AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making w/ Nik Suresh

Introductory remarks and guest introduction

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2:40We are back. You need to subscribe to the newsletter. You need to download the podcast you're already listening to. Take your friend's phones, download it on there. You will have failed me if you don't do this. Not really. I love you all dearly. But look, today I am joined by the incredible writer and consultant Nick Suresh, who two weeks ago put out one of the best pieces on AI I've ever read, and not just because it confirms my biases, and it's called AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making. Nick, thank you for joining me. Hey, thank you so much for having me on again. Again, this piece was terrifying.

3:11I just want to be really clear that the things that I read in here, a lot of them I was like, I assumed this was happening. I assumed that it was this bad. But to summarize the piece in short, it appears that just AI is this bordering on religious thing within business now that people get into regardless of whether it even does anything. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think the thing that got it so widely circulated is even that people who

3:42use AI in their work and say they're seeing benefits, a lot of the more sensible people are looking at their colleagues and going, what are you guys doing? Right? Like, I think I'm a little bit faster at my job. And here we have my CEO saying, let's just scrap every other project. We'll remove all the employees. We're going to have 100x productivity. And even sensible people that enjoy it are getting a little bit worried by the level the mania has gotten to. Yeah.

AI investments and corporate project failure

4:09So give me an example here. The first section is called AI Investments are Generally Total Failures. And I realize the title really does say it all there. But can you break that down for me? Yeah. So it's interesting because, you know, most projects at companies do fail, especially big companies. They're just bad at running tech projects. I've written about this well before the AI thing was big. What is fascinating is that they have an even higher failure rate for the AI projects. And again, like just a, we don't need to get into an argument with people about whether

4:42it works or not, right? We can just start with the basis of normal IT projects fail a bunch. Right. AI projects are novel technology. So these are failing even more. And the protective factor to companies normally that they don't want to spend all their money on IT. They actually want to spend the smallest amount on IT possible, right? It's mostly a thing you're, it's a cost for the business. Right. With AI, this is totally inverted. And companies are going, I'd like to take as much budget as I can feasibly get. I'm going to put it all into this thing that I know I'm bad at.

5:13And I want to do a harder version of that, but I can't admit to anyone. I've just wasted millions and millions of dollars. So it's sort of like all the organizations on the planet are going all in on the thing they know they're bad at, playing it on hard mode, and then sort of just lying about it after the fact. And when you say lying, what do you mean? Are they just being like, yeah, this is making me one bazillion more productive percents. I'm so good at AI. I love it. But like, what is that? Like, what are they doing?

5:43What are they actually doing with this crap? Well, okay. So it happens in a couple of ways, right? When I say lying, that sounds like very intentional. And there are people that lie because there are people that lie everywhere. But usually it's two things. Like internally, it can be a lot of delusion. There are a lot of executives out there who have funded AI projects, and they don't realize that the whole organization has sort of shifted into presenting them with the rosiest view of what is happening that is possible.

6:15Like, if you're a CEO who has heard good things about AI, and let's say you've got two guys underneath you gunning for a promotion. Right. Those two guys are now at an arms race to talk about their AI productivity and how much AI they're rolling out across the business. Like, that is the goal. It's not to make money. It's to be the most AI, whatever the fuck that means, right? So it's pretty nonsensical. But that's self-delusion. Yeah, it's very upsetting to watch. And again, it's an extreme version of what we already see, right?

6:45Because people already lie to CEOs for promotions. This is just that on steroids. So you mentioned in here, you say you've seen 0% success in a year and a half. Is it really zero? You've seen nothing? I just want to be... My audience is going to eat this up, I realize. But like, I just want to make sure. Yes, we should, you know, add one asterisk there because some people misunderstood that. Me seeing 0% doesn't mean like it's 0% across the whole world because I haven't seen every project in the world.

7:15Sadly, some people don't have enough reading comprehension for that. So you have to lay it out or you get like an AI booster who's like, it's not literally zero. Some must be getting some results somewhere. I have seen nothing. And I've been doing nothing but sales and onsites at companies like all across Australia and the US for a year and a half now. I don't get brought in to do them. They're like things I see on the side and I go, well, that is not working. Well, the thing I think about when I hear that people are like, actually, you haven't seen every software thing.

7:47It's just, this is how AI boosters work. They want you as the defender of reality to be like, prove unilaterally, this is, the AI is terrible. If it's so bad, prove it. But when you ask them to prove anything, they look at you and go, well, you know, the numbers, just the biggest number I made so big this year. It's the biggest I've ever seen. And they refuse to show you anything real. I think I've been sent the fucking ERDOS problem thing 15 times now.

8:17And the next time someone sends it to me, I'm going to draw a gun. That is a joke. That's a joke. I'm not going to, not going to do anything with a gun, but I am just going to possibly imagine the saw from jigsaw, sorry, jigsaw from saw, even they're going to get me in the comments for that one, just kind of tying them to radiate and say, show me, tell me what you think the ERDOS problem means. Tell me what it means. Tell me what you think ERDOS means. Because that's the thing. These people don't have anything tangible to share. And your piece kind of, I read it in an airport and I was just sitting there.

8:47I'm going like, fucking hell. And I did get a few looks because I was so surprised by it, but it feels like your piece crystallizes everything I've been thinking for two years. That just, this is this weird death of Stalin style situation where people are just saying, God damn, I love AI. Because if they don't say it, they'll make their boss feel bad, their customers feel bad, and their colleagues feel bad, despite none of them getting anything out of AI. Yeah. You know, the simple way to think about it is that any given business, you know, you have

9:20one problem generally that is bottlenecking how you're making most of your money. And whatever you think AI can do, it's really only the correct thing to deploy if it solves that one problem. It doesn't matter if you write more code, if writing code isn't the way to make more money. And I mean, it's basically just like as simple as that, right? People are going all in on a thing that doesn't really make sense for whatever context they're inhabiting.

