NVIDIAdrome with Steve Burke of GamersNexus

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey there, this is Josh from Stuff You Should Know with a message that could change your life. The Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring podcast playlist is available now. Whether Spring has sprung in your neck of the woods yet or not, the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist will make you want to get your overalls on, get outside, and get your hands in the dirt. You can get the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to this week's Better or Flying, I'm your host Ed Zetron. Subscribe to the newsletter, buy one of our beautiful new F***data-centered t-shirts, and join me in welcoming the wonderful and incredible Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus who joins us today to talk about how great everything is. I didn't know there was a F***data-centered shirt. Yeah man, we got F***data-centered, you got this shirt with like a skull where the U is so that you can wear it out, you're not technically swearing. I might buy one. We have the new Micro Slop shirt between the two of us. We're making the world the better place just like Silicon Valley. Yeah, I'm just worried that like someone's going to be walking around and do something wearing one of mine, but you know, it's not my fault. Yeah, so this year's GTC was, it kind of reminded me of this year's CES in the sense that it felt like a couple doing stuff to pretend that they were doing well, like being like, yeah, you know, we're great, we're going to Puerto Rico, we're going on vacation, we're feeling great. We love each other, we're only in couples counseling three times a week. It was so weird. Yeah, it was, I gotta say the DLSS appearance, the gaming appearance, I wasn't expecting just because- What happened there? What happened? Well, why was everyone upset? This part just completely passed me by. I, so DLSS is a gaming thing and one thing I wonder is that there's a huge amount of backlash towards it from just everybody. I mean, it's like one of the most hated things I've ever seen announced, so I'll get into what it is, but what I thought was interesting was, I don't know, just like Jensen's reaction afterward, where they had multiple statements and reactions. And I almost wonder if you're Jensen, if you look at that and you're like, okay, fuck gamers. Like, I- I mean, they're kind of already doing that already. They are, but I think, I mean, in like a more direct, less of a shrewd business decision and more of a no seriously shrewd guys. No, we actually don't. Yeah, we're just saying it out loud now. Yeah, so, yeah, it's basically a filter. It's an AI slop filter, more or less. They said it's not a filter and then they put out multiple different public statements that are like paragraphs long when you read all of them. And they say it's not a filter and then they proceed to describe a filter. But isn't DLSS generally good in that it adds frames? Like that's a good thing. DLSS has some things it's done pretty well over time. So it started as basically an upscaler and then it progressed to where there's been times where DLSS can be better than native while improving the performance just because of the way games render. Right. Yeah, different things. So I mean, there's certain types of, for example, fence posts or grates or things that have a lot of repeating pattern straight lines. Sometimes you have trouble with that at low resolution. So DLSS can upscale and sometimes even repair these things when they're rendered in a way that's just not good. But they've now attached this basically Instagram 2019 base filter to DLSS and kind of tarnished the name with something totally unrelated. It looks like they're trying to say, look AI, it has uses. Please give the bubble. And so it seems like it's not just like adding frames. It's attempting to fill in details. So it's almost like yassifying in some cases. This is really horrible. Yeah. So it basically, what it's doing, so they originally said that it changes, it uses color and some vectors on the screen to then. Improve things by using AI generation to do whatever it is they think is improving it. What they're actually doing. Nice. Yeah, they're changing the entire feel of the game. And I mean, you know this where AI generated images, especially when you ask them to be photorealistic, they all pretty much look the same, right? Yes. Yeah. There's no style. There's no character to it. And whether or not it's useful for people, I don't even care. I think what most people cared about was you're stripping all of the character out of the artwork. And you know, part of the art for video games is you have to work within these strict confines to make it rather of all. Yeah. And they strip it out and they replace it with something that just looks like the same slop everywhere. And Nvidia's initial defense was, well, but the artists can control it. And I think the answer to that is I find it very unlikely that the artists make these decisions. I think this is probably an executive level corporate decision of we're going to partner with Nvidia to use this thing. And if you're an artist. And then fire artists. So yeah, like. Yeah. Yeah. And also wouldn't it add a bunch of work to an artist anyway, because you'd have to tweak this completely separate thing that also is not consistent and is generative? Yeah. And I mean, it they didn't even show any like actual motion other than one game and it looked awful. Hell yeah. I think it's likely that the face detail slightly changed, you know, from scene to scene, because it's some form of generative. So it's it's not going to be perfectly consistent. So anyway, they're they're trying to shove AI slop into real time rendering for games now in a way that I will say I was, I guess, proud. Of the gaming community to see the amount of pushback was unbelievable. Like these large companies have done far more corrupt, terrible things in the real world with governments and data centers, whatever. And this got more pushback than that stuff. Yeah. I think everyone's just kind of fucking tired of Nvidia at this point, because it isn't really clear what Nvidia is doing other than selling more stuff. And it isn't clear who is actually using that stuff. I mean, I just the the indignity of watching a company with like a three, four trillion dollar market cap talking about open claw. Truly, like to this day, I cannot get a straight answer as to why you should use an open claw. I liked his in their pregame for GTC, where he made the comment to the other, I don't know, the podcasters about I think AI is going to make us all busier. Isn't it making you busier? Ha, ha, ha. What do