The AI Clown Car W/ Gamersnexus

Media.

Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. Goddamn, it's your host ed zychron I am bad, and we are returning with a returning champion of the show, Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, who's here to talk to us about how well the semiconductor companies are conducting themselves in this era of AI opulence. I think it's a good way of putting it.

Are you being happy with them?

Oh? Oh, they're great, They're so good. The clown industry has never had more candidates.

It's so strange, so you put out this wonderful video about the what's just we're out there are no more non clowns. It's just it's it's funny. There are no non clowns in the clown car. At this point, I think it's accurate. As we record this open up. They've recently announced that Open Eye and sp Energy of building a data center with Nvidia backstopping it. But it's not really a backstop. This doesn't feel like a real industry, Steve.

It's all it's all pretend and make believe. I think at this point, I mean, yeah, it's my favorite quote I've heard recently. I did see that news today, but My favorite quote was Jim Kramer saying I like data so much, data center so much, I wish I could live.

In one, which would Mike him.

Yeah, you weren't you on CNBC? Or was that?

I was on CNBC a few times recently, And they've not asked me about Jim Kramer living in a data center yet.

No, they haven't.

Okay, I thought I wanted to go and live in one, just so that he can sit around and just get deafened, I assume, because they're pretty loud from my experience.

Yeah, I mean it's there was. There's so much going on right now because locally, we had a data center town council meeting that was supposed to happen actually tomorrow, and I was going to go to that, and the pushback from locals was so much that they the applicant withdrew their application for the data center.

Where was this?

This was in Raleigh, Southeast Raleigh specifically is where they were looking at.

Because there were a few data centers over there, right I know. Cool, we've have.

Some cramp yep core weave. They they have a good amount of stuff out near the mountains out west, and uh, there's some of the one of the old like former crypto mining facilities, you know, it has been converted or in the process of being converted into a data center as well out there. So but yeah, I know they're they're popping up everywhere. It's just it seems like, finally, I guess there's a more widespread public understanding of what it means when a data center pops up. And it's I was talking with someone on the team about this.

Data centers have existed forever, right, and it's.

Yeah, interesting a lot of them.

Yeah, and they it's just like this particular type of data center for AI processing, Uh, it rightly gets a much worse wrap, and it's you know, it's far more power consumption, it's more typically more water consumption and potentially more land area. And it's they've they've sort of they sort of ruined it. For the rest of the data centers that have been around since the beginning of time, I feel like, but you know, they're all big structures.

It's just these new ones, and particularly the AI processing solutions, tend to be louder and more power hungry.

Uh.

And so I'm just happy to see though that people are you know, are finally informed on this stuff and showing up.

I do lot the amount of politicians who are like, now it's good for jobs. It isn't good for jobs, isn't good for jobs at all. It's good for the local economy. It's good for the local economy as long as the data center is being built, and then that stops, and even then it's how much how good is that actual the economy? We don't really know, And it's it's frustrating to watch this happen because it feels like something about data centers is just corrupting everything, like it corrupted.

I remember watching your video earlier today, watching Lisa Sue talk about this. Like watching Lisa Sue of AMD, who was before this, I would have genuinely been like, that's one of the good CEOs. She's a smart one. She doesn't give into marketing hype, she's no bullshit person. Listening to her talk about this stuff, it's like she's been huffing paint.

Yeah, she was pretty well liked. I mean, my experiences with am D over the years have been mixed, but broadly speaking, AMD has at least maintained the appearance of, if not the actual you know practice. I've been sort of an engineering first company, and Lisa Sue technically comes from an engineering background. I'm sure she doesn't do a lot of it these days, but that still counts for something.

And yeah, and so does Jensen, to be fair to him. But yeah, Lisa over the last year or so has shared the stage a lot with Michael Kratzio's from the White House talk about their AI action plan, and in that plan they describe things like getting clean water and clean air regulations out of the way of data center construction.

Good, oh good?

