June 7, 2024 • 41 mins
In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through what happens when tech's growth-at-all-costs epoch begins to collapse, and how the only way to save Silicon Valley is to put power back in the hands of those who actually build things - and reject the management consultant mindset killing innovation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed Zitron. What last episode I posited that
everything weird and bad you're seeing in the tech industry
(00:24):
right now can be attributed to the death of its
hypergrowth era. You see, up until around twenty nineteen, take
experience this epoch where there were these obvious, giant, multi
trillion dollar markets to conquer, things like software as a service,
cloud storage, streaming, audio and video, things like that, along
with billions of people that were getting online every single year.
(00:46):
Yet now they face another problem that only one hundred
million new people got online between twenty twenty two and
twenty thirty three, and the traffic that they're sending to
the majority of the Internet's top one hundred Internet properties
has entered this prolonged, agonizing period of declient and were
still they don't appear to be any new multi trillion
markets left to grow into. This led to a profound
(01:10):
period of desperation in tech. The tech industry got high
on the hog promising the world and then somehow actually
managing to deliver it. You see Facebook, they actually connected
billions of people. There are millions of electric cars, cloud
products are both ubiquitous and useful. You can stream music anywhere.
There are real things, real ideas, new things that they
(01:31):
could just pump money into and then reap the benefits until,
of course there weren't. Venture capital also got used to
making easy, safe bets on new startups and seeing pretty
much automated massive returns because there were still these massive
markets to enter, and of course they were able to
get very cheap money borrowed from limited partners and I
(01:52):
at some point really do need to explain exactly how
venture capital works, but that's a future episode. Yet, since
twenty nineteen, tech's biggest ideas of being a beer, it wank.
These new ideas they've had, NFTs, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, generative AI,
these movements, they seem to sell ideas and glimpses of
(02:12):
the future rather than an actual product that would solve
an actual problem for anyone, let alone the billions of
people required to make a giant market. And the commonality
between all of these products is that they're all trying
to create one. They all need to make a new
hypergrowth market, an industry that could be worth hundreds of
billions or even trillions of dollars for investors to pile
(02:33):
capital into or i should say, into startups that will
then grow into these industries. But in all of their
cases they kind of seem to fall short the moment
they enter the real world. Had NFTs actually been a
replacement for art or collectibles, they could have created an
industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, except they lacked
(02:53):
any compelling use case of reason to do so, other
than the fact that venture capitalists really wanted them to
do so. The same went for cryptocurrency, which draped itself
in these horrible manipulative concepts like decentralized software, programmable money,
democratized finance, ideas that could theoretically be trillion dollar concepts,
(03:15):
except in practice cryptocurrency is horrible as a store of
value and even worse as an operable piece of software.
But the same does go for the metaverse and for
generative AI. Their concepts sold on the idea of what
if it could do this, rather than what it can
actually do. And that's before if you got to the nasty,
messy problem of whether actually people wanted them to do anything,
(03:37):
whether people wanted to live in the metaverse or transact
with digital money, you can do that using zell or
Vemo today, you could do it years ago. I don't
really get it. And yet the most obvious problem with
these movements is that they're constantly having to explain why
you should care, rather than showing you why you should care.
The promises they've made they're not based on things that
(03:59):
they're actually doing, but on showing you this kind of messy,
childish drawing of a concept of something that one day
might exist, and almost universally rely on this kind of
pseudo religious belief system where one has faith in an
industry and that doing so makes you smart. And you
need to decry cynics as Luodites that hate progress, because well,
(04:20):
one has to be first, right And what's crazy as
well with all the AI people who are like, ah,
you need to believe in AI. A lot of these
people aren't invested in these companies. They just want to
be part of a movement. It's so sad, but it's
also so craven and manipulative. And the problem isn't so
much that these concepts are bad, but that they're premature.
(04:40):
The metaverse is a silly idea at the scale that
Zuckerbo pitched it, but digital worlds that people spend thousands
of hours of their lives and are not The take
that he's talking about just isn't there and may not
actually be, And without that tech, I just don't think
they become ubiquitous concepts adopted by hundreds of millions or
billions of people in the way that he said. To
do the things that he demonstrated in the twenty twenty
(05:03):
one video he showed when he changed Facebook's name to
Meta would require, as I mentioned last episode, all of
this extrasensory tech that is nowhere near existing. But let's
get a little bit into the present for a second
and talk about generative AI, which has use cases and
can do some cool things, but the desperation to make
(05:25):
it the next big hypergrowth market has turned it into
more of a marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign made
up of these gratuitous, insane promises about artificial general intelligence
or about how AI could run our lives, all kind
of to hide the fact that most of these models
are trained on a noxious form of public larceny, stealing
(05:48):
from thousands or millions of creators to train models to
do nothing. Training these models, by the way, will not
give us agi it's not going to give us cognition
in AI. They are lying about that. I really want
to be clear, but also want to be clear that, uh, well,
generative AI is probably not going to do much more
(06:09):
than it's doing today. I'm making that call right now.
What's happened in the last year. Nothing but these problems
are created by the fact that they might be good ideas,
but they're not trillion dollar ideas, but they're being given
the funding and the marketing efforts to make them that way,
even though they're so premature. It's ridiculous and it's just
(06:30):
a it's a rotten kind of mindset. It is the
rot economy, and it is the rot com bubble. This
is the bubble being inflated, pushing concepts to the limelight
before they're ready, pushing things through to show that companies
can keep growing, that the tech industry can keep growing.
And you can see miniature versions of this problem running
through all of your favorite tech products right now. Google's
(06:51):
forcing AI and to search, Facebook's constantly changing its algorithms
and adding AI. Amazon's letting in basically anyone to sell
anything on Amazon at any time, even if it's clogging
the Kindle store with AI generated crap. They're all doing
it because they're desperate to show that they're innovative and
adding new things and able to express perpetual growth, even
(07:11):
if doing so makes things worse. Even Apple, who I
generally like the products of, is doing it too. iOS
is a complete mess. Go into your settings, there's one
hundred different things at the top. It will sometimes transsell
you Apple News. Plus sometimes you get a notification about
a baseball game that's a nail biter. I had one
yesterday for the Angels Marlins, and if you're not a
(07:32):
baseball fan, that's not that exciting a game. It's like
watching two turds fight in a toilet. Sorry, if I've
got any Marlins or Angels fans. Back to the tech stuff, though,
I must be clear that there is a mindset behind this,
and it is the rot economy and the rot economy's
growth at all cost mindset. It drives these companies away
from innovation. It flies in the face of what it
(07:55):
takes to innovate, which means losing money on ideas that
actually help people. And it's all happening because these markets
they reward public companies and the startups that they try
and acquire for making a number go up rather than
any kind of consistent, profitable, sustainable, or useful business. And
it frustrates me and fills me full of angry bio
(08:16):
because they're all capable of making cool stuff. Amazon made aws,
Amazon web Services, the foundational thing of all cloud computing.
Facebook at one point was a very useful product that
connected people that you loved and you liked and that
you just met, except they had to make the number
go up. And I think, by the way, Zuckerberg is
(08:36):
separate to a lot of these companies because he was
always kind of evil listen to the Facebook episodes and
not lying. But really, though all these companies had noble times,
they had times when they were still doing value extraction,
where they were still doing some form of conning, where
they were still doing monopoly plays, but they were at
least providing something useful. Now they're making things worse because
(08:57):
they have no more useful ideas or at least you
ustful and profitable ones. What makes the last few years
worth of bullshit stupid tech movements different from the previous
innovations is that when an industry is ready for hypergrowth,
(09:19):
there's a product that actually exists that will truly change
people's lives. The promises made by tech executives were at
one point based on things that one can reasonably believe
would happen, rather than this kind of weird, erotic fan
fiction to send a stock number up. Using the first iPhone,
you could kind of see that you might make video
calls on it, or take video, or use distinct third
(09:40):
party apps like you were already doing on a Mac.
And while Steve Jobs and yes he was an awful person,
I know, did talk about what's coming next, he did
so by saying that the iPhone on the initial announcement
would add three G and amazing things in the future.
