May 1, 2024 • 38 mins
Ed Zitron walks you through how career manager Adam Mosseri pushed out Instagram's original founders, turning it into an ultra-profitable app that barely works, and how Sam Altman, the so-called hero of the AI boom, is a lobbyist dressed as a technologist best-known for being an absent, self-obsessed demagogue.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, Cool
Zone Media's happiest podcast. I'm your host ed ze Tron. Well,
(00:23):
as I've run through in the last two episodes, managers
have poisoned taxability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known
as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics
on companies you love will isolating and removing those that
don't agree. And by the way, they're the same people
who actually build things and make good products and use
(00:43):
them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta,
a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction
with their products or any value to society. Since two
thousand and nine, Facebook's core products have reliably become more
profitable and exactly the same rate they decay, with every
founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus,
(01:08):
and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about
how much they hated working there. According to a New
York Times piece from twenty eighteen, Kevin Sistrom, co founder
of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark
Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, Taking the spotlight
away from that of Facebook itself, an appy kind of
stole from the Winklevosses. Sistrom allegedly didn't really want to
(01:32):
leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of
resources and now and I quote seemed to want Instagram
to use its momentum to help the big Blue app,
which is an annoying way of describing a situation that
feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a
Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swisher's bloviating, it took tech Crunch's
(01:52):
Josh Constein to reveal the real reason that Sistram had left.
Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of Product Kevin will who
everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in
May twenty eighteen. You know that great year for news,
and that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take
(02:13):
over and over the next six years he would absolutely
destroy everything that Sistrom and his co founder Mitchell Krieger
had built. According to Constein's reporting, Sistrom had also clashed
with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time.
Constein described Masseri as a Zuckerberg loyalist who was and
(02:35):
I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of
Facebook gig that went to Will Cathcot, who now heads
up Whatsam. Over time, Massi and Zuckerberg moved to erode
Sistrom and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess
it all became too much to bear. Sistrom was there
to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which
(02:57):
was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in Due twenty sixteen,
two years before he left. That horrified users who feared
that they would now not see posts from their friends,
a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook,
which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in
twenty fifteen. Wait, wasn't that when Adam Masius? Oh my god. Anyway,
(03:21):
a few months later, Instagram would try and clone the
functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally
one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of Stories.
By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat.
They just didn't anyway. This move was illustrative both of
the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also
(03:42):
of its future direction, with Story serving as yet another
touch point for advertisers, and yet another thing that Mark
Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things
and have ideas. One Systrom left, Masseri became the head
of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable
business units in history while destroying its basic functionality is
(04:03):
an app that showed you photos and videos from people
you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability
to interrupt and annoy you and stop you from seeing
things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored
content seemingly at random. But the one thing you can
rely on is it would do it a lot. Since
taking over Instagram, Adam Massei has, with the direct approval
(04:25):
and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turned the app into a
glorified ad network, devoid of any ability to innovate with
products like IGTV and Threads. By the way, not the
social network. It was a camera app built to compete
with Snapchat, which has also been shut down. Neither of
them found traction, and every change under Massi seems to
be a direct copy of either snap or TikTok. It's
(04:49):
also important to remember and know what Adam Massari is.
Adam Massari is not a creator. He's not an engineer.
He's not a founder. He's a designer that found his
way into product manageer, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things,
into the beautiful pantheon of wearing suits and yelling at people. Okay, okay,
(05:10):
I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he
definitely annoyed them. And in late twenty twenty, he made
arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching Reels, a
fifteen second video format for Instagram built to compete with
the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly
became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram,
(05:32):
flooding your feed with fifteen and eventually sixty second clips
that automatically players you scrolled by, each one engineered or
paid to get in the way of things that you
actually want to see. And I really want to be clear,
though there are people who are going to say, well, surely,
surely ed the fact that Reels was such a runaway success,
(05:52):
Well that's proof that it was good, right, wrong, horribly wrong.
Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook. Now, Systram's
worry and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram. His worry
was that Zuckerberg was trying to just turn Instagram into
an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, Like
(06:14):
you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account.
This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook,
but with more visual media. It has the same logins,
it has the same problems. It also has no customer
support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry.
Thanks to Adam goddamn Massari, you can now pay fifteen
(06:35):
dollars a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which
will also get you access to customer support. Great goddamn idea,
Adam burn in hell anyway, I'm not the only one
angry with Adam Assei. He's also one of the least
popular tech executives in history. And I'm not kidding. I
have been reading the tech media very deeply. For Jesus
(06:57):
coming up on sixteen years bloody hell. Anyway, I've never
seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk, and
even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far
more riars than Adam Massearri, who mostly spends his time apologizing, No, seriously.
Since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an
update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways and I'm not
(07:19):
kidding about that one. He's had to apologize for Instagram
censoring pro Palestinian content. He's had to testify before Congress
about Instagram's harm to young people, and he said to
tell people that Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app.
What does the Graham eh? Anyway, He's overseen so many
deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who
(07:42):
between them have over six hundred million followers, had to
beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok,
to which he responded that more and more of Instagram
is going to become video over time, and claim that
it had cut back on recommended content, something I think
we can all agree was a blatant, fucking lie. I
find Adam Massari very annoying as well, because when you
(08:04):
watch his videos, he's always going, hey, guys, yeah, so yeah,
So the reason that Instagram's bad now is because, uh,
and you can see him in real time trying to
come up with a reason why it sucks. That isn't
just well, it makes it. It makes us so it
may it may have made me so rich. I have
a house in Kensington, now I'm so rich. Is so good?
He's just he's worm like. He and I want to
(08:27):
get into personally inside. I take that back. Adam Massari
is not wormlike. He is a coward. Though he is
the reason that Instagram sucks. Now he is the architect
of the destruction of one of the most dominant places
on the web. These are his decisions. Massari, like many
of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified
(08:47):
management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Massari has
already anounced that Threads metas dollars stor clone of Twitter,
is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind
of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made
by a company that has a rich history of screwing
over news organizations. Also, what the hell do I talk
(09:09):
about in social networks? Then, Adam, No, nothing that's happening
in the government of words. Well oh wait, let me
answer that. On threads, what people talk about is whatever's
making them angry that day, without much form, more feature,
and they still talk about politics and news. It's just
not supported by the algorithm. It's just it's the kind
(09:30):
of thing that you would make if you had no
idea how social networks worked, but you knew product management.
If you were like, all the people, what do we
want to see out of a social network? We want
to see lots of clicks, we want to see lots
of scrolling. Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging.
That's what makes good social networking, right. And I think
(09:52):
we can all agree at this point that Twitter was
a mistake. It was like a text based platform. I
don't think Bisstone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product
peace people, but they were smart enough to leave it
the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files,
which by the way, are very funny because they Matt
Taybe sold is sold to Elon Musk, the most deceptive
man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks didn't think
(10:17):
the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway?