Consulting work and profitable clients

9:44So you mentioned within the piece that you had to basically stop offering AI services or a specific one. Forgive me if I, forgive me if I misread that, but you just won't mention AI services within certain software projects because people go nutrageous over them. Yeah. What we found was, you know, we're a relatively small business and we optimize a lot for working with people we enjoy. And you're a software consultancy, just to be clear. Yes, we're a software consultancy in data specifically. So my post-grad degree was a master's in data science. Like I was into AI nominally before the whole LLM thing took off.

10:18And yeah, what we found was whenever we mentioned AI, two things would happen. And the one I mentioned in the piece was people would become rabidly interested in buying from us. But they were also really bad customers. Like they made bad decisions. They had cashflow issues. They didn't think clearly. Like these were not people we wanted to work with as a matter of lifestyle. But also, you know, it's like a lot of startups and stuff. The sort of customer where you have to take all the money upfront because you're worried

10:50they're just going to scam you. Like these are not people you want to be in bed with. And the people we really liked, we would mention it just as an aside, and they would immediately become so disinterested because they just go, well, you know, a lot of people are trying to scam you with this right now. I'm just not interested. So we just don't talk about it at all in any context. We don't like doing it. The work's really boring anyway. But yeah, like it's just, here's another thing I can tell you. Our clients that don't talk about AI at all are like far and away the most profitable

11:21because they're focused on whatever their biggest problem is at any given moment. It's very, very simple. Like this is not rocket science. Yeah, it's just like, it's like the companies that are doing well are focusing on solving business issues. The companies that are doing badly are the ones getting very expensive digital fidget spinners. Yeah, like it's as simple as that. I don't know many companies where LLMs unblock like whatever their core issue is. There's stuff I can think like maybe customer support, but I don't know much about customer support.

11:52Anything where I have some subject matter expertise, I'm like an LLM is not the most important thing you need right now. I can't think of it. I went to two, three, four boobless years into this bullshit and I am a spreadsheet hog and it doesn't do spreadsheets very well. I will say people can be, people will be very mad at me for this. I found one use of LLMs, one. And I think I've told you about this, the Bloomberg terminal, because the way that you request stuff on the Bloomberg terminal is through Python. I don't write Python.

12:22So you'd be like, Bloomberg LLM, tell me how to get this and it gives you the code and it runs it. Boom. Simple. Probably the least, like literally just sexy search. Well done. 1.1 trillion dollars of capex. I'm sure that was all worth it. But what's funny is the example you give in the piece of the AI chatbot thing for Snowflake feels like the things that LLM should be good at, which is a database request, right? Yeah, yeah. Why doesn't it work? Surely that is the thing that this should be good at.

Database requests and search limits

12:55What is the issue there? And why don't LLMs solve it? Yeah. The complexity there is, you know, I don't know much about Bloomberg terminals, although it's very funny everything you've told me about. Do people know you have one? It's an autism portal. It's so good. Yeah. So, you know, I imagine they're fairly constrained in what they can do. Yes. For example, you know, you mentioned writing Python, which means someone has written a Python library that interfaces with the Bloomberg terminal and constrains what sorts of things

13:25you can ask it. So if it's very well designed and you put all the text in there, the same thing that lets me, a human, interrogate it would let an LLM do it. What's very hard at a business is a lot of that stuff is just not written down or it exists in someone's head or the real world is very, very complicated. And the very people who are, let's use this example, right? Why does Cortex not work? So you go in and you're the CFO and you type in, I would like to know how much revenue we made last year. It doesn't know all the little nuances of your business. And for something really important, you need it to be correct.

13:56But if you're making use of an LLM and you're the CFO, you can't debug whatever it put out. And that's okay when the number is totally wrong because you'll go, hey, this isn't correct. If it's off by like 5% or 10%, you probably don't know. And exactly like with your Bloomberg terminal, right? If you looked up something really important, you might reach out to a friend and say, is this Python correct? Because I'm about to spend a lot of money on this. Yeah. And to be clear, when you make a request on the terminal, it does the Python.

14:27It's just the Python code to request Bloomberg's actual data. Like it hasn't, I imagine, don't write Python, but I imagine there is a library in this, that this is just a layer on top of it so that people like me can actually use it without just punching the, typing in like three letter things and making things pop up and then spending hours fucking with it. Which of course I never did before I used the LLM side, of course. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty different. But with Cortex, the search side, it seems that the problem is also that, is it making

14:57stuff up? Because I, and not being an ignoramus here, surely looking over a big database and information and pulling stuff out is what an LLM is good at? Or is the suggestion that the database layer is not something LLMs can solve? It's just very complicated. You know, so we were at a client site yesterday and, you know, they have this ledger internally, which tracks like all the transactions coming in and out. And there's like 40 different account types stored in all these different tables. And in different situations, you want to use different types of transactions to calculate

15:28certain things around like service utilization. And an LLM looks at that and it just goes, well, I haven't worked here for eight years, so I don't know how to run this calculation. Oh, so the data is, so it's that the data isn't labeled properly and all these other, so it's how the data is presented and looked over? Yeah, yeah. You can even label it properly, but there's a reason we have human specialists. It's the same reason I don't get an LLM to write all my contracts. I could, but instead I go to my lawyer, Ian, and I go, what should I actually do here?

