Transcript for:
Factually - AI Hype and Tech Industry's Future

hello and welcome to factually I'm Adam Conover thank you so much for joining me on the show again artificial intelligence is supposed to revolutionize the world and our economy the major platforms are spending tens of billions of dollars on it just this year alone to gain an advantage it's one of the largest infusions of cash into a specific technology in the history of Silicon Valley but while we're seeing all this investment what we're not seeing yet is anything approaching a revolution the companies tell us that AI is about to get massively better that this is just the beginning and that a mega powerful artificial general intelligence that will transform work and our lives is just around the corner but there's a big problem large language models require material written or generated by humans to train on and a recent study found that they might already run out of training data in just the next couple years which means those models won't be able to get much better and in the meantime all of the AI companies are burning cash chat GPT loses $700,000 every day that it's running open ai's recent release of GPT 4 lets users interact with audio or video but the underlying model is the same it's not actually any smarter than it used to be is just a little bit Slicker now and it's not going that much better for the other companies either Apple just did a big reveal of their new Apple intelligence which will let you use AI to turn a photo of yourself into an emoji which okay I mean who gives a [ __ ] and meanwhile Google has had to deal with the humiliation of people posting examples of their AI giving insane answers to boring normal questions no Google AI you should not put glue in your pizza sauce and it's kind of weird that your brand new product told me that I should so there's the suspicion growing that AI is nothing but marketing hype that it's the same as crypto web 3 and the metaverse just a new way for these tech companies to prop up their stock prices because they don't have any other real ideas so is that the case and if so what is going to happen when the bubble bursts well on the show today we have an absolutely incredible guest to answer those questions for us but before we get into it I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you you can do so on patreon head to patreon.com adamon over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free we've got a lot of wonderful Community features as well we'd love to have you join us and just to remind you if you want to come see me do stand up comedy on the road head to Adam con.net for tickets and tour dates coming up soon I'm heading to Phoenix Arizona and Toronto Canada Adam con.net for those tickets and now let's get to this week's episode to dissect the waves of AI hype being pushed by some of the most powerful companies on Earth my guest today is Ed zitron he's a writer he's a PR guy and he's also one of the smartest fiercest and most influential critics of tech out there which he puts in his influential newsletter where's your Ed at please welcome Ed zitron Ed thank you so much for being on the show thanks for having me you have a a wonderful newsletter called where's your Ed at correct where you are documenting more than almost anybody else what exactly is happening in the economy especially in Tech uh you use this phrase the rot economy what do you mean by that so the rot economy is this growth at all costs ecosystem that's kind of eaten all the markets and it's most prevalent in Tech where it's not about better it's not even about making more money per se it's being able to show that you will grow forever that you will show 10 20% growth per quarter forever perpetually and what this means is you see products like Facebook especially Facebook's the best example which are made worse they are harder to use there are more ads they interrupt you more they get in your way more they interrupt you trying to do the thing that the website is meant to be for connect with friends for example so that they can show Wall Street oh we're growing not only increasing Revenue but number go up and it really is the number go up mission Facebook also hilariously as of last quarter no longer reports their actual user numbers right they report daily active family people which is which is a really confusing metric you know I often feel walking around oh I'm a daily active family person yeah that's how I feel today but what's great is when you go and look back they've mentioned this metric before and it's just completely different to the other metric it just makes no sense yeah it's a there it it they're playing with the numbers it's a fake number yeah it's I wouldn't say it's Enron level but it's Enron adjacent yeah but you see it with other companies like Google you just did your video on Google Google wanted to increase the number of queries on Google which doesn't mean Google is good it means that more people are searching for more which usually suggests that Google is not doing its job right yeah because if the more you have to search the less good search results you're getting you're trying three search results when previously only need one needed one exactly and the problem is for the user there is Google is worse so you use it more but that's a solution for Google because you're seeing more ads and also number of queries goes up yeah great and this is really the RW economy r large it's when products have kind of escaped the pen of utility there was usually it used to not be quite so obvious a con it used to be oh this is a free product we make so much more money like you we should be paying you as well as this being free but we're all happy here because the product does what it's meant to not really the case anymore in a lot of cases at least you make the argument that Facebook is dying in what way so traffic to Facebook has been dropping off for like three or four years I mean I deleted my Facebook account totally uh four or five years ago and I've never once missed it I'm still I'm an Instagram addict right and I kind of have to be for my work like as a comedian literally people ask me to do shows on there that's where I see other comedians it's like that is the Town Square for what I am doing For Better or Worse Facebook never comes up it just is has disappeared from the social world I inhabit so what's insane is billions of people Alle legitly use Facebook yeah now you go in there and it is kind of like Instagram it is thing you followed Carousel of people you might know add add Carousel of videos you can't what that show it's like a 3se second Loop add person you follow add person you follow or sponsored content what's also crazy is it's full of AI content now mhm just weird like shrimp Jesus is the when everyone see like it's just a shrimpy AI Jesus it's Jesus but he's like made made of shrimp or like not even like cocktail shrimp like crustacean like in the sea shrimp it's so I have seen both okay and as a connoisseur of the shrimp um yeah I just wanted to be clear shrimp does not refer to the form of juist because he's actually usually quite buff what's also weird is you see a lot of these ones where it's like no one will share this on a poster with a million shares yeah and it will be a disfigured child begging for money on the street and people responding just like wow this is so so terrible I will support this it isn't obvious whether these are real people or not yeah but Facebook as a product has just deteriorated and the the traffic's gone down web visits are down something ridiculous like 20% 25% over the last few years along with most of the major internet platforms and actually the product itself functions so poorly if you one of my favorite things I found recently was if you type Facebook complaints into the search bar you can find six seven different groups with thousands of people all complaining to what they think is Facebook but when you go in there it's just the most obvious scam artists saying like oh yeah DM me I'll help you get back in there and then the occasional Judas goat with someone responding who's another scammer saying oh this person really helped me and it's so strange because yeah this website makes billions and billions of dollars but the actual product is broken broken you log in you're like there's nobody here it's a it's a dead Mall there's there's sort of like diluted Boomers walking around like people who people who like don't have their wits about them sort of stumbling about the place but uh not no like actual activity of the type that we were used to 10 years ago or the type that would indicate there's a thriving product happening I wouldn't go on there to talk to a friend which kind of feels like the point of the thing yeah and even Instagram the only reason I keep Instagram is I have three or four friends on there who for whatever reason maybe they hate me is they like they're not great with text they're not great with email they're amazing on Instagram DMS yeah and I guess it might just be the lanes of brains that people go into Instagram is right now pretty bad too as you well know yeah in the sense that you do get algorithm algorithm person's thing algorithm algorithm yeah but I think it's going to get so much worse I think once Facebook really falls apart they're going to go now we need to make Instagram even more profitable Adam misseri at the helm just nimbly screaming at people that we must show more ads did you see a few years ago when uh with Kylie Jenner I think it was when she complained the funniest thing there was she was saying we need to stop and her and she posted uh we just want to see photos of our friends like what are all these videos like Instagram was just for photos of our friends what happened and I I love Adam Missi the I hate him I think he's a disgusting he's the guy who runs Instagram under Facebook he used to be