And he did so just before and this was in
the original iPhone speech, showing the actual real features of
the first iPhone, things that people actually wanted, like having
(10:03):
your music on your phone, being able to see what
voicemails you had versus just calling a number and then
hitting buttons to skip to the ones you need to
see or hear in this case. And these promises, they
were believable, either because they felt like a logical next
step or because they described features that could be found
in other competing products. Apple's always been a company of
(10:25):
iteration rather than forceful, explosive innovation. It doesn't really create
new categories, but it does refine them. And this trait
was even referenced in the classic Douglas Copeland novel Microserfs,
first published in nineteen ninety five, before Tim Cook took over,
or even the return of Steve Jobs. It didn't make
the first smart watch, or the first table, or the
first arm based PC, but Apple did make them good
(10:48):
and made them practical and useful and sellable. You saw
these new products and you said, oh, I could do that,
I could take photos with that. Oh I don't need
an iPod and phone. I have a phone that does
two things. I'm not even trying to romanticize the iPhone.
I'm just describing what basic utility sounds like in a product,
(11:09):
something that has been lost in the tech industry. Just
look at Samultman, Sondhar Pashai, and Sachin Adella of Open Ai,
Google and Microsoft. They seem intent on discussing what AI
will do, that it will have a monumental impact, that
it will be a smart person in those everything about
your life, and yet when they're actually asked about what
it does today, they just seem to go kind of quiet.
(11:33):
They start her, they're speechless. And when sach a and
Adella was actually asked about how he uses AI in
his day to day work, he said the Microsoft Copilot
helps him compose emails better. Congratulations, Microsoft, you invented grammarly,
a product that's existed for fifteen years. Jesus Christ Anyway.
As an aside, sach In Adella of Microsoft said in
(11:56):
twenty twenty one that Microsoft was with the metaverse creating
an I quote here, a new platform and a new
application type that was similar to how it talked about
the web and the websites in the early nineties, and
that he could not overstate how much a breakthrough the
metaverse was. He would then dump it entirely two years later.
(12:17):
Two years before that, so in twenty nineteen, Nadella called
HoloLens two, microsoft's augmented reality glasses, an absolute breakthrough, a
few months after its demo failed live on stage at
Microsoft's Bill twenty nineteen conference. And while Microsoft hasn't killed HoloLens,
it's clear the company's appetite for mixed and virtual reality
(12:38):
has kind of dampened with HoloLens work as partially impacted
over the last year's sweeping layoffs at Microsoft and Microsoft
discontinuing its VR social network, All Space VR and Windows
Mixed Reality. Where's the breakthrough, Satcha, Satcha, you told me
this shit was a breakthrough in twenty nineteen. Hey, the
metaus was a breakthrough? Is everything a breakthrough? Satcha? Anyway,
(13:01):
every single one of these questionable, weird, stupid products and
the stupider decisions behind them, it's all an act of desperation,
an attempt to keep the rot economy going, and the
growth that all costs fire from going out, stripping crap
off of the walls and throwing it in, selling shit
so you can get more oil to throw on the fire.
You can tell I have done a lot of fires. But seriously,
(13:23):
this is all desperation to keep a party going that
ended quite some time ago. There's a finite amount of
people in the world right now, less of them getting online.
And while more people are being born, they're going to
be born into a very different tech industry than the
one we see today. And there's an even more finite
amount of those people that will go online at any
given time, and in turn, even fewer of them that
(13:44):
might actually want to use a particular service, especially one
that isn't obvious in why you should bloody use it. Previously,
these companies were able to anticipate and meet customers' needs
on both the consumer and enterprise level, in part because
they actually understood their customers and knew that making their
customers happy actually made them successful. I believe that behind
(14:06):
the scenes, many of these companies have been struggling for
years to find the next big thing, knowing that while
there might be needs to be made, you know, those horrible,
nasty customers that always want problems solved. Ugh, those needs
might not be things that will create double digit revenue
growth or convince Wall Street that a stock will grow forever.
Though I can't say for certain. I'd also say the
(14:27):
ascent of management consultancy types in tech, people like Sheryl Samberg,
Adam Useerri Sandar Pishai, and Sam Altman, who was adopted
by the management consultant types. It's a testament to how
obvious that they're desperate for the next big thing is,
and how big their failure is to actually adapt to
customer needs, or how incapable they are of building useful
(14:48):
things management consultancy people and Sundar and share all by
the way, they both came from McKinsey, one of the
worst companies around. They're not built to innovate, they're built
to grow. Oh, they're built to create business cancer. Now
you might say that's horrible. But at the same time,
do you think Facebook's useful? Do you think Google Search
(15:10):
has got better? Or do you think that management consultancy
people have seen it and gone number must go up,
number must go up forever because if number go up,
money go up, money go up. Good. I know I'm
being somewhat facetious, but really, look at the tech industry
right now. Look at it and tell me that this
is an industry going well, that this is an industry
(15:31):
building the future. No, right now, the tech industry feels
like a management consultancy people trying to do PowerPoint presentations
to customers to say this is going to change your
life without actually showing them how it will in the product,
and in the case of Microsoft lying in their Super
Bowl commercial, or in the case of Samulman and Open
Eye lying all the time. I mean tons of liars
(15:55):
at the top of most of capitalism. But really, the
tech industry is just full of them. But I think
generative AI is quite special. And what makes it so
special is it kind of has the hint of utility,
the scent of a product, and as a result, it
can be sold to the markets. Is the next big boom,
the next big thing that justifies hundreds of billions of
dollars of investment and increased market caps, even if it
(16:19):
doesn't really do something. Every single company chasing the generative
AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services, which,
as I mentioned, is the ubiquitous cloud product that went
from a side project of Amazon Store to actually something
that makes more than it and today it underpins most
of the Internet. And you want to know why AWS
(16:39):
does that, It's because it's useful. It's because it actually
does something. It's actually a thing that has utility. You
don't need to explain why someone needs a website on
the Internet, or why they need services to do the
compute to run an application that runs in the cloud.
That's pretty bloody obvious. And that's the problem with GENERATIFAI,
and that's the problem with a lot of things you
(17:00):
see in the tech industry. Nobody really seems to be
able to explain why or how generative AI is the
next big thing, just that it is Chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude,
all of these large language models. They can do some
things that are superficially cool. They can generate images, they
can quickly query databases, albeit with no guarantee they won't
(17:21):
hallucinate and make up something that isn't true and tell
you it is. And they can craft poetry. But there's
no real endearing reason to pick one of them up
every day and use them. These use cases that they enable.
They're not really exciting or ubiquitous or world changing. They're
not anything like what the tech executives are actually selling us.
And the problem might not be that they're useless, but
(17:43):
that as a piece of technology, generative AI just isn't
a hypergrowth market or much of an industry changer, no
matter how much money you shove into it. Sam Lman
is not asking Microsoft for a one hundred billion dollars
supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better. He's
doing it because what we have today is not a
world changing product. It's not the boondoggle that the tech
(18:07):
industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of
fulfilling these promises is basically a tech industry equivalent of
the Marshall Plan. Yet without generative AI, what do these
companies have left? What is the next big thing? For
the best part of fifteen years, we've assumed that the
tech industry would always have something up their sleeves. But
(18:27):
what's becoming apparent is that they might have actually run
out of ideas. They don't have any big, sexy things
to sell us. And the disruption that has become associated
with tech was predicated on there being new markets for
them to disrupt and ideas in their hands that they
could actually use to do so. And a paper from
(18:47):
last year from Nature that kind of worried me too
positive that the pace of disruptive research is actually slowing,
And I believe the same thing is actually happening in tech,
except we're conflating innovation and finding new markets to add
software and hard where to and we've been doing so
for twenty years, and the net result of this is
a kind of innovation stagnation and the rock economy and
(19:09):
the rock com bubble. A tech industry laser focused on
finding markets to disrupt rather than actually disrupting anything. Rather
than actually meeting anyone's needs. Where the biggest venture capital
investments go into companies that can sell for massive multiples
rather than sustainable, stable businesses or things that might truly
change the world. Venture capital is not investing in moonshots.
(19:32):
They're not putting money into the future. They're putting money
into the goddamn present. And there are exceptions. I like
a lot of seed stage investors because they're actually taking
risks on real companies that are doing new things. However,
the largest VC firms need to get their heads out
their asses and actually invest in the future. But really,
(19:52):
what's so stupid about this is of all these big
tech companies, before they really mess with their products, they
were good, sustainable, insane, li profitable businesses. There's no reason
that Google or Meta or Amazon couldn't build businesses that
have flat, sustainable growth and really respectable, reliable profitability. They
just choose not to impart because the markets will punish it,
(20:13):
and partly because their DNA has been poisoned by the
rot economy and the demands of the rot economy are
very simple, more always more. I also think that the
tech industry, both the venture capitalists funding it and those
running big tech firms. They've been dominated by people who
don't build things. The people running VC firms, the people
(20:35):
running Google, Facebook, and all these Wow. Mark Zuckerberg, I
guess was a code but he's not doing it anymore.
