In 2025, even those who can barely operate a cell phone have heard about artificial intelligence and how it’s going to shape the future. But while many are excited about the promise, tech journalist and podcaster Ed Zitron is suspicious of the hype. “All of these companies are claiming that large language models, OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the like, is the next big thing,” he says. “The problem is, the actual efficacy, the actual abilities of these programs, have been the same for about two years now. These companies keep growing, their stock valuations keep going up. But it’s not coming from any AI sales.”
Born in England, Zitron attended college in Pennsylvania and settled in Las Vegas, where he founded a public relations company. In 2020, he began the “Where’s Your Ed At” newsletter, a caustic, clever examination of the ways we’re failed by the tech that’s supposed to improve our lives. Last year, he began the award-winning Better Offline podcast, which has featured guests from former FTC chair Lina Khan to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu to comedian Andy Richter. Zitron spoke to Desert Companion about the AI bubble, the business idiot, and the honesty of Las Vegas. Here’s an edited version of that conversation.
What were your early experiences with technology?
I was the dumbest kid in private school and did not have friends. So tech really was my lifeline. ... I was fascinated by the fact that you could connect with people all over the world, that you could play games with them. I was actually a games journalist at 16, one of the first people to cover online gaming, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, in England. Yeah, tech was a big part of my childhood.
Is that why you’re so vexed by what’s happening to technology? It’s personal?
Absolutely. I hate these bastards. I’ll never forgive them for what they’ve done to the computer. There’s no reason it has to be like this, other than the fact that everything has to grow at all times: We must have more revenue growth every single quarter.
If you look at the people running these companies: Sam Altman of OpenAI, not a coder, not a technical guy. Satya Nadella of Google, MBA. Tim Cook of Apple, MBA. Andy Jassy of Amazon, MBA. Mark Zuckerberg, not an MBA; however, he has not written a line of code since 2006. They all love talking big business. They don’t know anything about technology. These people have no connection to code, to software. They don’t care: They don’t use their own products.
Do you think they know that they’re making the apps and searches and the things we use worse?
They know. They 100 percent know. … Mark Zuckerberg demanded 12 percent year over year, perpetual growth, and you had people inside Facebook at the time, now called Meta, saying, “Hey, by making these changes, we’re going to give people less useful notifications. We’re going to piss people off.”
As people get frustrated, can they keep the numbers going up?
We’re approaching a point where they’re going to start finding out — number is still going up, revenue is still going up, but you’re seeing weird cracks in it. Google search is so bad now, and the AI results are making things worse. On top of that, the large language models that run those things, those searches, those AI overviews, they’re expensive to run, and they’re not producing more revenue. So you’re watching the tech industry kind of get desperate, and the AI bubble is a big part of that.
Can you explain the AI bubble?
So, everyone’s saying AI is going to take all our jobs. If you look even an inch below that, you’ll see that the data behind it is complete nonsense. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, claimed that 50 percent of white-collar jobs will be gone in the next one to five years. Complete nonsense based on nothing. … The AI bubble is a hysterical event where these companies pretend — and straight-up lie — about what their products can do in the hopes that they can keep boosting their stock valuations.
So, you’ve got all of these companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and the like, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures to build these massive data centers and filling them full of these GPUs sold by one company, Nvidia. But no one’s making any money. In fact, these things are extremely unprofitable. OpenAI in 2024 spent $9 billion to lose $5 billion. Imagine if you or I did that. Would we be able to get more money out of the bank?
Of course not. So how are they getting away with it?
I have this grander theory called the business idiot. I believe our economy and the large structures behind it, the people in power, are completely disconnected from any kind of production or understanding of their customers. Not just MBAs, also the middle managers that you hate — the people that don’t seem to do anything, but always seem busy. They’re like the people inside the cave that Plato talked about. They see the shadows: “Oh, AI’s big now!” And I think you’re seeing a war between the business idiots and those of us who actually do the work. I’ve heard so many stories about bosses telling people to use AI. Why don’t the bosses use it, if AI is so good? Because it doesn’t work.
The main paradigm all of this is built on is large language models. They are probabilistic, which means that they generate the next thing based on how likely it’s the right one. So if you ask it for an image of a cat, these things don’t have consciousness. It says, “I’ve been asked for a picture of a cat; based on my training data, this is the thing that approximates cat.” And it’s pretty good at guessing, but it doesn’t know stuff. So you get hallucinations, those authoritative statements that aren’t true. It’s basically chatbots. The reason that they’re petering out and they’re plateauing is because they’re trying to make a chatbot do everything. They’re stapling things to chatbots and then being shocked as the chatbot cannot really do it. If you need proof, look at the fact that there aren’t really any products. What is the thing? Where is the thing?
How much of this AI bubble has been boosted by the tech media?
The editorial class of the tech media right now has failed. The people up top don’t know anything, and so many tech journalists aren’t educated in how to even investigate the basic things, to understand the basic economics. They’re educated to follow the markets: “Well, we should tell our readers what the markets are excited about.” You should tell your readers the goddamn truth!
You read the comment sections of these outlets and see people saying, “I’m tired of this crap. This doesn’t make sense.” I think that the tech media is worried about pissing people off, which I’ve never really understood — good for me, I guess. They think the powerful wouldn’t lie to them, that the powerful wouldn’t lie to the public, that the powerful wouldn’t possibly overstate their abilities, despite them always having done so.
If you see any headline telling you that AI is taking jobs, look a little bit deeper. Make sure it isn’t just a guy saying it. And if it is just a guy, ask yourself, “Why is that guy saying it? What does he have to gain?” Because the reporters aren’t going to do it for you.
What happens when the bubble pops?
It really comes down to how it pops. OpenAI has to run out of money. … They just got another loan. It took 21 banks, it’s all insane. If it breaks, it’s probably going to break with one of the hyperscalers, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, saying, “We’re pulling back.” They won’t say it like, “We’re done with AI,” but they’ll say, “We’re reallocating resources to focus on blah, blah, blah.”
I have a theory called the rotcom bubble, which is the reason they’re all going crazy with AI: They don’t have any other ideas. Do you see them talking about anything else? Do you see any other growth thing? They don’t have anything, so they will push AI up the hill as far as they can, because once they have to admit that AI is bubkes, they will have to admit that they spent hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, and then admit that they don’t have another growth mechanism.
Tech has always had a next big thing. What if they don’t?
You’ve done books on PR — are you doing a book on tech?
I have one coming out next year from Penguin Random House, Why Everything Stopped Working. The beginning is a history of growth, a history of how we got here, what I call the rot economy, the growth at all costs, going back to the ’70s of Milton Friedman through to Open AI today. The rest is “Why do I get scam calls? Why are there ads everywhere? Why is Google broken? Why is Facebook broken? Why are algorithms so messed up?” I really think that the tech industry has missed something. They don’t realize how pissed people are, how frustrated they are with everything.
What do you like — or not like — about living in Las Vegas?
I like how convenient Vegas is. This is one of the best food cities in the world, and people are still sleeping on it, which is great. Keeps the prices down. I think that this is also a very honest town. It’s a working-class town. No one’s weird because everyone’s weird. There’s no judging. There are people here who have been through the wringer, who have had really hard times, and the city treats them the same. You got money, fine. We’ll treat you a little nicer — as long as you still have it. There is an honesty to Las Vegas. I appreciate that it feels like both a fake and a real city at the same time.
