1047 - Let’s Lose Lots of Money feat. Ed Zitron (6/22/26)
Chapo tech correspondent and AI skeptic Ed Zitron is back to mourn Our Keir, a good man struck down in his prime. What will the future hold for the UK, and are the writers foreshadowing 2029 in America? We then turn to the world of AI, where more and more companies are struggling to find an ROI on AI and OpenAI is burning unfathomable amounts of money. Plus: Elon Musk’s trillionaire status, the government banning AI models, and the cross-partisan desire to turn the clock back to 2014.
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Comments (197)
I'm sorry but as an AI critic, who likes Ed Zitron personally and used to respect his writing a lot, he is trashing the credibility of the show on this issue more and more every time you have him on. He got addicted to having hot takes and he's been making increasingly disingenuous arguments and outright lying. I can point you towards AI critics who take the problem seriously and meet it where it is instead of lying about it and handwaving about how it'll all just go away soon.
In particular his continued insistence on insisting these things can't write code is BAFFLING. as -- again -- both an AI critic and a senior software engineer, they write better code than 99% of people I work with. Anyone who has used them at all can see Ed is full of shit and it's REALLY embarrassing.
I work in dev and we’re all getting pushed to adopt AI more and more into workflows by higher ups, it feels more like trying to pilot a swarm of turbo interns than anything else, in terms of usability it’s definitely a gray area, for some repetitive shit it’s definitely helpful, for more complex stuff it might speed us up a small amount, but not orders of magnitude more like claimed. it’s making the job much less enjoyable too cause now I spend all day doing code review which is the worst part of the job. At least with coding your output is objective, creative teams being forced to use this is genuinely the worst cause it just burns money to produce garbage that literally no one wants
Omg drink some lemon juice before you talk into a mic, i can hear the fucking phlegm rattling around in your throat and is actually so unpleasant
One thing I appreciate about Ed’s appearances are how they always bring out a few rubes in the comments
I'm late but re Felix's comment about game development: ultra-long development cycles aren't a problem that can be solved with AI. That's generally caused by direction changes, which is a result of a million human things - budget, research, market changes, creative disagreements, executive meddling, and testing an idea and learning it doesn't work.
This guy is pretty insufferable
can tell all the bots and libs from the whiney 'I like u guys but having this guest...' comments. I sincerely hope all data centres burn down.
I dunno molesting your sister is pretty interesting
Someone needs to tell Ed that AI is great at spamming pro-AI comments on Patreon
Next time you guys talk about how software engineers hate it, you should have a software engineer on to explain why they hate it. This stuff does suck but Ed is just talking out of his ass
They checked with the sofware engineers and they agreed witn ed
Unpopular opinion: Ed Zitron has a fundamental misunderstanding of how people can incorporate AI tools into what they do and it completely jeopardizes the reliability of his perspective. You don’t have to like AI, but pretending that there’s only useless and wasteful applications makes me feel like he is stuck in opinion pieces from 2 years ago. Hearing him write off what Felix mentioned about the advantages was actually frustrating because he clearly dodged and either doesn’t understand or fails to understand how things actually work
Still waiting on this useful and wasteless application of AI to present itself
Felix thinking that the term “ideas guy” comes from gaming is so funny
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altman squirming about the balaji murder is crazy
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Eyuplovely was too busy beating his shit dry to be on this week
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All-time sweatiest guest. It's no wonder he's fixated on Elon, their thirst to be liked is unmatched
“Management consultants and ayahuasca victims”
Shoutout to Neil Young
I shared the last Ed Zitron ep with my boomer dad and might have got him to see the light on AI based on how funny it was!!!!
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In a hundred years we will all worship the loud hum of data centers. Our competing religions will be centered around which tone of hum is the true lord, and as someone who enjoys noise music, I’m sad I will miss it! It sounds better than modern America!
Not a single person on this podcast knows what the fuck they are talking about on this particular topic
its not profitable? its not useful in the specific way its been marketed? and heavily subsidized?
They should get the Mouth of Sauron from Return of the King to play Peter Thiel in the Altman movie
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Remember when guys like Ed would just complain about how AI couldnt count how many Rs there are in strawberry? Good thing AI hasn't advanced at all in the 2 years since!