Yeah, yeah, I mean of things to put in your press release that would make a PR person go, wait a minute, So the the clean air part, how are we gonna how are we gonna spin that exactly?

Like, well, AI will make more clean app right maybe, yeah.

I mean it's so funny.

Well, because rewatching that video, I've seen a few of these clips of these various executives sounding like they're part of a Doomstakholt or what have you. And it's so strange watching people that even two years ago were like, yeah, and here's that. They're talking about things like inference and high bandwidth memory and like the actual financial sorry, the actual technical features of AIGPUS to just speaking in financial generalities, it's like it will be a thirty billion dollar, hundred billion, two hundred and fifty bazillion dollar TAM industry.

It will be so big, it will be so huge. We love it.

And you make the point it's it's become more about financial engineering than electrical engineering.

Yeah. Yeah, the whole thing feels like we've completely lost the plot of any of the technology. Like I, with some exceptions, I almost never hear these executives now when they're doing their various podcasts, which by the way, they've all gotten really onto the like podcast and TV show, and a lot more appearances than I've really ever seen from a lot of the CEOs. Normally, they've you know, they've historically kind of only wheeled them out for the big keynotes and then they disappear for six months, so that's been different too. But but yeah, it's out of all the appearances from Jensen and Lisa and everyone else, Sam Altman especially, you almost never hear anything actually technical now.

It's all how many billions of dollars or how many gigawatts? And that's kind of the start and the end of the conversation. Occasionally they'll talk about how it's going to create a bunch of plumbing and electrician jobs, while kind of you know, skirting past the fact that those will last for a couple of years at most, and then it's you know, the structure is built, so those jobs go away. But to your point, I yeah, I think it's, uh, the engineering side has completely faded. Which I wonder if I'm I'm not that that well informed on sort of the dot com era technicals, like how it actually built up.

Obviously I'm aware of what happened, but I wonder if you look back then, do you see a similar trajectory. Is it like it starts rooted in technicals and then that falls away over time and it becomes just pure money or is this different the way it's a discussed looking back.

The early days of the Internet were so vestigial that almost every article was basically re explaining what the Internet was, and the way they talked about it was in these vast generalities of like, okay, well so there's this that like just vaguely like yeah, the Internet, you know, it's pretty it's gonna be pretty big, or they get into very big ethical discussions, and a lot of the original pushback on the Internet was, Hey, we're just going to create a giant swamp of unverified information. Is this a problem?

And people were genuinely like, Sha, be fucking idiots, that'll never happen. It was, it's so funny. The pushback on the internet back then was actually quite smart, but for the most part, people were like, yeah, this could be anything. But when you read the articles about like Windstar, which was a telecoms company that basically was in a circular relationship where it borrowed money from Loosen to pay Loose and then use that money to pay loosent back for the loan that they were using to pay Loosen, And when you read their articles, fun fact, the only time I've ever been able to find a bubble where someone mentioned annualized revenues. Oh only other time it's the same bullshit.

But it would be like, yeah, and they're going to blanket the entire country with these dishes. They're going to be everywhere. It's going to be that. It was very high falutin very big numbers, but very very light on the technical details. Still heavier than it is now. Because the funny thing is is if we think about this thirty thousand foot view, taking away my critic glasses, putting on the booster glasses I use, and all you can see is yellow and blue. The thing that I think is, isn't this the time when the technology is the most important because they haven't made this profitable yet? They really haven't, Like it's very obvious they haven't, and you'd like, I keep every time I read about like Vera Rubin, for example,

next generation GP is Vera Rubin, right, every time I read about them, I get the same shit, which is, yeah, they're ten x more efficient or twenty five x and also they're twenty five x more efficient on deep Seek R one, a year and a half old model, And uh, yeah, you can't, like we haven't benchmarked that. It's not like we could benchmark with anthropic or open AI because if we did that, you might find out they're unprofitable.

And it's just it.

