751: Brewster’s Trillions
About this episode
The episode discusses the current state of AI, highlighting issues of trust, corporate behavior, and geopolitical concerns.
The AI hype train keeps shedding wheels this week. KPMG managed to publish a report about the transformative power of AI that was apparently riddled with hallucinations, fake citations, and imaginary products, proving once again that asking a stochastic parrot to do your homework is not a substitute for actual research. Meanwhile, Americans are using AI faster than ever while trusting it less than ever, OpenAI somehow turned $13 billion in revenue into losses that would make a dot-com CFO blush, and Silicon Valley CEOs have quietly stopped promising to replace all workers with AI. Not because they've changed their minds, mind you, just because they discovered that telling employees they're obsolete is terrible for morale and stock prices. Add in protests dogging Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta employees revolting against soul-crushing AI evaluation work, and the message is clear: the future is here, and everyone involved seems miserable. We then return to one of the founding principles of Grumpy Old Geeks: never build your house on somebody else's land. Anthropic learned that lesson the hard way when its AI models reportedly got caught in a geopolitical and regulatory tug-of-war…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jason DeFillippo, Brian Schulmeister, Dave Bittner
Topics covered
- AI hype
- trust in AI
- Silicon Valley
- geopolitical concerns
- Meta AI
- workplace morale
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: KPMG, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI
Places: United States
More episodes of Grumpy Old Geeks
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- 754: Frankly Asinine Questions
- 753: No-Talent AI Clowns
- 752: Grandma Got Run Over By a Tesla
- 750: Douchebag Ping Pong
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