This Tech Expert Thinks It's 'Time to Call Bullshit on the AI Industry'
LAS VEGAS—Most of the panels at the Ai4 conference here last week were overrun with enthusiasm for the possibilities AI is opening. He rejected the idea that companies still have time to figure out basic business models: “With four years and over a trillion dollars into this, we’re anything but early days.”But the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (“clammy Sam Altman” in Zitron’s first reference) keep pushing companies to get on board anyway. “There is an industrial-sized pressure on each and every person in this room, and most of the people in the economy, to adopt AI services with no regard for what they can do, what their outcomes are, or the actual costs,” he declared.
- ▪LAS VEGAS—Most of the panels at the Ai4 conference here last week were overrun with enthusiasm for the possibilities AI is opening.
- ▪He rejected the idea that companies still have time to figure out basic business models: “With four years and over a trillion dollars into this, we’re anything but early days.”But the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (“clammy Sam Altman” in Z
- ▪“There is an industrial-sized pressure on each and every person in this room, and most of the people in the economy, to adopt AI services with no regard for what they can do, what their outcomes are, or the actual costs,” he declared.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-tech-expert-thinks-its-time-to-call-bullshit-on-the-ai-industry |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 26 16:42:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T16:50:43.239Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T16:50:43.239Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | NXi_3SXUayQ9 · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
LAS VEGAS—Most of the panels at the Ai4 conference here last week were overrun with enthusiasm for the possibilities AI is opening. Ed Zitron’s talk was not one of them.In a 20-minute session, the tech publicist-turned-tech critic tore into the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic and warned of financial doom for the generative-AI industry and for everyday Americans whose retirement holdings could be within the blast radius.His thesis, also unpacked in a blog post and podcast episode: Now that AI providers have switched to usage-based billing and sent some customers' costs skyrocketing, they can’t make enough money to cover hundreds of billions of dollars of data-center expenses that they’ve already locked in.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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