15:59You know, like the... Yeah, it's experience versus data. Right. You know, like when we started the business, he wrote a contract for me that, you know, it's like a standard one. And it has things in there like I wouldn't have thought of. Like, for example, the agreement we have with clients on how long we take between email responses and how we factor in. When I was still doing PR stuff, that's exactly what I had in there. Like basic things that you wouldn't think of unless you'd experienced the thing. But it's funny because even now, even people who are anti-LLM, I will hear them say,

16:33but it's good for searching large databases. And it sounds like it isn't. Like AI is just not good at that. I specialize in the specific area, which is just like big information retrieval. It's pretty good at, you know, a database specifically in tech means something. It means systems like Postgres or whichever, which mean nothing to normal people. Uh, I would say they're pretty good at reading gigantic amounts of texts and then pointing a human at the correct place. So a good use is if we're like in a new client site and they have a million lines of some fucking

17:08thing, I can go, I need to look for the places where this logic might happen and they'll point me at them and it is still wrong sometimes, but at least I can look. Like that's not useless, but it's like, how much would I pay for that? I don't know. Maybe like $20 a month, but that's not that big a deal. But that's the thing. It's like, even with the terminal, it's the same thing. It will get things wrong. It never gets the numbers wrong because when it runs the numbers, it's pulling them from a specific place.

17:38And I still tell it, if I ever touch the LLM stuff, run it again, run it again, just like, and then I'll Google it and I'll look up the stuff because I don't trust anything that touches it. But still, it's just, it is a phishing expedition. You can't rely on it to have any logic, which I think is what most people want from search. When human beings are pretty terrible about asking for exactly what they want. And I feel like it just falls down. And the reason I keep going on about this stuff is because searching big databases and making decisions feels like 90% of the LLM integrations I've heard about.

18:11Like, it's just, how do I do this? And what does this mean? Is how people are kind of seem to at least be describing how it's useful in their business. But it can't do that, which is bad. Yeah. At the end of the day, as long as we're constrained by having to go in and check whether the results are correct, even if we grant that they're correct most of the time, which is not always true. It's very domain specific. That just means you can't get 100 times faster. And that's what's justifying the bajillion, million, infinity dollars of investment, right?

18:41If we went, hey, this makes you 50% faster, like, all right, is that worth a trillion dollars? I don't think so. I don't think it's worth a trillion dollars. Like, the market thesis depends on the psychosis claim. Also, I mean, it's meant to be artificial intelligence. Just to be clear, that's the intelligence part is in the name. But everything we're saying makes it sound really fucking stupid. Just like, it's just, it's not smart. It doesn't know anything. And it does dumb guy stuff.

19:13Oh, you didn't ask me in exactly the way I needed to be asked. I don't understand, mate. Sorry. I'm not going to be helpful at all. And also, what we are describing is very simple stuff. It's not a trillion dollars. It's not even a 50 billion TAM industry. It's just, even if it got everything we're saying right, it still wouldn't be that exciting.

19:35Yeah. You know, I think it was very interesting when it came out. It was, like, pretty novel. When GPT-3 came out, I went, what the hell? Like, this was not available when I was at university. This is fucking wild. I think this really sort of overstayed its welcome. And it's just so interesting because we've taken a technology that, I mean, if you're willing to set aside many, many ethical claims around stealing from artists and environmental things, like, if we just hand-wave all of that, which I'm not happy to do, but in this context for an argument, I will.

20:07Yeah, yeah. If you hand-wave all of that, it's like, all right, we've made something pretty neat. And then we've still somehow completely managed to fuck everything up. Like, all we had to do was be reasonable for 10 seconds about how we use this and invest in it, and we have completely failed. Everyone has gone insane.

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22:33My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for UnitedHealthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do. I'm Ben, and I work at UnitedHealthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.

23:07Yeah, it's like if everyone did platform as a service and take it to a trailer, it's like, wow, you could just put a single line of code and now your entire ecosystem is working perfectly on this. Yeah, it sounds like the promise that was made with PaaS and then just didn't happen. And I worked on a few of those clients. It was fucking terrible, explained to journalists what platform as a service meant. But again, no, everyone didn't suddenly say that no one was running their own computers anymore. No one was running their own databases anymore. And it's just, it feels like it's completely escaped reality. And you are very much in the trenches with this.

23:39And one thing I did want to ask about as well was this, my favorite section of the piece,

Tech evangelism and executive conformity

23:44heretics will be shot. And the way you describe it is that there is this genuine religiosity behind this, this aggressive kind of tech evangelism that says if you are not in with the AI stuff, you are out of the crowd. Yeah. And it's actually kind of scary to watch. Like normally when I write something, I'm mostly angry about it. And you also wasn't a lot of anger in that piece because I was more slowly realizing. Yeah, I was like, hey, there are not adults running our hospitals.

24:16You know, it turns out, I think the worst thing was realizing that they were always sort of immature and childlike and not responsible or brave. Like they've always been that way. This has just allowed them to coordinate around a thing that allows them to behave this way at the same time. Yeah. And anyone that does not get on board, like, God, I've seen some pretty wild stuff. We're sort of at the point where if you tell a CEO at maybe most companies, especially big ones, right, if they're worth over a billion dollars, if you tell certain

24:47people, certain executives that you do not believe that AI is the future, and I mean those words, right? I'm not talking like have a sound business plan or you believe a specific initiative will work. If you will not sign off on statements like AI is changing everything, it will transform this business, they will just fire you. I've never seen anything like it. Even, you know, we had the cloud a while ago. People still behave the same way. It's like a little bit culty. They go, we've got to move everything to the cloud. We've got to move everything to the cloud. I don't think I've seen someone get fired for expressing doubt about that.

25:19But if you say something like, I don't think AI is the way for me to do my job. CEOs, I've seen multiple CEOs say things like, well, then you don't belong at this company. You know, pack your bags, get out of here. What the fuck? What's the justification? Well, you're against AI, which must mean you're bad at your job because we won't need people who don't use AI anymore. You know, it's just, I don't know what to say, man. Like, because the question of why implies there's like a coherent reason. They've gone insane.

25:50That's just because you mentioned in here as well that doubting AI also scares their customers and that it's kind of a chain of idiocy. If you could talk about that a little bit. But yeah, so what was really interesting was I was chatting with a Fortune 500 executive, right? I thought it was really interesting because some of the, you know, two brain cell dudes on Hacker News were like, oh, this, this can't be real. And I'm like, I mean, look, it's a Fortune 500 executive. Like, what do you want me to say?

