This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Quarzone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Online. As ever, please check the episode notes for links to the things that I'm talking about.

Now, frequent listeners know that I'm immensely skeptical of generative AI, both as a technology, but also as a business.

It's expensive, it's unreliable, it doesn't actually do that much.

And the real-world use cases range from kind of helpful to unhelpful

to not really useful in any way, shape or form,

and definitely not useful enough to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.

And I know somebody is going to email and say,

but head, my mate's granny's uncle's dog uses chat GPT to brainstorm, or something else equally flimsy,

and I really need you to put all of this in context. Open AI loses $5 billion a year, and basically

every big tech company is blown past their emissions targets, with few signs that they'll ever bother to try and meet them again, all in pursuit of the piddliest or most convoluted use cases in history.

It's a goddamn farce.

And that's why Generative AI is such a regular topic on this show.

I feel like the tech industry is experiencing a kind of collective madness, a delusion that

seeing companies like Microsoft and Google, both their companies and our planet on a technology

that continually fails to deliver on, well, anything.

I want to say here, and I actually wrote down this supposedly massive potential, but what

was the potential ever?

...