The Twitter files, all you can see in there is
Twitter's executives just being like, Oh, I don't want to
touch it, mate, I don't want to know. I don't
want to if we mess with it it's going to
make it bad. It's going to break. Everyone will be
so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person,
we shouldn't change this threads is this weird, hyperoptimized, hyper
algorithmic crapfest. And all the people on there are people
(10:41):
who write comments on Instagram it sucks, and there are
some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that.
But it's a bad social network. And it's a bad
social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't
build products, unless you think of products as like financial vehicles,
in which case Adam Massei maybe the most gifted man alive.
But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Massari's consultant mindset
(11:06):
more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with
Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a
new type of family centered account in Instagram that would
permit Meta to upsell Instagram to children under thirteen, a disgusting,
loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting
(11:26):
stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against Meta filed
by the Attorney General of New Mexico, Yeah, Adam I
won't come without a link because I'm scared anyways. This
is the man running one of the most important tech
platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or
qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists
(11:47):
only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can
or will do, as the profits of making it harder
to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich.
He comes out every so often bab about how social
is important, how the changes he's made that make Instagram
worse are actually good, and then disappears up his own asshole.
(12:08):
One time he responded to something I wrote on the information,
and he responded with a bunch of typos, which is
very funny. But he also responded saying that Facebook planned
no layoffs and Instagram planned no layoffs. They laid people
off on six months later. It's just this is the guy.
These are the guys in power now. Well. Much of
the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can
(12:30):
obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg. It's
important to remember Mark sucks, and Mark is the reason
he did the original Facebook after he stole it from
the Wet Brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand
the sheer level of damage that Adam Massei has done
to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product.
(12:51):
It's terrible, and Massari's only response to the pain and
frustration of his users is to tell them that he
intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response
when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making
Instagram like TikTok, he said, I'm actually gonna make it
more like Tiktel. Your fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly
what he said. He just said there'd be more video.
(13:13):
They've claimed their rolling things back, but it's all nonsense.
It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset
that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences,
and they do so because they have giant monopolies, and
then they make their products worse and worse and worse
once they know that their users can't or won't go
anywhere else. And what's insane about this is Instagram could
(13:37):
have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking.
There are honest ways to do a business like this
if they really actually invested in algorithms. And I kind
of hinted this in previous episodes and made it so
it was just very good at showing you things you like. Hell,
they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well?
(13:59):
Because it's our algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is
actually very good at showing people things they'd find interesting.
It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad. But guess what Matt's
worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of
billions of dollars into the metaverse. Still, Reality Labs is
still burning what ten fifteen billion dollars a quarter or
a year. It's an insane amount of money. How about
(14:22):
feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck us.
I'm being vulgar, and I've been quite vulgar in this episode,
and I apologize, I really do. I shouldn't swear so much.
My mother tells me this, my father tells me this,
shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this
all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad
(14:43):
guys keep winning and the reason they keep winning is
nobody points at them and says how bad they are,
or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people
should walk out of Instagram, and we should stop using
Instagram and Facebook. I think I use it Instagram like
once every cup day's look at my friend's very fat dog,
which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say,
(15:05):
can you just send me picture of site of your dog?
But that's kind of weird. These apps have become part
of the social fabric, and people like Adam Masseria are aware.
Same with Mark Zuckerberg. They know exactly how well they've done,
and they have. They are a success story. An evil
success story, but they're a success story. You are on Instagram,
(15:26):
you are on Twitter, you are on email. You are
on these platforms because that's where people exist online. There
are people that I can only speak to on Instagram.
They're just bad at text, but they love Instagram, and
it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms, and
imagine you don't want to EVA, which is why it's
important to talk about who mess them up. It's important
(15:48):
to say Adam Masseri a hundred times and keep saying it.
That's the only way that history will know who has
done this damage. And these management consultant types they're everywhere,
They're everywhere, and they're inspiring people to be like them,
to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers, but
(16:10):
excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground,
one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers or
in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything,
to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a
crazy story for you. Recently, a generative AI on Facebook
(16:31):
responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child.
And you may think I'm mistaking something. No, no, it
said this whole thing about having a gifted child. This
is what happens when people who don't know product, who
don't build anything, who don't understand anything, get the keys
to the kingdom. They fuck it up and they'll keep
doing so, and their massive success only seeks to inspire
(16:57):
generations of useless founders with creating profitable pain boxes over
useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked up
loathsome one of the more is rising to power. I'm
talking about Sam goddamn Altman. Now if you don't know
(17:22):
who that is. Sam Altman is the CEO of open Ai,
which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company building software
to do something, and Generative Ai might do something. You
should go back and listen to the episodes about that.
But I want to tell you how Sam Altman got started,
and I want to let you know how shit Sam
(17:43):
Altman has peen at his job in the past. In
two thousand and five, Altman, a Standford dropout, co founded
a company called Looped. That's loopt, that's what companies were
called back then, and they were a location based social
networking app that raised over thirty million dollars from taking Hiba,
y Combinator, and vcs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven
(18:04):
years later, Aortmand would flog Looped to a publicly traded
financial services company called green Dot, best known for their
prepaid cards, for remarkable forty three point four million dollars,
despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or
revenue ormand got quite rich from the Loop deal, despite
the fact that a group of senior employees urged the
board on two separate occasions to fire Aortmand for what
(18:27):
they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior. According to The
Wall Street Journal, Ormand would almost immediately become a partner
at y Combinator, surprising a lot of people after working
there part time before being made president by co founder
Paul Graham in twenty fourteen. Yet, behind the scenes, according
to reporting by Elizabeth Dwaskin and Natasha Tiku of The
(18:49):
Washington Post, Aortmand was well known for and I quote
for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of
the startups he was supposed to nurture. Ortmand was also
double dipping in y combine at startups by investing through
Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack,
with one source quoted by the Post describing Aortman's tenure
(19:09):
as the school of loose management that's all about prioritizing
what's in it for me. Aortmand became wildly rich during
his tenure at y Combinator, using his connections and his
cult of personality to make early investments in companies like
Gusto and optimizedly, which was acquired in twenty eighteen for
one point one six billion dollars, and Patreon and Asana
(19:31):
and Reddit probably made a couple hundred million red air
really depressing. In twenty fifteen, he founded OpenAI, at the time,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications.
Yet it's really important to note that Aortman is not,
and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He
(19:52):
did code, but he was, in every case, from what
I can find, a figurehead and a fundraiser that was
able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman
and we'll check Zaremba and Iliasidskava to do the actual
work at open AI, while he sent master ptory emails
to Elon Musk, who only ever donated fifty million dollars
of the one hundred million he claimed he'd invested in open AI.