They're not actually building products, and they're not coder's even
Sam Morton's not an engineer. The future isn't being built
by the people saying what the future is. The future
is being built by people under the thumb of management
(20:57):
consultant brains. And I know, oh, I know, I'm being
a little facetious again, but really, these people aren't speaking
to people with real products. They're not looking at the
human condition and saying, let's make this better for money. Now,
they're saying, how do we drain more blood from the
consumer until they give up on our website? Well, guess what, asshole?
They are giving up on it. But this problem, it's
(21:20):
poisoning the startup industry as well, leaving big tech for
a second. So, the Rabbit R one and the Humane Pin,
I'm not sure if you've seen them. The rabbit r
one is this two hundred dollar orange brick with a
screen that claimed when you got it that you could
talk to it and it'd run these apps and it
cost two hundred dollars, by the way, and the Human
Pin is this AI powered pin that costs seven hundred
(21:41):
dollars and it has a little infrared screen that goes
in your hand except when you use it too much
of heats anyway, Now that like giving you back. Kind
of the backstory there. Both of these companies they raised
incredible sums of capital based on these vague ideas. You know,
that people felt overwhelmed by their smartphones, or that they
don't not connected with the real world, things that sound
(22:02):
nice to investors who don't experience speaking to people. And
they raised all this money hunt over two hundred billion
dollars between my believe, to build products that range from
extremely bad to potentially fraudulent, and they failed to build
products that anybody actually needed. What they did build were
very expensive things that answered questions nobody had and solve
(22:24):
problems that nobody had very poorly. And I'm not sure
if it was ignorance, ambivalence, or just pure evil, but anyway,
if I'm honest, these startups, they're only a symptom of
the rock on bubble. The investors are disconnected from the
process of building things, and they're funding ideas that they
don't understand in the hopes that the people building them
aren't full of shit, and they're not even doing the
(22:46):
necessary due diligence because clearly the people funding these companies
don't know enough about tech to actually see whether these
things are possible. Remember Saguoya, one of the largest venture
capital firms, put a lot of money into FTX. Again,
the crypto currency thing that was a big scam. There
are ways of looking beyond the spreadsheet or the power point.
You know, you can ask more questions and if they
(23:07):
don't give you a give you an answer, that's good.
I just feel a little crazy when I think about
tech from the last few years. There's just been so
much wasted money. There are people out there who were
just raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing.
And I'm going to say something a little bit controversial,
but who can blame them. I think they're scum. I
think they're con artists. I think they should give back
(23:29):
the money to their customers, and they should give back
the money to investors. But really, what do you expect
when the industry is engineered to capture what the next
big thing is when it isn't defined by utility or necessity,
but rather how big a market it can grow into.
Why wouldn't you try and capture that demand. Why would
you make a real company when venu money is going
into fake companies again and again for years and years
(23:50):
and years and years. Why do you think people don't
want to make startups. People are making startups, by the way,
it's still happening. But why would they be incentivized to
try something new when they know that venture capitalists are
funding stupid, bloody ideas that sound good on paper. It's
so frustrating, and it frustrates me working with startups every
(24:11):
day here in real ideas which actually exist, and they'll
raise modest rounds, they won't raise one hundred million dollars
because the people giving away one hundred million dollars are
giving it to people who have the next big thing
idea and then burning the money anyway. It's just it's
so insane, Like look at the rabbit r one. So
the rabbit are one is it's a little orange box.
(24:31):
When you ask it to order uber it breaks most
of the time. It does not work. It claims it
as a large action model that controls your apps on
a server. It doesn't really work. The whole thing feels
like a sham. There's a Coffee Ziller video I really
encourage you to watch. But the big thing is is
that what Jesselu, the CEO of Rabbit, has done is
he's over promised what this device could do. He said
it can control your apps with your voice, and it
(24:54):
can only kind of do that, and he's raised a
bunch of money as a result of these I don't
know if you call them live half truths, scams, I
don't know. That's up to you to choose. But nevertheless,
what Jesse Lou has done is as well as previously
run an NFT company, which is the same entity that
made the Rabbit. Jesse Lou has stated that AI can
do more than it can, that his device is actually
(25:17):
capable of doing things that might one day be possible
but really might not be based on the existing technology.
If we're honest, what's the difference between Rabbit CEO Jesse
Lou and open Ai CEO sam Orltman. They both went
through y Combinator, which is a tech incubator in the Bay,
and both of them have sold products that don't do
(25:37):
what they say based on what it might do in
the future. I can't work out the difference other than
the amount of money they've raised. Both of them lied,
both of them haven't delivered the products they say. I
think the only difference, as far as I can see,
is that Sam Ortman was better at playing the game.
I'm no, no, really though, Really sit with me for
a second. Jesse Lou absolutely misled his customers about the capabilities,
(26:00):
what the R one could do, and the company's previous operations.
But Sam Altman as shamelessly over hyped generative AI almost
every day for years. Senior members of Sam Moltman's first
startup Looped tried to get him fired twice for what
they described as a deceptive and chaotic behavior pattern. He
was fired from y Combinator for an absenteeism that rankled
(26:21):
his peers and some of the startups he was supposed
to nurture, and former Open Ai board member Helen Toner
told the ted Ai Show that Altman was so deceitful
that the board found out about the launch of chat GPT,
which by the way, is the definitional generative AI product,
when they saw it was posted on Twitter. Toner also
(26:42):
admitted that Sam Moortmon was caught outright lying on multiple occasions,
and the two executives provided evidence of psychological abuse and
lying and manipulative behavior on multiple occasions. If anything, Sam
Altman's much worse than jesselew All while lacking much of
a technical background at all. He is the archetypal rockcom CEO,
(27:02):
an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be a technologist and abusing
anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth. Sam
Moltman is the opposite of what the tech industry needs.
He is not building real things. He is selling you
a dream that doesn't exist. And when this bubble bursts,
people like him will escape. They'll be fine because he's
already rich. Nothing I'm saying is meant to suggest that
(27:36):
they can't be successful tech companies. Although there won't be
any more innovation, I just think there's going to be
less of it, and on a much smaller scale, and
I don't think we should fear it. The tech industry
can no longer rely on the idea that every year
or every couple of years, somebody will find an idea
that will create two thousand more startups or trillions of
dollars in market cap. Tech must reconfigure both venture capital
(28:00):
investment and public tech companies to a sustainable, profitable, and
useful model where get this, existing products are made better
and more profitable with the understanding that we're approaching the
maximum amount of people who are going to be online,
and that these products cannot be built with the assumption
that more and more users will always exist. I'm sure
(28:20):
some of you might say I'm wrong and that text
hypergrowth era isn't over, and that GENERATIVEAI it's going to
usher in this glorious new future of powerful assistance. But seriously,
what does that look like? What happens next? Where does
GENERATIVEAI go from here? Do they fix the problems? How
do they make it cheaper or more efficient? How do
they eliminate hallucinations? When Google themselves can't, when Facebook can't,
(28:45):
When none of these big companies can fix the biggest
problem that all of them know about. How will open
AI train GPT five their next model. They need four
to five times the amount of data that they have
right now, which already require them to do masses of
plagiarism to make GPT five happen. How are they going
to do that? Hey, another question, just why have you
(29:09):
has Google, Meta or Microsoft? If any of these companies
found a way to make generative AI profitable? Yeah, when
will they do so? How long do they have? How
long until the market sours? Salesforce just had their first
revenue miss since two thousand and six, partially based on
the fact that Mark Bennioff, the bullshitter in chief who
constantly talks about AI and has done so for years,
(29:32):
it turns out he didn't make any money from it,
and people are kind of upset and seriously though, putting
all that aside, when does generative AI prove itself useful?
Where's the big moment? Where's the iPhone moment? Is it
this autocorrect thing? Is it this thing that can write
poetry or generate pictures of the Joker as president? Where
(29:53):
is this big moment? I'm afraid the answer is kind
of simple. It isn't coming. Generative AI is not going
to change the world. And while AI itself kind of
already has and it definitely will do so more in
the future, it isn't going to with generative AI, and
it isn't going to do so in the hands of
Sam Altman in Open AI. I don't even think Anthropic
is going to do it either. When the bubble bursts
(30:16):
these firms, they're probably going to be absorbed into the
massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into
them already in exactly the same way that Microsoft just
absorbed Inflection, And they'll do this to quietly hide the
shameful failure. And they'll be able to, by the way,
repurpose all of the cloud compute investments they've made. There
are other places for that compute to go. They have,
(30:37):
they make billions off of cloud. They'll work it out.