the head of Facebook's newsfeed as well which is just the Michael Jordan of breaking the internet and he responded to that by saying we're actually going to show you more videos which honestly I have to give him credit for just like one of the most well-known celebrities in the world he's like actually it's going to get worse what you gonna do use Tik Tok no don't use Tik Tok don't don't use TI well and but that is striking because celebrities like her used to be the main currency of Instagram this was that was sort of one of the points of social media was oh hey this celebrity is actually on there actually posting you can comment they might see it yeah it's the imagin proximity yeah well and in some cases like real proximity people used to have those sort of casual interactions with celebrities or people they were interested in um and then there's the effect of you know the old effect of Twitter of this being the sort of large social casual social network for lots of different professions you know um uh everyone is sort of visible to each other everyone's posting things um and having generally a good time and then you see ads as well and that's what you get for it being free and seems to have disappeared that that version of social media yeah and Twitter is a particularly weird one because it wasn't that bad before Elon took over yeah but Elon it wasn't growing it wasn't growing but it um I think users were growing and it was not profitable but had been profit it was profit adjacent it could have trundled along it would have been fine then musk comes along and says hey everyone you've you've never seen me run a company before publicly it's going to be so epic and based and it was just he has ruined it yeah mostly because he fired the trust and safety people I don't think people realize how important those people were cuz it wasn't just them stopping people saying slurs which has of course increased yeah it was them stopping spam and the spam on Twitter is so bad now you just get you will post a normal thing and there is just hole someone posting hole in the reply just a bot instantly and I don't mean that in a oh you click through and it's no it's just that's the picture I mean that's become a meme now on Twitter in the way that you know whoo this blew up go to my SoundCloud used to be a meme now it's uh [ __ ] and bio let's bleep [ __ ] but um yeah [ __ ] and bio that is that is the new meme of what is in the reply of every single Twitter it's escalated now where it's just naked yeah just full hole and it's it's crazy but that was musk attempting to grow the website he's not a good CEO he's very bad at this that's why it went so poorly but that was his attempt to go okay I will take Twitter and I will just make it grow I'll make the money come out of Twitter and it doesn't work like that cuz social networks are very precious creatures yeah you touch one thing a lot of things break yeah and he touched a lot of things and a lot of things are broken now but you're kind of seeing with Instagram and Facebook what happens when someone better at this does it and Mark Zuckerberg's a horrible creep but he knows what he's doing and also everyone that works for him they're all part javat olivan the co uh BOS the CTO BOS the CTO by the way did a letter an internal letter called The Ugly back in 2016 2017 and within that he said all things are Justified for growth it's a crazy thing to write he talked about a terrorist planning an attack and killing people because of Facebook using Facebook and then he said but we connected people it so but that is what Facebook is Jesus Christ I know it's really horrible when you look back and you see these things and they said them out loud yeah but when you see what's happening today you kind of say oh that makes sense and a lot of what I write is just me looking at old stuff and Going H just oh no I don't like that that that makes more sense than it should and then you kind of look to them to be better you try and look even optimistically for a second isn't anything it's not they're not even trying anymore not even trying to pretend that they care anymore and that's really what frustrates me well what would what would it even mean to make Facebook grow in a way that that helped people right or in a positive way because they already had a third of humanity signed up for this service which is I mean that's got to be a you got to be pretty close to the ceiling there considering how much of humanity lives in dire poverty currently you know of the uh seven or eight billion people on on Earth how many is whatever um uh and so if they're showing growth if they need to show growth like the only way to do that is to continue to to like squeeze the juice out of the existing users you can't continue uh selling the same thing you were selling back in 2010 to more and more people that's the problem so there is data I've seen that said suggests that only 100 million people more people got online between 2022 and 2023 so as opposed to like hundreds of billions of people getting online so the amount of people getting online is going down it's not going down it's slowing right the low hanging fruit almost everybody who has the means to get it now is has it or we're reaching the end of that process the big problem being that like the global South is not getting online there probably serious issues there that are just not being solved right one might think and Mark Zuckerberg actually flirted with this idea before about um with the third world and trying to get people on line and he just didn't do it right there was stuff about like having a really low bandwidth low internet Facebook like we're you're going to be able to get Facebook on a phone that can work out in the middle of nowhere with like almost no battery like that kind of thing just as an attempt to we got to keep the numbers going up I feel like in India there was some sort of legislative thing but nevertheless That's a classic Facebook solution to a different problem yeah the actual problem there would be syn hundreds of millions of dollars into internet infrastructure if you want to actually do this right fix the problem don't make a new Facebook to fix and that's a huge problem that the internet compan compies I think worldwide have never grappled with the fact that internet infrastructure like limits what they do it's a little bit of a separate issue but it's just something I think about all the time how Google a couple years ago tried to um launch you know a video game service called stadia where you would where where they where their their premise was I'm sorry this is off topic but it boggles my mind to think about it all the time their premise was computers are too expensive instead people should rent the computer from us we'll have it in a Data Center and you'll just like send the frames back and forth over the internet your your controller data will go to the server and it'll send back frames so you'll play Call of Duty running on our computer but sent over the internet and I was like that's completely [ __ ] backwards computer Computing is very cheap people are able to get like incredibly powerful computers at a at a very low cost right now no one has good internet people in the US are paying hundreds of dollars a month for internet that's worse than anywhere in Europe because our internet infrastructure is so bad and Google I think at some point had a fiber optic program to like try to bring fber people that failed and like that should be if they want to grow the internet or if they want to grow their products in the US that should be their main focus is making sure that like everybody has fiber and they just didn't do it and they're facing the consequences to a certain extent so the irony of all this don't know if it's there is a connecting fabric though and all of this is no one invests for actual it they want growth but they don't invest for it right Google invested with Google Fiber and it grew in some places it was fine but instead in of investing on the time Horizon you should with something like this which is 20 years yeah they gave it 5 10 they were like not really making us a bunch of money and we don't really think of the future so we won't right so they didn't and they canceled it just like Google Reader Google wave all those other things just it's another little side project while they keep raking in money off of ads yes it's like it's it's frustrating because Google stadia for example there are there is precedent of this working a Xbox game pass uh Playstation remote like there are internet streaming things like that already now it's streaming from people's consoles people do like the idea of streaming gaming yeah but like you said the internet infrastructure isn't there and also it's not good enough yet even if it is it's just there's something missing and they're not really thinking why don't we make it really good then we'll do it yeah they just went well we got to what was it 2021 they did that was 2020 they just did it at the one time it looked like it would work yeah and then they didn't they just gave up on it what they should they tried it for a year and then they just H never mind whole entire year as well it also was a sucky program like you had to buy the games but you didn't you bought the games but only on stadia yeah and then they ended up refunding everyone which is nice but also why do this at all like yeah regardless with Facebook with Google with all this they don't think of the future they don't get to think of the future if they want to please the markets everything has to be now now now and if it's the future it needs to be the vaguest possible version so that they can roll it back if it doesn't work so that they can change it so that Jim Kramer screams at them in the right way and it's frustrating because like you said Facebook is running out of people to sell to and Facebook knows the