26:21It's just, it's the truth. And this guy was pretty smart, but his company had said some pretty crazy things. So I went, well, you know, do you like between you and me, we're sitting here having coffee. Is it true? Or do you believe that? Or what is making you say this? Is it just because you need to hit certain sales numbers? And it's like, yes, some people are very gullible and they bind to this stuff. We don't really believe it internally. Some people believe it internally, but whatever. It's crazy people everywhere. It was that at this company, because they're huge, they have tons of enterprise contracts.

26:52And some of those CEOs have deals with them. And that CEO says something like, we have a 100 times speed up in productivity. And the original guy, the guy I was talking to goes on the news and says, well, a hundred times is not possible. He has embarrassed his customer. And these people can be very, very petty. So they'll cancel the contract. And the first guy gets fired for insulting a customer. And we're in this weird game-theoretic prisoner's dilemma, you know, standoff, where you can't even contradict another executive because you can't tell if they're cynically playing the game.

27:27Because then you can say it and they don't care. Or if they really believe it, because then you've embarrassed them in public. So all of them have just sort of gone, even pretty responsible people have gone, I'm not going to disagree with them. I'm just not going to talk about this because it's too dangerous to talk about. That is fucking insane. I realize we're going to say this a lot today. But it's fucking insane. That is one of the craziest things that if you go on television and say you don't like something, you will lose a contract over it. Which kind of explains what happened with the PR firm, I guess.

27:59I mean, I don't know how they would have worked out. I don't like AI. But maybe there were some clues somewhere. But this is an industry gone mad. This is the craziest thing I've heard in any- This is like an actual information hazard situation. I am actually a little bit chilled by it. Yeah. I think it's fascinating because it's always been bad to insult your customers. Right. Obviously. But usually all your customers aren't saying the same thing at the same time in such a destructive way.

28:30When they're all saying one thing, that topic is just off limits. Because if you agree with them, I mean, you haven't really accomplished anything. They don't care if you agree with you. You know, they're just like, you know, for example, if you were the CEO at zero or something, right? You're going to have huge contracts with a bunch of big companies. You can't actually say what you think on this topic because you might upset someone. And I think what's been really interesting as well is seeing the pressure from boards. I've had so many executives write in since I wrote that and go, yeah, my board has ordered me to use AI.

29:00I don't believe in it. But they said, if I don't use AI, yep, boards are saying this. But I've also had board members tell me that they feel like if they don't tell everyone to use AI, they'll be removed from their position. So, like, it's just this, like, I don't know what to tell you. It's insane. It doesn't make any sense. It's like this huge mass delusion event that I feel like we might be writing about for the next 20 years. Like, it's just fascinating. Well, I think what the contra to all of this is it also feels like it could reverse very aggressively and suddenly.

29:34Because if everyone's just kind of sitting around being like, yeah, I actually fucking hate, or, like, there's a contingent of people that's impossible to measure, of people who are like, this kind of fucking sucks, I kind of fucking hate this, but I'm going along with it. And enough people start just saying they don't like it. It just feels like one day that the mood could shift. Because this is what I've been predicting the whole time, that just at some point, everyone will stop doing AI, or someone they like and respect will say, fuck this, I'm not doing it anymore.

30:04And then everyone will walk away. They're just looking for permission. Correct. We're basically talking about coordination problems, right? Which is a thing where a bunch of people want to say a certain thing, if one person puts their hand up, that person will be killed, so no one wants to put their hand up first. What you need is just some event for everyone to say the same thing at the same time. And what's interesting is we're here because a different problem was solved, which is a lot of executives and board members and people are very easily excitable. They always had this sort of latent level of mania.

30:35AI coming out in the form of LLMs, solve that problem for them. Because if you put your hand up and you said, I'm going all in on the metaverse, like that's kind of a joke. It was silly back then. So we first solved the problem by giving them something to coordinate and be frantic around. And now we're just waiting for the first like hyperscaler to collapse for the reverse event. Or just Sachin Nadella or probably not Sundar Pashai with the way that Google's earnings just went.

31:06But someone is going to eventually just go, fuck this. I truly, I think it could be meta, but also who knows with that wacky son of a bitch, Mark Zuckerberg, what he'll get up to next. I hear he's working on a Tamagotchi. Like an actual AI power. You know, he's wacky, you wacky son of a gun. It is really cool though. It kind of reminds me of your other piece I love, which is a brainwashing executive today. But the most extreme version of LinkedIn psychosis, where it's just everything you do is an artifact of how much LinkedIn you consume, except everyone is LinkedIn now.

31:40Everyone. Can I talk about that brainwash piece for a second?

LinkedIn influence and agency pivots

31:44Yes, please, please. Please do. Okay. So, you know, the whole thing in the piece is one of my executives, when I still like it didn't work for myself, came in and just asked everyone at the company about a product called Monte Carlo, which is like super niche, like fucking nerd thing. And we were like, why are you talking to all of us about this in our one-on-ones? You only talk to us once a year. This would be like my granddad coming in and going like, tell me about like quantum cryptography. Like, there's no way that this is a topic you should be interested in, right?

32:17Like, it's just so far out of your wheelhouse. Yeah. Where'd you hear about this? Like when my kid comes in and says a new word? I'm like, where'd you hear that? No, I did hear about this. And it was LinkedIn. So they did tell me where they heard about it from, which is dire. But I don't know if you saw this, the CEO of Monte Carlo, not knowing I'd written about the company with, you know, I wouldn't say criticize them, but I had some question marks. And I was like, who are you advertising to and what the hell's wrong with your website? So she took that piece and boosted it and said it's, you know, being shared with executives and boardrooms around the world.

32:50It might be the most circulated thing in boardrooms right now. I have no way of measuring that. And then if you look up the Monte Carlo website, you know, from someone who has just gone, you know, I like this piece. I think it raises some good points.

