Better Offline

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how organizations are freaking out after having to pay the real cost of AI tokens, and how the surge of competitive open weight models could lead to the post-bubble locally-run future of LLMs.
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley monoculture, and a monument to the cargo cult desperation of a tech industry that celebrates mediocrity and has run out of ideas.
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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it.

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Cal Newport’s “Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs To Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
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In a special exclusive episode of Better Offline, Ed Zitron digs into the audited financials of OpenAI from 2024 and 2025.

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Tech's hyper-growth era is ending, with online 100 million new people getting online between 2022 and 2023, and almost every major web platform seeing a decline in growth since 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how tech's decline is driving the tech industry to try and sell you useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI.
Original Air Date: 6.5.24
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