Every time you it's like a it's like being in a bad relationship where you don't want to ask the questions that you know would end in.

Do you know have you noticed the sort of dual narrative lately where because you were just talking about how you all to be, It'll be ten x the performance of whatever. So there's a performance number there. But then at the same time, I don't remember if it was core Weaver, who it was. Just last week I saw a an interview with some executive who was talking about the cost per GPU hour being two dollars previously and now those devices are four dollars.

I don't know if this.

Rings a bell to you, but yeah, no, I remember this, Yeah, And so the narrative that was being constructed by that interview was one of, look, even the old, the comparatively ancient technology from somewhere between you know, three and six years ago, is more expensive now or is more effective now and is still useful. And then obviously on the other side of it, you have the fomo of you need the absolute newest if you're a Rubin or what the fuck are you even doing?

You know, right, So.

It's just it's the have your cake and eat it too set up on the GPU side. But on the consumer side, like the end user side, all I saw was that our old GPUs are worth more than ever. Conversation was like, oh, this is bad, this is like because now now you're just you're the last bastion of hope I think for consumer pricing was Okay, well maybe we'll get the scraps from last generation. And now they're saying they even need that. So well.

The thing is, there's a few wonderful parts of this. Number One is I saw that it was saying there was like, you're getting instead of getting to something per black quail, you're getting four something an hour, right right, That is not enough to cover the costs. That's not even fucking close enough. I have an Oracle contact who told me that this is someone with actual info experience.

They were saying that it costs like six something dollars an hour in opex just to run a GB three hundred. Wow, So I don't think four bucks an hour is going to do it. And this is the story no one really wants to talk about.

This.

One's where it's like, yeah, when you're selling spot pricing to the desperate, you can make more money. But when it comes to the longer ones, when it comes to the longer duration contracts that costs that the cost drops, it drops dramatically. Oracle charging two something an hour per H one hundred GPU and H two hundred GPU for open AI with their contract, and again, no one really wants to talk about this because it's like, if you're getting two to four dollars an hours for this shit, okay, so maybe you'll break even in ten years if you have constant utilization, right, if that works, And even then it's like, wow, you have a gross margin of thirty percent. Mate, you want to start an airline? Like like what the folk,

This isn't really much of a business. But then you go and you hear these things that Lisa syl Jensen, Huongo, sam Aultman are saying. It's like, yes, the next industrial revolution, it's gonna be huge. You're gonna make so much money. Everyone's gonna be rich, everyone's super rich. Everyone's so buy a GPU, by seven of them, by as many as you can. We need to sell them. And it feels like living in an alternate reality sometimes because yeah, the math isn't that to me.

You know, well, I think it's also the government investment in all of this, or the increasing government investment, or the individuals in the government invest in not a Yeah, I.

Mean, well, the Trump's investment in Nvidia.

Right, millions of dollars transact. Yeah, I was talking with someone on the team earlier today and he made the comment he was asking me, you know, if there's all these data centers and this massive demand for storage now as well, if the average person is using chat, GBT or claude to make a spreadsheet at most or be a chatbot, you know at least like that doesn't require all that processing power and storage, And so what is it?

And then to me, it's I don't know if this is too conspiracy brand or not, but the dots I'm connecting are the government's really invested in that? I guess the success or at least the prevalence of data centers and AI companies. Some of that could just be as simple as no administration wants the economy to fail on their watch, so you know they they're invested in it.

But also you see stuff like flock cameras popping up everywhere in axon cameras and drones and all of that. That's what requires data centers. Like that's it, Oh yeah, to process it requires the GPUs, I think. So it's too The storage definitely is.

The storage, but you don't need an AI data center for that.

I think the only reason you might And this is still something I'm kind of playing with the idea of so I'm not sure on yet, but I think the reason you might find the GPS useful is to start connecting large complex matrices of information you have on people or objects to each other, like this is something that I you know, this is this is something that GPUs should be good at in theory.