33:04Monte Carlo, I don't know if it's always at this, but it's now Monte Carlo.ai. And they've completely shifted their messaging because they are no longer a data observability platform. They're now an agent observability platform. Whatever the fuck that means.

33:20Jesus fucking Christ. What's great as well, though, is the reaction to your piece. And I've been looking it up. It is. I occasionally see it with mine, but I'm more direct with how I feel about AI people. So they're less willing to share it. But the amount of people I've seen sharing it who are very clearly the subject of the piece is insane to me. It's just like people are very funny. It's just like people like, yeah, wow. I can't believe people are all using AI for no reason. I, of course, have nothing to do with this.

33:52All my AI solutions are perfect. I love AI so much. But these other imbeciles who are using it wrong, it's genuinely driving me insane, if I'm going to be honest. I have a phrase for this, which I think is novel. I might have invented this. It's the N minus two idiot solution, which is if you look around a room and you go, that guy is the smartest person in here. Everyone will agree. And in a room full of sufficiently, you know, ridiculous or compromised people, they're all okay with it because they assume they're number two.

34:29Right. So you just need to leave them enough wiggle room. What you can't do is go, only one person in this room is smart. You can go, two of you are smart and everyone's okay with that. They'll all agree on the first person. They all assume they're the second person. And yeah, a lot of the coverage has been, you know, this insane phenomenon. And, you know, credit to possibly the Monte Carlo CEO. Maybe she didn't say this in so many words, but maybe what she was actually saying was, I feel trapped by the situation. My whole company has pivoted to AI agents, even though it doesn't make sense. Maybe that was her gentle way of screaming into the void.

35:01I don't actually know, but it is very funny. I kind of want to do a blog at some point that's just, you can stop using AI. It's just like, literally, you can stop this at any time. You don't have to do this. If you feel trapped, you can just leave. You kind of did that at the end of the piece. You did a very empathetic thing at the end saying, here's how to deal with the organizational AI stuff. If you're told this, well, just quit. And in other situations, you could also do something else. It's just, it's genuinely sickening.

35:34It is actually sickening in a way that it pisses me off. I've said this before in not so many words, but this is meant to be an industry of meritocracy. This is meant to be the industry where people, oh, we do things for efficiency reasons, and we do things because they get good business results. And now I'm realizing, and you've kind of told me this in the past as well, everyone was lying about that. They were just doing stuff that made them feel good. Yeah, I kind of wish we had that.

36:05You know, every so often you'll hear someone say something like, you know, the issue with capitalism is it optimizes everything for money, right? We just throw away every other value for money and efficiency and productivity. And, God, I wish that was true because we somehow have, like, the worst of both worlds where we're throwing away every other value and somehow still not achieving peak efficiency, right? Like, we're doing all these horrible, hideous things, and then you're like, well, how much money are we making? It's like, not even that much money. We're wasting it all on data centers.

36:36I mean, the data centers alone are just fucking insane to me. I mean, what's really good as well is, on the subject of meritocracy in numbers, trying to just pull together very basic things like, is any of this profitable? And asking people and them getting angry at you. Just very angry, just agitated, being like, why'd you keep asking these questions? Why'd you keep doing this?

Profitability questions and demo software

37:00And I grew up in a rough neighborhood. I've met my fair share of scam artists. And 100% of the time, if someone gets angry at you for asking for things like that, that's because they are full of shit. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was in psychology before I was in IT. And you see that a lot in things like multi-level marketing scams and stuff. You know, like, if you go, hey, isn't this a pyramid scheme? They've got the whole script, which is like, what do you mean it's a pyramid scheme? What's your understanding of a pyramid scheme? Answer me, you fucker. And it's sort of the same thing here.

37:33Didn't we, maybe we talked about this previously, but have you seen like that clip of, you know, a very, very gentle interview with Sam Altman? And at the end, this interviewer who clearly loves him very gently goes like, so what's the plan for profitability? And he's just like, I've had enough of these questions. No, he's just like, we're making way more than $13 billion this year, you know, and if you need someone to buy your stock. And what's funny is Satchi Nadella was on that call.

38:04Like, just your bot. Yeah, just Satchi Nadella just sitting there with the, I don't know, the magic roundabout thing. Just nothing going on up there waiting for the next input. The world's most. Just like the little monkey with the symbol that does backflips just sitting in Satchi Nadella's head. It's going, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, I was going to say, I'm imagining like, you know, the little Mac OS speech ball. It's just a little spinning widget up there. The thing is, Sam Altman will never talk to me. They've already told me he won't.

38:35But that's because I know within five minutes he will get pissed off at me. Because it would just be really easy to just be like, hey, why don't you make any money? Why'd you lose so much money, Sam? Well, we make money. And then just, you'd get more and more immature until he eventually tries to get at you through the screen like a dog that sees his reflection. Easy peasy. He'd try and kill me within a day. I mean, there's no reason to, right? No, as a PR person, I would rather kill myself than put Sam Altman on a call with me.

39:09Like, I've just, that would actually be the appropriate choice. Like, whatever you do, do not put Ed Zichert on a call with Sam Altman. Yeah, it's also, it's like only a losing proposition for him. Yeah. Because let's say he comes on and he has the greatest showing of his whole life. You know, like, he just, he feels every question perfectly. That is the same outcome as just talking to another journalist that's going to jerk him off for an hour, right? There's no reason for him to take that risk when he can get so much positive coverage from people that aren't going to ask him any questions.

39:42And I will only ask him the most annoying, I'll just ask him, are you happy? And his head will start like erupting in smoke. Anyway, so we've kind of got off topic, I realize. I wanted to actually talk to you and break down something that I've heard with various people, which is this whole issue of demos with AI. That AI is really good at making a good enough demo to sell to someone. And you kind of covered this before AI was as far down the hole as possible with Brainwashing Executive.

