This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Now, before we go any further off-line, Better Online.

Now, before we go any further, I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help.

I'm up for this year's Webby's for the Best Business Podcast Award.

I know it's a pain in the ars to register, but can you sign up and vote for Better Offline?

Never won an award in my life, and I have enough listeners that I think we can tip the scales.

But on with the show.

The following two-part episode is the culmination of months of research, presenting a case I'd be making in part since July of last year.

Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley, a company that unrepentantly and needlessly burns billions of dollars with no end in sight, helmed by a cretinous, disingenuous billionaire who continually lies about what it is that it will do because he, like I've been saying since last year, knows that generative AI can't do much more than it does today. What I'm going to lay out for you is my case, the Open AI can't survive, that it's

borderline impossible under any of the current terms for this company to continue, and that

its demise will bring about the death of or significant harm of several other firms.

A cottage industry of despicable billion-dollar burn rate capitalistic monstrosities has sprung up around this stupid fucking company in the hopes of further inflating a bubble set to burst at any moment.

My disgust for the parties involved is unrelenting, as is my disgust for a media industry that failed to even attempt to tackle the subject matter I'm going to detail.

I believe at the end of these episodes, you'll see my point,

and at the very least agree that OpenAI's current situation is totally untenable.

If I'm right, Open AI will go down in history as an abdication of due diligence, fiscal responsibility and frankly common sense, both in the venture capitalists and entities that propped

it up, and a tech media that was more concerned with taking detailed notes on my comings and goings than knowing their ass from their earhole. Those who have

failed to hold men like Sam Altman and Darrahama Day accountable have tacitly approved a financial

and environmentally destructive movement that will lead to the very little actually happening

...