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Newsletter: I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

It's blatantly obvious that generative AI is a bubble. The returns and products just aren't there, and yet the media compliantly prints whatever OpenAI wants, even when it's insane things such as "they'll make $3bn from an agent product that barely exists in 2025." www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

The media needs to stop trusting every single thing OpenAI or other AI companies says. Blindly printing that OpenAI will make "$25bn from "new products" that don't exist in 2029 is propaganda, not analysis - and doing so only seeks to enrich the powerful. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Every story about OpenAI feels bereft of analysis or conscious thought. Their agents don't work, they will burn $6bn on inference alone in 2025, they have no path to profitability, yet most articles talk about them like a gifted child brimming with potential. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

I'm tired of fielding the same half-assed critiques of my work, so I've condensed my answers into one helpful section - no, the cost of inference isn't going down, no, OpenAI isn't growth stage, no, it isn't like the early days of the internet. Come at me. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

The generative AI bubble - by which I mean the growth of ChatGPT - grew in part thanks to Google Search's failure to innovate. Most people I know who use ChatGPT do so for search, as Google has got so much worse at understanding what it is you're searching for. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

I also briefly want to address anyone writing about AGI: stop. Stop doing it. Kevin Roose's "is AI conscious?" piece was a joke, a thinly-veiled ad for a new job at Anthropic, and every piece like this seeks to misinform the public and galvanize the powerful. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

I do think AGI or something like it is possible with current technology and known methods, but there's no chance the gen AI companies will pivot because I don't think they even want it. It'd eat into their investments if they actually produced the goose. And they've also convinced themselves...

It is now actively illogical to act as if generative AI is a real movement. Analyst Josh Beck said last week that Amazon will only make *$5bn* from AI in 2025 - after spending $105bn in capex. And they're pulling back on data centers too. This isn't a revolution! www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

I’m finding ChatGPT to be a great search tool, particularly for getting started in a new area, or for wild ideas. Be sure to ad “show sources” to the question.

Yesterday I needed to know IRS taxpayer correspondence response times. Two questions and 2 minutes later and I had the URLs of 3 gov't webpages with the info. This kind search would normally take me half an hour or more.