Zach Braff should play Sam Altman
It’s ovah https://x.com/yaqobhyndes/status/1709978447840481494
I love this artist because everyone of his drawing could be either the most first degree nazi shit since A Wyatt Man but actually it's from an ironic Corbyn POV
Felix is killing it lately. I really appreciated the acknowledgment that non-chatbot AI is actually useful. It’s so boring to just constantly be saying “it’s capitalism” but the problem is 100% capitalism 100% of the time. It’s the market. It’s the incentives. This LLM thing is a science tool that can run a couple automated experiments while you sleep + it legitimately destroys the junior SWE market, which is a long term problem… so that’s just never going to be solved and it’s going to hit like a train in a few years since that’s most of the economy right? Idk it’s all fucked. Who cares? I’m grillin
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more astroturf in the replies than the kingdome
forget reporting how long until Felix talks. Tell me what time he first mentions family annihilation each ep
I think Felix is correct in that there are niche scientific and technical applications for AI, but that these are usually based on open standards and code and are therefore not a viable profit machine. Researchers can run OpenFold via PyTorch on hardware less powerful than Felix's DCS rig, and they have able to for years. The legitimate uses of AI aren't profitable, so that means we gotta crank out crap and build capacity for the sake of driving up RAM costs.
I hope Ed is right about AI… ahh it would be very funny if he’s completely wrong tho…😅
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Didn’t know there were so many embarrassing AI stans who listened to this podcast. “It’s so amazing guys you just don’t understand how amazing and revolutionary it is! 😭” Yeah I’m sure it’s been a game changer for your email job.
They all say he's wrong but can't really explain how other than saying a bubble hasn't burst yet
As a video game worker, let me assure you the long development times would not be helped by having an automatic process to do things like the fine detail rendering; we would just have to do more of it. The issue overwhelmingly stems from the c-suite, often the same business idiots Ed’s talking about here.
I took a machine learning class in biostats grad school a decade ago and my final project was predicting Kobe shots using historical Kobe data and no Shaq was a highly significant predictor of made baskets
Ed seems to have a really weak grasp on both how AI is being used and the financials surrounding it.
Little did we know that Mike Judge created Idiocrisy and Silicon Valley in the same universe.
Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself of the things you’ve overcome.
Will's ability to perform over-the-top fake laughter on cue is the thin strip of glue holding this whole show together
Amber is so off-putting
Does anyone else feel like Zitron kind of plays up his British-ness with the way he talks as a way of getting around actually being funny? Or is it just me?
bruh get joe weisenthal on
I unfortunately find Ed Zitron pretty far off about the capabilities of AI. He keeps claiming it doesn’t work or doesn’t work well but in my experience it’s extremely powerful and wrt software development the best developers I know think it’s great and incredibly useful
Those developers are probably not very good then imo.
Couldn’t be clearer this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, assumes a priori that AI is completely a scam, and hasn’t updated on the last six months at all. It would be awesome to have someone on the show who actually knows what they’re talking about to have a real discussion about all the absolutely insane shit happening with the AI companies right now.
Grok is this real????
ed zitron has been invested in AI being a bubble for the last 3 years. he has a really naive perspective of how silicon valley works and just assumes everyone's a fucking moron that doesn't know what they're talking about. Yes, some of them definitely are, but sam altman literally weaseled his way out of getting fired by the board of open AI as ceo, and replaced a majority of board members with his guys. a piece of shit? sure. but a dummy? unfortunately not. AI ain't going away. it's literally taking over education and all institutions in a way where you're forced to engage with AI when you look for work now, both in finding a job and dealing with the AI trained keyword searches after submitting an application. throw away your life applying for 200+ jobs a day you'll never get a call back for. they're also using it to bomb the shit out of the middle east ffs. This ain't a fucking bubble, un-fucking-fortunately. it annoys the shit out of all of us, and isn't that what our politicians really want? AI is basically what Matt Christman predicted the metaverse would be. they're shoving this shit down our throats whether we like it or not
To me, what sets Sam Altman apart is that he raped his sister
The. Nintendo. 3DS. Is. Fucking. Good.
amen
I miss the horrified sincerity of our mad prophet Matt Christman
It'd be much more interesting to hear from a leftwing pro-AI perspective like Matt Bruenig.
🤢
His example of the kind of valuable tech company that we used to build is... Facebook?
Ironic considering Ed Zitron is just Chapo’s Keir Starmer. A Boring unfunny twat. Sick of hearing Will and Felix forget to laugh at his milquetoast mum level takes. Get a more interesting commentator please.
