pocket. Okay, so PhD level thing should be able to take real sophomore math sophomore and college math concept and visualize it.

Yeah, you should be able to do that. And then it didn't, and then I kind of just did it. I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I hmm. And then I just didn't think about it.

And then I just kept on kind of hoping that something exciting would happen.

Yeah, and I can a bit of empathy here, I get if you're and at that time, so it was September twenty twenty four. A month later, they'd raise six point six billion dollars to get a credit facility of four billion dollars. Like they it looked like open Aye was going places. Unless you're like me and you've read every single possible financial thing you can get hand on,

Yeah, I mean, and whatever. I mean, I don't know what the improvements were. And they improved on the benchmarks.

That's fine.

It's kind of like and I'm sure that the coding results are marginally better.

That's the thing. Though marginally.

Yeah, it's always margin, but now it's marginally. But that's the thing. Three to four was sick, huge jump.

That was sick.

That was not marginal. If you had, if you had, if your lights were on, if you were paying attention and you typed a thing into three and you typed a thing into four, you should be impressed.

Oh, I remember the jump. I wasn't doing better off alone at the time, didn't do that until February twenty twenty four. But I remember being like, oh that'sk but I remember just being like okay, now I was I was it was like, wow, we made a computer do this and this cool?

Okay now yeah, And so like I was vaguely aware of the of the line chart that I mentioned in that post, and so I was like, oh, like all they had to do it was like it is a freight train toward like actual really cool thing because it's like, just make it bigger. And therefore if we just need to make it bigger, then we do need more compute and the reasoning models.

Would you finally got another way to throw compute because it's the training compute and well compute to generate and on so test time compute. Wow.

Yeah, so like that's that's where the freight train's over. Yeah, and I and I just four point five came out, didn't really think about it that hard. They started doing the reasoning stuff and it's like, okay, well they have marginal improvements and they say it did really good on a math Olympiad or whatever, and like that's that's interesting. But but then it's like another whole year goes by and then and then GPT five comes out and like what what was that?

It was nothing and it was so strange.

And so that that was the final So when I'm talking about my confidence and the guns, that cured me of my boosterism. Like I started reading your stuff about it being expensive. Yeah, but then I was like, this is interesting. I've started reading this guy Ed's posts. GPT five is coming out next week. I wonder if this guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg on his face. Yeah, like you might have been scared.

I wasn't because I have the stonewell of the Buddha. But it's I was also just like when it when reasoning was coming up, going back to twenty twenty three, they did was some real shit. The rumors around that Q star, Yeah, it was like wit. The reason Samuton got fired was they found a terrifying new AI they kind of like drummed up. There were leaks about it. There were leaks about levels of intelligence. There was all

Well, and so that you and I had started exchanging emails because whatever, I sorry podcast, and I said them on my post over and it was it was it was interesting talking to you and then I I when that when announcement was going on, I emailed you and you got a lot of emails coming through. But I said, ed ed ed ed ed ed ed. They announced paywalled chat colors.

Yes, I go through. No, no, I remember this but go through this. In the announcement of GPT five, the biggest thing ever, They're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow, which they still haven't released.

They still haven't released that. I don't I'm not I'm not a paying subscribers. I've never seen a yellow.

I'm paying for chat JPT plus. See you can turn it yellow. I want to see if I can do this, live on it yellow, pink, green, change my window color well, GPT, GPT No, I'm going to ask it because it's fucking insane. If this doesn't searching the web, yes, you can change they did well. They did well. Can you though? On some platforms you can change the accent color. God, this fucking stinks. The fact that you can't ask a product what it does.

Well, if you if you can't ask, like, I don't know, what's it good? But I mean, if you can't ask, if you can't type into a Google doc in two thousand and seven, what does Google docs do? That's unsurprising.

But that's because Google Docs is a place to write woods. This is meant to answer the thing.

Well, no, that's what I'm saying. But it's like they've they claimed that it's this all you know, all all knowing omniscion thing and it cannot tell you how to turn. Shouldn't it have just done it for you?

Yeah?

H like give me the bus.

It should have it should have said edit, great question, would you like it to be blue?

Yellow?

Pin or or chars are orange? And and like? But where was the But where was That's what it should have done.

And also the idea that that was one of the announcements is very very cool. I love the idea that, like, it's the biggest moment ever and you can now make chair GPT brown. It's insane. It's insane.

Brown is one of the supportive colors. Probably not next year. Yeah, that that relies on the compute actually the oracle deal.

