AI Blows Up the Bullshit Around AI
Big Tech hype is a huge problem...until it is exposed...
One of the big news stories of the day is DeepSeek, “a new A.I. system that could match the capabilities of cutting-edge chatbots from companies like OpenAI [ChatGPT] and Google,” according to the New York Times. What makes DeepSeek newsworthy is two things. One, DeepSeek operates out of China. Two, DeepSeek reportedly does what it does for far less money than what American companies (OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, etc.) have/are investing in the scheme. The Times again:
The Chinese engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.
“The number of companies who have $6 million to spend is vastly greater than the number of companies who have $100 million or $1 billion to spend,” said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures, who focuses on A.I. technologies.
The Times reports that DeepSeek is able to challenge the big boys, ironically, thanks to rules laid down by American, European, Taiwanese, and Japanese governments to control the flow of tech into China. Starved from Western product, DeepSeek turned to unsanctioned, low cost, widely available computer chips, as well as open-source software. Denied resources and information, DeepSeek did what every internet Scrappy Doo does: They made do with what was out there.
If what the Times, Washington Post, and others report is correct, DeepSeek just put lie to the Big Tech model of development – at least the public-facing model – which is raise a shit-ton of a shit-ton of a shit-ton of money to see a product through, lose a hell of a lot of that money on building the product while clearing out the competition, fail, fail, fail, triumph Big Time with the Next Big Product…and everyone becomes billionaires.
This picture of Big Tech’s development model omits two things. One: Often, the hard, hard work that provides the foundation for Big Tech’s success is done by small scrappy companies (start-ups in techspeak) that get bought up by the big guys. These scrappy companies are generally denied big money (until they are bought up), forcing them to use the same low-cost tools used by DeepSeek.
Two: Big Tech spends a hell of a lot of money it doesn’t have to for some very normal reasons: Corporate bloat and entitled leadership, i.e. huge salaries and compensation packages, marque office space, lots of expensive perks like private jets, luxury travel, etc., and so on. Hell, the security costs of a Zuck or Musk is probably double that of a small start-up, and many times more that if we count the billionaire’s fortress/compounds.
On the second point, Big Tech often spends So Much Fucking Money not because it has to but because it can and because it feels entitled to. Certainly, Zuck, Musk, Bezos, Tim Cook, and the rest of the billionaires that attended Trump’s inauguration woo ha could have “carpooled” in a single private jet, but did they? From what I can find, that is a big N. O. And why? Because, forget logistics, they didn’t have to.
Now take that mentality and reinforce it with decades of extreme success. Really, who am I to tell Apple and Amazon that they are doing things wrong? I mean, they won, right? They did! Thing is that winning and winning and winning without any major resistance from competition (because you’ve bought them) can lead to sloth, especially when old, wasteful models are being shown up by Scrappy Doos like DeepSeek. Spend billions on being the last one standing in the marketplace, while living in serious luxury, and you might become a lumbering giant, a Sonny Liston facing a young Muhammad Ali. And you might not realize what you’ve done wrong until you are a minute-thirty into the first round and you are already thinking, “Oh fuck.”
Now, I am not an investor or technologist. I don’t play the markets or have any interest in AI (aside from some cultural and sociological issues). And I definitely don’t care about a money/power war between Chinese Tech/Gov’t and Big Tech. However, I kinda study bullshit and hype, and I know it when I see it.
San Francisco has a reputation for hosting piles of shit – not Musk and Zuck – but literal piles of human and dog shit on the sidewalk. Over-hype, but, some days, me dodging poop piles tells me that the rep is well deserved. However, living in San Francisco – part-time and then full-time – for the last 20 years, my BS detector tuned to 2, has taught me that the Bay Area’s prime producers of poo isn’t Fluffy Foo Foo or Fentanyl Fred but Big Tech.
Big Tech is a lot of bullshit and hype. I knew that decades ago when the World Wide Web was being sold to us as a utopia, an equalizer that would usher in a world of sharing and brilliance. We were fed the same horseshit when internet commerce started to take off. I remember when hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores took themselves out of action by ditching their digs for a space in a digital mall hosting a million merchants. Most of those booksellers went out of business within five years. The few people I know who made big money during that wave of internet commerce did so selling virtual items to gamers, and are now hocking crypto. From one scam to another.
Oh, and let’s not forget file-sharing and the copyright battle of the 1990/00s. Big Tech redefined creativity (a word that implies human activity) as content (a word with no personality), and then pitched us an impossible economic model promising “free content” and much wealth for “content providers.” The nut of the econ model was something that too many creative types have been promised since forever, “free exposure,” which evolved into a quiet, covert pay-to-play scheme.