We miss you Amber!
Fucking stoked for Chunks
Regarding SpaceX: https://youtu.be/sYA-z0Y8WRQ
If you need an AI to do your job then I can only assume you are routinely outsmarted by small dogs and those chickens playing tic tac toe at state carnivals.
Marlon Brando? how ‘bout Moral Brandon
That cold open was cringe af
Rip a good right bloke
Will’s work day be like: “Time to search Google for busty Latinas”
Ed Zitron is too optimistic, OF COURSE AI will get bailed out when it fails. Barack Obama himself will emerge from the stacks of his vast library to repeat the thing about Its Important To Look Forward Not Backward
“Computer Age” was covered by Sonic Youth, which is kinda funny considering they use fewer synths than Neil Young.
Unfortunately for Zitron, Anthropic is on track for something like 47B in revenue this year and the openai numbers he posted last week show that inference has positive unit economics, so all his blogging is probably for naught. Luckily he runs a PR firm that works for AI companies, so he's well-positioned to capitalise on this!
Even if this is true Im not sure they can keep it up. Ed is right that AI is unsustainable in its expenses and resources. If they make 47 billion they still need something like a trillion dollars to actually function and that is currently impossible.
Ed Zitron has made hating AI his entire shtick, yet has no idea what he’s talking about. I don’t mean just the technical stuff, I mean basic ass shit like financial reports. A billion legit critiques of the AI industry and Ed can’t get a single one right.
It’s truly infuriating
Claude code is an incredible tool for my scientific research. Being able to generate miscellaneous scripts in any language I need in a flash has helped my team tremendously. If AI could stick to what it’s really really good at, like code to support research, instead of being used as a cybersex vending machine, things would be a lot better for everyone. It’s a phenomenal tool when used correctly and can really blow open the doors of possibility for research teams on tight budgets.
I can’t believe someone pays you to post this
Please brother, can you spare a token?
I love nearly all the Chapo guests but ugh Ed Zitron sucks. Just wild “corporations bad” generalizations and speculation. The minute Felix tries to add a shred of nuance “AI has potential in drug-resistant bacteria research and gaming” Ed’s like “no that doesn’t count”. It’s boring. I’ll be skipping his next appearance.
Corporations are bad.
Amber.
Great discussion. Justice for Suchir Balaji!
Ed Zitron is a clown and glorified carnival barkers. He ultimately wants to drive engagement with AI as a world-defining paradigm shift
amber alert!
We're going to be listening to Ed in 2055 as an ever-present smog consumes our world. "Any day now, the AI bubble will burst!"
And to be clear, this isn't because I think that Ed is necessarily wrong or that AI isn't both evil and unprofitable, it's just that none of it matters. Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire and his companies aren't consistently profitable when looked at as a whole. Our own federal government doesn't abide by the laws of currency. The rich and powerful will always prop themselves up on the backs of the working class. We're in the fuckin' Matrix, man.
He was gay, Ed Zitron?
It's weird that in a spin podcast that aligns with my beliefs I am salty there is a guy that spins too hard, but Ed is def that guy
To the railroad example; Railroads at least have a very easily enunciated use that justifies investment. Nobody was hemming and hawing, saying “as soon as the trains learn how to grow legs, this technology will be worth more money than has ever been spent on anything.”
bad example, Railroads were actually a huge speculative bubble centered on when the first coast to coast line would open. And it did have a giant crash that took out the losers
Outstanding ep
Really cool to hear that Felix has the same opinions about Gen AI in game development as your average XBOX executive, really looking forward to more of his video game commentary
He phrased it poorly but it is very much true that there is a soul-crushing amount of tedious work involved when you’re a graphics programmer before you get to tackle more challenging and creative stuff. I know I would love to see at least some of the tedious shit automated away so I don’t have to waste hours of my work day on it.
It is refreshing to be reminded that it’s shitty everywhere, not just here.
Ed frequently references “clever accounting tactics” used by AI companies to obfuscate profitability, but does he ever specify what those tactics are? It was interesting seeing him get interviewed on Breaking Points because it wasn’t a complete softball interview like this.
He literally said here that they’re hiding inference costs as marketing to obfuscate cost per token sold
Bravo Felix, go ahead and put several thousand Indian art testers out of work so you can play GTA7 a few years earlier
Bangs
Totally sucks that zitron is the go-to dipshit critic of this rapacious industry. Never encountered a man more in love with the sound of his own voice than ed.