moment the market realizes the market is going to punish them punish them hard now Mark Zuckerberg can never be fired he has they have this Labyrinth thing Class A Class B thing where Zuckerberg controls everything thank you Shan Parker by the way it's all his fault he is the one that negotiate with Peter teal to have the third board seat go this is the guy who was played by I think Justin Timberlake in the movie way moreing whenever I hear his name I'm like Justin Timberlake is who we're talking about yeah yeah but that's the thing Justin to be like way more Charming way cooler but Mark Zuckerberg could do anything yeah which is why he's sunk $30 billion into the metaverse but he could just say screw you I'm going to have this company work sustainably it's going to be a great company still going to print money right but he likes money he likes power and he's always been like this back as far as 2008 they were buying Google ads to get Facebook holdouts onto the site yeah company's been rotten since the beginning but there is no reason it has to be like this other than the fact they're scared of the markets they're scared of what the markets will do but also they don't care none of the people running these companies actually give a [ __ ] about technology they don't build technology SAR py of Google CEO of Google alphabet as well McKenzie man uh Mark Zuckerberg actel Koda but also I had a bunch of growth freaks the heav elant CEO coo as well like all of these people are growth Freaks and what sucks is it really does not have to be this way it just is because it's super profitable for now yeah but I see everything slowing down everything is slowing down and they don't have a next big thing to sell to the markets when the markets realize that they've got nothing else it's not like they have a great product they can point to got oh people love this yeah look up how much everyone loves Google right now they love oh wait they don't because we put search in there to show the markets how cool we are it's they're no longer building products for people like you and me they're building things symbolic capital I call it to show off to the market and say look we'll grow forever we're so Innovative and we'll be Innovative forever it's very frustrating it feels like we've turned this corner where the tech companies used to sell us things that were genuinely almost magical products you know the iPhone Google Facebook these were things that you showed the promise them to people and every single person said I want that right now I need it in my life it'll make my life much better today I remember when I got an iPhone and suddenly I can look at a map wherever I'm going it changed my life voicemails that was the big thing visual voicemails oh my God that saves so much time but that was all the low hanging fruit and now they are in order to keep up that promise to Wall Street to to keep up the promise of we are going to keep growing like that forever because that's what we did for the last 10 years for the next 10 years we've got crypto AI VR and the public to all those things is saying what yeah like what why would we want that what is what is that for but the companies are like pretending as though everybody wants it they're making concept videos they're they're and they're tricking Wall Street to some extent but it's all like a fake version of what they used to do yes so call this the rockcon bubble where for about 20 years they have found all of the hypergrowth markets on the Enterprise level like Cloud we've gone from point when computers were relatively decentralized in the sense that getting a file from you to me was quite difficult to ubiquitous Enterprise and consumer Cloud so you can share a file with someone quickly it's kind of seamless you don't realize how much is going on behind the background we have really good batteries we have incredibly fast smartphones we have apps on our smartphones that connect with each other we have all of these things all of these we can now rent a property in a few clicks we can do all these things in a few clicks that we couldn't before these were all hypergrowth markets these were ways of building billion hundred billion trillion dollar Industries we're out I think we're actually tapped out of them yeah except everyone is still acting like there is one yeah and so vr's a weird one because been around for a while and anyone who'd used it was like yeah this is still Niche up until now I have friends who love V said this is my mate Casey says yeah VR is Niche and he loves VR I love VR I think it's really cool yeah when it works which is a loadbearing win yeah I mean I I I tried it you know like I have a I have a quest too I played um I'm a I'm a gamer I played the valves halflife Alex game you know the best quality game from one of the best studios in a thing I loved the game was really fun I stopped playing it after a couple days cuz I couldn't handle being nauseous for 3 hours after playing for 30 minutes like it just wasn't worth the experience and nothing has motivated me to put on that or any other headset since and no one has come up with a compelling pitch for what it's for including apple whose only pitch seems to be what what if all of your emails were in the room around you well who gives a [ __ ] who does that solve a problem for so what's funny with the Vision Pro is I have one and I watched half of June on a plane before getting a migraine what was really annoying was as much of the movie as I could take so cool yeah I love giant screen I've used like the desktop it's cool yeah about two years too early they should have kept it in the oven but I can see what they're doing with it what's also interesting is Apple's been surprisingly for their new thing surprisingly quiet they've not been too pushy with it they've not they did the whole Apple thing well this will be you walk around an office with this very funny idea um they haven't talked about it in like six months it's not like they're making a big deal about it still but then you go to like Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse for example yeah so just a complete lie how the hell is that not some sort of sec problem like he went in this video and was going on about oh yeah I'll go into the metaverse and I'll hit a button and I'll change how Mark Zuckerberg here looks just complete fanfiction nonsense the whole thing was bollocks but what it is was that was Mark Zuckerberg realizing I bet I could say something that sounds plausible and none of the people in Wall Street and many people in the media like CBS This Morning they're not actually going to care they're just going to go along with it the problem is that he's stuck in his own bubble as many of the CEOs are where it's when you don't build anything of use for a long time when you really have no connection with a regular human being you just believe that everything you say is smart and I think he thought yeah this will work fine no one will like they'll just buy Horizon worlds even though it sucks and it didn't work but it worked in the media there was a large chunk of the media who liked it yeah Wall Street kind of liked it and then they saw how much it was costing and they went no no no you got to get rid of that Mark but I do believe that that was the first time you saw one of these CEOs becoming aware of the problem in public he he wanted this to be the next internet he said it'd be the next generation of the mobile internet I think Zuckerberg knew back then that the growth train was slowing and he needed a new thing except he chose the most insane thing he's he chose virtual reality and also online gaming so unproven Niche Tech and just one of the most expensive things to build in the world from a company that is terrible at building things Facebook's launched like 15 different things and canceled yeah like the best thing they built is the Facebook portal which is just a video camera like all their other products are things that they bought WhatsApp Instagram Etc every they don't innovate but also they only build things for growth so now that they just they're out of ideas but the metaverse was a sexy big idea that sounded if it was real yeah if it was an the actual thing he promised would have been except to do what he wanted to based on Ready Player one which is a dystopia he would need extra sensory Tech that does not exist like very basic things like touch and feel and spatial awareness senses within the human body with the brain that just cannot exist yeah maybe hundreds of years away yeah and it's so weird that I I'm still shocked he even pretended and I'm more shocked that everyone agreed with him yeah I mean when you even looked at what they built like it was laughably bad you know all this I mean I did a video about it all this stuff about like we've added legs and things and they didn't even add legs that's what's they never did add legs they never actually added legs that's what I I mean it looked worse than Second Life which was you know is 20 years old as a product now um it had no U people you know the actual service was a dead zone people logged in and and had nothing to do on it um and the idea that people would hold meetings there all this stuff it was like it was H like Mark Zuckerberg at least gives the appearance of being a smart guy it was hard to imagine him believing his own bull bu [ __ ] in that case I just think he's Craven I think he doesn't care I don't think he cares whether it was real or not he was just like but these little pigs will buy this just complete that man so I did some Facebook reporting and just everything you read about Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook crew and the people at meti you're like these people are just evil like there's an evil to it uh they have this guy uh nam's um Joel Kaplan the head of US policy so there was a a time during Facebook's wonderful history where the