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Hello and welcome to your first better offline monologue of 2026. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

We're back from CES and we've already had a great conversation with the wonderful Steve Burke of Gamer's Nexus.

And this felt like a good time to take stock and talk about what I see happening in the year ahead.

Also, legitimately thank you for all for listening at CES.

It was one of the best weeks of my life and we made some amazing stuff and you've all sent wonderful emails and such. Love hearing from you. But let's talk about this year. I have a strong gut instinct that this is the year of reckoning for the AI bubble. Nothing I'm seeing in the news, the markets or hearing from people I talk to behind the scenes suggests that things are improving at all. In fact, it kind of feels like when your dog takes a shit somewhere in your apartment, but you can't quite find it. There's that little stink, but it's not strong enough to give you an idea of where it is, but you know, one day, without fail, you're going to find a nasty brown delight under your foot. Colorful similes aside, though, generative AI is not becoming cheaper, more effective or more efficient.

Invidia's new Vera Rubin GPUs are likely to be more expensive than ever, in part thanks to the ever-increasing price of RAM,

and in part because of its single vendor monopoly, which allows them to set prices, well, to stun.

And the other thing with them as well is they're going to allow people to use the same

racks from Blackwell, so the things you put the GPUs into, but only for the beginning of

Vera Rubin. Then they're going to move to these giant, I think they're called Kaiba racks. The current

ones are called Oberon. Someone will email and correct me, but it's one of those two. The new one

is going to require an entirely new cooling system,

architecture. It's all very good. But on the subject of things that are also very good,

I believe we're also on the verge of the multiple con jobs of the AI bubble collapsing too.

In July of last year, former Open AI CTO Miramirati, who barely appeared to be able to get

out a fucking sentence

in every interview I've seen, founded thinking machines, raising $2 billion at a $12 billion

valuation, all while refusing to tell investors what product they'd make or what the business

plan was or how they'd make money or anything like that. Naturally, investors were like,

take my money, please, I need to give this to you, Mirror. I am an idiot, I'm a moron, I'm a goofball, I just love wasting money. Now, when this happened, they were able to poach open AI's VP of Research for Post-training, Barrett Zoff, among two other staffers, I just really can't engineer the excitement to name. And then a few days ago, as reported by friend of the show,

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