All podcast hosts and guests love to talk lol otherwise they wouldn't be doing it
Can we see Amber in the Baseball Crank suit? No shoes.
Dicks out for Kid Starver
One day Israel will be no more and I can drink Coca-Cola products again
What’s the name of the song at the end of the episode
computer age by Neil Young
I work one of the “watch out you’re getting replaced by AI” white collar jobs, and I have this constant cycle of the first time I use AI on a new task I’m like “wow yes I am definitely obsolete with this”, but then I look closer and realise it’s left out half the task or included loads of rubbish, and I spend the next day and a half trying to get the ai generated outcome to a decent standard. But the thing is we’ve had three rounds of redundancies in 5 years before there was even a whisper of AI, so I’m sure they’ll just let a load of us go and blame AI and automation. After all, shareholders don’t care if the ai produces shit as long as they get paid.
Like/dislike relationship with Ed, he’s knowledgeable but hyperbolic, and way too long winded. Glad to see him on mainstream news programs recently.
One of my favorite concepts i have ever read about is the idea of the "hadith hurler" from The Great Theft. It describes a certain type muslim extremist who will justify their beliefs or actions by simply quoting an appropriate hadith at you without having engaged with it or the context the hadith came from at all. The "but Uber lost a lot of money" people are perfect hadith hurlers, just throwing that statement at any critics with no analysis or context.
On occasion you may encounter a Christian fundie who's actually read the Bible (usually not an American, since they can't read) that does the same thing.
How the fuck does Ed remember all this? Equally impressive and concerning. Thanks for the insight, Edward
The minute Felix talked about the failure rate of AI to follow instructions I realized that the demiurge did not trap us in a time loop that terminates immediately before Christ's death, he fucking trapped us in an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Oh man, l thought l was alone in constantly seeing half-remembered ATHF episodes in the goings on of the world. It's like we're living in a world of Master Shakes Is this what it feels like when Meatwads cry?
Da'a centa
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Let sip the hounds of Starmer
Yeah, Ed has been away from the UK for too long. The Lib Dems and Andy Burnham are basically the same backstabbers. They only care about being Prime Minister just like Starmer did. He's already declared his loyalty to the American branch of power in public just like Starmer did when he got the Leadership role. He's actually been faster than Starmer when it comes to swearing his loyalty to the same evil monsters who oversee western chaos. Starmer didn't wear glasses and then when the election started he never was seen without them, that goes to today too, one long glasses streak after not wearing them in public at all. That's because a think tank told him to wear them. Guess who has just started wearing glasses when he never did? Burnham. It's literally the same shit but faster. XD I know Ed didn't like Corbyn but he at least didn't swear his loyalty to the Americans. Yeah, he was ultimately doomed because of how much he values democracy (too much, he couldn't pick a wallpaper colour without consensus and that's dumb but still.)
Burnham is also a longtime Labor Friends of Israel member, which should tell us exactly how his Prime Ministership will go.
AI bad, Amber good
Always happy to hear from Kath!
My favorite PR guy, he does the PR for our AI startup!
I know, right? Such cognitive dissonance. If you’ve read one (8000-word) Zitron article, you’ve read them all. He’s also super on top of his own PR, as I was observing on the Ed Zitron subreddit that he mods himself. Last week he was teasing some “huge drop” about AI that he was working on that he said would take down the whole industry. As far as I know, genAI is still going strong, unfortunately.
i’m not sure I buy a projection of American facing yokel Noble savagery on recent events in British politics. I think it’s a lot more closely similar to American events than that imagined reality, which is to say that their boomers decided to end their relatively coddled, frictionless lives in economic and political murder suicide because they are the worst fucking people to ever live
I do a lot of research in my job and I use AI search functions to aid in that. It's genuinely useful for some things and reduces some busy work. But LLM's are useful to quite a small niche. It's what is so bizarre about them being mass marketed. And no, no one has lost their job, it just makes our work maybe 3% more productive
Keep torturing the "software engineers" until they stop being pretentious and admit they're just programmers
We love Amber
Speak for yourself
Keir Dullard
I don't especially dislike Ed Zitron but it's pretty clear he either doesn't know how to read financial reporting document or does it on purpose for entertainment effect or because he runs a PR firm that deals with enemy AI companies. You really have to take what he says either as an elaborate prank or as extremely spun infotainment work. Which I guess is true of a lot of things but hey
❤️amber
Please get this lad onto Novara Live with centrist final boss Michael Walker, he is far too enthralled with AI
He is definitely the centrist final boss. Good lord
I’m glad felix got to have his friend on the pod.