you do all day, Jensen? Jensen, you're not that busy. I refuse to believe any of these people are busy at all. In fact, I think that they just kind of fucking sitting around, coming up with new ideas of stuff they can say at GTC. And then they go to sleep for three months. Yeah, I'm not even sure. It's just not even a good. I don't know. It's it's not news that these executives are tone deaf, obviously, and disconnected from reality. But it is a very disconnected from reality thing to say to make the cell of AI is going to reduce the workforce for the executives. And then also say that it's making people busier. And it's just like these. This isn't the cell you think it is. Or also, these aren't thoughts that connect together. If you say them both in a sentence, you sound insane. I just this I'm sure you haven't really explored open claw march. I certainly haven't wanted to. But it appears to just be what if I turned over my computer to a large language model and nothing really changed? That's long and short of it. So which is what makes it so insane that Nvidia is like GTC used to be a place they announced hardware and new technology. Not, hey, guys, the latest open source thing you're going to forget about in six months. That is now the most important thing in video stack. It's it's really weird because we've covered Nvidia for so long that I've met a lot of the engineers there. Yeah. And the the people who are running these AI departments now are at hardware and software levels are people that I worked with on the gaming side. You know, anywhere from 15 years ago until even more recently, like three years ago. And it's it's a little sad for me seeing these people move over to purely AI in these big important roles. And it's just like, I don't know, they're smart people. And I have nothing I respect about their work anymore, for the most part, because of the just I think sort of feckless roll out and widespread damage that it's causing. And it's just it's interesting where you see Nvidia moving their pieces around like a chessboard where they're OK, this guy is really good at this specific type of research. Let's strip him out of the thing that he's been doing really well for 10 years in gaming or whatever and put him into AI, you know, and then outcomes like the DLSS. Oh, Nemo claw or Nemo. Nemo claw, Nemo claw. This literally like four months ago, no one knew what the fuck this was. Like they the guy who made open claw sold his self to open AI, cool for him, I guess. And now this is like now this is the most important thing to Nvidia now. Like what's it's just it's so strange. It's it's just very strange. They did a song at the end of GTC as well. They had a song. I saw that I saw take him as a disgrace to journalism. Sorry, Tay, who was like not going to lie. It's just kind of a banger. May go to the side of the song as a banner. Yeah, banger. Yes, he did go to the doctor. That's my first thought is like, you need to go to the doctor, man. You have like I didn't hear it and it was not good. But I heard it and it made me angry. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about this when AI music covers first started to really propagate on YouTube. And right. Yeah, I remember the first one I ran into. It was like slipknot reimagined as soul like blues. Oh, yeah. And I did actually that was the first one I saw. I listened to it and I was like, damn, this is like not bad. And it was only, you know, 30 seconds into it where you realize the horrors of music and entertainment. The entire currency of it is attention and you only have so much time you can give to listening to music in a day. And for each of these AI songs that someone's going to listen to and even worse for the real artists, if people start liking them, you know, that's one less real artist who may already be like a starving artist archetype who doesn't get that view or that listen. And yeah. And I've heard some of those AI things and it's always like the first 10, 20 seconds, you're like, OK, this is and then nothing changes. It's just very repetitious. But you're right, it only exists as a kind of fishing law to get people in to just kind of here in the background. It's just patently evil. There's it's just wafting evil at the moment. And even by the standards of regular software, it's not really clear what any of these companies are doing anymore. Like I GTC, I don't know if I'd describe it as exciting, but it felt like they were selling real things every year. Yeah. And now it's just you do you want an open floor? Oh, actually, I forgot my favorite part. So Jensen went on the All In podcast, you know, the classic guys we don't think of anything happening to. And he went on and he was like, what? So what should happen now is that you should give engineers when they join your company, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of tokens a year. And that's part of their comp package. It's like, oh, I'm sure I'm sure he would love that. I'm sure he would love that. I'm like so much of so much of this is just Jensen going out and being like, it'd be really good if you use my stuff. That's not even comp, though, right? Like if they're using it for work, it's literally just budget. Yes. It's it's it's your compensation so that you can do your job. Like it's just it's really weird. It it's really weird. The more of these we see, the weirder it gets. Like it says on the website now, Nvidia is opening in the agentic frontier with sorry, Nvidia launches various CPUs purpose built for a genetic AI. I'm not sure that that's really true considering GPUs run it. Yeah. Large language models and something about Vera Rubin and agentic as well. It's just it feels like mad lips at this point. I mean, I remember this is together going to old GTC's like some of the really early ones and announcements. The exciting announcements were, you know, they'd have the shield like handheld gaming device or they'd have the shield TV. If you prefer that, they sometimes some GPUs, sometimes it would be Quadro or or professional class as fun gaming class. Yeah. And it was pretty interesting. And they had servers to a lot of the time and they were also interested in it wasn't pitched the same way. But the biggest thing about it, and I actually really did like the show was there are a lot of panels where you can do really technical discussions and they still have those. But it's just completely transformed into now it's the AI show and there's like almost nothing else there. So we don't even bother going anymore. Total company shift. I mean, they're they're really all in on this. I speaking of things that Jensen though has studies all in on. I don't know if you even want to get into this one, but