(20:14):
You know what the thing is, Sam, at the very least,
can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are
you that much of a count anyway? I really want
you to remember that Sam Mortman was an absentee parent
for the first few years of open AI. He split
his efforts in actually a way that was very similar
to Elon Musk, across multiple other investments and enterprises like
(20:36):
the two funds he'd built inside of Y Combinator for
him to run. In twenty nineteen, according to reports at
the time, Alltmond would step down from Y Combinator amid
a series of changes at the accelerator, a story that
much of the industry press just simply chose not to
look into. Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit
for calling people out for this kind of in vain.
(20:59):
Yet the Washington Host's reporting revealed that Y Combinator found
a Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets
and very long and quite boring blogs. That's my job, Paul. Anyway,
he flew from the United Kingdom to Francisco to personally
kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for
some reason, and anyway due to Altman continuing to focus
(21:20):
on his own personal projects and press over his thing
at WY combinetor This is the story of the man
whom New York Magazine called the Oppenheimer of our Age
in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI
as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth, when
I think the truth might be far simpler. Sam Altman
(21:41):
is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published
in early twenty twenty one, Sam Altman proposed the concept
of Moore's law for everything, referring to the principle that
the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately
every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing
power in the process. And if I got that wrong,
I just I think it's okay anyway. Moore's Law for
(22:03):
Everything is, in essence a utopian take on the impact
of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of
humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and
services and thus the cost of living will go down exponentially,
something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history.
The problem with this piece is it's kind of like
Sam Moultman in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing.
(22:26):
It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI
will lower the cost of goods and services because labor
is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain,
and suggests things like that we should tax capital rather
than labor by creating an American equity Fund where companies
are forced to give up a percentage of their shares
to a nationally incorporate adventure fund, an idea that makes
sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies
(22:47):
to public companies. Moore's law for Everything is a remarkably
telling piece in that if frames Aortman's worldview as one
where the only thing that can save mankind is startups,
and those should be funded in the way that Sam
Ortman likes, and this piece feels a lot like everything
in a Ortmand's universe. Endeavor actually connects Moore's law to anything,
(23:10):
which I should add isn't so much of a law
as an observation as long ceased to be relevant as
the shrinkage of transistors as slowed in the recent years.
In many respects, this comparison is actually ierially prophetic given
the slow down and even regression of improvement we've seen
in large language models like chat GPT, And much like
(23:30):
chat GPT, Ortmand is capable only of loosely approximating the
output requested, because that is core. He lacks any kind
of substance or technical history that you'd need to do so,
like chat GPT, he's a very intelligent know nothing that,
through deterministic measures, completely detached from the meaning of the
(23:50):
underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the
right time. And by the way, this is the man
selling the artificial intelligence stream. He's a salesman, and he's
a salesman capable of superficial connections between ideas in a
way that's initially satisfying as long as you just don't
think about it too much. Altmand's famed startup playbook, which
(24:12):
is published in twenty fifteen, is full of the kind
of obvious yet satisfying crap that you'd expect. He extols
the virtues of being flexible yet rigid. Advis is that
you talk to your users and watch them use your product,
which is an exact quote, and he says that you
should try to improve your product five percent each week.
These are the kind of things that are very useful,
(24:34):
genuinely to an early twenties founder, and super impressive to
a mid fifties white venture capitalist that doesn't remember the
last time they worked a job that wasn't ten hours
a week of investing in Chuntley the SaaS for dog breeders.
They're the tech equivalent of live, Laugh, Love It does. However,
at one point, betray Sam Altman's real mindset that the
(24:56):
only universal job description of a CEO is to make
make sure that the company wins. Almand's material contributions to
open Ai kind of hard to nail down. Well, it's
unfair to judge someone entirely by their emails. Those that
I can find, such as the ones from Elon Musk's
lawsuit against open Ai, feel like they could be from
(25:18):
any other managerial huckster, and they feel kind of as
specious as Elon Musk's. And by the way, you're able
to compare those because when Elon Musk sued open Ai,
open Ai published a bunch of emails and him and
Alman are the same guy. They're both just sitting going, yes, yes,
the future will be very good. It'll be very important
that we have technology in the future. Yes, AI will
(25:38):
be able to grow. And Sam Almond's like, yeah, dude, yeah,
that's great. That's crazy man. It's like Joe Rogan, except
they're worth billions of dollars. Almond blathers on about governance
structures and how open ai needs to create the first
general AI and use it for individual empowerment, which he
defines as the distributed version of the future that seems
(26:00):
the safest. Like I said, Musco and Aortman are very
similar creatures, managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited
as having expertise in AI without actually appearing to have
written a single line of code in a decade. And
let me tell you something about most of the guys
who actually work deep in AI. You know what, They've
got academic papers, they have actual published things they've done.
(26:25):
They're not afraid to share their code. They're not asking,
as Elon must did when laying people off at Twitter
for people's most salient lines of code, because they actually
know how code works. I, by the way, do not.
I'm not going to pretend I do. But I'm also
not there selling you the future of AI. From what
I can tell, Altman has like broberkar Ragavan, the villain
(26:47):
of the last episode Fallen Upwards. He was a constant
source of frustration at Looped due to his pursuit and
I share you not of side projects, with the Wall
Street Journal reporting late last year that Altman wants diverted
engineers to work on an unnamed gay dating app. As
I previously noted, Ortmand was fired from y Combinator for
(27:08):
his absenteism and I quote reputation for favoring personal priorities
over official duties, and the Wallstroop Journal reports that by
early twenty eighteen, a year before he was fired, Ortmand
was barely present at y Combinator's headquarters, spending more time
at open Ai, which rankled longtime partners at y Combinator
who began losing faith in him as a leader. The
(27:41):
journal's piece does reveal a little more about why Ortman
was fired as CEO of open Ai, something that happened
last November and was very weird if he didn't see
it happen. He was fired for like three days, and
then a bunch of managers like Reid Hoffman and Brancheski
of Airbnb, sachurn Adela, the king of managers, the CEO
(28:02):
of Microsoft, got together and bullied a nonprofit into putting
him back. Super happy story, But one of the reasons
that he was fired was because Sam Altman is a
pretty atrocious manager. Founding and sadly now former open Ai
board member Ilia Sutzkava described to the board when calling
for Altman's removal, a long running pattern of Altman's tendency
(28:25):
to pit employees against one another, or promised resources and
responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts.
More worryingly, the General reports that other members of the
board had heard similar concerns from senior OpenAI executives. By
the way, anyone who brought Sam Altman back in ire
ascam bag, we all know it. They also feared that
(28:48):
Sam Altman would use his influence in Silicon Valley once fired,
something that almost immediately came true when Sam Altman ran
as I mentioned to Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who then
called Saturn Della of Microsoft, which sparked a chain of
events that restored Altman as CEO of open Ai and
led to the removal of the non believers like Ilia
Suitskafer from the board entirely. This this is Silicon Valley's king.