40:14But I get the sense that it's just very good at doing enough to sell an imbecile on something. Yeah, you know, I'm willing to be a little bit more charitable here because it doesn't have to be an imbecile necessarily. It just has to be someone who is not proficient with tech. Because when you work with something sufficiently complicated, you understand there's a lot of difficulty around the fine details and deploying a piece of software and the design and achieving business value, whatever you want to do.

40:44But, you know, as an end user, like I don't really know how my oven works. I just have some knobs that I twiddle and then the oven works, right? So if you turned up and you said, you know, I've got nanobots that assemble ovens perfectly and then it does it and it bakes a pie. If I don't eat the pie or, you know, whatever, I might go, hey, that was really, really cool. And it is genuinely impressive enough that possibly no one would blame me for investing in it initially.

41:14Yeah, because you got shown something that looked plausible. Right. And not just plausible, like literally impossible prior to 2020. Like you couldn't do this sort of trick. And then the next day you start to find out like, hey, well, you know what? Like this pie is really bad. And it turns out the oven only has one setting and sometimes it catches fire. And, you know, I still might not be an imbecile because what I saw up front was so impressive. I would be an imbecile if I kept buying it four years later, right?

41:46Like there was a period where the overinvestment was understandable. Well, this actually kind of gets back to brainwashing executive because there's the point in there that the people that buy software are often not the people that use it. So you just have to impress the CIO or the CTO or the CEO enough. And that person does not have the practical on the ground experience to make that decision, but usually does. Yes, and that is basically what makes not just this con, but like a lot of enterprise bad software possible.

42:21You just go, hey, you know, your customer support monkeys, they need a new platform. Do you want to put them on Zendesk? And then someone buys Zendesk. And as the CEO, like you're never going to log into Zendesk. You should. I actually think, you know, most executives I meet aren't that busy. They're pretty busy. Yeah, they got nothing on. I'm serious. Yeah, like, but they absolutely could just go down and sit next to someone for like an hour and check out what their work looks like. That might do a lot more for sort of a long-term company strategy than whatever they're doing, like going to big meetings.

42:52Look, there's probably some level of wealth where that's not true if you're worth personally worth enough billions. But yeah, tons of people worth hundreds of millions of dollars still take the time to do that. And again, they run very profitable companies and they don't waste their time on this stuff beyond what's necessary.

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45:20It really is just the grimmest thing ever. And I'm guessing that the reason that LLMs are so good at creating these demos is you can vibe code together something that has buttons that work. And because the buttons work, it's good enough. Yeah, the buttons do work. And that's the thing. The buttons do work, which is why it's sort of understandable. But then you had other problems, right? Like, you know, the buttons work until you load it on mobile. And then this button disappears and that button doesn't work. Or two people click the button at the same time and it puts down, like, you know, it doesn't lock inventory.

45:54So, now you've got minus one in the warehouse. Like, all these things. And, you know, it's not that an LLM can't solve them, especially with human guidance. It's that it hasn't delivered on the promise of human takes its hand off and software is solved. It's also very likely not running on your infrastructure, right? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time it's literally just running on a laptop and you haven't solved complex deployment issues and that kind of thing. But, again, I understand, right? Like, if I'm talking to a random CFO, they don't know what infrastructure means in the context of IT.

46:28So, it's all basically understandable, but it's the same reason sane people don't get super excited about developments that they're not specialists in, right? I don't walk around every time there's, like, a new breakthrough in medicine going, oh, my God, this is going to change everything. I go, I don't know how to evaluate this. I have no idea if this is game changing. I'm just going to shut up and let doctors talk about it. But this feels like, actually, I think I've kind of worked out something, which is the problem isn't so, well, the problem is the fact that you've got executives buying something that they don't really understand.

47:03But that's been a problem before. The problem is they're more incentivized to do it. Instead of that one example of an executive getting kind of brainwashed into buying Monte Carlo, it's I will buy anything with AI on it. And, in fact, I believe that if I don't do this, I will be under existential threat. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, for what it's worth, that executive didn't buy Monte Carlo in the end. They just wasted a bunch of time. And I suspect if Monte Carlo had AI on their front page, they would have bought it, right?

47:36Like, it really... Just instantly. I think they would have been like, yeah. Yeah, especially because, you know, with this whole thing where no one is actually using the tools, it lets you tell your CEO that you've made an investment in AI and it's transforming something. Don't ask any questions about what it's transforming. It's actually hard to make businesses more profitable, especially established ones, right? Startups can do whatever they want because they have nothing to lose. But if you've been in business for five years or 10 years or 20 years, there's a lot of things you're doing and it's not as easy as just going, claw double my profits.

48:08If that worked, we'd already be seeing it. That doesn't work. It kind of sounds like most software doesn't solve problems. Well, I don't mean that. I don't mean that no software solves any problems. I just mean people regularly buy software that does not actually improve their companies. Yes, that is pretty common. And this is not an LLM point, right? This is just generally true. Yeah, yeah. And I really, I must be clear. I mean this on a much larger scale than LLMs. Yes. I would say a lot of software does not deliver on its promises.

48:42They tend to have much stronger sales teams than they have. Firstly, you know, literally programmers, like the programmers tend not to be very good at a lot of companies. I had to explain to a physio yesterday that we're not a regulated field. And like this, this blessed, very happy man was just like, oh yeah, they wouldn't let you program a computer without like a license. I had to study physio for so long.

49:08I know. I felt like I was breaking his heart. That's really fucking good. Oh no, I kind of think you should have to now. Okay. I kind of think we need a computer license. Well, maybe, right? Like anything else serious, like, you know, if you want to be a firefighter, you train, you take it seriously. Yeah. I had to explain to him like, hey man, like, they'll let you program if you've read zero books on the topic, right? You can be a principal engineer. And he went, that can't be true. I've met people who've earned like $300,000 that have never read one book.