Felix should pay attention to what’s happening in Australia because the Australian Labor Party actually managing to do some cool class warfare things like going after landlords (or at least, landlords who aren’t building new houses anyway)
Lol
They keep saying “getting things back to 2014” but Britain was already in the shit in 2014 with stagnation and austerity. Britain has never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. If they wanted the “good times” they’d have to aim for going back to 2006
None taken mate
Those shitty cab photos are actually structurally built in like the photo at the end of a rollercoaster.
Amber gave us an Oscar winning performance
Eh
Amber
it’s nearing the end of June. Last week, we had riffs on the glimmer man. The people of Chapo nation need Hesse Deni
trouble in river city is pretty good
I feel like most major western countries (excl US) are just becoming Greece
Yeah, basically. Definitely true for the UK and Canada.
12:37 all good I have no idea what the fuck we're doing either
"What's left is software engineers just being tortured in every company." Hasn't it been like that for awhile? Office Space touched on how brutal the industry was in the 1990s.
its our turn in the torment nexus machine
RIP kid starver
Jump Scamber
I work at a big-ish tech company. It's true that the higher ups are forcing everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in the company to use AI. It is truly baffling. They gave everyone access to these AI tools and said "find a way to use this in your job or else". Tell me, for what other software deployment would you do this? Imagine you go out and get licenses for SAP for everyone in the company, provide no training, and just tell everyone to figure it out and start using it immediately. It's absurd. I guarantee you that the AP clerk isn't going to build a tool that revolutionizes payables. They're asking people who already have jobs to take on second jobs: acting as consultants that evaluate processes and recommend and implement improvements. Except they aren't being paid for the second job and it's obvious that job is meant to erase their first job
I mean, makes perfect sense when you consider that stemlords think you are essentially training your replacement
I wonder if Felix might have hit on something with the "it's so good people will murder for it" AI/soda hype. I'm reminded of this being an actual story line in 2019 when the Popeye's Chicken Sandwich was launched. Three years later we have ChatGPT and other AI stuff being "so powerful" that it was coming for everyone's job and potentially destroying civilization, which were all reasons we needed to fund this stuff to the max as quickly as possible.
These are the connections I listen to Chapo for.
I’m an accountant and they’re making us start learning to use AI at my job. So far the only applications are that it can help populate an excel spreadsheet slightly faster
Scawwy!
One time nick mullen became a scary cloud and used his miasma powers to make me feel bad and gay.
I just hope the economy collapses in a way that destroys me personally. I've been sitting too high and dry
I shouted when I heard Amber
addressing my cat: That's Amber
My mom me mm I'll lm
It's nice to hear from Amber again.
Keir Starmer has a trash future.
iswydt
Rest in peace Keir Stalin
AMBER
To the tune of pet shop boys?
amber
Felix begins speaking at 2 minutes and 59 seconds
Who cares
So I have been hear for almost a year. What is up with the first and gay posts ?
commenting first because you're first is kind of a half century old Online tradition. the other one I'm pretty sure is ref to Stavros Cumtown who'd say "I'm gay and my dick is small" as a verbal tic
Amber
People really go to work at data centers...like do they not just think "ah yeah time to clock in to my job at the global warming factory"
I’d think the oil and gas industry contributes significantly more to global warming
AMBER
I hired BILL HADER! He’s AVAILABLE because the “Barry” finale left viewers DISAPPOINTED!
Support your local Zitron!
we love our angry British boy
of course this had to drop RIGHT as giannis gets traded smh
the way i screamed YYYAAAASSS when i saw this notification? happy pride month to me
Bloop!!!
Who the fuck IS Nick Mullen?
We've all asked ourselves that in our gayest moment
Oh hooray! Love Ed Zitron!
Speak for yourself
#BringBackBoris
I've been solemnly bonging for boris all day
Slop
My favorite action figures are playing!
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Amber stops speaking at 2:06.
Thanks! Love from Tel Aviv ❤️
Goon