Soundtrack: The Hives — Hate To Say I Told You So In the last week or so, but especially over the weekend, the entire generative AI industry has been thrown into chaos. This won’t be a lengthy, technical write-up — although there will be some inevitable technical complexities, just because the| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Before we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Masters of Reality - High Noon Amsterdam I have said almost everything in this piece in every one of these articles for months. I am not upset, but just stating an obvious truth. The current state of affairs effectively pushes against the boundaries of good sense, logic and reason,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
I feel like the tech industry is currently in the midst of the most bizarre cognitive dissonance I've ever seen — more so than the metaverse, even — as company after company simply lies about their intentions and the power of AI. I get it. Everybody wants something to be excited about.| 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
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
Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class.| 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
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At