But in the end, if all of this falls apart,
if the rock com bubble bursts, if the hypergrowth period
is over, I actually think it's better for the tech
industry to have a better world, one with more interesting
things and where society doesn't constantly feel at odds with
the tech industry. Tech companies need to share this growth addiction.
(31:00):
They need to get off the horse, and I believe
that we forced to do so. Whether they like it
or not. There's still going to be many, many, many
hundred million or even billion dollar companies. There's just not
going to be that many hundred billion or trillion dollar ones.
I realize I come off as negative as at times
I know I do. And as I've said multiple times
(31:23):
and I'll say again, I'm a broken hearted romantic. I
want a better tech industry. I love the companies I
work with. I love the companies I've worked with. I
love the tech I use. I think that tonal that
it's a workout machine, one of the best pieces of tech. Ever,
It's changed my life, as iPhones have, as computers have,
as many things have. I want there to be these exciting, interesting,
(31:43):
actually innovative and useful products that change my life and
your life and other people's lives are the better. Any
anger or frustration you hear in my voice is directed
toward the people that have diverted the massive sources of
innovation that come from having masses of money and talent
away from building useful things towards finding new vessels for hypergrowth.
(32:06):
And the same goes for the venture capitalists that seem
incapable of backing actually new or interesting things. They just
double down on new trends that everybody else is following,
rather than putting money into young, hungry founders that are
trying to build real things. A better tech industry is
one that puts more money into earlier stage companies doing
new things in better ways or completely new ways, rather
(32:26):
than all following the same trends and doubling or tripling
down on the same guys doing the same things. It's
also goddamn boring and useless and wasteful. I love tech.
I find tech amazingly useful. I'm using it right now.
I would be a liar if I said I didn't
love the tech industry and I didn't love the tech
that I use. And I feel like many of you
might feel the same way. Maybe you don't, not putting
(32:48):
words in your mouth, but the problem is that it's
getting less useful, it's getting less magical. It isn't magical anymore. Generally,
if AI isn't magical, we're being told it is, and
it isn't. I wish that I was doing all these
crazy things. I wish it didn't have to steal from everyone,
and I wish that, quite frankly, any of the people
building these big AI companies seem to want to build
(33:08):
cool or interesting things, and I just feel that if
they actually built useful things, things could change things would
be better, and tech can be both an incredibly profitable
industry and a vessel for building better, more interesting things
and a better, more interesting future. What's holding it back
are people with management consultancy brain and all they can
(33:29):
do is find and dominate new markets at all costs,
and they fly in the face of innovation and invention
and creativity when they do so. People like Mark Zuckerberg,
Sam Moltman, Sundar Pishai and Satchina Dalla and Mark Andrews
and too are not interested in any future other than
the one that they own, and have turned their companies
and the companies they invest in into management consultancy firms
(33:50):
that happen to sell technology. The solution is a more
decentralized and I do not mean crypto tech industry. A
decentralized tech industry, one where VC dollars flow into smaller,
earlier stage companies, where the source of what's next isn't
three or four large companies, but a thousand little ones
that have actually taken a risk to build something. New
tech companies will be funded that don't succeed. It's happening already,
(34:13):
It's been happening forever, but those failures should at least
be trying to build something new and interesting. It doesn't
have to be world changing. It can change the lives
of people that run servers. It can be something that
changes the lives of people trying to get fit. There
are many industries that can be fixed or improved or grown.
(34:35):
But they might not be worth one hundred billion dollars.
That still makes them valuable. It still makes them worthwhile,
just not to the arseholes in charge. Silicon Valley can
be better by giving the keys back to the people
who actually build things and actually solving problems that real
human beings face. And I also believe that the tech industry,
and especially Silicon Valley needs to start talking to regular
(34:57):
goddamn people again. Bubble and I know I've mentioned multiples.
The rock com bubble itself is a problem, but also
the bubble of Silicon Valley, of the venture capitalists and
a lot of the big tech companies is one that
is never penetrated by regular people with regular problems. That
needs to change. Talk to some regular bloody people fix
(35:18):
their problems. Focus on fixing the problems of the billions
of people before you assume that those billions of people
will become your goddamn users. The tech industry needs to
realign around sustainability, profitability, and building useful things for real people.
And until that happens, billions of dollars will be plowed
into building hardware and software to inflate the rock com bubble,
(35:41):
to keep the rock economy going, and the hopes that
the growth of all cost party will never end. And
I really do not think that anyone in tech is
ready for it to end. I think when this bubble pops,
it's going to take out maybe slowly, maybe it's a
slow bleed one of the big tech firms. What's happening
with Google today with AIS search is a travesty. It
(36:02):
is a goddamn disgrace. Sondhar Pashai and Liz Read should
be ashamed of themselves. They should tender their resignations. To
turn Google Search into an AI powered slot machine that
may or may not give you useful information. That is disgusting.
It's a societal loss. What's been done to Facebook is
a disgrace. As I said in the two Facebook episodes,
(36:24):
Facebook is barely functional. It's spreading pornography and misinformation. It's
hurting people, it's helping people get scammed. It's not connecting anyone.
These are tangibly worse products. Amazon's so full of nonsense
the reviews. Almost every review seems fake. And now it's
got generative AI summaries that don't make any sense. Every
product's getting worse. And what I want to say, And
(36:45):
it's kind of big headed to assume that Sandhar Pashai
or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg would ever hear this.
But if they do, your party will end one day.
And when it does, you won't have any talent or
innovation to lay back on you. I've demonized your customers
and treated them with contempt. Also that you can please
faceless people in Wall Street. When the rot com bubble bursts,
(37:09):
you will be humiliated. You will still be so rich,
but your legacy will be one of failure. All that
money that you extracted, all that value you took, will
be just for you. You will have ruined products that
were formative for people's lives. You will be known for that,
(37:30):
not for innovation, not for being a genius, not for
being remarkable, but for being remarkable in the amount of
damage you did to the tech industry. Sheryl Samberg, Mark Zuckerberg,
Sam Altman, You're all the same management consultancy brain, unable
to create real value for real people, and it's perhaps
(37:53):
because you don't talk to them. I realize I've kind
of diverted from the podcast. I'm yelling at people who
may never hear. But this frustration in my voice has
nothing to do with engineered rage. This is nothing to
do with the podcast or even getting more downloads or
anything like that. This is because tech change my life.
(38:15):
It changed so many people's lives. It's the reason that
I'm able to keep talking to my family in England,
that I not having many friends in Las Vegas, can
have rich, meaningful friendships throughout the world. The reason that
I'm able to is because people were able to find
a balance between profit and actual innovation and actually creating things.
(38:37):
But the people in charge in tech have lost their way.
They have lost their way from creating meaningful things, from
making meaningful decisions that help people. Now, all they want
to do is make changes that make their companies look
like they can grow forever. And when that bubble pomps,
I hope they're humiliated, and I hope they're kicked out,
(38:57):
but they probably won't be Mark Zuckerberg can't even be fired.
This is the injustice of tech right now. This is
the disgraceful state of the rock com boom. My anger
inside me is that things can be better, that tech
can do great things. But the people with the money,
(39:18):
the people directing the money and the compute, the people
making the hires, the people that have hired the greatest
minds in tech who should get paid well by directing
them toward making stuff for Wall Street. And until that changes,
I'm still going to feel like this. I'm not here
to tell you how to feel. I'm just telling you
(39:38):
how I feel, and I promise you every episode of
this show is about trying to give you transparency into
the system and the things it creates, to try and
answer why so much of the stuff we see today
doesn't seem to be for us, and doesn't even seem
to be for a use case. It's frustrating, nauseating. I
(40:01):
don't like it being like this. I wish I had
more good news. I wish there was something cool I
could talk about from one of these companies. Sit Gmail
changed my life. Gmail was fantastic. These companies are fully
capable of making great things and even a deadbeat piece
of shit. Steve Jobs is still beloved by history because
he actually ushered in good things, even though it was
(40:24):
mostly him getting other people to do it. But no
tech doesn't seem to care at least big tech. I
want to see change. I want to see things being better.
I just I want tech to be fun and exciting
and interesting and innovative. Again, I think you do too.
Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening to
(40:52):
Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline
theme song is Metasowski. You can check out more of
his music and audio projects Selski dot com, M A
T T O s O W s Ki dot com.
