Pod Preview: Zitron’s AI Winter

Last week, Ed Zitron — a tech journalist covering AI with no fear, no favor, and no filter — dropped three podcast episodes on his Better Offline podcast in a series called, “The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble.” In it, he expounds and expands on posts from his “Where's Your Ed At” newsletter, which itself offers a compelling tale of a hype cycle that is about to run out of steam, due to a few key factors:

• AI is not delivering high-value products or systems to the market
• No AI company is generating sufficient revenue to overcome the expenses
  • AI doesn’t scale
• One chip maker (NVIDIA) and five companies are at the heart of the bubble
  • This makes the underlying substrate “brittle,” as any one company jumping out would cause collapse
• There are weird debtor relationships, almost a Ponzi scheme, around GPU chip sales and data center buildouts
• Money from Softbank and others is not forthcoming, Stargate has been downsized and delayed so much it has been effectively shelved, and other promised initiatives are not coming to fruition
• Even if some proceed, the timelines for building promised data centers and filling them with servers and staff don’t square with the funding available or the ability to maintain hype around tech that is already proving embarrassingly bad
• This all never made sense in the first place, and is just a desperate tech industry trying to recapture its glory days
  • Web3 fizzled, crypto is a crime-enabler, the Metaverse was a dud, VR headsets didn’t go anywhere, and they’re out of ideas . . .

Zitron is not alone in predicting an AI winter is coming — and a big one that might also chill all the major tech companies, those that hyped AI, and all the associated 401(k)s. While not alone, he is the most active and unabashed journalist in the space, and he is working the beat actively. His takes are pretty compelling.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss all this and more on our Disrupted Science podcast — Zitron’s insights, what they mean for scientific and scholarly publishers, and why perhaps we would be better served by unhitching our wagon from the AI train before it transports us into a frozen, lifeless wasteland of crippling expense and inevitable layoffs.

Our podcast — “Disrupted Science” — is available on all podcast platforms. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. We have a lot planned.

See you there!