Yeah it's brown, I'm brown. Oh my god. It's so cool that we've built our entire economy on top of this as well. But but the GPT five thing is it was such a weird moment because watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good. There was the whole THEO white weight, not THEO weight, and that's the information THEO there's this fucking guy. Now I'm gonna I really shouldn't have blanked. I've mentioned him. He did

I guess yeah, whatever, I mean, you're gonna get the next one. But that's the thing is like, if it's just continued marginal improvement, what am I? Yeah, what what are we doing? It doesn't make it doesn't make me. That did not make me excited. And yes, it can save software engineers typing time and whatever. I mean, if you know what you're doing, you can get a lot down.

That's fine. Yeah, And it's it's literally fine.

I'm actually saying like it sounds super sarcastic, but like that's literally fine.

No, but that's literally fine. Would be if this was a ten billion dollar industry, if they were selling it as like the equivalent of virtualization or like some side thing to the great de cloud compute, not the entire future revenue engine because it isn't. I mean.

And so you know, I run a business and I think that So a thing that started people say is they say, like you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good. Yeah, if like one of the criteria is if it went away today, would your users like throw a fit?

Yeah?

Would you throw a fit of chat GPT you got uninstalled from your front You would not, But like you know, would the general person be that upset, and I don't think they would.

I think that there would be a contingent of people who'd be very upset if you have a like parasocial exact the right word. Yeah, if you're like in love with your GPT, then that would be like a death in your family and that's very sad, which would be horrible. And indeed they But it's like I've been saying this for what it's like, say it to boosters, like if this disappeared, would your life change? Would it really change that much? And like, well I used it for baby names. I've used it for it's.

Like you named your baby after No. I'm just saying, like, if you like, if.

You've got a baby name from chat GBT, that's that's tough. Yeah, that's really bad. The more that was said to me by a booster and the more I think about, the more I'm like, brother, one day, your child is going to hear this, because all they do is they.

Sell a book called like the Baby Name Book, and it has like a list of names in it.

I don't fucking know read some books like just think about it. Yeah, I'm gonna one of the most important choices the identity of a future human. I'm going to send it to incorrect Google search. Yeah, it's it's depressing, but it's also quite funny because I feel like this era has really revealed who just doesn't know anything about sucking it. The people who are just like will believe anything or will just believe that they are smart at something because of machine told them they are, that they

So someone online posted I can't wait for the day when there's an AI agent that'll tell me when my friend's birthdays are.

Fuck, there's no other way to do that. There's no way to do that. I don't have like some kind of calendar.

No, No, it's going to be a reminder. And so that's like, that's what's happening now. Is that in the like startup space or just people building technology, it's like, well, we're going to get or if you like watch the ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you were going to agent is going to do the thing that software is supposed to do. Like software. So like I got sold at one point accounting software. Right, that was AI, Right, the AI is going to categorize your transactions. Sure can't

That's what I decided client conversation. And so I I had a meeting with this the founder of the thing, and I was like, dude, like, what are you? What is it? What is this? What did they say? Well, they were just like, you know, sometimes it makes mistakes. We should get on that. Fuck. Yeah, that's that's my accountant. Yeah, you. My whole thing is I know, it's I think with all of this AI coding stuff in the big in the big tech realm, something's gonna break something. Really, but

Well, so so back to replet. I mean I think that they I kind of hope that they're I don't know if I hope that they're first to go. I mean whatever, they're nice people working there. So that's the unfortunate thing is there are nice people working at these There are people with jobs like it will involp people.

I don't I wouldn't want.

To ask for people to get laid off who are hardworking people, and some of them are like cool scientists who have studied hard and they're like the nice people.

And it's the grimpa of all this is like people are gonna lose fucking job.

But it's I mean, it's the executives who you know obviously pissed me off for just yes lying through their teeth, right, I mean, those people deserved it, and but you know, they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happened.

To them this, which is why we need to write things to put their it because at some point there needs to be a record of this, of course. Yeah, so I'm going to wrap it there. Charlie whek came people find you?

So I have a blog blog dot Charlie Meyer dot co, which is like where kind of my writings go. But I'm also trying to set up a newsletter. So that's Csmeyer dot substack dot com. And my name is spelled m E y e R.

Hell yeah, and I of course amed Zytron. You can find me on the internet at Google dot com. That's where I live. I will put all the links to Charlie's stuff of course in the episode notes, but it's good for you to hear it now. And yes, should have a monologue coming up this week. I know I did an announcement where I said I was going to have a big story that is on hold, not because anything went wrong, but because the scale of the information

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.

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