You can email me at easy at Better offline dot
com or visit Better offline dot com to find more
podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
(41:14):
recommend you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at
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Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
your host ed Zitron. What last episode I posited that
everything weird and bad you're seeing in the tech industry
(00:24):
right now can be attributed to the death of its
hypergrowth era. You see, up until around twenty nineteen, take
experience this epoch where there were these obvious, giant, multi
trillion dollar markets to conquer, things like software as a service,
cloud storage, streaming, audio and video, things like that, along
with billions of people that were getting online every single year.
(00:46):
Yet now they face another problem that only one hundred
million new people got online between twenty twenty two and
twenty thirty three, and the traffic that they're sending to
the majority of the Internet's top one hundred Internet properties
has entered this prolonged, agonizing period of declient and were
still they don't appear to be any new multi trillion
markets left to grow into. This led to a profound
(01:10):
period of desperation in tech. The tech industry got high
on the hog promising the world and then somehow actually
managing to deliver it. You see Facebook, they actually connected
billions of people. There are millions of electric cars, cloud
products are both ubiquitous and useful. You can stream music anywhere.
There are real things, real ideas, new things that they
(01:31):
could just pump money into and then reap the benefits until,
of course there weren't. Venture capital also got used to
making easy, safe bets on new startups and seeing pretty
much automated massive returns because there were still these massive
markets to enter, and of course they were able to
get very cheap money borrowed from limited partners and I
(01:52):
at some point really do need to explain exactly how
venture capital works, but that's a future episode. Yet, since
twenty nineteen, tech's biggest ideas of being a beer, it wank.
These new ideas they've had, NFTs, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, generative AI,
these movements, they seem to sell ideas and glimpses of
(02:12):
the future rather than an actual product that would solve
an actual problem for anyone, let alone the billions of
people required to make a giant market. And the commonality
between all of these products is that they're all trying
to create one. They all need to make a new
hypergrowth market, an industry that could be worth hundreds of
billions or even trillions of dollars for investors to pile
(02:33):
capital into or i should say, into startups that will
then grow into these industries. But in all of their
cases they kind of seem to fall short the moment
they enter the real world. Had NFTs actually been a
replacement for art or collectibles, they could have created an
industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, except they lacked
(02:53):
any compelling use case of reason to do so, other
than the fact that venture capitalists really wanted them to
do so. The same went for cryptocurrency, which draped itself
in these horrible manipulative concepts like decentralized software, programmable money,
democratized finance, ideas that could theoretically be trillion dollar concepts,
(03:15):
except in practice cryptocurrency is horrible as a store of
value and even worse as an operable piece of software.
But the same does go for the metaverse and for
generative AI. Their concepts sold on the idea of what
if it could do this, rather than what it can
actually do. And that's before if you got to the nasty,
messy problem of whether actually people wanted them to do anything,
(03:37):
whether people wanted to live in the metaverse or transact
with digital money, you can do that using zell or
Vemo today, you could do it years ago. I don't
really get it. And yet the most obvious problem with
these movements is that they're constantly having to explain why
you should care, rather than showing you why you should care.
The promises they've made they're not based on things that
(03:59):
they're actually doing, but on showing you this kind of messy,
childish drawing of a concept of something that one day
might exist, and almost universally rely on this kind of
pseudo religious belief system where one has faith in an
industry and that doing so makes you smart. And you
need to decry cynics as Luodites that hate progress, because well,
(04:20):
one has to be first, right And what's crazy as
well with all the AI people who are like, ah,
you need to believe in AI. A lot of these
people aren't invested in these companies. They just want to
be part of a movement. It's so sad, but it's
also so craven and manipulative. And the problem isn't so
much that these concepts are bad, but that they're premature.
(04:40):
The metaverse is a silly idea at the scale that
Zuckerbo pitched it, but digital worlds that people spend thousands
of hours of their lives and are not The take
that he's talking about just isn't there and may not
actually be, And without that tech, I just don't think
they become ubiquitous concepts adopted by hundreds of millions or
billions of people in the way that he said. To
do the things that he demonstrated in the twenty twenty
(05:03):
one video he showed when he changed Facebook's name to
Meta would require, as I mentioned last episode, all of
this extrasensory tech that is nowhere near existing. But let's
get a little bit into the present for a second
and talk about generative AI, which has use cases and
can do some cool things, but the desperation to make
(05:25):
it the next big hypergrowth market has turned it into
more of a marketing campaign, and a marketing campaign made
up of these gratuitous, insane promises about artificial general intelligence
or about how AI could run our lives, all kind
of to hide the fact that most of these models
are trained on a noxious form of public larceny, stealing
(05:48):
from thousands or millions of creators to train models to
do nothing. Training these models, by the way, will not
give us agi it's not going to give us cognition
in AI. They are lying about that. I really want
to be clear, but also want to be clear that, uh, well,
generative AI is probably not going to do much more
(06:09):
than it's doing today. I'm making that call right now.
What's happened in the last year. Nothing but these problems
are created by the fact that they might be good ideas,
but they're not trillion dollar ideas, but they're being given
the funding and the marketing efforts to make them that way,
even though they're so premature. It's ridiculous and it's just
(06:30):
a it's a rotten kind of mindset. It is the
rot economy, and it is the rot com bubble. This
is the bubble being inflated, pushing concepts to the limelight
before they're ready, pushing things through to show that companies
can keep growing, that the tech industry can keep growing.
And you can see miniature versions of this problem running
through all of your favorite tech products right now. Google's
(06:51):
forcing AI and to search, Facebook's constantly changing its algorithms
and adding AI. Amazon's letting in basically anyone to sell
anything on Amazon at any time, even if it's clogging
the Kindle store with AI generated crap. They're all doing
it because they're desperate to show that they're innovative and
adding new things and able to express perpetual growth, even
(07:11):
if doing so makes things worse. Even Apple, who I
generally like the products of, is doing it too. iOS
is a complete mess. Go into your settings, there's one
hundred different things at the top. It will sometimes transsell
you Apple News. Plus sometimes you get a notification about
a baseball game that's a nail biter. I had one
yesterday for the Angels Marlins, and if you're not a
(07:32):
baseball fan, that's not that exciting a game. It's like
watching two turds fight in a toilet. Sorry, if I've
got any Marlins or Angels fans. Back to the tech stuff, though,
I must be clear that there is a mindset behind this,
and it is the rot economy and the rot economy's
growth at all cost mindset. It drives these companies away
from innovation. It flies in the face of what it
(07:55):
takes to innovate, which means losing money on ideas that
actually help people. And it's all happening because these markets
they reward public companies and the startups that they try
and acquire for making a number go up rather than
any kind of consistent, profitable, sustainable, or useful business. And
it frustrates me and fills me full of angry bio
(08:16):
because they're all capable of making cool stuff. Amazon made aws,
Amazon web Services, the foundational thing of all cloud computing.
Facebook at one point was a very useful product that
connected people that you loved and you liked and that
you just met, except they had to make the number
go up. And I think, by the way, Zuckerberg is
(08:36):
separate to a lot of these companies because he was
always kind of evil listen to the Facebook episodes and
not lying. But really, though all these companies had noble times,
they had times when they were still doing value extraction,
where they were still doing some form of conning, where
they were still doing monopoly plays, but they were at
least providing something useful. Now they're making things worse because
(08:57):
they have no more useful ideas or at least you
ustful and profitable ones. What makes the last few years
worth of bullshit stupid tech movements different from the previous
innovations is that when an industry is ready for hypergrowth,
(09:19):
there's a product that actually exists that will truly change
people's lives. The promises made by tech executives were at
one point based on things that one can reasonably believe
would happen, rather than this kind of weird, erotic fan
fiction to send a stock number up. Using the first iPhone,
you could kind of see that you might make video
calls on it, or take video, or use distinct third
(09:40):
party apps like you were already doing on a Mac.
And while Steve Jobs and yes he was an awful person,
I know, did talk about what's coming next, he did
so by saying that the iPhone on the initial announcement
would add three G and amazing things in the future.
And he did so just before and this was in
the original iPhone speech, showing the actual real features of
the first iPhone, things that people actually wanted, like having
(10:03):
your music on your phone, being able to see what
voicemails you had versus just calling a number and then
hitting buttons to skip to the ones you need to
see or hear in this case. And these promises, they
were believable, either because they felt like a logical next
step or because they described features that could be found
in other competing products. Apple's always been a company of
(10:25):
iteration rather than forceful, explosive innovation. It doesn't really create
new categories, but it does refine them. And this trait
was even referenced in the classic Douglas Copeland novel Microserfs,
first published in nineteen ninety five, before Tim Cook took over,
or even the return of Steve Jobs. It didn't make
the first smart watch, or the first table, or the
first arm based PC, but Apple did make them good
(10:48):
and made them practical and useful and sellable. You saw
these new products and you said, oh, I could do that,
I could take photos with that. Oh I don't need
an iPod and phone. I have a phone that does
two things. I'm not even trying to romanticize the iPhone.
