Better Offline

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how society continues to manage rather than deal with crises, and how the AI bubble is yet another crisis resulting from a failure to deal with the complexity of the real world.
Last Week’s Newsletter: Hyperscale Normalization https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/
This week’s newsletter: Concentration Risk https://www.wheresyoured.at/concentration-risk/
Hypernormalization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 80% of Anthropic and OpenAI’s enterprise revenues come from the top 1% of its customers, and how the entire AI bubble is a series of different concentration risks supported by venture capital and debt.

Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/hyperscale-normalization/
Ramp Data: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1w5i9t4/ramp_80_of_openai_and_anthropics_enterprise/
Terrible Groundbreaker piece: https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom - please note that many of the numbers in this piece are wrong and it’s written by Claude, but the overall thesis is useful.

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Arif Hasan of Wide Left and Caleb Wilson of Kill The Computer to talk about an academic paper on AI slop, and the many reasons why LLMS can never truly make art.

Why Slop Matters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060

Arif Hasan
wideleft.football
x.com/ArifHasanNFL
arif.bsky.social

Caleb Wilson
https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the AI bubble has increasingly become Jensen Huang and NVIDIA feeding different companies money, and how NVIDIA’s revenue is mostly dependent on a small handful of customers being able to raise more and more debt every year.

EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!

Newsletter: The AI Hater’s Manifesto: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-haters-manifesto/
Bloomberg Article: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-500-billion-plan-envelops-164209178.html
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs.

Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport

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Email Me: ez@betteroffline.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.