Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hi there. Do you like this post? Did you know that I also do a podcast called Better Offline? If not, please immediately download it on your podcast app. Follow the show. Download every episode. Share with your friends, and demand they do the same. I did an entire episode| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Like this newsletter? Subscribe to my podcast Better Offline - this week we've got a two parter digging into Sam Altman, with a deeper dive featuring Tom Dotan of the Wall Street Journal (Part 1) and Ellen Huet (Part 2, airing Friday.) I think you'll love the back-catalog too! The| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two part deep dive into the Rot-Com Bubble. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at the core of every issue that I've ever written about. It’s the force that drives| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Like this newsletter? You should listen to the Better Offline episode! In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
A few months ago, OpenAI showed off “Sora,” a product that can generate videos based on a short prompt, much like ChatGPT does for text or DALL-E does for images, and I asked myself a pretty simple question: "...how can someone actually make something useful out of this?" and "how| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murati failed to satisfactorily answer. When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI's app for generating video with AI,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Sorry! On Friday, Sam Altman was unceremoniously fired as CEO of OpenAI, with the board citing that he was “not consistently candid with his communications…hindering [the board’s] ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Greg Brockman, then-President and board member,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Please scroll to the bottom for news on my next big project, Better Offline, coming this Wednesday! Last week, Sam Altman debuted OpenAI's "Sora," a text-to-video AI model that turns strings of text into full-blown videos, much like how OpenAI's DALL-E turns text into images. These videos — which are usually| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