I'm just describing what basic utility sounds like in a product,
(11:09):
something that has been lost in the tech industry. Just
look at Samultman, Sondhar Pashai, and Sachin Adella of Open Ai,
Google and Microsoft. They seem intent on discussing what AI
will do, that it will have a monumental impact, that
it will be a smart person in those everything about
your life, and yet when they're actually asked about what
it does today, they just seem to go kind of quiet.
(11:33):
They start her, they're speechless. And when sach a and
Adella was actually asked about how he uses AI in
his day to day work, he said the Microsoft Copilot
helps him compose emails better. Congratulations, Microsoft, you invented grammarly,
a product that's existed for fifteen years. Jesus Christ Anyway.
As an aside, sach In Adella of Microsoft said in
(11:56):
twenty twenty one that Microsoft was with the metaverse creating
an I quote here, a new platform and a new
application type that was similar to how it talked about
the web and the websites in the early nineties, and
that he could not overstate how much a breakthrough the
metaverse was. He would then dump it entirely two years later.
(12:17):
Two years before that, so in twenty nineteen, Nadella called
HoloLens two, microsoft's augmented reality glasses, an absolute breakthrough, a
few months after its demo failed live on stage at
Microsoft's Bill twenty nineteen conference. And while Microsoft hasn't killed HoloLens,
it's clear the company's appetite for mixed and virtual reality
(12:38):
has kind of dampened with HoloLens work as partially impacted
over the last year's sweeping layoffs at Microsoft and Microsoft
discontinuing its VR social network, All Space VR and Windows
Mixed Reality. Where's the breakthrough, Satcha, Satcha, you told me
this shit was a breakthrough in twenty nineteen. Hey, the
metaus was a breakthrough? Is everything a breakthrough? Satcha? Anyway,
(13:01):
every single one of these questionable, weird, stupid products and
the stupider decisions behind them, it's all an act of desperation,
an attempt to keep the rot economy going, and the
growth that all costs fire from going out, stripping crap
off of the walls and throwing it in, selling shit
so you can get more oil to throw on the fire.
You can tell I have done a lot of fires. But seriously,
(13:23):
this is all desperation to keep a party going that
ended quite some time ago. There's a finite amount of
people in the world right now, less of them getting online.
And while more people are being born, they're going to
be born into a very different tech industry than the
one we see today. And there's an even more finite
amount of those people that will go online at any
given time, and in turn, even fewer of them that
(13:44):
might actually want to use a particular service, especially one
that isn't obvious in why you should bloody use it. Previously,
these companies were able to anticipate and meet customers' needs
on both the consumer and enterprise level, in part because
they actually understood their customers and knew that making their
customers happy actually made them successful. I believe that behind
(14:06):
the scenes, many of these companies have been struggling for
years to find the next big thing, knowing that while
there might be needs to be made, you know, those horrible,
nasty customers that always want problems solved. Ugh, those needs
might not be things that will create double digit revenue
growth or convince Wall Street that a stock will grow forever.
Though I can't say for certain. I'd also say the
(14:27):
ascent of management consultancy types in tech, people like Sheryl Samberg,
Adam Useerri Sandar Pishai, and Sam Altman, who was adopted
by the management consultant types. It's a testament to how
obvious that they're desperate for the next big thing is,
and how big their failure is to actually adapt to
customer needs, or how incapable they are of building useful
(14:48):
things management consultancy people and Sundar and share all by
the way, they both came from McKinsey, one of the
worst companies around. They're not built to innovate, they're built
to grow. Oh, they're built to create business cancer. Now
you might say that's horrible. But at the same time,
do you think Facebook's useful? Do you think Google Search
(15:10):
has got better? Or do you think that management consultancy
people have seen it and gone number must go up,
number must go up forever because if number go up,
money go up, money go up. Good. I know I'm
being somewhat facetious, but really, look at the tech industry
right now. Look at it and tell me that this
is an industry going well, that this is an industry
(15:31):
building the future. No, right now, the tech industry feels
like a management consultancy people trying to do PowerPoint presentations
to customers to say this is going to change your
life without actually showing them how it will in the product,
and in the case of Microsoft lying in their Super
Bowl commercial, or in the case of Samulman and Open
Eye lying all the time. I mean tons of liars
(15:55):
at the top of most of capitalism. But really, the
tech industry is just full of them. But I think
generative AI is quite special. And what makes it so
special is it kind of has the hint of utility,
the scent of a product, and as a result, it
can be sold to the markets. Is the next big boom,
the next big thing that justifies hundreds of billions of
dollars of investment and increased market caps, even if it
(16:19):
doesn't really do something. Every single company chasing the generative
AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services, which,
as I mentioned, is the ubiquitous cloud product that went
from a side project of Amazon Store to actually something
that makes more than it and today it underpins most
of the Internet. And you want to know why AWS
(16:39):
does that, It's because it's useful. It's because it actually
does something. It's actually a thing that has utility. You
don't need to explain why someone needs a website on
the Internet, or why they need services to do the
compute to run an application that runs in the cloud.
That's pretty bloody obvious. And that's the problem with GENERATIFAI,
and that's the problem with a lot of things you
(17:00):
see in the tech industry. Nobody really seems to be
able to explain why or how generative AI is the
next big thing, just that it is Chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude,
all of these large language models. They can do some
things that are superficially cool. They can generate images, they
can quickly query databases, albeit with no guarantee they won't
(17:21):
hallucinate and make up something that isn't true and tell
you it is. And they can craft poetry. But there's
no real endearing reason to pick one of them up
every day and use them. These use cases that they enable.
They're not really exciting or ubiquitous or world changing. They're
not anything like what the tech executives are actually selling us.
And the problem might not be that they're useless, but
(17:43):
that as a piece of technology, generative AI just isn't
a hypergrowth market or much of an industry changer, no
matter how much money you shove into it. Sam Lman
is not asking Microsoft for a one hundred billion dollars
supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better. He's
doing it because what we have today is not a
world changing product. It's not the boondoggle that the tech
(18:07):
industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of
fulfilling these promises is basically a tech industry equivalent of
the Marshall Plan. Yet without generative AI, what do these
companies have left? What is the next big thing? For
the best part of fifteen years, we've assumed that the
tech industry would always have something up their sleeves. But
(18:27):
what's becoming apparent is that they might have actually run
out of ideas. They don't have any big, sexy things
to sell us. And the disruption that has become associated
with tech was predicated on there being new markets for
them to disrupt and ideas in their hands that they
could actually use to do so. And a paper from
(18:47):
last year from Nature that kind of worried me too
positive that the pace of disruptive research is actually slowing,
And I believe the same thing is actually happening in tech,
except we're conflating innovation and finding new markets to add
software and hard where to and we've been doing so
for twenty years, and the net result of this is
a kind of innovation stagnation and the rock economy and
(19:09):
the rock com bubble. A tech industry laser focused on
finding markets to disrupt rather than actually disrupting anything. Rather
than actually meeting anyone's needs. Where the biggest venture capital
investments go into companies that can sell for massive multiples
rather than sustainable, stable businesses or things that might truly
change the world. Venture capital is not investing in moonshots.
(19:32):
They're not putting money into the future. They're putting money
into the goddamn present. And there are exceptions. I like
a lot of seed stage investors because they're actually taking
risks on real companies that are doing new things. However,
the largest VC firms need to get their heads out
their asses and actually invest in the future. But really,
(19:52):
what's so stupid about this is of all these big
tech companies, before they really mess with their products, they
were good, sustainable, insane, li profitable businesses. There's no reason
that Google or Meta or Amazon couldn't build businesses that
have flat, sustainable growth and really respectable, reliable profitability. They
just choose not to impart because the markets will punish it,
(20:13):
and partly because their DNA has been poisoned by the
rot economy and the demands of the rot economy are
very simple, more always more. I also think that the
tech industry, both the venture capitalists funding it and those
running big tech firms. They've been dominated by people who
don't build things. The people running VC firms, the people
(20:35):
running Google, Facebook, and all these Wow. Mark Zuckerberg, I
guess was a code but he's not doing it anymore.