he made the comment in the in the all in. I think it was podcast about AI uses in the Middle East, given the current situation. Oh, God, what do you what? Why is Jensen Jensen? You run a you run a GPU company. Come on, man. Oh, he said that he believes there's a paraphrase and he believes there's a reason for the war with Iran and talked about potentially AI use cases in the Middle East. And I don't really he said he did say I'm 100 percent in on that when he was talking about the subject, which is just like, how did we get from you're on stage talking about like doom and quake and making jokes about crisis, you know, to like judging the reasons for various wars? I don't know. You just you wonder like they've been angling for this military industrial side for a while now. And that to me, it seemed kind of like more of a signal to the US government than anything. I'm like, hey, we want to sell you stuff. But I just I think it just feels that it's kind of my thing to say. But it's the end of the hyper growth era in the sense that it's just everyone going like, oh, what do you want to do war with the GPUs? I guess you want to. Yeah. What do you think of the you want to blow stuff up? It's not really what we do. Well, I mean, actually, I take the back doesn't Nvidia also already involve itself with what's it called? The robot platform. They're definitely involved with Palantir, which is involved in war. Is it? It's not Isaac. There's they have a specific Jetson. Oh, yeah, Jetson. Jetson's already involved in so I can't say specifically, truly. But I swear to God, I heard it was involved in some sort of related senses. Yeah, I'm not sure if I should say it. But yeah, Jetsons, we have photographs of things that they are in that have been used in in Ukraine. So I don't know if I can say any more than that. That was a conversation with some congresspeople earlier. Yeah, that's the thing, though. It's like they talk about the Nemo, chlorine. They talk about doing war stuff and they talk about all these things when the only 90 percent of their revenues from these fucking GPUs. It's not even it's not even a case of like, oh, they're making like 50 percent of revenue. All pretty much all of their revenue comes from the GPUs. And just before we got on, I have I've been trying to answer a question of how many data centers have actually been built in the last year. It is a very difficult question. But from what I can tell based on like that was like four or five gigawatts might have gone online, which means we're running out about. It takes about a year to install like half a year's worth of GPU cells. Oh, wow. OK, it's it's really I don't think people realize how slow this is. But I just can't work out at this point why anyone's buying these GPUs anymore. Like it's just just if they stop doing it, it's like the bus from speed, their company or shut down. Yeah, I mean, it might be like there might be a chain reaction, you know, just. It's just so bizarre because Metaverse was killed last week. They killed it. They shot it with a gun. Horizon Worlds will no longer you can. But then they were like, oh, we're going to keep it running kind of. But it's not clear what that means. That whole thing was stupid to begin with. It's so cool. It's so cool. It's just a shitty video game. Like it's not even you could literally just play a video game and it would be better. It's just the great thing is, is they are no longer bringing it to Horizon Worlds to VR, but they are also bringing it back for an indeterminate amount of time. I I just I don't think the tech industry knows what it's doing ever anymore. I think that they just wake up one day and they're like, what? What are we? What do we do today? What we do? Fuck it. Do I have to buy more GPUs? That what you like that? Hey, there, this is Josh from Stuff You Should Know with a message that could change your life. The Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring Podcast playlist is available now. Whether Spring has sprung in your neck of the woods yet or not, the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist will make you want to get your overalls on, get outside and get your hands in the dirt. You can get the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's validation seeking, right? It's almost like the whole industry is seeking validation. And I I think some of that may mirror what we saw happen to Intel for for multiple CEOs running where it's they eventually moved from engineering focused CEOs to accounting focused CEOs and and marketing in one instance. You know, and that didn't work out very well for them. And I don't know, I wonder if maybe there's just so much money in everything now that it's become a game about and it's like cost engineering or it's stock engineering or whatever, rather than engineering, engineering. I think maybe that's some of where we're seeing that. Well, I think we came out just before we we got on as well. We're finally getting in on shit, though, because OpenAI is trying to offer. They try to do this spurious joint venture thing with private equity firms. And they're like, well, what we'll do is we'll raise money and then the private equity firm will pay us in advance to install chat GPT across their portfolio companies. Right. And as part of this deal, OpenAI is guaranteeing a minimum minimum return of 17.5 Now, you may be saying that's a good question. And also a 17.5 percent return on what? I read the I've read the Reuters article four or five times. I cannot work it out. This whole thing feels like an exploitation of ignorance. It's just like how many reporters actually read the emails they get or when they write up a story, how hard do they think about it? I had a reporter from another from a business focused publication email and asked to talk about NVIDIA and basically the reporter was interested in learning from our perspective, why is it that gamers and why is it that consumers are so mad at NVIDIA? And the first question that was asked of me was, did gamers notice or were they happy about NVIDIA stock going up when it started to go up? And I had to start, it's like, let's start from scratch. The consumers 10 years ago weren't paying attention to NVIDIA stock. They wanted to buy GPT to play video games. People weren't interested in the GPU for the stock price. You don't get stock when you buy a graphics card. You don't get that. That is a good idea though. Maybe that's what we can do next. Yeah, and they're just like, that's how they do stock buybacks, but each time they sell the GPU, they buy back. It's just, I love it, but I actually think that that question is really indicative of the media problem with NVIDIA where it's just like, oh, NVIDIA, right? So