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Guaranteed Human.

Quarzone Media.

Hello, I'm Ed Zittron, and this is Better Offline.

Better Offline

We finally reached the end of our three-part How to Argue with an AI booster series.

Big strong men are standing outside of the Better Offline studio suspended 200 feet above the Las Vegas strip with tears in their eyes and they're saying, sir, sir,

it's the most beautiful podcast I've ever heard. Please stop recording it. Everyone else will feel

insufficient when they hear it. No, no, I have to continue. I'm afraid my listeners need me.

But okay, seriously, folks, if there's anything I want you to take home so far is that the

arguments that these people,

these AI sycophants make, they crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny. And yet these arguments

work because they either exploit the lack of knowledge of those of us who don't understand

the rotten economics of AI, or because they force the opposite party to surrender their reason

and to exit the planes of reality.

To which I say, fuck that. Absolutely not. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on, and I'll hope that you'll all be standing with me side by side. Now, in the first episode, we shook away the claims that it's the early days for AI, and we just need to give it more time. Then I took the idea that generative AI is like Uber or Fiber Optic Networking, two industries that both burned a lot of money at the start, but are otherwise nothing like Generative AI. And now it's time to deal with the dregs of the arguments. These are the worst of the worst booster quips. Here we go. Ultra boost equip. I thought about recording that with a bunch of reverb, but it didn't really work out for me. But I wanted to do it once. But anyway, their argument is, at home, AI is just like Amazon Web Services, a massive investment that took a while to go profitable, and everybody hated Amazon for it. Now, I actually covered this in-depth in the haters' guide to the AI bubble, but the long and short of it is that Amazon Web Services is a platform, a necessity with an obvious choice, and has burned

about 10% of what Amazon, and all of them have burned chasing generative AI, and had also

proven demand before building it. Also, Amazon Web Services was break-even within three years,

and open AI was founded in fucking 2015, and even if you start from November 2020, by

Amazon Web Services standards should be break-even by now.

But now I'll quote myself, Amazon, no wait, sorry, that's for boosters, Amazon Web Services

was created out of necessity.

...