But this is the thing though, to push back on this, because I think the a fair amount of emails people saying this is, this is this is the thing. I'm afraid of the government surveillance, Ah, the Department of I think like there's multiple different government agencies that work directly with Oracle and already have and already have that like they already have they already have like bunches of GPUs.

So if they were going to do this, they were going to do this, they've probably already.

Done it, right.

Well, I think the difference is a lot of this new stuff is being rolled out by private companies in large volumes, you know, just like the cameras alone, I don't know, it's something like six months ago it was eighty thousand flock cameras and now I'm not sure what it is. It's definitely well over one hundred thousand, and it's a private company. There's a lot of data. I'm not sure to what extent they currently process this stuff, but definitely to process image or visual recognition data against video frames is a very computationally intensive task that would require data centers.

Right, So I'm just saying that all of these data sets, you don't need all of these data centers.

No, definitely not.

You definitely don't. And it's not like they're doing CDN shit where they need to have it delivered to all points of the world. I'm not saying that this could never happen. It's just the I don't think the reason they're building all these GPU data centers is because of that. I think that they'reing all of that because they don't know what they're fucking doing.

Yeah, I think it may actually just be really simple, to be clear, I don't think they're trying to they're building all of them for that. I think that is a use case of them and is a reason that you know, government may be interested in being invested as well. So yeah, by and large, no, that's not like the main use case, and you see things like it's kind of the same discussion as the taking ownership of software and hardware into the cloud, where no, they're not building all of the data centers to take gaming away and put in the cloud. That's like maybe a couple here and there for GRS now, right, but it's just another use case where I don't know it's It's kind of like, I guess what it comes down to is whatever the

problem is that you have or think you have as a private business for a government, the data center is going to fix it for you, right, you know, there's.

A panacea for your business.

Even though when you go and look at the actual returns for businesses, there was an open AI study that came out that said it said, it's hilarious. It was like, there is no connection between revenue per employee and the amount of tokens used. Okay, four years in four years, in four years, and where are we? We're here and we all know where. We absolutely fucking know what other than the fact that Jensen Wong has to create like some sort of weird financial engineering not quite en Ron, sort of Enron Enron esque and Ron Jason thing to sell as many GPS as possible.

Hey, what can I ask? So as as the person I know who is the most knowledgeable on my favorite company? Enron?

Uh what to you? What?

What's the what would break the damn you know what bridge is it from being Enron ask to being more? Actually just know this is literally Enron, Like this is what they did? You know, what's what's the defining or what's the distinct feature that we're missing. If I'm Jensen Juan and I say to you Ed, you could you say I'm Enron ask? I really just want to be Enron?

You know what do I need to do to get there?

And the thing is the thing is though, like Enron was just nakedly illegal, Like that's that's the big comparison. Things like everyone would take these SPVs and take their dat or their bad parts of the company and just dump them there and be like, ah, well look our this is fucking brilliant. There's nothing wrong with this. I think that this isn't it. This is an opinion with no with absolutely no financial information that I found just looking at the financial and open Ai. Open Ai has a weird thing in their financials that I've mentioned, which talks about moving losses onto different entities. That's that's weird.

That's I can't say it's Enron, but it smells like it. In video, on the other hand, has been smart in the They never in video, never uses its credit. In video always gets something invested for this. So, for example, this sp Energy deal, in Vidia is guaranteeing they're investing one and a half billion dollars in sb Energy, who's building the data center, and they are guaranteeing the value of the data center up to one hundred and six billion dollars if it gets completed. Now, because we have financial markets and credit markets run by people with no object permanence, they see that and they go, well, in video has guaranteed that this data center will do this.

They don't make the link that what happens if the data center doesn't get built. And the other thing that in video did there is they said, okay, well, if if open Ai can't rent this, you can try and find someone else. And if you can't find someone else, we will pay you the difference between whatever you can sell it for and what it sells and what is one hundred and eight billion. Again moving never quite en running, never end running up. They're very careful to not go full en run.