every single person who's ever used NVIDIA cares about the stock. That's not true. Like most people should not think about the stock market. For sure, I don't know exactly, but at least going back to the earlier days for NVIDIA, I can't say their stock price ever really came up in any discussions in technical news. Like it definitely came up in news in general, but in aerospace, it never came up. Why would it come up? Why would it come up? You are covering hardware. You cover hardware. Why would the stock come up? Yeah. Why? I think it's also because, and I mean this with no offense, the reporters that listen, I'm sorry, but people did not know who NVIDIA was four years ago. They had no idea. They did not. They had no idea. They were not thinking about NVIDIA. They had, they did not think about. It's kind of like how a much larger version of how I think I now see 75 different guys who are now an expert on the straight off Homoos. Despite learning what it was around two weeks ago. Right. Like they say, I'm now, oh, look at the straight. And did you see the venture capitalist whose solution to it was to just build a big road? Is just, there's this little like blob, like the kind of the tip of it. The see, understand how, how far it is. It's fine. You just draw a giant road from like the coast of Amman to the coast of, of the UAE. And you also, there's just the. Infrastructure, infrastructure is famously quick to build. Exactly. Especially during a massive assault from a large nation the size of Alaska. But on top of that, I assume he has some way around the giant rocks either side and also away for the boats to get in. It's just that easy. But I genuinely think that that's the era though, because people like, yeah, you know, there's like 240 gigawatts of data centers being built right now. And it's great. Actually, there's only about five gigawatts in America that's actually under construction. But you know, it's crazy because if you look at maps of like announced or planned or hopeful data centers, there's thousands of them in the US, you know. Yeah. There's, oh God, I, I had it. I was just working on it before I came on. But it's something like there's 240 gigawatts, but let's see. Yeah. It's very, very, very strange. That's, you know, yeah, there's about five gigawatts that are actually under construction, despite like 60 or 70 that's allegedly meant. There's meant to be like 13 to 14 gigawatts that actually, there's meant to be, I think, 14 that comes on this year from, yeah, Sightline. Sorry. I'm going to get it right this time because I actually found it in my notes. I'm sorry, everyone. 16 gigawatts of capacity was slated to come online in 2026 across 140 projects, but only five gigawatts is currently under construction. And that's under construction. That's under construction. That's just being built. It doesn't mean they're actually going to be built. And the only reason this is happening is so that we can keep NVIDIA inflated. I, I, people still, I don't know who they're pulling the wool over the eyes of these days, but we, I was reading the following the news of some of the ones that were canceled and, you know, from pushback from the community and town council hearings and stuff. And it's interesting reading the comments where if they're even humans these days, I don't know anymore, but some of the comments being about why are people proud about turning away jobs? And it's just like, do you know how many jobs this like million square foot facility would create? Because it's not a lot. And on top of that, even the jobs supposedly created by building them, they're all flown in. Like they're, they're not local. It's not like you get local builders. That's an extra thing. Well, Stargate, Abilene, they've just flown in people to just move in to town. So I guess like that helps the economy. And then when it turns on, which it never will, there'll be like 70 jobs. I mean, that's the same, right? It's like, it's the one it turns on where, okay, you get this transient burst. Great. But this isn't, it's not like you're, I think the branding of data centers as AI factories, which is insane, by the way. But I think the branding of it, it's like blue collar washing or something. It's like they, they, they're trying to make it sound like a, I don't know, like, like the grit and the hard work and like the manpower you get out of a traditional factory, except it's a bunch of computers in a room. Yeah. You know, and there's like 15 guys on the, on the floor who are just keeping them turned on, which is a real job and can be an important job, but it's not a factory. Yes. It's not like bringing thousands of factory jobs from the bygone era. Like we're not, like we're not going to repeal NAFTA. So we're not actually going to fix the problem here. But my favorite, my most favorite of all recent data centers are not being built story is from Sachin Kati, who is head of infrastructure open AI, March 6th, 2026. Construction is underway at our site in Port Washington, Wisconsin. And there is just a single steel beam. That was by just one beam. I saw your tweet. That was like probably my favorite tweet of all time when you put that out. Just a single, just, and at this rate, great. This will be done in like 2029. Maybe the beam was almost entirely in the ground. Yes. And it's like, there's like four guys, like three guys that sitting, they're kind of standing around it like poking it and one guy walking towards it. It's just, it's just really, what's great, but they only do this because none of, no, I don't think, I know I sound conspiratorial, but it's like the mainstream media just doesn't say anything. Like to naturally move into my favorite story, Supermicro. Yes. With a Wally Liar who, so to explain for the listeners, Supermicro is an AI server company. They two years ago had a massive accounting scandal where a bunch of people resigned. I forget exactly what happened in the scandal, but like they had to restate earnings. They had to delay earnings, but then things got back on track. 20, late 2024, 2020. Sorry, it's 2018 when the scandal was, but 2024, 2025, they got back on track. They were selling GPUs to Crusoe. They were selling GPUs to Corewave. And then very recently, the Department of Justice arrested three different guys, including co-founder Wally Liao, for shipping like hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs to China. And like changing the serial numbers using a hairdryer. Yeah. Which I fucking love it. They were removing the serial numbers and the stickers, then using a middle-end logistics company to basically repackage and forward them. And this story, this story's just kind of disappeared already. Yeah. There was a picture where Jensen Huang is standing next to co-founder Charles Liang of Supermicro. Just standing there. My personal opinion, and this is an opinion, but my opinion is that there is no way that Nvidia couldn't have known this was happening. I just think it's like actually impossible that they were not aware of GPU smuggling. But wouldn't they, don't these GPUs have some mechanism of phoning home? Oh, for sure they can be identified through the internet. 