Welcome to another premium edition of Where's Your Ed At! Please subscribe to it so I can continue to drink 80 Diet Cokes a day. Email me at ez@betteroffline.com with the subject "premium" if you ever want to chat. I realize this is before the paywall, so if| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan - One Of Us Is The Killer An MIT study found that 95% of organizations are getting "zero return" from generative AI, seemingly every major outlet is now writing an "are we in a bubble?" story, and now Meta has frozen AI hiring. Things are| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Editor's Note: For those of you reading via email, I recommend opening this in a browser so you can use the Table of Contents. This is my longest newsletter - a 16,000-word-long opus - and if you like it, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. Thanks for reading! In| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In an attempt to catch up with Google, a company that has successfully destroyed its popular search product through sheer force of greed, Microsoft invested a further $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI (six days after laying off 10,000 people), hoping to make its own search engine Bing better, or more popular, but certainly not more| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hello and welcome to the latest premium edition of Where's Your Ed At, I appreciate any and all of your subscriptions. I work very hard on these, and they help pay for the costs of running Ghost and, well, my time investigating different things. If you're on the fence, subscribe!| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Thanks for subscribing to Where’s Your Ed At Premium, please shoot me an email at ez@betteroffline.com if you ever have any questions. Yesterday, OpenAI launched GPT-5, a new “flagship” model of some sort that’s allegedly better at coding and writing, but upon closer inspection it feels| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hello premium subscribers! Today I have the first guest post I've ever commissioned (read: paid) on Where's Your Ed At - Nik Suresh, one of the greatest living business and tech writers, best-known for his piece I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, probably my favourite piece| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Earlier in the week, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank and OpenAI's "$500 billion" "AI Project" was now setting a "more modest goal of building a small data center by year-end." To quote: A $500 billion effort unveiled at the White House to supercharge the U.S.’s artificial-intelligence| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too. Also,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, I'm sorry that I paywalled this, but it took me so much effort and drove me a little insane. --- Back| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris As ever, thank you for subscribing to Where's Your Ed At Premium. Email me at ez@betteroffline.com with the subject header "Premium" sometime if you have a question. Please ask your friends to subscribe too. Based on recent reporting by| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Have you ever heard Sam Altman speak? I’m serious, have you ever heard this man say words from his mouth? Here is but one of the trenchant insights from Sam Altman in his agonizing 37-minute-long podcast conversation with his brother Jack Altman from last week: “I think there will| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
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The Words of Ed Zitron, a PR person and writer.| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - Villains of Circumstance Listen to my podcast Better Offline if you haven't already. I want my fucking tech industry back. Maybe you think I sound insane, but technology means a lot to me. It’s the way that I speak to most of| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Hello Where’s Your Ed At Subscribers! I’ve started a premium version of this newsletter with a weekly Friday column where I go over the most meaningful news and give my views, which I guess is what you’d expect. Anyway, it’s $7 a month or $70 a| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
The Words of Ed Zitron, a PR person and writer.| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Next year is going to be big. Well, I personally don't think it'll be big, but if you ask the AI industry, here's the things that will happen by the end of 2026: * According to the Financial Times, OpenAI's Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas will be "fully operational," and| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Like this newsletter? Why not listen to the podcast version on Better Offline? Part 1 is out now (here're other links), and Part 2 comes out Friday May 2nd! I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better Offline? I have| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist." An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything. The most notorious example of this is| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: EL-P (ft. Aesop Rock) - Run The Numbers In my years writing this newsletter I have come across few companies as rotten as CoreWeave — an "AI cloud provider" that sells GPU compute to AI companies looking to run or train their models. CoreWeave had intended to go public last| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called "The phony comforts of AI skepticism," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated on the things [AI] can't do." I am not going to focus too hard on this blog, in| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
A week ago, analyst TD Cowen revealed that Microsoft had canceled leases "totalling a couple hundred MWs," with "at least two private data center operators across multiple US markets." The report also details how Microsoft "pulled back on converting negotiated and signed Statement[s] of Qualifications (SQQs)," which it added| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have used a compliant media and braindead investors to frame unprofitable, unsustainable, environmentally-damaging and mediocre cloud| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Bad Religion — The Resist Stance A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world — watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
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
In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: Spinnerette - The Walking Dead - (Alt: Postmodern Jukebox - Radioactive) Thanks so much to everybody that has supported me in the last year. This newsletter started as a way for me to process the complex feelings I have about the technology industry, and still remains, in a way,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More| 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: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay I haven't wanted to write much in the last week. Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: EL-P - Flyentology At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged. I am| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
You cannot make friends with the rock stars...if you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company. [There’s] fuckin’ nothin' about you that is controversial. God, it's gonna get| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
The latest episode of my podcast Better Offline is a conversation with Matt Stoller — America’s leading voice on monopoly and antitrust matters, and a thoughtful and prolific writer. You can find Matt on Twitter here, and his newsletter here. It was a timely conversation. At the start of August,| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened. On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text, Judge Amit Mehta| 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
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
Want to listen to this interview instead? Download the latest episode of Better Offline! You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you can insert an RSS feed. Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Daron Acemoglu — one of the world’s most important and| Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala) When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that| 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
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
Last week, Apple announced “Apple Intelligence,” a suite of features coming to iOS 18 (the next version of the iPhone’s software) in a presentation that FastCompany called “uninspired,” Futurism called “boring,” and Axios claimed “failed to excite investors.” The presentation, given at Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference (usually referred| 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
Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now| 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
Thank you to Emily Shepherd for her hard work reporting parts of this story, as well as her assistance clarifying details related to GAMA and finding company documents related to Rabbit and Cyber Manufacture. In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million for its “Next Generation| 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
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, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg reports that the| 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
As I wrote a year ago in The Rot Economy (and as I argued on the first episode of my podcast Better Offline), I believe that both public and private markets have become decoupled from the concept of "good business," ruled instead by a hunger for the eternal growth of| 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