algorithm kept pushing this video called plandemic conspiracy theory so Mr Kaplan I believe worked with the Bush Administration he pushed to not have it suppressed he said no no leave it alone and the only reason that he ended up taking Facebook ended up taking it down was because Kevin Rose of the New York Times posted that it was the top video on Facebook wow and that was using a tool called crowd tangle which used to let journalists see inside the most famous things on Facebook yeah and then Kevin kept posting that hey everything on the algorithm is just right-wing garbage there was a lot of press about that about yeah that that that top rated Facebook things were all conspiracy theories so Facebook's response that you think would be wow we've got a real problem with the right wing taking over no their response was to uh shut down crowd Tangles so that no one could see Alex Schulz the CMO real real winner and then all of these the people running the company Facebook is unique in the sense that I think the other companies are just completely lost and run by management Consultants Facebook is just honestly the evil machine it's so funny how nakedly evil they are and just like I know it's dramatic to call things evil but you look at what they're doing you look at how they act it's there's a great book by um Jeff Horwitz called broken code that everyone should read read that book and come out of that and tell me whether Facebook is a nice company or a bad one because you read it since 2008 they've been like this and all the OG people who did all the original stuff with people you may know yeah algorithmic thing that cure people you might know used Google ads to Target people who W on Facebook outed sex workers uh helped patients find psychiatrists who really didn't want to be found cashmir Hill did some great journalism around that the people who worked on that uh Natalie Gale uh Javier olivan Alex Schulz they're all running the company now yeah it's the same people people and this is with my work people have said oh you seem angry how can you not be when you read that you read this stuff and you're just like it's not even like there's one person who said yeah uh this is bad though they just kind of like H yeah I mean maybe we're abusing notifications a bit you know but that's business baby it's just so and it's so weird and it's so it's so weird there some of the stuff you read in this just you're like this is all almost cliche in how yeah deliberately bad it is yeah especially coming from an industry that that for so many years presented how good it was how virtuous how this is a new way of doing business we are not like those old companies in the P the Cheryl Sandberg lean in this is a new thing where you know this is the utopian future sanberg is McKenzie as well yeah yeah they're all there yeah oh god um well talking about these you know fads from I mean the metaverse is almost two years old now as an idea and no one has said the word metaverse to me nor have I read it in like a Bloomberg article in like 18 months like it's it's gone it's dead the the end um I think everyone has conveniently forgotten about you know Mark little attempt to to juice what was happening with this company um same with crypto crypto is basically I mean you know whatever the bit torrent freaks on Reddit are still hanging out saying hdle but you know it's no longer uh Super Bowl ads or you know something that is uh uh you know the next big thing in business now the next big thing is AI it seems like everyone has forgotten about those previous past two fads yes how much is AI especially coming from Facebook just another one of those like is that just Mark trying to do the same thing again so Facebook and AI is almost an entirely separate thing because who even knows what they're doing there AI as a general fed has a bit more validity yeah but not much more yeah because large language model are I mean the first time I played with one I was like oh this is cool and they're still pretty cool sometimes I go play with one every once in a while the problem is with AI they do something they do something and that is also the problem because AI as a concept been a while been around a while yeah like decades and it's very loose term it can be used to describe a lot of things you exactly which is great for companies like Microsoft so Sachin Nadella 2021 says that he could not overstate the Breakthrough that the metaverse was yeah two years before that he said that Hollow lens too was a breakthrough their AR goggle thing yes which have now been but they exist but they've been they he's fired most of the team yeah and satcha is now major beneficiary of the open AI boom he they've put what $13 billion in they've invested early and they invested $10 billion mostly in the zor credits so their cloud services the thing is with AI is it smells like the future it has a feeling of the future and when you say AI people will fill in the gaps autonomous agents that do things for you oh um a super smart friend who knows everything about right it has the advantage of it's at least been around in science fiction enough that the public knows what it means you had to explain what crypto was and what the metaverse was unless someone had read like snow crash or Ready Player one but artificial intelligence oh I know what that is that's the that's the computer that talks to me from every movie I've ever seen from her yeah from from 2001 from the movie AI what I love is when they quote these movies like yeah like great things for AA like 2001 the movie that classically ends with the computer helping the game like but with AI what's interesting is it has both the smell of the future but none of the taste because the idea of what AI could be this autonomous thing that does things for you to quote samman a super smart person who knows everything about you all these things sound plausible and you can with chat GPT approximate something that sort of feels like it kind of yeah but the problem they have is all these companies are promising a thing that is not there yeah so Super Bowl commercial for Microsoft's co-pilot during it there's a bit where it says write the code for my 3D open world game and he hits it and then it cuts away before you actually see what would come out so the problem with that is that is not what comes out it tell it I've typed this in many times because I'm a little [ __ ] um and it just gives you a guide for doing it and it's like a yeah it's like an SEO article like first you code the game Microsoft can't even show you why you should give a [ __ ] about this thing on their Super Bowl commercial yeah they can't actually explain what it does today so they have to talk about the future Sam mman worst of them talks about what it could be what it will do it will be like a virtual brain all these things and the thing is the people in the markets the Jim Kramers of the world the cnbc's of the world much less Bloomberg Bloomberg has done some excellent journalism about AI not so much with CNBC mhm those some do like Hayden field there is great but nevertheless the markets people just go and artificial intelligence is the future yeah and this is good and thus they kind of buy the [ __ ] train but then the consumers get these things they get chat GPT they get co-pilot what have you and then they say now what yeah what's this meant to do what's it do and I'm sure some person will now email me and say oh well actually it helps me with my productivity and every time you ask them to explain it they said well first of all sat there and I did all this stuff it's like no no no okay shut up shut up I don't care because we're being told we are being told one thing and presented another we're being told our autonomous AI future is here and this is why these companies will grow forever because Google meta all Microsoft they're all connected to the AI boom yet the reality is the actual products themselves llms don't really do enough they do something you can use them they are kind kind of like the next generation of internal automation they're like robotic process automation like UI path it's stuff that kind of exist but a bit better there are some cool things yeah I I I used on the phrase on the show before I forget where I got about the idea that it's a it's a word calculator it'll there is a way that if you put in a certain combination of words you might get some output that you find useful to some degree um but it's not like a lot of the stuff's things you could have found on Google already um a lot of it is something that if you put in a little bit of time you could figure it out you could do it yourself you and it always feels Hollow because it is yeah it's just it's calculated like it feels calculated surprisingly enough but the problem is as well it isn't that it's useless it's the it might only be worth 3 or 4% profit growth like it's not it may be the future but it might not be the next big thing but they're selling it as if it is and what the big problem is is going back to your old iPhone example you could tell a friend exactly why that thing was cool they it was too expensive yeah it was like 600 it was a lot of money but they certain wow this looks great like oh you can listen to your music and text people you didn't have to onerously explain why people should care with chat GPT genuinely gone to my head I'm not sure how i' describe what it does I mean I describe the process but what is chat gbt um it it can write stuff kind of but it gets it wrong it can generate pictures of stuff so right and you can you can talk to it sort of and it'll give you a rather boilerplate response it can if you want it to I whenever I'm playing with it which I do sometimes I'm always like okay give me a recipe for a uh pizza with poop on it and then it does that and then I say now write that as a limmerick and then it writes a little poem I'm like that was mildly amusing