In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Arif Hasan of Wide Left and Caleb Wilson of Kill The Computer to talk about an academic paper on AI slop, and the many reasons why LLMS can never truly make art.

Why Slop Matters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060

Arif Hasan
wideleft.football
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Caleb Wilson
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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the AI bubble has increasingly become Jensen Huang and NVIDIA feeding different companies money, and how NVIDIA’s revenue is mostly dependent on a small handful of customers being able to raise more and more debt every year.

EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!

Newsletter: The AI Hater’s Manifesto: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-haters-manifesto/
Bloomberg Article: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-500-billion-plan-envelops-164209178.html

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs.

Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/
Newsletter: https://calnewport.com
New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue growth is decelerating, and how OpenAI’s pause on model development and collapsing economics create the very real possibility it could collapse.

EDITOR’s NOTE: I incorrectly say at the beginning of this that NVIDIA’s earnings were this week. They’re next week. Sorry!

Newsletter: What If OpenAI Dies? https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/

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In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about the increasingly-delusional promises of the AI semiconductors industry, the rotten economics of LLMs, and how everything is becoming more frantic and desperate as we reach the end.

GamersNexus - There Are No Non-Clowns In The Clown Car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33Ohjufi9k
Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia
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In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by comedian Chloe Radcliffe and critic Ed Ongweso Jr. to talk about AI’s attempts to interfere with the creative arts, horrible little robots, Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible AI essay, and why we can’t respect people writing using AI.

Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th in NYC!
Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en
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Ed Ongweso’s newsletter https://www.thetechbubble.info/

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through NVIDIA’s entirely-theoretical $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership with various asset managers, all to keep up with analyst expectations that it will make more than $1.6 trillion in the next three years.

Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th
News Story: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/nvidia-wall-street-asset-managers-500-billion-ai-push.html 
Jensen Huang Tweet: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2086934705207959965?s=20 
WSJ story on Anthropic IPO: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-tries-to-shore-up-investor-confidence-ahead-of-blockbuster-ipo-0ff736ad 

Numbers: Consensus analyst estimates for revenue for the next three years are utterly fucking insane. NVIDIA made about $216 billion dollars in fiscal year 2026 - which ended on January 25th 2026, frustratingly - and analyst expectations have it at $393.7 billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2027, or a little under doubling its revenue year-over-year. In Fiscal Year 2028, expectations are at $565.7 billion dollars, and in Fiscal Year 2029, NVIDIA is expected to make $694 billion dollars. Over 90% of its revenues come from selling GPUs and other data center hardware.

I realize that’s a lot of numbers, so I’ll put it simply: NVIDIA is expected to sell over $1.6 trillion dollars’ worth of GPUs by January 2029, and the vast majority of its customers - including hyperscalers - are having to take out hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of debt to pay for it.

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI, with 7% of Microsoft’s FY26 revenue coming from OpenAI alone, and how this is cast-iron proof that demand for AI doesn’t exist at a scale that warrants any of the trillion dollars in capex they’ve spent.

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In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by Prof G Markets’ Ed Elson to talk about the recent slew of tech earnings, how analyst estimates show that 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues come from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the logical endpoint of his AI bubble thesis.

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In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how the media deliberately ignores reality to hide how Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s cloud growth is near-entirely driven by Anthropic and OpenAI, and how doing so threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m offering a sale on one-year subscriptions. Between now and midnight July 26, you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 - for life - https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/N9bqSLKBoS?ref=wheresyoured.at  

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In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by writer and software engineer Nik Suresh to talk about how AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making, weakening businesses and creating a culture of fear that demands workers lie about the benefits of AI to kiss up to Business Idiots.

Nik’s blog: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ 
https://hermit-tech.com/ 
Brainwash An Executive Today! https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/  

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m offering a sale on one-year subscriptions. I extended it exclusively for Better Offline listeners through this Sunday (the last time, for real this time), you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 - for life - https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/N9bqSLKBoS?ref=wheresyoured.at   

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