They're not actually building products, and they're not coder's even
Sam Morton's not an engineer. The future isn't being built
by the people saying what the future is. The future
is being built by people under the thumb of management
(20:57):
consultant brains. And I know, oh, I know, I'm being
a little facetious again, but really, these people aren't speaking
to people with real products. They're not looking at the
human condition and saying, let's make this better for money. Now,
they're saying, how do we drain more blood from the
consumer until they give up on our website? Well, guess what, asshole?
They are giving up on it. But this problem, it's
(21:20):
poisoning the startup industry as well, leaving big tech for
a second. So, the Rabbit R one and the Humane Pin,
I'm not sure if you've seen them. The rabbit r
one is this two hundred dollar orange brick with a
screen that claimed when you got it that you could
talk to it and it'd run these apps and it
cost two hundred dollars, by the way, and the Human
Pin is this AI powered pin that costs seven hundred
(21:41):
dollars and it has a little infrared screen that goes
in your hand except when you use it too much
of heats anyway, Now that like giving you back. Kind
of the backstory there. Both of these companies they raised
incredible sums of capital based on these vague ideas. You know,
that people felt overwhelmed by their smartphones, or that they
don't not connected with the real world, things that sound
(22:02):
nice to investors who don't experience speaking to people. And
they raised all this money hunt over two hundred billion
dollars between my believe, to build products that range from
extremely bad to potentially fraudulent, and they failed to build
products that anybody actually needed. What they did build were
very expensive things that answered questions nobody had and solve
(22:24):
problems that nobody had very poorly. And I'm not sure
if it was ignorance, ambivalence, or just pure evil, but anyway,
if I'm honest, these startups, they're only a symptom of
the rock on bubble. The investors are disconnected from the
process of building things, and they're funding ideas that they
don't understand in the hopes that the people building them
aren't full of shit, and they're not even doing the
(22:46):
necessary due diligence because clearly the people funding these companies
don't know enough about tech to actually see whether these
things are possible. Remember Saguoya, one of the largest venture
capital firms, put a lot of money into FTX. Again,
the crypto currency thing that was a big scam. There
are ways of looking beyond the spreadsheet or the power point.
You know, you can ask more questions and if they
(23:07):
don't give you a give you an answer, that's good.
I just feel a little crazy when I think about
tech from the last few years. There's just been so
much wasted money. There are people out there who were
just raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing.
And I'm going to say something a little bit controversial,
but who can blame them. I think they're scum. I
think they're con artists. I think they should give back
(23:29):
the money to their customers, and they should give back
the money to investors. But really, what do you expect
when the industry is engineered to capture what the next
big thing is when it isn't defined by utility or necessity,
but rather how big a market it can grow into.
Why wouldn't you try and capture that demand. Why would
you make a real company when venu money is going
into fake companies again and again for years and years
(23:50):
and years and years. Why do you think people don't
want to make startups. People are making startups, by the way,
it's still happening. But why would they be incentivized to
try something new when they know that venture capitalists are
funding stupid, bloody ideas that sound good on paper. It's
so frustrating, and it frustrates me working with startups every
(24:11):
day here in real ideas which actually exist, and they'll
raise modest rounds, they won't raise one hundred million dollars
because the people giving away one hundred million dollars are
giving it to people who have the next big thing
idea and then burning the money anyway. It's just it's
so insane, Like look at the rabbit r one. So
the rabbit are one is it's a little orange box.
(24:31):
When you ask it to order uber it breaks most
of the time. It does not work. It claims it
as a large action model that controls your apps on
a server. It doesn't really work. The whole thing feels
like a sham. There's a Coffee Ziller video I really
encourage you to watch. But the big thing is is
that what Jesselu, the CEO of Rabbit, has done is
he's over promised what this device could do. He said
it can control your apps with your voice, and it
(24:54):
can only kind of do that, and he's raised a
bunch of money as a result of these I don't
know if you call them live half truths, scams, I
don't know. That's up to you to choose. But nevertheless,
what Jesse Lou has done is as well as previously
run an NFT company, which is the same entity that
made the Rabbit. Jesse Lou has stated that AI can
do more than it can, that his device is actually
(25:17):
capable of doing things that might one day be possible
but really might not be based on the existing technology.
If we're honest, what's the difference between Rabbit CEO Jesse
Lou and open Ai CEO sam Orltman. They both went
through y Combinator, which is a tech incubator in the Bay,
and both of them have sold products that don't do
(25:37):
what they say based on what it might do in
the future. I can't work out the difference other than
the amount of money they've raised. Both of them lied,
both of them haven't delivered the products they say. I
think the only difference, as far as I can see,
is that Sam Ortman was better at playing the game.
I'm no, no, really though, Really sit with me for
a second. Jesse Lou absolutely misled his customers about the capabilities,
(26:00):
what the R one could do, and the company's previous operations.
But Sam Altman as shamelessly over hyped generative AI almost
every day for years. Senior members of Sam Moltman's first
startup Looped tried to get him fired twice for what
they described as a deceptive and chaotic behavior pattern. He
was fired from y Combinator for an absenteeism that rankled
(26:21):
his peers and some of the startups he was supposed
to nurture, and former Open Ai board member Helen Toner
told the ted Ai Show that Altman was so deceitful
that the board found out about the launch of chat GPT,
which by the way, is the definitional generative AI product,
when they saw it was posted on Twitter. Toner also
(26:42):
admitted that Sam Moortmon was caught outright lying on multiple occasions,
and the two executives provided evidence of psychological abuse and
lying and manipulative behavior on multiple occasions. If anything, Sam
Altman's much worse than jesselew All while lacking much of
a technical background at all. He is the archetypal rockcom CEO,
(27:02):
an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be a technologist and abusing
anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth. Sam
Moltman is the opposite of what the tech industry needs.
He is not building real things. He is selling you
a dream that doesn't exist. And when this bubble bursts,
people like him will escape. They'll be fine because he's
already rich. Nothing I'm saying is meant to suggest that
(27:36):
they can't be successful tech companies. Although there won't be
any more innovation, I just think there's going to be
less of it, and on a much smaller scale, and
I don't think we should fear it. The tech industry
can no longer rely on the idea that every year
or every couple of years, somebody will find an idea
that will create two thousand more startups or trillions of
dollars in market cap. Tech must reconfigure both venture capital
(28:00):
investment and public tech companies to a sustainable, profitable, and
useful model where get this, existing products are made better
and more profitable with the understanding that we're approaching the
maximum amount of people who are going to be online,
and that these products cannot be built with the assumption
that more and more users will always exist. I'm sure
(28:20):
some of you might say I'm wrong and that text
hypergrowth era isn't over, and that GENERATIVEAI it's going to
usher in this glorious new future of powerful assistance. But seriously,
what does that look like? What happens next? Where does
GENERATIVEAI go from here? Do they fix the problems? How
do they make it cheaper or more efficient? How do
they eliminate hallucinations? When Google themselves can't, when Facebook can't,
(28:45):
When none of these big companies can fix the biggest
problem that all of them know about. How will open
AI train GPT five their next model. They need four
to five times the amount of data that they have
right now, which already require them to do masses of
plagiarism to make GPT five happen. How are they going
to do that? Hey, another question, just why have you
(29:09):
has Google, Meta or Microsoft? If any of these companies
found a way to make generative AI profitable? Yeah, when
will they do so? How long do they have? How
long until the market sours? Salesforce just had their first
revenue miss since two thousand and six, partially based on
the fact that Mark Bennioff, the bullshitter in chief who
constantly talks about AI and has done so for years,
(29:32):
it turns out he didn't make any money from it,
and people are kind of upset and seriously though, putting
all that aside, when does generative AI prove itself useful?
Where's the big moment? Where's the iPhone moment? Is it
this autocorrect thing? Is it this thing that can write
poetry or generate pictures of the Joker as president? Where
(29:53):
is this big moment? I'm afraid the answer is kind
of simple. It isn't coming. Generative AI is not going
to change the world. And while AI itself kind of
already has and it definitely will do so more in
the future, it isn't going to with generative AI, and
it isn't going to do so in the hands of
Sam Altman in Open AI. I don't even think Anthropic
is going to do it either. When the bubble bursts
(30:16):
these firms, they're probably going to be absorbed into the
massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into
them already in exactly the same way that Microsoft just
absorbed Inflection, And they'll do this to quietly hide the
shameful failure. And they'll be able to, by the way,
repurpose all of the cloud compute investments they've made. There
are other places for that compute to go. They have,
(30:37):
they make billions off of cloud. They'll work it out.