(29:14):
This is the guy that people think is the Oppenheimer
of our age. This is the king of Silicon Valley now,
a multi billionaire who's actually a lobbyist role playing as
a founder, a diplomat masquerading as a technologist, A charming, capricious, abusive,
and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again
(29:36):
that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must
benefit Sam Altman. This also explains why so little of
Sam Altman's promises about AI makes sense and why open
ai has been so unashamed in steam rolling and plagiarizing
the entire world. Altman has created nothing other than wealth
for himself and other rich guys, helping elevate and protect
(29:58):
existing power structures and the ideologies of men like Microsoft
CEO Sachnadella and LinkedIn founder and career manager Read Hoffman.
And let's not forget open AI's new board member Larry
Goddamn Summers, and it all kind of makes sense why
GENERATIVEAI doesn't really help anyone other than those who want
to sell something. When the center of attention at a
(30:21):
company isn't really on the product or the tech, but
the idea of what the product could do, very little
about the company's culture is focused on building useful things
for real people. When leadership is dominated by managers that
haven't touched a line of code in decades or talked
to a normal person in decades, nobody steering the ship
has the ability to judge whether software is good or useful,
(30:43):
or valuable, or does anything other than help you raise
venture capital, of course, and this is the direct result
of Silicon Valley's corruption by the managerial sect. While Propakar
Ragavan may be a decorated computer scientist and academic, he
arguably oversaw the destruction of Yahoo, formerly one of the
(31:03):
Webb's most dominant search engines, and failed upwards into a
managerial role that allowed him to take over and now
arguably ruin Google's search product chasing Away Ben Gomes a
hero and a man responsible for actually building things. Adam
Masseri was and always will be a manager making calls
about products he's had no hand in building, and has
(31:25):
architected the outright destruction of a social network used by
billions of people. And Sam Altman, a career failure famous
for making himself rich and popular and upsetting and hurting
the people he works with, is on course to become
the most toxic manager of them all. If left unchecked,
OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history,
(31:47):
looting the Internet and using it to train models that
have yet to prove their necessity. Other than there's a
symbol that Silicon Valley has still fucking got it, even
though it unquestionably doesn't when it comes to generative as yet,
because Altman, like every manager, is so thoroughly divorced from
natural production, he's only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and
(32:09):
making vague promises that the people who do the actual
work at OpenAI likely know that they can't keep. And
it's frustrating because, as I said before, bad guys keep winning.
There are people in Silicon Valley making real products. There
are people out there who are doing good things, but
Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we
(32:31):
entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don't
build things. Just look at Humane, a company that raised
hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice activated
AI powered pin that the ultra popular YouTuber markus brownly
called the worst product he'd ever reviewed. One might wonder
how a company would willingly launch a seven hundred dollars
(32:52):
product that overheated within minutes of use and repeatedly failed
to answer basic queries. And the answer is actually really simple.
Was founded by Bethny Bonziano, a former management consultant at PwC,
and Imronchell Dori, a former director of design from Apple,
that re firs to himself as an inventor and innovator
that was fired in twenty seventeen for sending out an
(33:13):
email about his planned exit from the company that suggested
that Apple could no longer innovate. Well, may look at
the humane pen. Do you think you innovated? Just to
be clear, if you haven't seen this thing, you should
really look it up. It's really funny. It clips on
and you are meant to use it to project a
laser thing onto your hand to make phone calls or
(33:33):
take photos. It's got a little camera in it. Here's
the problem. It overheats after a few minutes because of
the laser. And on top of that, the queries don't
work after time. And when they do, who really cares?
It's just chat GPT except seven hundred dollars worth a
twenty four dollars a month subscription. And this is what
happens when you're insulated from real people's problems, and when
(33:54):
you don't participate in the process that might actually solve them,
you become fundamentally disconnect from any real value creation. Silicon
Valley is atrophying as a result of lazy, disconnected vcs
and power players elevating man like sam Altman and incumbents
helping career consultants dictate the actions of those who actually
(34:15):
build software and hardware. If the tech industry wants to
escape the public's eire, it should push back against this
managerial poison and talk to real people with real problems
and focus on solving those before creating yet another growth
centric bullshit machine. And as the value really wants to change,
it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards
(34:38):
just because they say the right things. It feels good.
I get it that we have a guy out there
who's saying, yeah, I can help the value be worth money.
But as we speak, in vidios down ten percent by
the time this episode's out, I truly don't know where
it will be. But I'm worried. I'm worried that the
tech industry is going to start sputtering because every rues
(35:00):
put their eggs in the AI basket. But I do
have some hope. A lot of the startups I talked
to are only slightly touching generative AI. They don't seem
firmly embedded in it. Maybe this is just anecdotal, Maybe
I just know good people. I don't know, but my
thought here is the fact that the zero interest free
generation has kind of ended. That venture capitalists can't just
(35:22):
get hundreds of billions of dollars quite so easily. Means
that they're not so quick to invest in this stuff.
But I think are reckoning's coming, and I don't know
if it will be from people, but I think it's
going to be kind of a larger effect. It's going
to be one where you see that these products just
don't get adopted, like I mentioned in the AI episode,
(35:44):
and I think you're going to see these big, nasty,
overfunded consumer AI companies fall apart. But like I said before,
I'm afraid the open AI is going to start falling apart,
even if it is mostly part of Microsoft. I'm afraid
of the knock on effects on the stock market. And
I know, oh, stock market is only rich people play. No,
that's people's pensions as people like regular people do actually
(36:07):
invest in the stock market, and regular people watch Jim
Kramer as he goes you need to invest in AI.
That man does not know a goddamn thing. By the way,
a lot of people who've responded to my AI episode
have said, yeah, it's good that AI's fail. It's good
that the tech industry is falling apart, and it feels
good to see bad people fail. But the thing I
need to caution you about is management consultants are also
(36:29):
really good at avoiding blame. Prabakar Ragavan he destroyed Yahoo,
or at least watched it happen, and he's now the
head of Google Search and he's destroying that too. Sam
Altman has messed up so many times, and yet here
he is. He's the king of Open AI. He gets
these glossy stories. He can be interviewed by anyone anywhere.
