Son of Sam Altman ft. Ed Zitron
Added 2025-09-05 14:49:27 +0000 UTCEd Zitron returns to talk about the AI bubble, market concentration, and popular backlash. We also look ahead at what would happen when the AI bubble begins to pop.
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Comments
what is going to happen when all the people who have ruined their brains by becoming dependent on AI slop because they’re fully outsourcing their mental capacity to it.. what happens when they can’t afford to pay it $200+ a month to ask it questions
Jeremy Cohn
2025-10-09 15:06:11 +0000 UTCTerrific episode. The FB-Ai was a contender for title for sure. But this one is great too. It sound# in my mind on the cadence of "son of a preacher man".
Josep C.
2025-09-19 11:25:49 +0000 UTCA sufficiently magnificent curtain will necessarily bring into being an omnipotent and beneficent wizard!
Em
2025-09-12 19:17:04 +0000 UTCIgnoring constant egregious AI hallucinations that only get worse and worse as the training data becomes more and more inbred (genAI training on other genAI)? I'm sorry you're high on your own supply my friend. Generative AI has such a limited use case it's laughable and it doesn't work well at all even for those. Analytical AI is where real advancements are being made without the insane levels of wasteful and needless energy consumption. Western genAI is particularly dogshit. At least Chinese AI companies have found a way to make their glorified chatbots not use the energy consumption of Lichtenstein to generate an image of sonic the hedgehog flipping the bird
miramask
2025-09-09 05:16:26 +0000 UTCControversial view here but I think these AI systems, despite their abundant serious issues both technological and social, also are capable of producing a lot of value for their users. This space is hard to navigate - it’s easy for a well intentioned person to go wildly off course, misunderstand what is happening, and cause a lot of problems - yet we cannot make the strong claim that these systems are never useful. As a robotics engineer with 20 years of industry experience and a deep desire to see engineering be used for good in the world, I have been dismayed at the many ways AI will be used to surveil us, divide us, and mislead us, yet I also see great power in tools like the new crop of coding agents. A coding agent behaves like a junior engineer - you can describe a program in simple language, and it can go and write the program, test the output, identify failures and debug them, and then return to you when the program is working. This is a fascinating capability! Never before has a computer been able to produce such things with so little human intervention. It’s not merely a compiler, it’s truly holding abstract concepts in its memory and creating code to implement them in the real world. I cannot impress enough that this is new, novel, and world changing. When you look at the state of old systems like GPT-2 which was just a few years ago, and you assess the state of the art of new research in to things like Vision-Language-Action models, you can easily get a sense for where this is headed. For my entire life, robotics has been plagued by the complexity of the real world. A hand written algorithm cannot easily interpret the fractal complexity of the real world. But these algorithms can, and we will see long imagined advances in robotics, software, and the very way computers operate. I’ve lived through a world changed by the internet and smartphones. These AI systems are absolutely going to advance and change things as much as those technologies have, for better and for worse. I can’t say if this is all a bubble or if it will continue rapid growth for a long time to come, or whether it is worth it in the face of so much energy consumption and resource extraction. But I must impress upon the leftist tech commentariat that this technology is genuinely powerful. It is not simply bullshit. It is not a magic trick which will disappear in a poof of smoke the way we saw with NFTs. These billions of investment are real efforts to buy a piece of what is to come. The market may over invest and correct, and we see this often, but the underlying tech is real. I think those of us concerned with the future and our part in it would do well to take this seriously. Dismissal is easy (and funny!) and most of these companies, like all startups, will fail. It’s easy to predict failure and be right. But I hope we can muster a bit of genuine insight in to how we as leftists can navigate the world to come, and that takes more than bemused dismissal. So many tech bros and fascists are going to find value in this tech to use it against us. If we dismiss it then our opportunities to fight back will pass us by. We must understand what these tools really are and what they mean for the future. We may, and I would encourage this, even find ways to use this capacity to our own benefits. I’ll be out there doing so and I hope some of you will join me. Thanks all for your work. You have brought me joy on this podcast for years. Love y’all. - Sequoia.
Sequoia Alexander
2025-09-08 17:37:32 +0000 UTC