But in the end, if all of this falls apart,
if the rock com bubble bursts, if the hypergrowth period
is over, I actually think it's better for the tech
industry to have a better world, one with more interesting
things and where society doesn't constantly feel at odds with
the tech industry. Tech companies need to share this growth addiction.
(31:00):
They need to get off the horse, and I believe
that we forced to do so. Whether they like it
or not. There's still going to be many, many, many
hundred million or even billion dollar companies. There's just not
going to be that many hundred billion or trillion dollar ones.
I realize I come off as negative as at times
I know I do. And as I've said multiple times
(31:23):
and I'll say again, I'm a broken hearted romantic. I
want a better tech industry. I love the companies I
work with. I love the companies I've worked with. I
love the tech I use. I think that tonal that
it's a workout machine, one of the best pieces of tech. Ever,
It's changed my life, as iPhones have, as computers have,
as many things have. I want there to be these exciting, interesting,
(31:43):
actually innovative and useful products that change my life and
your life and other people's lives are the better. Any
anger or frustration you hear in my voice is directed
toward the people that have diverted the massive sources of
innovation that come from having masses of money and talent
away from building useful things towards finding new vessels for hypergrowth.
(32:06):
And the same goes for the venture capitalists that seem
incapable of backing actually new or interesting things. They just
double down on new trends that everybody else is following,
rather than putting money into young, hungry founders that are
trying to build real things. A better tech industry is
one that puts more money into earlier stage companies doing
new things in better ways or completely new ways, rather
(32:26):
than all following the same trends and doubling or tripling
down on the same guys doing the same things. It's
also goddamn boring and useless and wasteful. I love tech.
I find tech amazingly useful. I'm using it right now.
I would be a liar if I said I didn't
love the tech industry and I didn't love the tech
that I use. And I feel like many of you
might feel the same way. Maybe you don't, not putting
(32:48):
words in your mouth, but the problem is that it's
getting less useful, it's getting less magical. It isn't magical anymore. Generally,
if AI isn't magical, we're being told it is, and
it isn't. I wish that I was doing all these
crazy things. I wish it didn't have to steal from everyone,
and I wish that, quite frankly, any of the people
building these big AI companies seem to want to build
(33:08):
cool or interesting things, and I just feel that if
they actually built useful things, things could change things would
be better, and tech can be both an incredibly profitable
industry and a vessel for building better, more interesting things
and a better, more interesting future. What's holding it back
are people with management consultancy brain and all they can
(33:29):
do is find and dominate new markets at all costs,
and they fly in the face of innovation and invention
and creativity when they do so. People like Mark Zuckerberg,
Sam Moltman, Sundar Pishai and Satchina Dalla and Mark Andrews
and too are not interested in any future other than
the one that they own, and have turned their companies
and the companies they invest in into management consultancy firms
(33:50):
that happen to sell technology. The solution is a more
decentralized and I do not mean crypto tech industry. A
decentralized tech industry, one where VC dollars flow into smaller,
earlier stage companies, where the source of what's next isn't
three or four large companies, but a thousand little ones
that have actually taken a risk to build something. New
tech companies will be funded that don't succeed. It's happening already,
(34:13):
It's been happening forever, but those failures should at least
be trying to build something new and interesting. It doesn't
have to be world changing. It can change the lives
of people that run servers. It can be something that
changes the lives of people trying to get fit. There
are many industries that can be fixed or improved or grown.
(34:35):
But they might not be worth one hundred billion dollars.
That still makes them valuable. It still makes them worthwhile,
just not to the arseholes in charge. Silicon Valley can
be better by giving the keys back to the people
who actually build things and actually solving problems that real
human beings face. And I also believe that the tech industry,
and especially Silicon Valley needs to start talking to regular
(34:57):
goddamn people again. Bubble and I know I've mentioned multiples.
The rock com bubble itself is a problem, but also
the bubble of Silicon Valley, of the venture capitalists and
a lot of the big tech companies is one that
is never penetrated by regular people with regular problems. That
needs to change. Talk to some regular bloody people fix
(35:18):
their problems. Focus on fixing the problems of the billions
of people before you assume that those billions of people
will become your goddamn users. The tech industry needs to
realign around sustainability, profitability, and building useful things for real people.
And until that happens, billions of dollars will be plowed
into building hardware and software to inflate the rock com bubble,
(35:41):
to keep the rock economy going, and the hopes that
the growth of all cost party will never end. And
I really do not think that anyone in tech is
ready for it to end. I think when this bubble pops,
it's going to take out maybe slowly, maybe it's a
slow bleed one of the big tech firms. What's happening
with Google today with AIS search is a travesty. It
(36:02):
is a goddamn disgrace. Sondhar Pashai and Liz Read should
be ashamed of themselves. They should tender their resignations. To
turn Google Search into an AI powered slot machine that
may or may not give you useful information. That is disgusting.
It's a societal loss. What's been done to Facebook is
a disgrace. As I said in the two Facebook episodes,
(36:24):
Facebook is barely functional. It's spreading pornography and misinformation. It's
hurting people, it's helping people get scammed. It's not connecting anyone.
These are tangibly worse products. Amazon's so full of nonsense
the reviews. Almost every review seems fake. And now it's
got generative AI summaries that don't make any sense. Every
product's getting worse. And what I want to say, And
(36:45):
it's kind of big headed to assume that Sandhar Pashai
or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg would ever hear this.
But if they do, your party will end one day.
And when it does, you won't have any talent or
innovation to lay back on you. I've demonized your customers
and treated them with contempt. Also that you can please
faceless people in Wall Street. When the rot com bubble bursts,
(37:09):
you will be humiliated. You will still be so rich,
but your legacy will be one of failure. All that
money that you extracted, all that value you took, will
be just for you. You will have ruined products that
were formative for people's lives. You will be known for that,
(37:30):
not for innovation, not for being a genius, not for
being remarkable, but for being remarkable in the amount of
damage you did to the tech industry. Sheryl Samberg, Mark Zuckerberg,
Sam Altman, You're all the same management consultancy brain, unable
to create real value for real people, and it's perhaps
(37:53):
because you don't talk to them. I realize I've kind
of diverted from the podcast. I'm yelling at people who
may never hear. But this frustration in my voice has
nothing to do with engineered rage. This is nothing to
do with the podcast or even getting more downloads or
anything like that. This is because tech change my life.
(38:15):
It changed so many people's lives. It's the reason that
I'm able to keep talking to my family in England,
that I not having many friends in Las Vegas, can
have rich, meaningful friendships throughout the world. The reason that
I'm able to is because people were able to find
a balance between profit and actual innovation and actually creating things.
(38:37):
But the people in charge in tech have lost their way.
They have lost their way from creating meaningful things, from
making meaningful decisions that help people. Now, all they want
to do is make changes that make their companies look
like they can grow forever. And when that bubble pomps,
I hope they're humiliated, and I hope they're kicked out,
(38:57):
but they probably won't be Mark Zuckerberg can't even be fired.
This is the injustice of tech right now. This is
the disgraceful state of the rock com boom. My anger
inside me is that things can be better, that tech
can do great things. But the people with the money,
(39:18):
the people directing the money and the compute, the people
making the hires, the people that have hired the greatest
minds in tech who should get paid well by directing
them toward making stuff for Wall Street. And until that changes,
I'm still going to feel like this. I'm not here
to tell you how to feel. I'm just telling you
(39:38):
how I feel, and I promise you every episode of
this show is about trying to give you transparency into
the system and the things it creates, to try and
answer why so much of the stuff we see today
doesn't seem to be for us, and doesn't even seem
to be for a use case. It's frustrating, nauseating. I
(40:01):
don't like it being like this. I wish I had
more good news. I wish there was something cool I
could talk about from one of these companies. Sit Gmail
changed my life. Gmail was fantastic. These companies are fully
capable of making great things and even a deadbeat piece
of shit. Steve Jobs is still beloved by history because
he actually ushered in good things, even though it was
(40:24):
mostly him getting other people to do it. But no
tech doesn't seem to care at least big tech. I
want to see change. I want to see things being better.
I just I want tech to be fun and exciting
and interesting and innovative. Again, I think you do too.
Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening to
(40:52):
Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline
theme song is Metasowski. You can check out more of
his music and audio projects Selski dot com, M A
T T O s O W s Ki dot com.
You can email me at easy at Better offline dot
com or visit Better offline dot com to find more
podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
(41:14):
recommend you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot at
to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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