like I've never seen a computer program that can do that before um you know there's stuff like I talk I've talked I think before on the show about there's a game called AI dungeon that like works like a text Adventure like an old text adventure and but it can do anything right you're like I want to turn into a wizard and fly away and it'll just generate some text that describes you doing that so it's sort of like a like a oneperson tabletop role playing thing where like an automated DM who can you know uh spit out a fantasy for you that's like yeah absolutely nothing people might pay for that sure but what's the it's not like Steve Job standing on stage going it's a phone it's an iPod and you can it's a revolutionary internet device you can connect to it from connect to the internet from anywhere that you are you hear that pitch and you're like my God I mean that'll change my life exactly like you look at what GPT does as well and you look at Claude and anthropics model for example you look at L metas one and you go wow okay you can do stuff now what now what now like seriously what is the next step of this GPT 40 just came out the thing that got them EMB rolled in the whole scandal with Scarlet Johansson yeah so that was an iterative update but that's the best they've had it's the last time they did anything new and it's so bizarre because I feel like quite lonely in saying this but what if this is all they've G yeah what if this is it because once everyone works that out and is willing to say it the tech industry has backed this so ously they've really gone to town on this one to the extent that they feel forced to I mean apple looks like they're doing all this AI stuff like with a gun pointed at their head they're like we've got AI emojis we oh it's it's gonna right we've got Apple intelligence and like they give this whole presentation and I was like these are the features that I give a [ __ ] about the least that I've ever seen in an Apple keynote what I really liked about that though was the chat GPT integration into the new iOS they're like yeah we got chat GPT it will sometimes answer some things and you will have to give it permission every time 100% just something they did for the markets that's just B yeah we got chat GPT in this [ __ ] whatever who cares but when you look at what they're doing with their own models they kind of interesting oh you can do distinct actions across apps that that's cool don't know if it's the next big thing but it's a cool new way for the phone but when you look at that sort of feature well that just looks like that's just a regular old feature they're calling AI now you know that it's it's a little bit of automation actually AI it is actually their own models but it's their own models runon device it's stuff that people have been doing so Edge Computing so on device AI mhm but yes like it's been around in very simple example the the one I give is like you can Raspberry Pi so these tiny computers which by the way significantly bigger Innovation than anything generative AI has done people invented Raspberry Pi should be like no about yeah it's like a $40 powerful computer that you can put anywhere powerful enough you can attach you can have that and it can have Aji running to like for like a machine that can identify a strawberry that's rotten on a farm genuinely useful industrial stuff yeah what Apple's doing is just what what you can do when you have complete control over your operating system and no one else is really allowed to touch it they SDK that can connect the model to different parts of different apps could be really cool but also surprisingly de about it like it was a big thing at worldwide developers conference but there's no big ads there's no big like they've done a media push but it's not huge right there and also they don't appear to be really I'm sure that they have giant GPU so Graphics processing units which are used to train these models sure they have them but they've not been very flashy about saying we've just built hundreds of acres worth of service space for the future it seems like they're hedging their bets like they're they're dipping their toe in because they feel like they have to but not going all in yeah and apple to be clear no company's particularly ethical but Apple seems to also realize we piss off all our users and make our products suck ass maybe they'll stop using iPhones yeah that's bad for business they want to do they don't want to do what Google just did the Google AI search that one's so good though that one that one really that one really felt like begin to disassociate when I saw I because I've been watching this for a while because it was on Google Labs yeah there's an SEO expert called Lily Ray who's been watching it very close and she's been posting for a while just saying this is bad they should not launch this these results of Bonkers and then they didn't surpris and Bing did the same thing a year ago like it released AI results in bing and people made fun of it because it did exactly the same thing that Google did except they were very cautious with it Yep this is a side feature please don't trust this Google you got to give him credit for just being like yep here you go and then when people found the terrible results they said actually that's good yeah it's actually good that you found that and also those are uncommon queries anyway so no one makes pizza and it's but as though but they've also said forever that like what is it 15% of all Google searches are are like searches that they have never seen before are completely unique like their bread and butter is unusual Google searches that's the point of Google to help you find things that are unusual um well the interesting thing about chat gp40 to me um okay so the AI boosters or a lot of the people I know who are still frightened of AI um you know here in Hollywood the thing that a lot of people were saying last year uh during the strike is this is just the beginning it's going to get rad rally bettery this is we don't you know they've got stuff cooking up that we don't even know about yet it's going to be so huge you know in 5 years people were literally saying to me last year in five years Hollywood won't exist as an industry you know because AI will be so radically great and you know I would have to say have a little bit of skepticism because this is what this is what Sam Alman is telling people he's saying my product is going to destroy the world so you should do what I want yes um but where is the evidence that it's going to get radically better rather than that hey they've invented this thing called a large Lang model that can do this one thing but it might not have actually this like incredible growth curve ahead of it and I think some evidence for that for me was chat GPT 40 was not a radical Improvement in the quality of the large language model or its results it was a better productization yes of chat GPT where it's like okay now chat GPT is in a little app and it can it has the front-facing camera it responds faster it responds a little faster it has a voice now it didn't have a voice before but it's still saying the same [ __ ] right like it still has the same cognizance it's not smarter it just can sort of look around a little bit better we put the same dumb brain into a slightly more advanced robot dog but it is still a dog yeah and so what do you think the prospects are for the radical Improvement of AI because I've started to read these things oh they're running out of training data that sort of thing so the big problem they have is that training data yeah so there was an estimate in the w Journal researcher I forget his name it was the GPT 5 so the next model of chat GPT or GPT their large language model will take five times the available training dat or the five times the amount of training data that it took to train GPT for mhm so big problem there is they don't have much more they are running out and they may have run out well chat gbt 6 takes another five times that's an exponential problem and on top of that they don't seem to be too good at making new models they were meant to spin up one and more efficient model for Microsoft called arus godamn it God damn it like I like when I read that I'm [ __ ] just God damn it and then it didn't work out cuz it wasn't efficient enough which is not a good sign but also these things are not getting they're getting better but they're not getting better it's not like the jump from I don't know gpd2 to GPD 3 on top of that the ways they're getting better do not suggest they're going to get better in the ways that Sam Orman has been talking about a super smart friend that knows everything about you suggests features that are not part of a large large language model right like memory is something they've kind of worked on there are other people who've worked on memory within these things but the fundamental thing of knowing requires knowledge which requires actual intellect which GPT cannot have it's mathematics it's extremely complex yeah but also all of these people talking about oh it's going to be so much better in the next year history doesn't look great for you either but also how how just how yeah why do I have to constantly explain to you why your product is good why do I have to make your argument for you why don't you have one other than it will be good and that's the thing everyone wants it to be because it would be cool and also if there's no big Tech thing coming out what's the future look like for Tech it's a scary I just have to continue living in the present forever like I need the computer to distract me but also it's a situation where so much money has gone into it so many billions of dollars so much money into Data Centers so much money into marketing efforts so much Venture Capital everyone is so deep down the hole that kind of who's going to wake up first rather than it getting to some