(36:50):
These people keep winning, but you want to know how
they get defeated Sunlight talk about them, Talk about Adam Maseri,
talk about Sam Mortman. These stories to your friends, say
the name Propacar Ragavan. As much as you can blame
these people for their actions, I can't say it will
change much. But at least the wider society will know
(37:13):
who to blame for destroying the Internet. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
(37:33):
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasowski dot com. M A t t O. S
O w Ski dot com. You can email me at
easy at better offline dot com or check out better
Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links
to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better
Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
(37:54):
from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the I or radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, Cool
Zone Media's happiest podcast. I'm your host ed ze Tron. Well,
(00:23):
as I've run through in the last two episodes, managers
have poisoned taxability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known
as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics
on companies you love will isolating and removing those that
don't agree. And by the way, they're the same people
who actually build things and make good products and use
(00:43):
them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta,
a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction
with their products or any value to society. Since two
thousand and nine, Facebook's core products have reliably become more
profitable and exactly the same rate they decay, with every
founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus,
(01:08):
and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about
how much they hated working there. According to a New
York Times piece from twenty eighteen, Kevin Sistrom, co founder
of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark
Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, Taking the spotlight
away from that of Facebook itself, an appy kind of
stole from the Winklevosses. Sistrom allegedly didn't really want to
(01:32):
leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of
resources and now and I quote seemed to want Instagram
to use its momentum to help the big Blue app,
which is an annoying way of describing a situation that
feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a
Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swisher's bloviating, it took tech Crunch's
(01:52):
Josh Constein to reveal the real reason that Sistram had left.
Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of Product Kevin will who
everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in
May twenty eighteen. You know that great year for news,
and that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take
(02:13):
over and over the next six years he would absolutely
destroy everything that Sistrom and his co founder Mitchell Krieger
had built. According to Constein's reporting, Sistrom had also clashed
with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time.
Constein described Masseri as a Zuckerberg loyalist who was and
(02:35):
I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of
Facebook gig that went to Will Cathcot, who now heads
up Whatsam. Over time, Massi and Zuckerberg moved to erode
Sistrom and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess
it all became too much to bear. Sistrom was there
to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which
(02:57):
was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in Due twenty sixteen,
two years before he left. That horrified users who feared
that they would now not see posts from their friends,
a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook,
which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in
twenty fifteen. Wait, wasn't that when Adam Masius? Oh my god. Anyway,
(03:21):
a few months later, Instagram would try and clone the
functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally
one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of Stories.
By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat.
They just didn't anyway. This move was illustrative both of
the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also
(03:42):
of its future direction, with Story serving as yet another
touch point for advertisers, and yet another thing that Mark
Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things
and have ideas. One Systrom left, Masseri became the head
of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable
business units in history while destroying its basic functionality is
(04:03):
an app that showed you photos and videos from people
you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability
to interrupt and annoy you and stop you from seeing
things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored
content seemingly at random. But the one thing you can
rely on is it would do it a lot. Since
taking over Instagram, Adam Massei has, with the direct approval
(04:25):
and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turned the app into a
glorified ad network, devoid of any ability to innovate with
products like IGTV and Threads. By the way, not the
social network. It was a camera app built to compete
with Snapchat, which has also been shut down. Neither of
them found traction, and every change under Massi seems to
be a direct copy of either snap or TikTok. It's
(04:49):
also important to remember and know what Adam Massari is.
Adam Massari is not a creator. He's not an engineer.
He's not a founder. He's a designer that found his
way into product manageer, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things,
into the beautiful pantheon of wearing suits and yelling at people. Okay, okay,
(05:10):
I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he
definitely annoyed them. And in late twenty twenty, he made
arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching Reels, a
fifteen second video format for Instagram built to compete with
the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly
became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram,
(05:32):
flooding your feed with fifteen and eventually sixty second clips
that automatically players you scrolled by, each one engineered or
paid to get in the way of things that you
actually want to see. And I really want to be clear,
though there are people who are going to say, well, surely,
surely ed the fact that Reels was such a runaway success,
(05:52):
Well that's proof that it was good, right, wrong, horribly wrong.
Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook. Now, Systram's
worry and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram. His worry
was that Zuckerberg was trying to just turn Instagram into
an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, Like
(06:14):
you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account.
This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook,
but with more visual media. It has the same logins,
it has the same problems. It also has no customer
support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry.
Thanks to Adam goddamn Massari, you can now pay fifteen
(06:35):
dollars a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which
will also get you access to customer support. Great goddamn idea,
Adam burn in hell anyway, I'm not the only one
angry with Adam Assei. He's also one of the least
popular tech executives in history. And I'm not kidding. I
have been reading the tech media very deeply. For Jesus
(06:57):
coming up on sixteen years bloody hell. Anyway, I've never
seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk, and
even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far
more riars than Adam Massearri, who mostly spends his time apologizing, No, seriously.
Since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an
update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways and I'm not
(07:19):
kidding about that one. He's had to apologize for Instagram
censoring pro Palestinian content. He's had to testify before Congress
about Instagram's harm to young people, and he said to
tell people that Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app.
What does the Graham eh? Anyway, He's overseen so many
deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who
(07:42):
between them have over six hundred million followers, had to
beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok,
to which he responded that more and more of Instagram
is going to become video over time, and claim that
it had cut back on recommended content, something I think
we can all agree was a blatant, fucking lie. I
find Adam Massari very annoying as well, because when you
(08:04):
watch his videos, he's always going, hey, guys, yeah, so yeah,
So the reason that Instagram's bad now is because, uh,
and you can see him in real time trying to
come up with a reason why it sucks. That isn't
just well, it makes it. It makes us so it
may it may have made me so rich. I have
a house in Kensington, now I'm so rich. Is so good?
He's just he's worm like. He and I want to
(08:27):
get into personally inside. I take that back. Adam Massari
is not wormlike. He is a coward. Though he is
the reason that Instagram sucks. Now he is the architect
of the destruction of one of the most dominant places
on the web. These are his decisions. Massari, like many
of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified
(08:47):
management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Massari has
already anounced that Threads metas dollars stor clone of Twitter,
is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind
of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made
by a company that has a rich history of screwing
over news organizations. Also, what the hell do I talk
(09:09):
about in social networks? Then, Adam, No, nothing that's happening
in the government of words. Well oh wait, let me
answer that. On threads, what people talk about is whatever's
making them angry that day, without much form, more feature,
and they still talk about politics and news. It's just
not supported by the algorithm. It's just it's the kind
(09:30):
of thing that you would make if you had no
idea how social networks worked, but you knew product management.
If you were like, all the people, what do we
want to see out of a social network? We want
to see lots of clicks, we want to see lots
of scrolling. Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging.
That's what makes good social networking, right. And I think
(09:52):
we can all agree at this point that Twitter was
a mistake. It was like a text based platform. I
don't think Bisstone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product
peace people, but they were smart enough to leave it
the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files,
which by the way, are very funny because they Matt
Taybe sold is sold to Elon Musk, the most deceptive
man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks didn't think
(10:17):
the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway?