100%. I mean, yeah, they have, the firmware has identified information in it for the GPUs. You don't need the serial number on the sticker to know what it is. You know, you don't have to physically see it to know what it is. And so, yeah. If this is like connecting to some kind of server somewhere or whatever it may be doing, if in any way that's linked back to Nvidia, they would know about it. If there's ever a service request, I would assume at some point someone figures out and maybe it's a, okay, well, kind of, you know, blind eye approach. But it's just, I don't know. I really think there's no way that they were ignorant to this. Because to quote one of the guys we spoke with when we did the black market GPU smuggling documentary last year, the professor of a university in Hong Kong we spoke with, I asked him, I was like, do you think Nvidia knows? And his reaction was, well, how could they not? These are very expensive GPUs. You would think you would traffic them all extremely carefully. Yeah. I just, and also it's the co-founder of Supermicro. And just to be clear, Wally Liar, the co-founder, resigned in 2018, rejoined as a consultant a few years later, and then was just added back to the board. Yeah. And now he is in jail. And you're telling me that Charles Lang had no idea. No idea. No one, no one an inventor would, where would they think they were going? But this is like, this is yet another story that is just ignored. And I'm trying to work out if it is a journalistic competence issue, or whether it's just a, don't fuck with that up, Disneyland problem. I think there's, yeah, I'm not sure. So first of all, Nvidia has a lot of money in different media publications. And then also the ones that are, How do you mean? Yeah, the media publications that are involved in like stock coverage, they're all going to be biased towards protecting Nvidia in some way or another for the most part. But secondly also, I do think there's probably an issue of what's a super micro for a lot of the reporters. And yeah. I just, there's a picture of, he, Charlie, Wally Lear was at, he was actually at GTC. There's a picture of him with an ice loosh. There's a picture of him standing three people over from Jensen Huang. You can like Lambda, an AI compute company. He was commenting on their LinkedIn very recently being like, super congrats. All he, he's like clearly a dorky old man, because he's like, super congratulations. Super, I kind of, I kind of love that. And I kind of love the text he sent where somebody basically said, you're going to jail and he just was spotted with three crying emojis. I saw that, that was funny. Honestly. It was sad, but it was funny. Could be, if I would do the same thing, I would be responding the same way if I was going to jail for like the most obvious crime, but it's so weird. Like there's, Supermicro is the backbone of Corewave. Like they're a big part. I also wonder if, so some behind the scenes is after our black market documentary last year, I went to Washington DC and met with a number of congressional staff on one of the committees there. And it was, they, they, one of the things they told me was that they had some stuff in the works. There was some talk about, you know, maybe testifying or something, but they had stuff in the works and they were hoping it would materialize early this year. I didn't know what that was at the time, but I know they said it was related to the GPU smuggling. They had a bunch of questions about it and how it works and whatever. And I think this is probably what they were working on. It was probably the Supermicro case. I guess, but just the fact that Supermicro is just walking around still doing business and they weren't named in the indictment. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. They weren't a defendant, right? It was the three. Yeah. And it's just, I don't know. That doesn't see, it doesn't seem very likely that nobody knew, but you know, it was just, well, it was a few bad apples, right? Just the co-founder of the company. Yeah. Just, just one guy couldn't be, I just feel like by the end of this, we're going to have a few of those. I don't see, you've got everything that you could possibly want from a scam, for a scammer. You've got a vague technology that could do everything, but doesn't really have to do anything and a shit ton of construction. Just an absolute ass ton of- That's a funny point on the construction. It's easy to hide money there. And just also let money just like marinate. The one thing that I can't find any way of like structuring this into an argument I could point out with data, but I've never seen a building project come in under budget. Not once in my life. And you're telling me none of these companies need follow-on funding. Yeah. None. I think the construction alone is, I don't know, it's all part of this interesting like the meme that's gone around of buying GPUs that don't exist yet to put in data centers that aren't built in ours. Yeah. The amount of promise, especially open AI versus actualized is there's a huge disparity there. My favorite thing is them claiming that the more compute they get, the more revenue they make. Because that doesn't make sense at all. I mean, Jensen said that in one of the interviews where I think he went as high as 10x, he was like, if they had 10x more, too cute. And they would have 10x their revenue. It's just like, I don't think so. Hey there. This is Josh from Stuff You Should Know with a message that could change your life. The Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring podcast playlist is available now. Whether Spring has sprung in your neck of the woods yet or not, the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist will make you want to get your overalls on, get outside, and get your hands in the dirt. You can get the Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, the thing with that, that I always say is, where is the current state of affairs, if that's the case? Where are the people that cannot do something because there's not enough compute? What is the thing being held back? Who is holding it back? Are they sitting there and they're saying, when this comes online, X bazillion dollars will slosh out of it? What is not, well, what's