Slop Bubble "Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble"
Edward Zitron Says It like it is
Someone in our IRC network has just linked to this article by Edward Zitron, whom we recently cited in relation to the slop hype. Microsoft's slop sales are floundering, so it is rebranding stuff like Office as "slop" (it says "AI") and then pretending that it's a success story. It doesn't get any worse than that! You can't make this stuff up! This was discussed yesterday evening in IRC.
Anyway, quoting Zitron: "Yet the robotics companies were surprisingly ethical compared to the nonsensical tide of LLM-driven wank, from no-name dregs in the basement of the Venetian Expo Center to companies like Lenovo warbling about its “AI super agent.” In fact, fuck it, let’s talk about that. [...] Lenovo rented out the entirety of the Las Vegas Sphere to do a demonstration of a fucking chatbot powered by OpenAI’s models on Microsoft Azure, and everybody acted like it was something new. No, Qira is not a “big bet” on AI — it’s a fucking chatbot forced on anybody buying a Lenovo PC, full of features like “summarize this” or “transcribe this” or “tell me what’s on my calendar,” features peddled by business idiots that have little experience with any real-world applications of just about anything, marketed with the knowledge that the media will do the hard work of explaining why anybody should give a shit. [...] In fact, most of the show felt like companies doing madlibs with startup decks to try and trick people into thinking they’d done anything other than staple a frontend on top of a Large Language Model. Nowhere was that more obvious than the glut of useless AI-powered “smart” glasses, all of which claim to do translation, or dictation, or run “apps” using clunky, ugly and hard-to-use interfaces, all using the same LLMs, all doing effectively the same thing. These products only exist because Meta decided to blow several billion dollars on launching “AI glasses,” with the slew of copycats phrased as being “part of a new category” rather than “a bunch of companies making a bunch of useless bullshit nobody wants or needs.” [...] These are the actions of a tech industry that has escaped any meaningful criticism — let alone regulation! — of their core businesses or new products under the auspices of “giving them a chance” or “being open to new ideas,” and those ideas are always whatever the tech industry just said, even if it’s nonsensical."
This one recalls the "metaverse" passing fad: "Three years and $70 billion later, the metaverse is dead, and everybody acts as if it didn’t happen. Whoops! In a sane society, investors, analysts and the media would never trust a single word out of Mark Zuckerberg’s mouth ever again. Instead, the media gleefully covered his mid-2025 “Personal Superintelligence” blog where he promised everybody would have a “personal superintelligence” to “help you achieve your goals.” Do LLMs do that? No. Can they ever do that? No. Doesn’t matter! This is the tech industry. There is no punishment, no consequence, no critique, no cynicism, and no comeuppance — only celebration and consideration, only growth."
On LLMs: "Generative AI lowers the barrier of entry for anybody to cobble together a startup that can say all the right things to a venture capitalist. Vibe coding can create a “working prototype” of a product that can’t scale (but can raise money!), the nebulous problems of LLMs — their voracious need for data, the massive data security issues, and so on — offer founders the chance to create slews of nebulous “observability” and “data veracity” companies, and the burdensome cost of running anything LLM-adjacent means that venture capitalists can make huge bets on companies with inflated valuations, allowing them to raise the Net Asset Value of their holdings arbitrarily as other desperate investors pile into later rounds."
On the 1990s bubble: "Yet in a very real sense, the “dot com bubble” that everybody experienced had very little to do with actual technology. Investors in the public markets rushed with their eyes closed and their wallets out to invest in any company that even smelled like the computer, leading to basically any major tech or telecommunications stock trading at a ridiculous multiple of their earnings per share (60x in Microsoft’s case). [...] No. No it isn’t. AI boosters and well-wishers are obsessed with making this comparison because saying “things worked out after the dot com bubble” allows them to rationalize doing stupid, destructive and reckless things. Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic — the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 — but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO. The AI bubble bursting will be worse, because the investments are larger, the contagion is wider, and the underlying asset — GPUs — are entirely different in their costs, utility and basic value than dark fiber. Furthermore, the basic unit economics of AI — both in its infrastructure and the AI companies themselves — are magnitudes more horrifying than anything we saw in the dot com bubble."
Amen. It only gets crazier over time. █
Image source: Ed Zitron, EZPR.com; Experience Summit stage; Web Summit 2024