point Sora the video generating model from chat GB I can't wait to talk about this yeah so good it's so bad um yeah everything it makes has Hall so in hallucinations in the written word it will say something authoritatively that isn't true in Sora it just makes like a monkey with seven arms and it looks terrible yeah and every time you ask it to do anything it takes I think it's if it's 20 seconds long it takes 10 minutes or 20 minutes to generate yeah and it the prompts no matter how precise it usually makes up some extra stuff yeah and the amount of training data they'll need to make Sora work is insane yeah on top of all of this also horribly unprofitable and it doesn't do anything it does not do anything it doesn't make anyone money like this is this is the big thing people talking about oh well it's going to get exponentially better first of all it hasn't been but on top of that it's still not profitable it's still horribly unprofitable and it requires all this energy and it requires all this training data there's so much more evidence that this is kind of tapping out in the generative AI space yeah I mean when when sort of came out and let's be clear that product is not available to the public it's it's they released some tech demo videos but again working in Hollywood a lot of people I know said well this is the end you know like they're going to this is going to the future of movie making they won't need to film anything they'll just like have Sora output shots and you know I'd have to walk through with people I like okay first of all this is not available to the public they've released like six videos that they say were made by this right so how many bad videos did they need to make before they got these six that they showed us right yeah how long did it take to make each one of these like what was you know we talking about uh you know 30 frames per second of 4K uh footage right and not even 4K by the way oh really so I spoke to someone who makes who a guy from a company called shy kids that made a video with Sora they had to get it at 48p because it took too long if you went higher resolution yeah because I mean rendering times are are very serious just with traditional visual effects and so you're talking about a large language model generating something or it's not a large language model but a similar technology right a a generative AI s's large language model okay great um uh but so there's that piece of it um then so so the amount of processing that it has to do compared to making you know a dolly image is like exponential right um then you don't have the ability to make a tiny tweak right that you do in uh you know when you're actually working with an actor you can say walk a little bit faster walk a little bit slower if you I know because I've you know if you ask doi generate the same thing but make it a little bit brighter it gives you a whole new image right and so it would be like that as well plus if they you know they made a great image of a lady walking down a Hong Kong street right with a with a shiny floor right with SH with where there was rain on the legs at one point girl like that yeah yeah but it like it looked pretty okay it looked plausible yes but the only reason that it knew what it looked like for a lady to walk down a Hong Kong Street was because it had ingested huge amounts of footage of people walking down Hong Kong streets like it needed the footage to begin with to generate the thing so it can't generate new things and you know you won't be able to solve the problem that the executive will have at the film company where they're like oh I don't like the take can we get another one no actually we can't because if we do that it'll be a completely different person in a completely different situation so that problem is unsolved you to ask well isn't it [ __ ] and and it's going to be massively expensive to compute all of this over and over and over again generate all of this so at what point is it cheaper just to send a [ __ ] dude with a camera to Hong Kong and get a lady on a rainy day like it it what is the but it's a great Tech demo but people are getting rolled by seeing the tech demo and imagining what it could do rather than looking at the reality of Technology at all and that is the entire AI hype bubble R Lodge it is letting people so journalists let's be honest filling in the gaps for these companies yeah Sora great example so okay theoretically if the computer could spit out an image of a woman walking down the street at any time that would be great but like you said it is not just a question you can't even ask if you say woman with black hair Asian woman with black hair different Asian every time probably pink hair at some point right because of the training data is trained on well and because the technology is fundamentally unpredictable like that's that's how it works you can't say I want exactly this but slightly different it because it is generating istic it's probabilistic yeah and it's funny because look at chat GPT when people write about the future of open AI they're not talking about this [ __ ] they're talking about what Sam mman has been beating off on on TV for a year they're talking about Sam mman saying oh yeah well he said to New York Magazine in 2016 I think it was New York Magazine New Yorker that in it would be not unreasonable to think within 10 years or 20 years I think it was that he would have a computer version of his brain and he's very good at making these things where the gap between the pr itions is long enough and no one's really going to check yeah I will check Sam I'm I've got it in my flipping calendar I do um but you look at this and every he goes out there and he'll vaguely say that chat GPT is the future AI is the future we need to be scared of AI he'll say AI is not a creature but what he wants you to think is did someone think it's a creature because he wants this Mystique because if he actually had to talk about the thing he s today he go well it's a calculator of sorts well it doesn't always work but when it does it's sort of good and it's and I can understand in business process automation I mentioned uipath they're robotics a robotic process automation company they're worth billions because of them doing these very minute very simple customer service things but because you can scale that that's useful GPT and large language models fit into this kind of thing extremely well these companies are growing because of that that will help them that ain't sexy and that ain't big that's not true you can't markets that it's just that and also RPA is profitable GPT large language models absolutely not but because Alman goes in there and says is this thing that kind of looks like the future look this thing can do kind of realistic videos people say they're scared I'm scared of what this could be and they fill in that white space and they say well because this thing can approximate how human rights this thing will write in place of humans within five years oh because this video kind of looks like something you could film of real people naturally in 5 years this will be how entertainment is generated and the problem is that's the old old that's the old world when things used to there is no Mo's law for this crap this is not a system a situation where we're simply going to get more power and this will fix itself even if we threw so much more power at this problem it would still hallucinate because that's maths baby but that's how it works and it still wouldn't be able to give you that slight variation on the previous clip because it would still be probabilistic that's the nature of the technology it's not something that they can just like cram more transistors onto a smaller chip like they do with Mo's law and the problem is as well is notice that samman has been crying about how he needs more power he needs an energy breakthrough he needs more server space he's begging Microsoft for an hundred billion dollar supercomputer which by the contingent on a meaningful Improvement to GPT so he's he's screwed but he's asking for these things because there is no way this goes much further yeah based on what we have today and the only company that's really having a great time with this is NVIDIA because jent WS can just like yeah it's chips faster you you little pigs will buy this every day and he kind of you watch any of his Keynotes Nvidia CEO and it is very much him just completely waffling there's a bit in the latest keynote where he says yeah you know you'll have a super a a which talks to smaller AI which then speak to other Ai and people in the audience like woo yeah B [ __ ] idiots like the lot but but he doesn't really care cuz he's he's the guy selling guns to the war he's just he's just selling chips and so it doesn't need to work for him he's going to make a lot of money right now it works what he's selling works the chip does the thing yeah like he he's fine he is also just I he has jumped on Trends before Nvidia has had a very weird history yeah games Nexus has some great videos on Nvidia he's been waffling this [ __ ] before he did it with crypto that guy's just just a classic business like he he's almost kind of folky in how much of a classic techit he's just like yeah faster bigger who gives a [ __ ] when you look at everyone else with these llms just this air of desperation yeah Facebook as you mentioned great company uh they've put AI in everything now there's AI in Facebook there's AI in Instagram you can ask meta AI anything yeah with it at 1: a.m. last night when I couldn't sleep yeah sure and it's now responding on comments it responded on a parenting group whoa because you can activate it so it responds on groups it responded on a parenting group a couple months back saying that it had a gifted child and then recommended the school I was just when I saw that I'm like this is so good I hope there's more of this I genuinely