going on? In the previous CNBC interview, I think it was where Altman and Juan were with Brockman, who is a dollar store Jensen Juan with his leather jackets. They were talking about that $100 billion investment back at the time. Altman, to answer your question, his angle for the CNBC or whoever was audience was if you could choose between free education for everybody or curing cancer, and he pitched it as that's those your choices, but if they only had more compute, they could do both. Right, as opposed to neither. Right, correct. As opposed to nothing of the sort happening at all, anywhere. But I do like that that's, it's, I don't like the examples he chose. They're just so intentionally manipulative, I think. You know, where it's like, well, you could, you could choose from preventing puppies from being kicked or from preventing cats from being homeless. It's just like. You can only crush one animal. Right. It's just very, it's also the kind of thing that you come up with if you do not do any work. If you don't really know what happens in the real world, you're like, fuck, what if education was free or what if cancer no, no happen. Do you like this? Like, and of course, CNBC was like, yep. Can I have money now? Yeah. This is good. And that $100 billion is very real. That's enough. This is the thing. Maybe conspiracy theorists are right all along in the sense that it's like, yeah, there was a point last year where Nvidia and OpenAI lied, $100 billion deal never happened. AMD and OpenAI lied as well. Just nobody talked about their guidance didn't change for AMD. They do not appear to have sold a single chip to OpenAI. Broadcom, still nothing. Three quarters in, we don't have a single sale. What the fuck? Jensen was really defensive about that one when the Taiwanese media asked him. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, there was never any commitment, he said. There's never any commitment from any of these things though. I just, I think at some point we're just going to find out that nothing happened. Like, I just, nothing actually moved to anyone. Like, we still haven't heard if Nvidia has sent a dime to OpenAI. SoftBank has to raise $40 billion to send $30 billion to OpenAI. Yeah. That hasn't happened yet. Did you see the game, so there's a game that came out this past week called Crimson Desert. I've been meaning to play it, but I hear it's a mess. Yeah, it is a bit of a mess, I think. But the interesting thing was they had a bit of an unexpected scandal where, amongst all the other various problems like blocking Intel from working, they had, some users noticed that there was very clearly AI generated art in the game. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So it's like you walk into the, whatever, the tavern and on the wall there's a painting hanging. And if you get close to it, you can see it's like the early several years ago, generative AI art, that's just very obvious. And so on Steam, you're supposed to disclose if there's AI art or assets in the game. They didn't do that. They're too big, so they're not going to be punished for it. But they put out a statement apologizing saying these are placeholders, they're supposed to be replaced. We're going back through and removing them all, whatever. And Mike Avara, who's currently the CEO of PrizePix and previously was president of Blizzard and previously was also VP of Microsoft, Windows, he tweeted out asking why the studio was apologizing and basically saying this is going to be an everything, so you shouldn't apologize. And it's just, it's crazy to me where the approach to a lot of the AI stuff, it feels so like this is inevitable is what you're being told by the suits and the VP is and the CEOs. I don't think they realize that that's the part a lot of people don't like is the part where it's being forced and you're told this is inevitable, get used to it. Yeah, it doesn't have to be good or you don't have to like it, but you're going to have it because of us. We're going to make you have it and that'll be good. Well, it won't be good, but you'll have it and we will ostensibly something will change. Like they're not even making, I don't even think they're saving money doing this stuff or if they are, it's the kind, it's like very, it's just firing three people, which is a lot for the people being fired and their work would make the game better. But it's just a fucking Excel spreadsheet. For the larger companies. I think that this is also a mask off moment for so many of these companies. It's the ones that just don't give a fuck about anyone who just, they don't make stuff, they don't contribute things. They just like, yeah, you know, man, you know, the thing you're like, it's going to suck shit. And we're going to save like $80. Yeah, it definitely enables grift in, right? Like the whole, let's say you said earlier where you have the, just the entire premise of the way the technology is set up and pitched and the lack of understanding technically for a lot of like media and coverage, it just, it's set up where people can grift. And I think you saw it with crypto too, where there's a lot of blockchain, you know, is the big word everyone's thrown around suddenly all these people on TV who had no idea what that meant. But same, same type of thing. It's, I don't know, the situation's right where maybe there's some real use cases for sure. But, but it's pretty easy to scam people right now. I just, I also think that it's just showing how many dances there are, how many people that don't actually want to learn anything. I mean, even the coding side, the little code I've learned so far has just made me aware that there are a lot of engineers who don't read any of the code that comes out and they're like, it'll be fine. Should work fine, I think. I had someone really pushing me to try Claude where he's basically like, no, like, you don't, the other ones, because I've tested a few of the LLMs and I'm not too impressed. But he was like, this one, this is the one, you know, this is unbelievable how good it is. And I guess my use case wasn't maybe the right fit or something. Never seems to be. Yeah. But like, I tried it and the thing I tried it for was, I wanted to make a template for Adobe InDesign, which I've never used. Right. And you can go buy and download a template and whatever, but I wanted like a specific one made in the way I wanted to use it. And because InDesign can accept code, it might be XML, I don't remember, but it's got some kind of code it can accept. I thought, okay, this should be able to write the code. It's not a design I'm asking for, it's code. And then I should be able to shove it into InDesign and have a template. And I experimented with