A Feast Of Sludge, With Ed Zitron

Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season games something of a relief. It also makes it possible for us to get a little more creative with booking this podcast. When the baseball season is starting and the college basketball season is roaring towards its end, it’s only natural that we would try to talk about it. When that isn’t happening, it makes it a lot easier to have our buddy Ed Zitron back on to talk about the state of the AI bubble and tech psychosis more broadly. So we did.

And after a few stray thoughts on l’affaire Russini-Vrabel and the subsequent masterclass in crisis management, we got right to it. Ed got us caught up on how AI technology is being put to use in the disastrous Iran engagement, and how those tools differ from the janky public-facing offerings currently being put to work writing some of the wackest high-school essays ever submitted. We also discussed how difficult it is to tell which AI tools are better than others, and why Grok is nevertheless instantly identifiable as the unchallenged worst in the field. We considered the hell dimension of Grok users that complain about Grok on Reddit, delivered a cursory RIP for OpenAI’s baffling Sora video technology, which Drew aptly dubbed “the Quibi of AI,” and dove into the spectacularly upside-down business model of the big AI companies. Finally, we pondered the question of why OpenAI is trying to go public, given what the sort of paperwork involved in an IPO would reveal, and considered whether it’s possible for a money-losing business to skip straight to meme-stock status. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Ed is not optimistic on that one.

After the break, Drew zoomed us out a little bit, resulting in a conversation that was more about what intelligence is, what it’s worth, and how it can be identified. We talked about the tricks that LLM plays on people, and why people fall for it, considered what Ed described as “the jingling keys issue,” and spent an unexpected amount of time on what a mind is for and the pleasures of using it. I liked this bit a lot, but then again, I am partial to anything that lets me speak for 90 uninterrupted seconds about something I barely understand. We also discussed some innovations that are actually good and promising, and why Silicon Valley seems so much less interested in those than in the sour and anti-human stuff that they push instead. You’d be surprised at how naturally Drew pivoted into Las Vegas Raiders chat from there. When the conversation is about vexing and unlovable failures who will never go away, it’s just a short jump from Sam Altman to Alex Guerrero.

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