hope that I want to see so I want to see this thing cook everywhere but that's such a great that when I saw that I'm like oh maybe that's what Zuckerberg wants it to do if you need people to interact with a product you need them to engage what better way than poking viciously with it hey look look you've got people responding to you you have someone to talk to I don't think it'll work but I can imagine someone being like yeah really good idea but on top of that again how is that profitable every single one of these transactions every time someone uses this thing it's losing them money yeah because it it is very high takes a lot of to make this so expensive and also there's no profit on the horizon where's the money coming from like taking away all the cynicism just where's the money honey like where is it yeah are they running ads in the middle of the chat GPT responses what are they doing even then do you think anyone's like they're now saying they have that they are 404 media reported that they are triing doing injected ads into people's videos on Instagram they are ripping out the wiring from the wall they are desperate and I think the AI stuff is just them going ego we're doing the thing now yeah who cares Zuckerberg doesn't care at all he can't be F like I mentioned he's just doing it what's really interesting is Microsoft they're the ones where I'm like you guys are really in the whole I think they are actually really in trouble so of course heavy investor and open AI however open AI a nonprofit sure buddy yeah yeah for real but heavily invested in open AI heavily saying it's the future this the future but also tied to Sam Alman who is a nakedly corrupt and very strange figure but on top of that promising the world with AI but probably more aware than anyone of how limited it is because they have all the money into J gbt they got their own models put so they're paying Oracle billions to build more data centers they build data centers too I don't why Oracle is big on build outs I guess and it's very weird because they must know they must know this [ __ ] sucks and they like the co-pilot thing where they had the the they could not even explain why you should use it they are probably looking at this and just counting down the days they're just like I they there's a company called inflection which made a empathetic large language model called po I think it was that Microsoft absorbed them in the most bizarre way they acquired them but also gave contracts to the m they took all of the people from the company who made the large language model then made a deal with the remaining inflection company people to keep running it and now I think the Department of Justice is looking into it because it's extremely weird it was also worth a billion dollars Jesus what are they doing like this is these are not the actions of someone doing well these are like yeah this is like crackhead style Stu this or it's it almost seems like a Ponzi scheme where it's I always need to find the new injection of money and I mean look the the the the sky-high valuations of tech companies all the money that flooded into the industry my understanding is it came in for two reasons a the costs were extremely low you know like for running an internet company way cheaper than building a new car company right you don't need factories you just need data centers it's like the the cost are low and B there was a potential to create entirely new businesses entirely new business models you know the what is it the blue ocean approach to business right you can uh create this like new world and the first person to dominate it um and that is what they are they need to continue to try to create those new blue oceans those new vast universes unex untapped wildernesses to go explore and there might not actually be any left and so I guess my question is what does this mean about the market like if the market is driving this right we've been talking about all the bad decisions that the tech companies are making um that are forcing them to turn a large language model from hey a kind of cool Niche product that maybe would be kind of neat like into the wave of the future everything's going to be different where it's going to destroy the entire economy and we're going to rebuild around large language models they have to make that argument because the market is demanding it of them so what the [ __ ] happened to the market where the market is demanding this right because we are describing the the the dysfunctions of tech as being a symptom of the market so what the [ __ ] is up with the market so Market's addicted to growth and the raw economy is much larger than Tech I just know my tech much better than I know wider economics more fun to talk about too yeah I also believe that trying not to was done in KW the whole I'm not but nevertheless there is a problem across the whole stock market where it's addicted to growth when everything is always growing at all times why would you not invest in the thing going up because everything it's always gone up you see it in games companies getting way overfunded hiring firing hiring firing journalism a great example people taking over ISM oh well we'll just shove more money in it and we'll get so much more money out never works but man do they feel good about it yeah and what it is is that the markets are just disconnected from value there has been an E I don't really know when it started but there has been an economic shift away from sustainability and I make Casey put it it's a good fire is one that's sustainable it keeps you warm what they are doing now is throwing bits of furniture Into the Fire they are throwing gasoline on it getting burned and like ah make more warm and the problem is companies that are sustainable that are reliably growing or perhaps they're plateauing but they are still making more money than they spend they're happy employees happy customers those aren't sexy to the markets the markets must have growth I'm not sure what started it I really am not yeah but it's everywhere it's just more pronounced in Tech because of what you mentioned blue ocean approach when you crave growth at all times this Tech is a sexy little beast oh my everything's growing all the time you've got these little companies that grew with three people that are worth during the metaverse time it was one that got funded I think like hundred million they didn't have a product they just formed the company I have no idea how they did it well and every investor once you got in early you know you you were the first person in there was this great big thing don't you want to hop on board I mean I hear this sometimes people were telling me 10 years ago you should make something for VR VR headsets are the next big thing and I was like I actually don't think that they are but um you know that's what I was that's what I was told um and I find it very interesting that you know we're we're having this debate constantly about like is the economy good or bad right that's like the the core issue for Biden right now like people feel that it's bad but the numbers are actually good unemployment is down you know interest rates blah blah blah there's this whole thing and one of the things you can point to is the stock market is doing very well it's done extremely well since 2020 and then before 2020 it was doing extremely well since the housing crash it's been like this this sustained upward growth um and you know I've got i' I've ever reement funds you know like hey that's great for me look at the nice big number right um but it puts this worry in the back of my mind well it seems like the one thing that the people who run the economy know how to do or that the system is optimized to do is to produce good stock market returns you know that no matter what's happening no matter what the fundamentals are we can get the stock price to go up yes um but that that might be by these rot economy methods that that it is by squeezing more juice out of the thing while destroying it like short-term short-term short-term you know know uh Shoring everything up you know sticking 2x4s underneath all the sagging uh sagging ceilings yes um and that that is what's really going on which would imply that there is perhaps a reckoning coming uh I'm scared of that yeah I am definitely scared of what happening in Tech because once the overall thing you're talking about I believe like why people feel bad when economy good it's cuz things are more expensive the cost of living is high everywhere rents have gone up they rarely go down yeah wages are stagnant it is harder to get a mortgage than it's ever been yeah it's so difficult mortgage rates are high too the basic costs of living one's life are harder and higher and nastier in a very tangible way yet there are articles saying economy is good yeah we should all celebrate with what [ __ ] money yeah where am I what am I celebrating I'm I'm not complaining myself I'm lucky I really am yeah but also healthc care cost in this country is what I GRE father work for the NHS like I have great the fact we don't have Medicare for all in this country is completely [ __ ] insane insane but also that's why people feel bad it's not about a CNN article about the economy being good it's their life kind of feels shitty and when and when they say this feels bad everyone's reaction is H yeah things like overdraft fees that's a good thing they can do but there are more things they should credit scores should be just illegal they as a concept they're evil made by evil people evil evil evil stuff that's a great example of something make mortgages easier to get that's a way of fixing things but yeah to The Wider economy yes I'm scared of a reckoning and I'm especially scared of one in Tech because when the markets realize that AI is not the next best thing or the next biggest thing even they're then going to say so what is yeah what do you got for