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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I am your host, Ed Zittron, of course.

Better offline.

So if you're listening to this as the episodes there, you're in the middle of a two-part episode about the systemic risk caused by Open AI, a company that's always been unsustainable and is ultimately rigged for collapse.

But today I wanted to turn to a question I've been asked a few times. What are the ways the media can avoid doing this in the future and what are the things

that they could have done differently? Well, it starts pretty simple. I don't believe the media,

and this partly falls upon the people running media outlets, actually knows enough about the

subject matter, be it the technical side or the financial side of these companies. If you've ever

read an article about tech that just didn't seem to make sense, like say about an

AI company, like an obtuse series of sentences that sounds rational, but when you really think

about it, it doesn't explain what it does. It's because the writer doesn't actually understand

what they're saying, and that's because they're rarely given the time or incentivized in any way

for knowing what it is they're talking about. They're just there to kind of get it out the door, and, well, that and an alarming amount of tech writers are edited by editors that don't know a fucking thing. When ChatGPT launched, the press absolutely lost their shit, despite nobody being able to describe what it actually did and why it was the future, other than it could create an image or a block of text

based on a prompt. And this was about the level of nuance that we'd see applied to OpenAI

for pretty much the rest of history. Egregious extrapolations were made in part because the media

was far too willing to just copy paste or quote whatever Sam Altman said. When interviewed on stage

at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event in October

2023, a reporter allowed Sam Altman to say that Chat GPT and I quote, has this larval reasoning

capacity that's going to get better and better. And this was a great moment to say, I'm sorry, Sam,

...