The Twitter files, all you can see in there is
Twitter's executives just being like, Oh, I don't want to
touch it, mate, I don't want to know. I don't
want to if we mess with it it's going to
make it bad. It's going to break. Everyone will be
so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person,
we shouldn't change this threads is this weird, hyperoptimized, hyper
algorithmic crapfest. And all the people on there are people
(10:41):
who write comments on Instagram it sucks, and there are
some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that.
But it's a bad social network. And it's a bad
social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't
build products, unless you think of products as like financial vehicles,
in which case Adam Massei maybe the most gifted man alive.
But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Massari's consultant mindset
(11:06):
more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with
Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a
new type of family centered account in Instagram that would
permit Meta to upsell Instagram to children under thirteen, a disgusting,
loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting
(11:26):
stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against Meta filed
by the Attorney General of New Mexico, Yeah, Adam I
won't come without a link because I'm scared anyways. This
is the man running one of the most important tech
platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or
qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists
(11:47):
only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can
or will do, as the profits of making it harder
to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich.
He comes out every so often bab about how social
is important, how the changes he's made that make Instagram
worse are actually good, and then disappears up his own asshole.
(12:08):
One time he responded to something I wrote on the information,
and he responded with a bunch of typos, which is
very funny. But he also responded saying that Facebook planned
no layoffs and Instagram planned no layoffs. They laid people
off on six months later. It's just this is the guy.
These are the guys in power now. Well. Much of
the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can
(12:30):
obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg. It's
important to remember Mark sucks, and Mark is the reason
he did the original Facebook after he stole it from
the Wet Brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand
the sheer level of damage that Adam Massei has done
to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product.
(12:51):
It's terrible, and Massari's only response to the pain and
frustration of his users is to tell them that he
intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response
when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making
Instagram like TikTok, he said, I'm actually gonna make it
more like Tiktel. Your fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly
what he said. He just said there'd be more video.
(13:13):
They've claimed their rolling things back, but it's all nonsense.
It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset
that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences,
and they do so because they have giant monopolies, and
then they make their products worse and worse and worse
once they know that their users can't or won't go
anywhere else. And what's insane about this is Instagram could
(13:37):
have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking.
There are honest ways to do a business like this
if they really actually invested in algorithms. And I kind
of hinted this in previous episodes and made it so
it was just very good at showing you things you like. Hell,
they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well?
(13:59):
Because it's our algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is
actually very good at showing people things they'd find interesting.
It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad. But guess what Matt's
worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of
billions of dollars into the metaverse. Still, Reality Labs is
still burning what ten fifteen billion dollars a quarter or
a year. It's an insane amount of money. How about
(14:22):
feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck us.
I'm being vulgar, and I've been quite vulgar in this episode,
and I apologize, I really do. I shouldn't swear so much.
My mother tells me this, my father tells me this,
shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this
all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad
(14:43):
guys keep winning and the reason they keep winning is
nobody points at them and says how bad they are,
or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people
should walk out of Instagram, and we should stop using
Instagram and Facebook. I think I use it Instagram like
once every cup day's look at my friend's very fat dog,
which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say,
(15:05):
can you just send me picture of site of your dog?
But that's kind of weird. These apps have become part
of the social fabric, and people like Adam Masseria are aware.
Same with Mark Zuckerberg. They know exactly how well they've done,
and they have. They are a success story. An evil
success story, but they're a success story. You are on Instagram,
(15:26):
you are on Twitter, you are on email. You are
on these platforms because that's where people exist online. There
are people that I can only speak to on Instagram.
They're just bad at text, but they love Instagram, and
it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms, and
imagine you don't want to EVA, which is why it's
important to talk about who mess them up. It's important
(15:48):
to say Adam Masseri a hundred times and keep saying it.
That's the only way that history will know who has
done this damage. And these management consultant types they're everywhere,
They're everywhere, and they're inspiring people to be like them,
to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers, but
(16:10):
excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground,
one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers or
in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything,
to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a
crazy story for you. Recently, a generative AI on Facebook
(16:31):
responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child.
And you may think I'm mistaking something. No, no, it
said this whole thing about having a gifted child. This
is what happens when people who don't know product, who
don't build anything, who don't understand anything, get the keys
to the kingdom. They fuck it up and they'll keep
doing so, and their massive success only seeks to inspire
(16:57):
generations of useless founders with creating profitable pain boxes over
useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked up
loathsome one of the more is rising to power. I'm
talking about Sam goddamn Altman. Now if you don't know
(17:22):
who that is. Sam Altman is the CEO of open Ai,
which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company building software
to do something, and Generative Ai might do something. You
should go back and listen to the episodes about that.
But I want to tell you how Sam Altman got started,
and I want to let you know how shit Sam
(17:43):
Altman has peen at his job in the past. In
two thousand and five, Altman, a Standford dropout, co founded
a company called Looped. That's loopt, that's what companies were
called back then, and they were a location based social
networking app that raised over thirty million dollars from taking Hiba,
y Combinator, and vcs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven
(18:04):
years later, Aortmand would flog Looped to a publicly traded
financial services company called green Dot, best known for their
prepaid cards, for remarkable forty three point four million dollars,
despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or
revenue ormand got quite rich from the Loop deal, despite
the fact that a group of senior employees urged the
board on two separate occasions to fire Aortmand for what
(18:27):
they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior. According to The
Wall Street Journal, Ormand would almost immediately become a partner
at y Combinator, surprising a lot of people after working
there part time before being made president by co founder
Paul Graham in twenty fourteen. Yet, behind the scenes, according
to reporting by Elizabeth Dwaskin and Natasha Tiku of The
(18:49):
Washington Post, Aortmand was well known for and I quote
for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of
the startups he was supposed to nurture. Ortmand was also
double dipping in y combine at startups by investing through
Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack,
with one source quoted by the Post describing Aortman's tenure
(19:09):
as the school of loose management that's all about prioritizing
what's in it for me. Aortmand became wildly rich during
his tenure at y Combinator, using his connections and his
cult of personality to make early investments in companies like
Gusto and optimizedly, which was acquired in twenty eighteen for
one point one six billion dollars, and Patreon and Asana
(19:31):
and Reddit probably made a couple hundred million red air
really depressing. In twenty fifteen, he founded OpenAI, at the time,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications.
Yet it's really important to note that Aortman is not,
and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He
(19:52):
did code, but he was, in every case, from what
I can find, a figurehead and a fundraiser that was
able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman
and we'll check Zaremba and Iliasidskava to do the actual
work at open AI, while he sent master ptory emails
to Elon Musk, who only ever donated fifty million dollars
of the one hundred million he claimed he'd invested in open AI.
