Ed Zitron’s “Burst Damage” is a monster of an essay about the current state of generative AI investments that clocks in at about thirty minutes’ reading time. It’s not about what generative AI as a technology can do (I’m still sure, as I was in my very first essay on this topic over at Medium, that actual practical applications of generative AI will change how we live, in good ways and in bad ways). It’s also not about the AGI and Super AGI hogwash we’ve been relentlessly pelted with (about which I wrote a lot too). Instead, it’s about the preposterous amounts of money that have been burned, and will have to be burned still, for something that will never have a tolerable return of investment for anyone in the future.
For all the gritty details, you have to read it in full. But there are a few parts I’d like to quote that are related to how all this relates to “innovation.”
First, it’s never been about innovation, only about growth:
There is no magic, no whimsy, no joy in any of these Large Language Models and their associated outgrowths. They’re not helping anybody, yet their peddlers demand our fealty and our applause. […]
Generative AI was not peddled as a solution to any problem other than tech’s lack of new hypergrowth markets, and it’s the kind of bet that only a tech industry devoid of natural selection truly builds. These companies don’t take risks, because they don’t want to end up looking stupid. And regular people know—they know Google is worse, they know Facebook is bordering on unusable, they know that generative AI doesn’t do anything obviously useful, and that these companies have never made more money than they’re making today. […]
We’re all sitting and staring at innovation’s corpse, stabbed full of holes by McKinsey veterans and slimy con artists—and it’s time for men like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to atone, because their big bet looks like a gigantic waste, one so obviously rotten from the beginning that they have never been able to tell anyone that they never had a plan beyond “throw money at it, and eventually it will do something,” or “we will do this as long as the other guy does it.” This is a big, ugly mess, a monument to excess that burned more than $200 billion dollars and allowed equally lazy and uncreative people to replace real people with shitty facsimiles that are “just good enough.”
Then, not only was it never about innovation, it’s also not innovation:
These men have burned hundreds of billions of dollars on a machine that boils lakes to make the most mediocre version of the past. These men are not supporting innovation—they’re regressive forces too scared to piss off the markets to actually change the world, domesticated animals that fear no natural predators and thus have no hunger for something new. They propped up generative AI because they’re followers rather than leaders that are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to empower a nihilistic kind of growth-capitalism that dresses up monopolies as “disruption.”
They have propped up generative AI because building the future is hard, and expensive, and involves taking risks, and making sure you have a culture that doesn’t expect the answer to a question in the fastest amount of time possible. Innovation isn’t efficient. It’s lossy, has indeterminate time scales, and requires both capital investment and the space required for great people to think of actual solutions to problems that involve them talking to and caring about real people.
Fire Satya Nadella, fire Sundar Pichai, and work out a way to fire Mark Zuckerberg. These men are unworthy. They don’t truly find any of this exciting or meaningful. Big tech has been overcome with nihilism, and it must change its ways to not eventually face perdition.
To that I would like to add, on a more pessimistic note, that none of this will end well. Somewhere in his essay, Zitron mentions “the stench of Jack Welch wafting through every boardroom.” That stench comes from a “nihilistic form of capitalism where growth is all that matters, even if it means making worse products, and treating human beings like inanimate assets.” That’s the utopia these people promise to shareholders, and that’s the hell we, i.e., everybody else, will all find ourselves in—no matter whether they succeed, which is highly unlikely—or fail.