Ed Zitron

Here’s this week’s Better Offline. I’m joined in-studio by @paris.nyc and @ashwinrodrigues.com to talk about the amount of lead in protein shakes, why people turn to the internet for medical advice, and how supplements became the Wild West. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...

I think that any big tech company that walks away from AI will have celebrations like the end of Return of the Jedi. Is anyone having fun? Does anyone *really* like this? It all feels so strained, so distant. Even the people who love AI talk about it like someone has their family captive. It’s sad!

No it doesn’t! Google doesn’t break out its AI revenue and never has. Making this assumption misleads retails investors

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Going to start a collection of people who have said that ai companies are “profitable on inference” I think…

This is something I said would happen over a year ago in the Subprime AI Crisis, they were always gonna do it because they are morons www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

Lora is a lovely and wonderful person who would never say this so I'll say it for her: these claims are utter bullshit and based on nothing, they are marketing, almost every AI job replacement article is bullshit

this all happened to me

Next week I will have my biggest story yet

Ok! Looking forward to seeing how you pay for it dude, especially if I’m hearing right about your nasty little deals with other cloud providers!

I swear to god if Microsoft puts the OpenAI equity on their earnings as a positive event, or put their $250bn spend as RPO to boost the stock, I will become the joker fully, I will simply erupt the makeup from my face

So if they converted - I need to see the documents, but hey, maybe they pulled it off! - this gives OpenAI the chance to raise more money and then immediately burn it. I wonder if Microsoft books that "$250bn in azure spend" as remaining performance obligations or does weird shit with the equity