(20:14):
You know what the thing is, Sam, at the very least,
can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are
you that much of a count anyway? I really want
you to remember that Sam Mortman was an absentee parent
for the first few years of open AI. He split
his efforts in actually a way that was very similar
to Elon Musk, across multiple other investments and enterprises like
(20:36):
the two funds he'd built inside of Y Combinator for
him to run. In twenty nineteen, according to reports at
the time, Alltmond would step down from Y Combinator amid
a series of changes at the accelerator, a story that
much of the industry press just simply chose not to
look into. Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit
for calling people out for this kind of in vain.
(20:59):
Yet the Washington Host's reporting revealed that Y Combinator found
a Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets
and very long and quite boring blogs. That's my job, Paul. Anyway,
he flew from the United Kingdom to Francisco to personally
kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for
some reason, and anyway due to Altman continuing to focus
(21:20):
on his own personal projects and press over his thing
at WY combinetor This is the story of the man
whom New York Magazine called the Oppenheimer of our Age
in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI
as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth, when
I think the truth might be far simpler. Sam Altman
(21:41):
is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published
in early twenty twenty one, Sam Altman proposed the concept
of Moore's law for everything, referring to the principle that
the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately
every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing
power in the process. And if I got that wrong,
I just I think it's okay anyway. Moore's Law for
(22:03):
Everything is, in essence a utopian take on the impact
of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of
humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and
services and thus the cost of living will go down exponentially,
something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history.
The problem with this piece is it's kind of like
Sam Moultman in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing.
(22:26):
It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI
will lower the cost of goods and services because labor
is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain,
and suggests things like that we should tax capital rather
than labor by creating an American equity Fund where companies
are forced to give up a percentage of their shares
to a nationally incorporate adventure fund, an idea that makes
sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies
(22:47):
to public companies. Moore's law for Everything is a remarkably
telling piece in that if frames Aortman's worldview as one
where the only thing that can save mankind is startups,
and those should be funded in the way that Sam
Ortman likes, and this piece feels a lot like everything
in a Ortmand's universe. Endeavor actually connects Moore's law to anything,
(23:10):
which I should add isn't so much of a law
as an observation as long ceased to be relevant as
the shrinkage of transistors as slowed in the recent years.
In many respects, this comparison is actually ierially prophetic given
the slow down and even regression of improvement we've seen
in large language models like chat GPT, And much like
(23:30):
chat GPT, Ortmand is capable only of loosely approximating the
output requested, because that is core. He lacks any kind
of substance or technical history that you'd need to do so,
like chat GPT, he's a very intelligent know nothing that,
through deterministic measures, completely detached from the meaning of the
(23:50):
underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the
right time. And by the way, this is the man
selling the artificial intelligence stream. He's a salesman, and he's
a salesman capable of superficial connections between ideas in a
way that's initially satisfying as long as you just don't
think about it too much. Altmand's famed startup playbook, which
(24:12):
is published in twenty fifteen, is full of the kind
of obvious yet satisfying crap that you'd expect. He extols
the virtues of being flexible yet rigid. Advis is that
you talk to your users and watch them use your product,
which is an exact quote, and he says that you
should try to improve your product five percent each week.
These are the kind of things that are very useful,
(24:34):
genuinely to an early twenties founder, and super impressive to
a mid fifties white venture capitalist that doesn't remember the
last time they worked a job that wasn't ten hours
a week of investing in Chuntley the SaaS for dog breeders.
They're the tech equivalent of live, Laugh, Love It does. However,
at one point, betray Sam Altman's real mindset that the
(24:56):
only universal job description of a CEO is to make
make sure that the company wins. Almand's material contributions to
open Ai kind of hard to nail down. Well, it's
unfair to judge someone entirely by their emails. Those that
I can find, such as the ones from Elon Musk's
lawsuit against open Ai, feel like they could be from
(25:18):
any other managerial huckster, and they feel kind of as
specious as Elon Musk's. And by the way, you're able
to compare those because when Elon Musk sued open Ai,
open Ai published a bunch of emails and him and
Alman are the same guy. They're both just sitting going, yes, yes,
the future will be very good. It'll be very important
that we have technology in the future. Yes, AI will
(25:38):
be able to grow. And Sam Almond's like, yeah, dude, yeah,
that's great. That's crazy man. It's like Joe Rogan, except
they're worth billions of dollars. Almond blathers on about governance
structures and how open ai needs to create the first
general AI and use it for individual empowerment, which he
defines as the distributed version of the future that seems
(26:00):
the safest. Like I said, Musco and Aortman are very
similar creatures, managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited
as having expertise in AI without actually appearing to have
written a single line of code in a decade. And
let me tell you something about most of the guys
who actually work deep in AI. You know what, They've
got academic papers, they have actual published things they've done.
(26:25):
They're not afraid to share their code. They're not asking,
as Elon must did when laying people off at Twitter
for people's most salient lines of code, because they actually
know how code works. I, by the way, do not.
I'm not going to pretend I do. But I'm also
not there selling you the future of AI. From what
I can tell, Altman has like broberkar Ragavan, the villain
(26:47):
of the last episode Fallen Upwards. He was a constant
source of frustration at Looped due to his pursuit and
I share you not of side projects, with the Wall
Street Journal reporting late last year that Altman wants diverted
engineers to work on an unnamed gay dating app. As
I previously noted, Ortmand was fired from y Combinator for
(27:08):
his absenteism and I quote reputation for favoring personal priorities
over official duties, and the Wallstroop Journal reports that by
early twenty eighteen, a year before he was fired, Ortmand
was barely present at y Combinator's headquarters, spending more time
at open Ai, which rankled longtime partners at y Combinator
who began losing faith in him as a leader. The
(27:41):
journal's piece does reveal a little more about why Ortman
was fired as CEO of open Ai, something that happened
last November and was very weird if he didn't see
it happen. He was fired for like three days, and
then a bunch of managers like Reid Hoffman and Brancheski
of Airbnb, sachurn Adela, the king of managers, the CEO
(28:02):
of Microsoft, got together and bullied a nonprofit into putting
him back. Super happy story, But one of the reasons
that he was fired was because Sam Altman is a
pretty atrocious manager. Founding and sadly now former open Ai
board member Ilia Sutzkava described to the board when calling
for Altman's removal, a long running pattern of Altman's tendency
(28:25):
to pit employees against one another, or promised resources and
responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts.
More worryingly, the General reports that other members of the
board had heard similar concerns from senior OpenAI executives. By
the way, anyone who brought Sam Altman back in ire
ascam bag, we all know it. They also feared that
(28:48):
Sam Altman would use his influence in Silicon Valley once fired,
something that almost immediately came true when Sam Altman ran
as I mentioned to Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who then
called Saturn Della of Microsoft, which sparked a chain of
events that restored Altman as CEO of open Ai and
led to the removal of the non believers like Ilia
Suitskafer from the board entirely. This this is Silicon Valley's king.