me Mark Zuckerberg is going to freak out I I don't know I actually don't know what happens I just had a Tom doton from The Wall Street Journal on the podcast and I asked him what happens if all of this compute space or the gpus get bought for AI and the demand's not there yeah and he said I don't know yeah and I don't know either and that's actually the scariest thing that a little bit like the housing bubble or something like that we bought a lot of something that we thought was going to be worth a lot of money and it is not anymore and that's exactly what it was that and it reminded me of the hiring in 2021 when all the tech companies hired tens of thousands of people they didn't need just to hoard them yeah but the biggest thing is there's a way of repurposing that stuff but there isn't much there really like you can't just throw gpus into something you can but like what's it going to be and there's no other next big thing sitting around if you think about it there have been many directions we could have gone in the past yeah you had Airbnb you had stripe you had Uber you had all of these different things that you could do there's really none of that right now there's there's some exciting companies but there's not like a next big thing in in process and if there isn't there's going to be a terrible downturn against Tech look at the startup market now worst funding environment I've probably seen in my career 15 years and that is more of a bell weather than anything else like if it's a frothy investment market and the public markets are a bit scared okay that just means the public markets public companies aren't innovating it's weird that it's like this the startup Market should tell everyone what it is because Venture capitalists aren't spending their money CU they have no easy wins they know something's up but all of the public companies and some of the private ones have got them tied themselves tied up in a a tizzy following a market I think they all kind of realize this [ __ ] and when that falls apart it's going to I don't think one of the big tech companies will die but I think you're going to see a massive collapse in one of them I think meta is probably the biggest one especially because you can't you can't G Zuck out I mean it's quite a prediction if that happens like I mean huge amount of the stock market as a whole like the US is the tech industry um and that's like people's uh Pension funds it's their retirement accounts it's uh like that's a that's a broader economic Reckoning uh again I mean not making predictions here but you know 2008 that was housing it rippled everywhere else you know there's like potentially a similar Ripple here there is and I don't know if it would be quite as ruinous because it will bring the stock market down but stock market will find a way to survive I'm more worried about tech in general I'm more worried about Society view of tech the thing that the tech industry and I I try and tell as many people as I can tech people especially the ones in power are so goddamn smug they're so sure everyone in society loves Tech I don't think that's the case I think things like Google's AI search are turning people against Tech yeah and Tech may say who gives a [ __ ] about these people I know they make us money but they're little bastards I don't care they use my things I make money off of them except when regulation comes to Tech they're going to really be in trouble yeah on top of that private private investment in Tech is going to go down even further yeah no one's going to people already don't trust these companies if they start collapsing I mean do you like one of these big products is going to just stop Facebook is probably it it's the first one that's really collapsing in user numbers if they're moving their numbers around to make it sound better something's wrong if Facebook falls apart or if Instagram goes into the red that's that's when you're going to see these companies freak out or maybe it's just going to be in three is when the markets realized that llms are not the future and then all of Microsoft meta Amazon they're all going to get ripped through and it I would say sometimes people said oh wouldn't that be funny not for the people working at the companies who are victims of circumstance yeah well especially after these companies have already destroyed so many other Industries um like journalism media Etc um have been you know just e either destroyed or the industries destroyed themselves trying to chase the tech companies as has happened in Hollywood for example uh it's it's pretty bleak is there a chance just as a you know way to bring us in for a landing here is there a chance that you're that you're wrong and things will go along continue to go along fine or uh I I mean do you have any positive view of the future so yes so I don't think it's going to be a full scale apocalypse where everything goes to zero I do think that when this AI thing falls apart and the markets start getting a little mean I think you Pro I think s Pai gets fired I think he gets rolled I'm surprised he didn't over Google AI search I think they will have to start making things a little bit better they could find a Next Big Thing sure but at some point when the because in the rockc bubble piece I wrote traffic to most of the major platforms other than like Reddit LinkedIn and Tik Tok is going down yeah these companies are losing users there are less people getting online I do believe that there could be a shift where they go oh God we need to fix our products we need to be a bit more sustainable I believe we kind of heard a little bit of it in 2022 the year of efficiency and so on and so forth I think that there will be that that pushes things I also think the EU is going to aggressively move against generative AI in a way that makes them move away from it anyway yeah I think that you will see these stocks get chopped up a bit and things will realign but the future tech industry will have to be more sustainable it's not about optimism it's just the growth at all costs economy will always exist to an extent but Tech Will have to realign because so much money is being wasted right now yeah billions is being burnt and I just don't think the companies and personally talking to the startups I know the companies that are getting funding right now are the ones that have this crazy idea at them you don't know you heard about this what if a company made more money than it spent crazy idea that these kids these days they got all sorts of ideas I mean hopefully you know there's a coming correction and hopefully there'll be enough people who see it coming and change course ideally to blunt some of the impact I will say one thing please the startups and the investor like the small scale seed investors I talked to I talked to them all the time from a day job in PR they don't seem worried but they also don't seem beguiled by large language models they generally everyone right now the earli stage people they're talking about sustainability they're talking about building things that will last and not growing too fast smaller teams that gives me a [ __ ] ton of hope that's great when I talk to these people and it's usually like and this is aging myself at 38 here but it's a lot of these gen Z Founders they don't give a [ __ ] about big Tech they appreciate that they exist but their reaction to this thing is kind of like mine which is why are you acting like this this is a bad company this is a bad business these llms are cool yeah but they're not doing the things you say what if we built a business that people like that they paid for and it's very pragmatic and it's cool I I actually that gives me a lot of hope it's why I'm not full scale Doomer about this and honestly I think big Tech could use a punch in the face figuratively I think they need to be taken down a few PS I think they need to realize that they've forgotten their customers and forgotten their purpose in life I can't thank you enough for coming on here to talk to us about it we'll have to have you back in a year or two to see whether or not your prediction because these are very strong predictions and I want to see how accurate they are because that you you are you are uh validating my own emotional truth and you are making it very definitive well if I'm wrong I'll be happy to explain why that sounds great I love that attitude as well Ed thank you so much for being on the show for having me oh where can people find your work so you can find me at where's your ed. app and that's my newsletter and better offline. comom that's my podcast and iHot radio and coolzone media thank you so much for being here Ed thanks you well thanks once again to Ed zitron for coming on the show I hope you love that conversation as much as I did if you want to support the incredible conversations that we bring you week after week once again you can do so on patreon head to patreon.com adamon over five bucks a month gets you every one of these episodes ad free and you can join our wonderful on onine Community full of people just like you who love learning and complaining about how screwed up the world is for 15 bucks a month I will read your name at the end of every podcast episode and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues this week I want to thank Eden Welch Patrick Flanigan katton lindl Andrew urao Marcus Mitchell Vanessa Russell Josh beol and mask when you can protect your community thank you so much mask when you can protect your community for slipping that message in Via a $15 a month donation if you want to slip a clever message in at the end of this podcast once again head to patreon.com Adam conon to join all the wonderful people who make this show possible of course I want to thank my producers Sam rman and Tony Wilson everybody here at headgum who makes the show possible head to Adam 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