And the full en run really that that leap into just distinct illegality.

Yes, and that's that's why. So for example, with Enron, they were just committing fraud. You can't Enron never published the balance sheet or like, which is fucking crazy. Like anyone who saw that company was like, oh, they publish a balance sheet. That's fine, kind of kind of should have seen that coming, right, I've seen that one. That being said, I've said this in the premium recently. They're a lot more like General Electric, who would just invest in their clients lend them money. Again, Nvidia hasn't lent money.

That's where they're really. They've been quite smart to not actually become a creditor, so they'll back They backstop a core Weave lease, as in, they agree to pay it if core Weave can't pay. They invest in core Weave. They are instead of offering up their credit, they're like, we agree to buy a certain amount of compute from core weave, so you can say core weave has revenue.

They exploit the financial.

Foundation of course, otherwise, oh.

God, I forgot about that.

So wait, what is the they rented through core weave? Right, that's his weird nonprofit.

I think that's the what the connection was. I'd searched it a while ago for a while, but yeah, So the Juan Foundation is some kind of nonprofit also rent some coal wave. Yeah, it's and they basically say, you know, we're renting this GPU capacity for I think it was for students.

Was Yeah, they donated one hundred and eight million dollars worth of coal wee AI computing resources for research.

Which is just like so crazy to me because it's so beautiful. Yeah, you have this on one hand, you you run and own part of a company that sells the GPUs. The other you've got this foundation that's supposed to be you know, your own thing. And then it's it's getting involved with the customer of the first entity to create the band for the customer that's.

Not legal company. It's all legal. Yeah, right, it's legal, baby, don't worry about it.

It's all legal. It's totally fine. It's all good.

Don't worry about it. It's fine. But this is the thing.

When you push back on financial journalist business journalists about this, that's what they say.

It's all gap legal. It's totally legal.

There's nothing illegal about this, And it's as if if something isn't.

If something isn't literally.

Illegal, then it's okay. Then it's totally fine, and actually people should do it more and it's not a bad sign if what I think, like twelve percent of core Weave's revenue comesman video, it's largest supplier.

Well, Jensen did say we played that clip again in this video. Oh yeah, yeah, he did say something to the effect of, with that on video, they don't exist.

Yay.

It's just look, I love it. I love that shit. I loved it because it's just like, wow, okay, you're just saying it because you know, no, this should something like that should have the sec go and like, whoa, whoa, what do you mean you're doing that? Because I swear there is regulation around round tripping. Yeah, it's meant to be, I believe maybe. I mean, who gives a shit? Right, there's so much of this when you go to like when you go to the AI boosters, you're like, yeah, this is a problem that goes It's actually great. I saw one that one of our favorite analysts, that Daniel Feller the other day posting like people will criticize this is a circular financing, but what I see is one of the most successful venture capitalists in history. It's like, yeah, true,

the balloons that the clown in flights are so full of air as long as the clown keeps inflating them.

And I like Jensen was asked by Axios, you know about is this a bubbler or something like that, and Jensen made his counter, well, the bubble will come someday.

It's not today, but it's in five to ten years.

Yeah, and he describes how we're in the beginning of it. The next word started with the B and I was like, please be bubble, but he said build out unfortunately, and the I don't know you could see it. First of all, I don't want to like analyze the body language really, but he did definitely have kind of a it was.

It was a very measured I need to carefully think about this answer, split imagining.

Call it cress with a gun. Just let the CFOs like, don't say it. Jensen, Well, he said the other day that compute should become an investable asset class.

And it's just it's just the.

Exactly what's the people who are like compute should be traded like a commodity, and it's like gun to your head, tell me what you think compute means?

Yeah, what is that? Even what is compute as an asset class?

Well, asset class GPUs should be traded as that, but also compute should be sold as a commodity. None of these really make any sense if you think about it for even one second.

