Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: 'AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings' His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he's no longer the outsider he once was I f some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about "how the AI bubble burst", Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He's the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who's become one of big tech's noisiest critics. This is not to say the AI bubble burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron's blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure. His tech newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he's a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself - one user describes him as "a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit".

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He's one of the loudest voices of the AI haters--even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention. In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like "Sam Altman is full of shit and "Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul." Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a "chunderfuck." And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic," Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. "I work with founders all the time. I'm a founder myself, I guess--I don't like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year--and everyone's celebrating them? We were talking about whether any of Zitron's ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. "I said, 'I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn't about you,'" Zitron told me. "His company is burning billions of dollars.

That year's game was known as the Dot-Com Bowl. Twenty years later, Super Bowl LVI was called the Crypto Bowl, and featured ads from Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX. Soon, FTX was bankrupt, and Bitcoin was sputtering. This year, the Super Bowl was all about artificial intelligence, as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Salesforce ran ads showing off their A.I. tools. "It is such a bad sign," Ed Zitron, an A.I. skeptic and the host of the tech podcast "Better Offline," said the other day.

"Privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services," declared Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Google, in a New York Times op-ed this week. "Privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world." Pichai's column, published in conjunction with Google's annual developer conference, was a two-pronged public relations offensive: an attempt by the company that has been one of the chief architects and primary beneficiaries of digital surveillance to wrap itself in the mantle of privacy, while simultaneously taking a swipe at one of its competitors. In Silicon Valley, "privacy" is in 2019 what reclaimed wood was in 2010: a must-have design feature that signals a certain degree of authenticity and hipness and could also double as a weapon in a pinch. Pichai's broadside, in case you're not attuned to the subtleties of tech CEO shade, was aimed at Apple.

When Rachel Whetstone left Google two years ago to replace David Plouffe, a former Barack Obama official, as policy and communications vice-president at Uber, it seemed like a promising Silicon Valley role. The taxi-hailing app had a reputation for aggressive and even underhand tactics, and a CEO, in Travis Kalanick, with a reputation as a gaffe-prone "tech bro", but it was one of the fastest growing startups in the world, achieving a $50bn valuation (now almost $70bn) within just six years. However Whetstone departed the company this week amid a stunning array of scandals and controversies, including allegations of sexual harassment, a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver, a legal battle with Google over the alleged theft of driverless car technology, the revelation that Uber used secret "Greyball" software to deceive city regulators, and allegations that the company had another program called "Hell" designed to spy on its arch-rival Lyft. For Whetstone it's been a hell of a ride. Public relations veteran Ed Zitron described Whetstone's job as the equivalent of having "two fists permanently punching you in the head".