49:41Like, it's- Yeah, it's so good. And to be clear, that regulation of to do software engineering at a company, you need a license, maybe not. But I think we can extend it to, you can only use social media on a sit-down computer. That's a good start. And you can only talk about programming if you've read these three books. Like, you have to qualify to be able to post about it. You can't post about it. Yes, I think it would be helpful if we had some sort of accreditation that lends some trustworthiness to the right people.

50:15Because, yeah, I don't even read comments I get on things anymore. I do emails. If someone emails me, I'll read it. But like the quality of comment is so bad. And it's not just people that, you know, disagree with me. A lot of them have literal reading comprehension issues. I rarely get like an actual critique on what I've written. I get critiques of what people think I've written. But even sometimes people will agree with me, and I'll see they've also missed the point. And I'm like, well, I'm just going to stop reading these. But to answer your question, though, about software, you know, not being very good, there's the quality issue of a lot of programmers aren't very good.

50:52You can have badly programmed stuff that is still good enough to deliver value to someone. But a lot of software is fundamentally ill-conceived. So an executive will hear some pitch that's like, well, if you get this software, you know, you'll have 10% more throughput on your customer support, whatever. A lot of the time, that is just not true. So they do the whole migration into a new system, and there's just no outcome at the end of it. They just don't see an improvement. That's, I mean, it really just feels like the entire software industry is based on nothing at this.

51:26But there's just, I keep thinking of calamity at this point, because we've got tons of people coding with LLMs, not reading the code anymore. You've got software being bought by people that don't use it and don't really understand it. And now just a mass acceleration of that problem that already existed for 10 or 15 years. I think probably the problem we're discussing is probably at least 15 years, because it's like a very SaaS-based problem. Because software as a service allowed you to subscribe to software rather than buying an expensive license up front.

51:56Which sounds good right up until you're in year three, and there's been three price increases, and you realize you're paying Oracle. But it feels that we're just accelerating dramatically towards something breaking somewhere at scale.

GitHub outages and agentic claims

52:12Like, I really am, I mean, we were talking about GitHub last night.

52:17Right, yeah. Oh my god, the GitHub outages have been so funny. I've been really enjoying them. I think I mentioned that, what was it called? Oh my god, I'm going to disappoint my friends so much. I forgot the name of the piece, but it's about GitHub and, like, their massive outages. It's by Efron Lake. GitHub used by basically every person in software engineering, and it has the uptime of an unstable startup with $2,000.

52:48Yeah, I would say a startup with $2,000 can achieve higher uptime than that. Like, that's actually probably true. Look, there's some extenuating circumstances, like GitHub deals with a volume of traffic that a startup doesn't, but they're not broke, right? Like, what's going on here? And more importantly, they weren't having these issues a couple of years ago. Like, they're doing something wrong. I've heard it's related to, you know, Azure migrations from inside Microsoft.

53:18It probably doesn't help that they're slinging LLM slop everywhere, too. In that post by Efron, he did talk about how almost every changelog they've had has just used the word agent and AI over and over. He never sees the word stability and reliability. There's no, like, stability or the word improvement. It's just agentic. I think that there are now 11 different companies that claim you can do agents with credit cards now as well. It's just like the tech industry is all just kayfabe.

53:50Sorry, what do you mean agents with credit cards? What does that mean? Well, that's a good fucking question, Nick. Like, they are suggesting that you can connect an API of some sort to an AI agent, and then the AI agent will go and buy something with your credit card. I mean, look, as a matter of technical truth, that is true. Why would you do that? That's such a bad idea.

54:20Well, because you love, I mean, no one uses it. No one's actually using these things. DoorDash is doing a command line interface now. Why? What is fucking going on, dude? This whole industry is, well, what I think it is, is just, especially Bay Area people have just been driven completely insane by this stuff. And they are, the way I describe it is, it's a community of 30 to 50 year olds desperately trying to impress 22 year olds. And they're all desperate to make the, like, they're all like, on, on God, this is a permanent underclass.

54:59And they kind of look around, they're like, yeah, agentic, right? Fuck. Command line interface. For real, for real. Yeah. On God, no cap. And it's just insane because even, like, Mark Andreessen being, like, based, it's like, shut the fuck up. You are 100 years old. Did Mark Andreessen say based? That's very upsetting. I believe he has said based more than once. That's actually worse than all of the AI investments so far. Go fuck your Mosaic browser, you fuckwit. It's just like, it's just like these people don't know anything.

55:32And I think we're just, because the argument about the CapEx, for example, keeps coming back to, well, these are the richest companies in the world run by some of the greatest tech talent in the world. What if that isn't true? What if that's not true at all? And in fact, what if it's not run by the smartest people? And indeed, as we've been discussing today, there is an active culture to reduce intelligence across the board. And that's the thing, if I am right, the entire tech industry is going to experience a depression because everyone went insane. Like, everyone got taken into Heaven's Gate.

56:05Except instead of killing themselves and other people, they're just doing command line interfaces for fucking DoorDash. I don't understand why you'd want a CLI for DoorDash. That's baffling. But I'm not even going to talk about that because it's upsetting me because, like, I don't... Like, what do they think? No. See, I can't... DD-CLI lets you order DoorDash directly from your agent. Search stores, find the best deals, checkout, and more.

56:35See, like, okay, no. You can't trick me to talking about this. I have, like, 80 different thoughts, and I'm not going to poison my... What I love is the first response is Boris Cherney, the head of Claude Code, saying, BRB downloading. I don't know much about computers, but do you download a CLI, like... I mean, yeah, you type in, like, you know, pseudo-app-get DoorDash, I guess. You type in something, but, like, I don't know. I just, I feel like these are the people with the money, and they gave me even half of this money.