It's I need to declare my storage room full of GPS we've tested as some form of some for some separate line item on the taxes going forward because of the theoretical compute they could produce.

Your commodities trader. Now great, well.

The famous thing towards the end with Enron though, and just to be clear, and video is not trading compute, but towards the end of Enron they were going to trade bandwidth. Hm hm, I mean if Jensen gets it, I mean we've already got some people trading power. You've got Meta doing it, Apple doing it. So that's we've already got a little bit to look forward to there.

But the other thing is if I want to see in I personally want to see in video it do more financial engineering. I want way more than this. I want to see in Nvidia just buying compute from itself.

At this point, I mean they're not far from it. But yeah, I the energy stuff too has been kind of wild because the government is getting really involved there. You know, Like months ago, Trump talked about the sort of early concept of the bio power plant plan.

Which is well, sorry, I must have missed that one.

So basically that's my name for it. But he the plan of companies to provide their own energy. So if they need energy for their data centers, then the companies are either or through one form or another, going to provide that energy. And the sort of pr play was that this would help prevent rising energy costs on residents and locals. And when I say pr play, I mean President Trump literally in the meeting said data centers need some good pr right now.

I mean colon pulls and strikes them, mister.

Trump and h and so the concept of, you know, the data centers will be more responsible for bringing online and provisioning their power that they need, which I could certainly see how if that's that work. Well, I mean that's definitely the first question. But from a pr standpoint, I guess if you strip all detail out of it, you can see how that that might win some people over if they don't really think too too deeply about it, because like okay, yeah, I mean they so they pay for their own ship and I don't have to pay for their energy. Right, But energy is like a terrifying thing to not be fully regulated. Like energy is dangerous to do wrong, like actually dangerous. You know, it can kill people.

But also just there's only so much of it, Like it's I think people AI people especially really underestimate how difficult power is.

Yeah, they're just.

Like, oh, yeah, you know, it's just fucking start up and they just boom, fucking do you want you need some power or something?

What you have been a dick about it? It's fucking you.

Know, just well, that's how the gas turbines, right, if you just drop gas turbines on the roof of the data.

That's the crazy thing. I read this story the other day where it was saying that the gas turbines are dying because they're not meant to be run. They're not meant to be run all the time.

Yeah, which is just for emergencies. It's like stuff that female will you know, will deploy.

Dude, And they're everywhere. I know, it's stargate, Apple and they're they're everywhere. They got them all over the shop.

It's just so strange.

I mean, you are a died in the wall hardware guy. You've been dealing with hardware for years, and I think you've successfully cammen on to the fact that this is no longer about hardware or GPS or anything.

That's about It's about money. Honey. Yeah.

Yeah, the technology stopped mattering. I mean they don't even really even in the keynotes now, which I still watch really closely. Jensen used to be so technical, even with the early machine learning and deep learning stuff before they rebranded to AI. Like I was at some of those earliest conferences he did. I was at the really awkward GtC where he and Elon Musks got across from each other on stage, and.

That was a.

I could feel the secondhand embarrassment from just fifty feet away from them, and all of that there was. There was always pandering to investors, but there was also a lot of technical detail. Like I could walk away from a keynote and write a really dense right up about the architecture of some brand new thing they just announced, and now there's like I'll watch keynote and at the end of it, I'm like I Honestly, I don't even know what the difference is between this generation and the last generation without going and looking up a white paper, you know, like it's right, they've stripped it all and there's still technology there, but somewhere it just yeah, it just doesn't matter anymore, which is real depressing because it's like,

even if I want to cover the pure technology side of the architecture, it goes into enterprise products and then say to the audience, you know, well, we cover this stuff because hopefully this comes to consumer at some point some capacity, which is typically how it's been done in the past. Even if I want to do that now, it's like they're not even really putting the effort into making those materials as widely available as they used to be because it doesn't matter and only the money matters.

