Ed Zitron pulling no punches:
It’s been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we’ve seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century—a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it.
Zitron’s been writing about this con game for a long time, particularly its elusive business models and its numbers that are not adding up. The crucial point is that no matter how much generative AI/LLM might be able to change our lives in fundamental ways, there is no product, not even on the horizon. All we get from the major players, while they happily burn through hundreds of billions of dollars, are future promises as absurd as intelligence-insulting on the one hand, and one-day wonders as over-hyped as counterproductive on the other:
Sam Altman believes you are stupid. He believes you are a moron that will slurp up whatever slop he gives you. Deep Research and Operator are both half-products that barely brush against the fabric of their intended purposes, and yet the media screams and applauds him like he’s a gifted child that just successfully tied his shoes.
Among the real major problems of so-called AI is that it will tank the economy with a probability and severity that both grow with every humongous stack of cash set on fire:
Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it’s fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we’re all fucking morons.
This entire bubble has been inflated by hype, and by outright lies by people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their lies perpetuated by a tech media that’s incapable of writing down what’s happening in front of their faces. Altman and Amodei are raising billions and burning our planet based on the idea that their mediocre cloud software products will somehow wake up and automate our entire lives.
The truth is that generative AI is as mediocre as it is destructive, and those pushing it as “the future” that “will change everything” are showing how much contempt they have for the average person.
Thus, welcome to the ultimate hat trick of the twenty-first century: an accelerating climate catastrophe, Western democracies sliding into the hands of Nazi parties and brazen crime lords, and an economic crash that will hit us like a brick the size of the moon.
For the longest time, there were urgent warnings about the kind of Earth we don’t want to leave for our children and grandchildren. These warnings are a thing of the past now, an area of interest for the historian. Today, even if you happen to be an octogenarian, this triple whammy will very likely catch up with you. And for all those of us who are younger than that, in our forties or fifties or sixties even, who’ve felt more or less safe until now from this horrible future we keep creating, sufficiently insulated by life expectancies and our own private modicums of prosperity, it has slowly come closer and closer to become our reality instead, and we’ll soon be able to take a picture.