(29:14):
This is the guy that people think is the Oppenheimer
of our age. This is the king of Silicon Valley now,
a multi billionaire who's actually a lobbyist role playing as
a founder, a diplomat masquerading as a technologist, A charming, capricious, abusive,
and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again
(29:36):
that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must
benefit Sam Altman. This also explains why so little of
Sam Altman's promises about AI makes sense and why open
ai has been so unashamed in steam rolling and plagiarizing
the entire world. Altman has created nothing other than wealth
for himself and other rich guys, helping elevate and protect
(29:58):
existing power structures and the ideologies of men like Microsoft
CEO Sachnadella and LinkedIn founder and career manager Read Hoffman.
And let's not forget open AI's new board member Larry
Goddamn Summers, and it all kind of makes sense why
GENERATIVEAI doesn't really help anyone other than those who want
to sell something. When the center of attention at a
(30:21):
company isn't really on the product or the tech, but
the idea of what the product could do, very little
about the company's culture is focused on building useful things
for real people. When leadership is dominated by managers that
haven't touched a line of code in decades or talked
to a normal person in decades, nobody steering the ship
has the ability to judge whether software is good or useful,
(30:43):
or valuable, or does anything other than help you raise
venture capital, of course, and this is the direct result
of Silicon Valley's corruption by the managerial sect. While Propakar
Ragavan may be a decorated computer scientist and academic, he
arguably oversaw the destruction of Yahoo, formerly one of the
(31:03):
Webb's most dominant search engines, and failed upwards into a
managerial role that allowed him to take over and now
arguably ruin Google's search product chasing Away Ben Gomes a
hero and a man responsible for actually building things. Adam
Masseri was and always will be a manager making calls
about products he's had no hand in building, and has
(31:25):
architected the outright destruction of a social network used by
billions of people. And Sam Altman, a career failure famous
for making himself rich and popular and upsetting and hurting
the people he works with, is on course to become
the most toxic manager of them all. If left unchecked,
OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history,
(31:47):
looting the Internet and using it to train models that
have yet to prove their necessity. Other than there's a
symbol that Silicon Valley has still fucking got it, even
though it unquestionably doesn't when it comes to generative as yet,
because Altman, like every manager, is so thoroughly divorced from
natural production, he's only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and
(32:09):
making vague promises that the people who do the actual
work at OpenAI likely know that they can't keep. And
it's frustrating because, as I said before, bad guys keep winning.
There are people in Silicon Valley making real products. There
are people out there who are doing good things, but
Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we
(32:31):
entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don't
build things. Just look at Humane, a company that raised
hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice activated
AI powered pin that the ultra popular YouTuber markus brownly
called the worst product he'd ever reviewed. One might wonder
how a company would willingly launch a seven hundred dollars
(32:52):
product that overheated within minutes of use and repeatedly failed
to answer basic queries. And the answer is actually really simple.
Was founded by Bethny Bonziano, a former management consultant at PwC,
and Imronchell Dori, a former director of design from Apple,
that re firs to himself as an inventor and innovator
that was fired in twenty seventeen for sending out an
(33:13):
email about his planned exit from the company that suggested
that Apple could no longer innovate. Well, may look at
the humane pen. Do you think you innovated? Just to
be clear, if you haven't seen this thing, you should
really look it up. It's really funny. It clips on
and you are meant to use it to project a
laser thing onto your hand to make phone calls or
(33:33):
take photos. It's got a little camera in it. Here's
the problem. It overheats after a few minutes because of
the laser. And on top of that, the queries don't
work after time. And when they do, who really cares?
It's just chat GPT except seven hundred dollars worth a
twenty four dollars a month subscription. And this is what
happens when you're insulated from real people's problems, and when
(33:54):
you don't participate in the process that might actually solve them,
you become fundamentally disconnect from any real value creation. Silicon
Valley is atrophying as a result of lazy, disconnected vcs
and power players elevating man like sam Altman and incumbents
helping career consultants dictate the actions of those who actually
(34:15):
build software and hardware. If the tech industry wants to
escape the public's eire, it should push back against this
managerial poison and talk to real people with real problems
and focus on solving those before creating yet another growth
centric bullshit machine. And as the value really wants to change,
it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards
(34:38):
just because they say the right things. It feels good.
I get it that we have a guy out there
who's saying, yeah, I can help the value be worth money.
But as we speak, in vidios down ten percent by
the time this episode's out, I truly don't know where
it will be. But I'm worried. I'm worried that the
tech industry is going to start sputtering because every rues
(35:00):
put their eggs in the AI basket. But I do
have some hope. A lot of the startups I talked
to are only slightly touching generative AI. They don't seem
firmly embedded in it. Maybe this is just anecdotal, Maybe
I just know good people. I don't know, but my
thought here is the fact that the zero interest free
generation has kind of ended. That venture capitalists can't just
(35:22):
get hundreds of billions of dollars quite so easily. Means
that they're not so quick to invest in this stuff.
But I think are reckoning's coming, and I don't know
if it will be from people, but I think it's
going to be kind of a larger effect. It's going
to be one where you see that these products just
don't get adopted, like I mentioned in the AI episode,
(35:44):
and I think you're going to see these big, nasty,
overfunded consumer AI companies fall apart. But like I said before,
I'm afraid the open AI is going to start falling apart,
even if it is mostly part of Microsoft. I'm afraid
of the knock on effects on the stock market. And
I know, oh, stock market is only rich people play. No,
that's people's pensions as people like regular people do actually
(36:07):
invest in the stock market, and regular people watch Jim
Kramer as he goes you need to invest in AI.
That man does not know a goddamn thing. By the way,
a lot of people who've responded to my AI episode
have said, yeah, it's good that AI's fail. It's good
that the tech industry is falling apart, and it feels
good to see bad people fail. But the thing I
need to caution you about is management consultants are also
(36:29):
really good at avoiding blame. Prabakar Ragavan he destroyed Yahoo,
or at least watched it happen, and he's now the
head of Google Search and he's destroying that too. Sam
Altman has messed up so many times, and yet here
he is. He's the king of Open AI. He gets
these glossy stories. He can be interviewed by anyone anywhere.
(36:50):
These people keep winning, but you want to know how
they get defeated Sunlight talk about them, Talk about Adam Maseri,
talk about Sam Mortman. These stories to your friends, say
the name Propacar Ragavan. As much as you can blame
these people for their actions, I can't say it will
change much. But at least the wider society will know
(37:13):
who to blame for destroying the Internet. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
(37:33):
can check out more of his music and audio projects
at Matasowski dot com. M A t t O. S
O w Ski dot com. You can email me at
easy at better offline dot com or check out better
Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links
to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better
Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
(37:54):
from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the I or radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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