I just don't see how they soble the Like I've been digging into Broadcom recently and all, like pretty much every time you read about a semiconductor company, well specifically AMD and Video and Broadcom, it's like, yeah, and I mean for the future pretty much, we need hm, I don't know, oh, everything to go perfectly for the next three years because all of our revenue growth is coming from only this like Broadcom I think is I think like over sixty percent of their revenue in the next few years is coming just from AI, which is mostly coming from Google's TPUs.

I mean it. I don't know. The thing that comes to mind, like when you said that everything needs to go perfectly for three years. It reminds me of just when I played games as a kid, like board games, so Chess or Magic the Gathering or something, but Chess in particular, where you know, you're a turn based game, and it's like you could come up with this master plan of how you're gonna win as long as everything goes perfectly and they move their pieces in exactly the wrong way for the next you know, thirty minutes. But like, this's not how reality works. And it does seem like these companies right now are I don't know if they're.

Sometimes it feels like watching Jensen some of the other like Open Eyes, you know, Sam Altman speak. It feels like there's a little bit of acknowledgment now of things might not go perfectly, but we just kind of need to keep the facade up long enough until there's some major breakthrough where we can get more money pumped into the system. And that's that's kind of what it feels like I'm watching lately. Is the sales pitch for we need to dig up the next one hundred or five hundred.

Yeah, we need to make this all work perfectly without fail.

It's pretty much it.

And even when they ask about they usually eat Sammy's done this Jensen stunt. It's like, yeah, you know, some people.

Run out of money.

How'd you like Sam's new comments about what the genie, Oh the genie was that was a pretty good one. But also the comments about how some descendant of chat GBT will be able to see everything you ever do on your computer screen.

He's so good at this.

He's so good at this because it's like, I'm sure you remember when Microsoft did they announced Microsoft recall, Yeah, and everyone's reaction was I'm going to kill you. I'm going to burn down your house. Do not touch my computer. I will murder you and eat Microsoft, who could push through just about anything. We're just like, eh, no, we're just gonna skip this and then open AI turns up about ye la and goes, fuck yeah, bro, fuck me up.

We're gonna look at everything you do and Orman is there being like, yeah, we can see everything you want, you do, everything you've done, and suggest you could do something else, which is great because again it comes back to the classic thing of AI. It's when we think about AI as a society, it's a cultural thing. We think, okay, AI, it's this thing that just knows everything without us telling it makes smart decisions without us really having to. But this AI is feed is much datrus humanly possible to this and maybe it will work one day.

Yeah.

Well, and you also see this and things like this video is not up yet for us, and I don't know when you're air in this, so this might go up a little before us.

But we have.

A deep dive into some specific smart TVs right now and other places. And you know, if you really go through the privacy policies of these companies, the stuff they tell you they're doing is crazy like, and that's the stuff they tell you they're doing, and it's all data collection and data harvesting, and now of course they've all got AI tacked onto it. You know, there's in one of these smart TV companies they have a special exhibit for their AI features, like Exhibit A AI Connected functionality and you read through it all and it's just it's they straight up say we tell your data like they just tell goods. You know, it's yes, right there. And this couple of things like ACR Automated Content Recognition, which

depending on that the deployment has the capability of screenshotting you show what you have on your screen on your smart TV in some cases and transmitted it back to be analyzed, or converting it technically into a fingerprint transmitting that back to be analyzed. All of this is mountains of data. They all really want to deploy AI to process it. We received some tips from viewers who say that for now they're hiring staff to manually parse advertising profiles for TVs by looking at the screenshot data and stuff like that. But the goal is to move it all into some kind of LM that just magically does all this for you. And I guess that's kind of the dream client for a company like open AI or Anthropic.

But even in that dream client scenario, it's just wanted to be to b us and too. It's like a strictly evil use.

Yeah, and it's also I don't know they've.

