Reality Check

Summary

I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this day, people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the Earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their maws. Things are astronomically fucked outside, yet the tech media continues to tell me to get my swimming trunks and take a nice long dip in the pool.I apologize, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual.I don't know why I'm the one writing what I'm writing, and I frequently feel weird that I, a part-time blogger and podcaster, am writing the things that I'm writing. Since I put out OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry, I've heard nothing in response, as was the case with How Does OpenAI Survive? and OpenAI Is A Bad Business. There seems to be little concern — or belief — that there is any kind of risk at the heart of OpenAI, a company that spent $9 billion in 2024 to lose $5 billion. While I'd love to add a "because..." here, if not because it’s important to be intellectually honest and represent views that directly contrast my own, even if I do so in a somewhat sardonic fashion, nobody seems to actually have a cogent response to how they right this ship other than Hard Forker Casey Newton throwing a full-scale tantrum on a podcast and saying I'm wrong because "inference costs are coming down."Newton is a nakedly-captured booster that ran an infographic from Anthropic a few weeks ago the likes of which I haven't seen since 2013, but he's far from the only one with a flimsy attachment to reality.The Information ran a piece a couple of weeks ago that made me furious, which was a surprise because — for the most part — their coverage of tech, and especially AI, has been some of the best around, and they generally avoid the temptation to be shills for shaky and unsustainable tech companies. The story claimed that OpenAI was "forecasting revenue topping $125 billion in 2029" b...