it for probably, I get like really obsessive when I'm trying to make software work. I spent like eight hours on it. Jesus. It did the same thing as chat GBT where, you know, it gives you code. It didn't work. I feedback the error to it and it's like, oh, I see what went wrong. It was this and then it sends you more code and it doesn't work. And before you know it, you've blown through all your tokens for the day, right? Like, which seems like a great way to make more money. And I ended up after that experiment, I was like, let me just do this the old fashioned way. And I watched like three tutorials. And within two and a half hours, I had done what I wanted myself. So the model did not provide you with the thing you needed. It did not. And it not only that, but there was a moment there where I was starting to feel that that disconnect or that like psychosis, I think some people get as they use these tools more and more and rely on them where it starts to feel like, well, I can't do this. And this thing doesn't help me. So there's that temptation of like, I'll just give up. But then you know, you try to do it yourself for like five minutes, like, oh, this isn't that bad to learn new software. You know, I can handle this. And I just worry the people who get really reliant on this stuff. I don't know, it seems not good. Well, that's the thing though, whenever I've, because I have the times I've experimented with like Claude and chat GPT, I've always thrown it stuff where I'm like, I've already finished a model, I've already finished a paragraph. What do you think? And it will say something. I'll be like, okay, but what about this? And I'll just make up something. I was like, actually, there were 80 gigawatts, I didn't ask what would you think about that? I'll be like, oh, my mistake. It's just like, no, I'm gaslighting you. Like I am, I am abusing the model. But that's the thing. You have to be careful. That's going to come back to you one day. Yeah. Well, Rococo's modern basilisk. Yeah, it's just, but it's just like, the fact that they can just have their arm twisted immediately makes them useless because the whole point of artificial intelligence is it's meant to be intelligent and kind of support you when you're like not agree with you when you're wrong, but be like, hey, you're wrong here. But it's just very weird as well that every time I hear a story, it's like yours where it's like, yeah, I wanted it to do stuff, but it didn't. And you talk to someone who's a booster and they go, well, what you should have done, it's like, so, so you're just going to just let's start from the point of this thing doesn't work and you have to find a way to make it work. Well, it does work. You're just not using it right. Well, why not? Yeah, you're not. Well, how did you product it? How did you exactly? But the thing is, you can hold something wrong. There's no way to use these right. It's just how much can they gaslight you into believing that you're deficient and that you should think how was it work? It just seems like, at least for the task I was doing, the amount of time required to baby step it through the process is so much greater than just learning something new actually. I also don't know about you, but when I don't understand something, the more I don't understand it, the more worried I get. I can't sacrifice myself to a machine. I'll be like, I will straight up just think like, I don't get this. I'm worried that I'm going to learn something wrong because I'm looking at this and it seems to be trying to gas me up when I do not understand what I'm talking about. Well, I'm just like, I don't fucking know what you're talking about, brother. Well, you had a great quote when we met up when you came down here and I've actually said it to writers on the team for training, but one of the things I made a comment about how I needed us to do a bunch of fact checking that day or something and you made a comment about how you always double check your facts and if you want it to be right, you check it a third time, which was brilliant. I think if you add AI to that, it's like, it's kind of that same feeling where it's like, if anything comes out of an LLM, the amount of anxiety I have is not even worth whatever the answer is. And also, a while ago, I had access to a much bigger, more financial focused one and I used it to look up a bunch of stuff, like do a report on this. Three or four of the links were just dead. One of them referred to something that just was an irrelevant link. I did look something up on Claude once and it gave me two different citations of Grockipedia. Are you not familiar with Grockipedia? I am not. Well, that's the special Grock Wikipedia that they made at X the Everything app. They have their own Wikipedia. Yep. And that's what Claude is citing from. There's the base Wikipedia. It's so good. It's just, I do think that there is also a degree here where AI is just a test of how much your, how willing you are to just be like, yeah, I get it, I guess. Like just quickly you can wave off something. Be like, yes, fine, I guess. I mostly get it. This sounds good enough. For me, the best use cases have still been for browsing Chinese internet or browsing the internet generally in another language. And specifically, it's for like, when I've needed sources and research. So, I don't know if I gave this example on your show before, but the one that came up previously was for the DRAM cartel piece and for the rise of Chinese memory, we were looking at a bunch of different filings for these companies in China. I wasn't 100% sure if they had like an SEC equivalent or something like that. And so using, I don't know if I use, I think I use GPT to try that, but using GPT or whatever it was at the time, it was useful for providing phrases where it's like, okay, here's the Chinese characters of what you should search for. And the reason Google Translate wasn't good enough on its own for that is because I didn't know the colloquialisms of what might they call these different things that I know exist in the US, but I don't know if they exist there. And then I can take that and I can put it into Google Translate, which is a dumb translator. That's just word for word and just make sure it makes any sense. And that was useful for, but so far, that's pretty much the only use case I've had. Yeah. And it's also, it's the classic thing of maybe an on-device model could do that. Yes. I think that eventually that will be the case. And it's just, is that really enough to substantiate nearly $200 billion worth of GPU and networking sales from Nvidia a year? No, it's not enough to... $193 billion. Yeah. It's not enough to be worth the destruction of the consumer hardware, you know, and that was constantly, like every time I try to poke at these things every now and then so that I might, I want to make sure if I'm criticizing them, I've at least used them. Same. Yeah. Yeah. But it still feels bad. It's just, and then you, even then, just having my Twitter feed up while we're talking, random shit pops up, such as SAS CEOs, if your CFO hasn't used Claw for Excel by now, you need a new CFO, only the curious will survive. Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Like, what are you talking about? Why? Why? What do you mean? That's so, I feel like that's so dangerous specifically for... I'm just responding with why? Feed all of your companies for financial information into the cell. Also, what do you think, like, what do you think a CFO does? Oh, they just, they build models, I guess. Yeah. Well, the good idea for financial modeling is when you distance yourself from everything as far as, but ideally, you're so abstracted from the problem that you don't even really understand it anymore. As we're finding out, isn't a problem anywhere. It's just insane. I feel like we live in a truly insane period. It's bad. I mean, the consumer space is just like, last time I talked to you, similar topic, but more of the companies in the industry, computer industry that don't sell silicon products, you know, cases, coolers, accessories, whatever, motherboard. We've had more of them now contact basically saying, hey, we're in big trouble and they want to talk to us about it for a video, but it's just, when I say big trouble, I mean, a lot of these companies, they're down like 50 plus percent from expectations. And that's because you can't build a computer as a consumer if you can't afford like $500, $600 minimum for basic memory now, because of the data center demand for it. How does any of this turn around though? Like how quickly is there any possibility that when the bubble bursts, anything returns to normal within gaming? Like you've seen, I'm sure you've seen areas where they've oversold memory in the past. Yeah. Not like this though. Yeah. I've never seen it like this. Memory is a really unique industry because of how it's been corrupt for 40 years. And when I say corrupt, how do you make? Well, yeah. So like the Department of Justice under the Bush administration, W, busted the memory makers for what they call the cartel. And by definition, that's what it was, price fixing cartel. And this has been happening like at least once a decade, where in the late 90s, early 2000s, the memory suppliers all got together and would agree on price ceilings and floors. So when they go and sell memory to Dell or Apple or HP, they've already spoken to their competitors and agreed, we're not going to go below this price. Cool. Yeah. And this has happened multiple times for that industry. Very cool. And you know what? My favorite part of this story, and I didn't know this till we did our report recently, was so there were several people, there were like over 100 people involved, if I remember correctly. And if you look up, the people who were charged with crime, including find and even sentenced to prison for that for price fixing cartel, if you look up what happened to them after a lot of them got promoted. Yep. One of them, his reward was to become CEO. Geez, at what company? Samsung Europe. Very well, didn't someone from Samsung also go to jail a few times? Like I swear to God, like people from Samsung. Yeah. It's just, it really does feel that by the end of this, someone else is going to jail. Like there's just some what, and they'll get out and they'll be promoted. You know, well, the question is what way of it's clammy Sam Altman though, that I don't think they're gonna, I don't know, I hear people were like someone was going to go to jail. I don't know if I buy it, but there's private equity thing with the minimum returns maybe, just do a classic Ponzi. I hope so. Yeah, classic Ponzi at least has some history of meaningful busts and sentences, right? So, I don't know. But a lot of the white collar stuff, I feel like a lot of the time it's kind of a whatever you get, like in the price fixing cartel, most of them got seven or eight months max. So I just America doesn't really have antitrust anymore. Otherwise, this would be, I don't know, all of this just feels like it's going to set back consumer hardware for a decade at this point. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's not just gaming either. Like I think that's just what we specialize in. But yeah, it's more, it's becoming increasingly viable, I think for people on the surface to rent their computer or rent access to a computer in the cloud. And that's a bad thing. We don't want that. Is that really a likely outcome? I mean, the low end is drying up. And so if you can't really afford the cheapest, let's just keep it a gaming gaming computer anymore. Your best option might be to go rent server access from Nvidia and use one of their $1,000 GPUs for $20 a month. God, what a fucking bleak. What a bleak environment. I just hope it, I hope it works out more that just these companies lose shit tons of money. I don't know if the, because surely the memory prices would come down and storage prices would come down as well. I would think so. Yeah, I would think so. I think everyone involved with this should suffer in ways I can't say on the show due to legal reasons. You know, just the thoughts they have inside my head. All right, Steve, we're going to wrap it there. You got anything you want to hype? No, I mean, we've got a, yeah, I guess I'll throw one out there. We've got a big, another documentary we're working on right now, but it's going to be on the war on Huawei. So we went and dug through all of Huawei's history. It's pretty interesting. And then interesting. Yeah. And that should be over an hour long and lots of, they're a wild company and the, it's very politically intertwined with the U S and China. So, so that'll be our next big one. Should be fun. And yeah, you know where to find me. The links will be in the show notes. Thank you as ever for listening to better offline. There will be a monologue this week. Love you all. Goodbye. Thank you for listening to better offline. The editor and composer of the better offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I.com. You can email me at easy at better offline.com or visit better offline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.Where'syoured.at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Josh from Stuff You Should Know with a message that could change your life. The Stuff You Should Know ThinkSpring Podcast playlist is available now. 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