Yet to do it, like I feel like if they had a super secret source that was great for surveillance, that worked really well, and someone would be buying it and paying more for it than the cost of operating it. Which when the direct topics it seems to be happening. It seems that people that you when you talk to, when you talk to like an average enterprise customers like yeah, AI costs are already too high, why do you do it? Well, all my friends are telling me I have to do this.

If I don't do this, I'll face competitive pressure from people that are yelling about how good AI is.

I have an interest in one on that go on, Yeah, I have. I have a friend who works at a game development company, and a pretty large one. And so the directive, as I understand it from internal now at this company is that AI use is an expected part of their job, meaning if they don't find ways to burn tokens on queries, then they're not doing their jobs.

Great.

Yeah, And so the internal moved for management has been everyone is sort of in this. Your mission is to figure out could AI help you with your job, by which they mean try to get it to do your job, and then present that to management. And if the answer is yes, you know, well, I guess we'll see what happens to that job later.

Yeah, good luck on that one, right.

But it's just the crazy part to me was the even the people who don't want to use it in a creative field for a distinctly human thing like creating art of someone you know, writing or literal art or whatever, for that field, it's even if you don't want to use it, you have to because the executives have decided that this is how your job is to be done.

I guess in their eyes it's like refusing to use your email or something, which.

Is I don't think they do any real work. So the bosses are just like, the bosses are just like, I just use this thing.

Because I read this.

Nick Sireesh, who was on the show a few weeks ago, was talking about this how there's just this corporate pressure that if you are not saying you're using AI in the loudest voice possible, your peers will say they use AI more, and then people will get mad, and that there's this chain of this kind of dereliction of duty where everyone is saying they use AI so that no one else, no one will ask the question of how useful it is or when they do, they just go dies somemahawk a hundred hundred times more profitable. Of course, at the productive side of the business is just number go up so bit right.

But it's so fitting to me that because what you're describing as sycophancy, you know, where if telling the executives, yes, I'm using it and it's great and it's making me so productive. Even if it's not true, that's sycophancy, which is there's something that's just the irony, I guess is perfect where it's like because AI lms as they're deployed, by and large, are sycophancy machines.

Yes, they're they're glazing machines.

Right, Like, we didn't talk about this one yet. Sam Altman's tweet from a couple of weeks ago when he said he had a great idea after talking to some people about Oh.

God, yeah you know I know the one no hit me with it.

Yeah, A great idea after talking to some people at work that what if you asked your kids about their day and about things they were interested in, and then you use the AI to generate a podcast to maybe talk about one kid's birthday and the other kids upcoming sport events, and then they can listen to this podcast that you've generated for them on the ride to school.

Right, And there is of course no other way to do this.

No want to talk to them.

No, I mean like you could you could like, uh, I well, maybe you could talk to the child.

No no, no, no, no, that's not.

How else would you focus on business?

Right?

Yes, focus on business? Number go on.

And I think that was one of the highest liked replies to him, which I guess is the currency of our world now. But you know where they're like, or you could talk to your kids. But even if you do this idea of his, the thing I would worry about it is like this is it just seems so bad to just pipe the sick offency machine at children.

Like I mean, if you let children, if you let children use this shit, you were doing a bad job as a parent. I'm sorry, I'm unilateral on that.

Fuck you.

You shouldn't be using This is a bad thing for adults to use, and it's even worse for children that do not have I don't know any of the potential ways to protect themselves, right, Yeah, Well you know what Steve let's wrap it then. Now we've on a happy end, Steve. Where can people find you? What you're working on at the present? Give yourself a shout.

Out gamers and access on YouTube, and we're currently working on the smart TV investigations that'll be up soon.

And what you're investigating there.

The capability of converting smart TVs into covert listening devices without your knowledge.

Very cool.

I look forward to watching that and screaming of course at Zetron. You'll find me at at ed Zeitron on basically every platform. We'll be back with the monologue this Friday.

Of course.

Thank you so much for listening.

I love you all.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com.

M A T T O S O W s KI.

You can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's youreaed dot am to visit the discord and go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.

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