Jump into the hype around different tech companies and things start to get ridiculous. There are the outright frauds like Theranos, a scam that everyone should have identified from the get-go. There are idiotic ideas that morphed into scams and tech cults, such as WeWork. There are also stunningly stupid things like Bodega, which sold a what was essentially a vending machine designed to put the neighborhood bodega or corner store out of business, something that absolutely no urban dweller wanted or asked for.
From shitty ideas to total grifts, there are tens of thousands tech crash-and-burns littering the Bay Area, every single one of them backed by hype campaigns full of bullshit – and that is because Silicon Valley is more than tech companies and venture capitalists. It is also public relations companies, advertising agencies, branding consultants, and marketing firms. Many youngsters move to the Bay Area looking to use their graphic design degrees in product development, and then wind up doing digital paste-up for an ad firm…and that is because this shit must be sold and money must be invested.
So, yeah, my experience in journalism, politics, and living in two cities immersed in PR – Sacramento and San Francisco – has taught me to be very wary of claims by Big Anything. So, when something like AI is hyped, I step back and smell the bullshit, and when I do, I wait and watch thing play out. I do the same for counter-hype.
Two times over the last three months, I’ve bumped into a young man who is terribly concerned about the AI Apocalypse – a dystopia that is part Terminator, 2001, and The Matrix. If we don’t stop them now, this guy says, we are doomed. Trying to talk to him about who owns the technology is useless, dial him back from apocalypse to something shitty we should keep an eye on is impossible. The guy is an acolyte: He knows what will happen...but does he?
Let’s take AI off the pedestal and look at it as we do nearly every other product Big Tech has “given” us. What do you see? What I see is more mediocrity and greater stupidity. AI will be (and is being) used to collect your data so that they can sell more things to you. It will “create” content, meaning it will patch together “shared” (actually stolen) information and form it into something consumable. That something will be average at best, a compilation of the most popular, the most available, and the most palatable, but not the most of everything (and even if it was the most of everything, the most of everything averaged out is not the best of anything).
There are limits to what AI can “scrape” off the internet. Not all information hidden behind paywalls, including a lot of academic research, is available. News organizations, publishers, and creative types are already suing to stop AI from stealing their work. Operations like Soriano’s Circus are ignored by AI because we are “too small” to matter. And then there’s a ton of research being done offline, generating information that AI can’t find without people feeding it, something tech companies are loath to do because it costs a bunch in labor.
What results is a smallish “sample size” for AI, and, since AI can only “make” stuff from what it has, if it doesn’t have everything or if what it has is the most popular, most available, and the most palatable, what it will turn out is the most average or most mediocre crap available. So, AI music will not give you the most soulful, heartfelt R&B song ever sung – a miraculous combo of Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Curtis Mayfield (or, more obscure, Eric Mercury, Nathaniel Mayer, Margie Joseph, and Bettye Swann) – but it will give you some grey mishmash of Post Malone, Jennifer Hudson, Billy Ray Cyrus, Carrie Underwood, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, John Legend, Amy Winehouse, Michael McDonald, and Pink.
I don’t fear that AI will seek to control and eliminate us, not when modern tech’s (and capitalism’s) record shows that AI is inclined to give sell us the most flattened, consumable versions of what is already the most flattened consumable stuff we already have. I not only dismiss the “positive” hype about AI, I distrust the apocalyptic reaction to it, a reaction that comes from the hype!
Who the hell knows what DeepSeek becomes in the next year? It could displace ChatGPT or it might be bought up, shut down, sidelined, etc., as has happened to many “small start-ups.” What I do know is that DeepSeek’s claims of success through scrappy frugalness challenge Big Tech’s Big Money model and has given Wall Street a bit more than hype to mull over.
AI hype also shows how careful we everyday people have to be when reading or consuming anything on the internet. We must remember that people are trying to sell us stuff – products, ideas, scams, conspiracies – 24/7/365 and they are relentless. Fortunately, we have a tool to deal with this stuff, the bullshit detector each of us have inside.
Yes, we get way more info tossed at us every day than we can process, but once we discipline ourselves to avoid distraction, to seek meaningful interactions, and to ask a few questions, we can reduce the flood to a manageable stream and use the BS detector we honed pre-Internet or at least pre-social media. That is what we can do right now with tools that we already have inside us. What I ask is far more realistic than whatever world Big Tech is promising to bring us with AI, a promise that is both a gamble and a wish, as well as something infused with enough bullshit to make a drive from Fresno to Bakersfield a run through the roses.