57:09I could do basically anything else and make them way more than zero or negative, as is happening to them. But it's, like, these people are never going to... This is a horrifying thing to say, I realize. These people are never going to learn without suffering. Like, it's just, it really is that the tech industry... I'm not saying that I want anyone to suffer. I really wish there was a soft landing out of all of this. There was a way out of this without genuine depression hitting the tech industry. But I think that's the only way anything changes, because they've never...

57:40Like, the dot-com bubble was much... I mean, the telecommunications side was big, but the dot-com bubble, the tech industry was much smaller back then.

57:49And I think that something like that is the only thing that could change things, because they need an egregious screaming in the face. They need to be told, not just that they're wrong, but they need to be shown it in a graphic way. Yeah. Unless they're going to start learning stuff. Unless they're going to start learning things. So, you know, I had you on my podcast a few weeks ago, and the guests right after you were the authors of a book called Crisis Engineering. So they did some of the healthcare.gov bailout.

58:21One of them, Marina, was the CTO of Veterans Affairs in the U.S. And the thesis behind crisis engineering is just that organizations don't undergo change unless they're in an acute state of crisis, which is not just a problem. I mean, a crisis so bad that there is a complete dissolution of sensemaking, like panic in the streets. This is sort of true everywhere, right? Like, people tend to make big lifestyle changes after a huge divorce or, you know, some massive event like that. And yeah, I think you're right. I think it's why my advice to most people now is not like, you know, raise a huge stink about this.

58:56It's like, if someone is actively hurting something in front of you that you care about because of AI, yes, stand up and say something. If you work at a fire department and you just need some money to fix a fire hydrant or whatever it is that is important to you right now, we're so far past the point of arguing with these people. I'm like, just ask for your money and ask for an extra $10,000 for a chatbot that doesn't work. Fix the problem. Just pretend this doesn't exist until it all blows up.

59:28It'll be fine, right? Like, I'm just waiting to pick up a bunch of really cheap NVIDIA shares. That's all I'm doing.

Aftermath predictions and finding clients

59:35Well, as we wrap up here, that is kind of what I'm telling people, which is after this blows up, and it will, goodness it will, there is going to be a lot of money and competency. I think you've already kind of seen this as well. It's just like, people are going to realize because of the crisis to follow that the imbeciles have taken over, the business idiots are everywhere. And I'm already, I mean, little PR work I've done in the last few months, even then it's people being like, yeah, I keep talking to people and they just, hey, I generate fucking everything.

1:00:10They don't seem to know anything. And I think that that is going to be everywhere. The things that people read. I don't think it's going to be a utopian society or anything. But I think that there is going to be in engineering, in any kind of business management role, a certain degree of, right, did you get taken by this? Because I must be clear, once this explodes, I am not going to stop pointing out people who fell behind this. Oh, yeah. I'm going to be, I have detailed notes to quote Casey Newton, not speaking about anyone specific about who I might be pointing out here.

1:00:47But we will, it will actually be, I think, our civic duty to remind everyone who fell for this. And I think that result of that is competent people are going to make more money. Yeah. And if I could, I have one bit here where I think I'm a little bit less optimistic, which is once this blows up, suddenly everyone will pretend that they were never for it, right? Oh, yeah. And a lot of these people are then going to immediately pivot because they have no principles, right?

1:01:19Just chasing money. A lot of these AI experts are going to be to go on LinkedIn and change their byline to AI project cleanup crew, right? Like, I think the time to be competent is right now. Like, I pay my team entirely through not doing AI. I'm the only fucking guy out here in Melbourne I know that isn't just doing AI projects 24-7, right? But the market is there, and it's maybe the easiest it's ever been to find sensible clients because now they're all signaling when they're insane. Once the bubble blows up, I'll have to find out by, like, signing the contract and finding out if they suck on the day.

1:01:56Now I don't have to. I just need to see, can they make it through a 40-minute conversation with me without asking me to pivot their whole business to AI? And if they don't do that, they're almost certainly awesome to work with. Well, thankfully, my rautism allows me to document every single person I've ever seen mention AI. And it's really easy to tell. And by the way, every listener of this show, your civic duty when this breaks is take screenshots and respond to anything anti-AI someone says when they try and pretend that they never fell for this.

1:02:30This is going to be, like, the Super Bowl of this you images. I've been keeping, I have hundreds of screenshots of people saying stuff about AI.

1:02:42And, like, the dumbest shit in the world. I cannot wait. I'm going to be quote posting so much my fucking trackpad breaks. I will keep a folder and then I will send it to you right after you invent a death note, right? Oh, no, no, I don't want these people to die. I want them to be alive to read how much I'm going to post about them. I need them to, like, they need to be alive so that they can suffer by facing the truth again and again and again.

1:03:12And I think it is going to be funny. It is really, it remains funny to me, though, that these people still, that there are people who are still questioning whether there's a bubble. Like, it's just, it's remarkable to me, in fact. I don't know anyone sensible who's questioning it. Even people I know who are like, I really like AI, they're like, this is clearly a bubble. Like, it's fucking over. It's Jova. Well, you know what? Much like this podcast there, Nick, where can people find you?

1:03:45Two places. So, the first one is my personal blog, ludic.blog, that's L-U-D-I-C, blog, or my company's website, which is hermit-tech.com. And we have a blog on there, too. Lovely. And you can find me, of course, on google.com slash google, and then type in Ed Zitron, criminal, and ignore all of the other stuff. Just look at the podcast. I, of course, will be back later in the week with him on a log. And who knows, it's earnings week, so who the, what the fuck's gonna happen? Who goddamn knows?

1:04:15Anyway, love you all. Thank you for listening. This has been Better Offline.

1:04:28Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matt Ossowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

1:04:58Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

1:05:38Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman.

1:06:10I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

1:06:43And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Turturro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman.

1:07:15And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone, from Seth Rollins. What are you doing with my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Turturro. It's called Happiness. Delivering Happiness. And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.

1:07:46Guaranteed human.