Show me the other money

This is a long but good read. Zitron really researched this.

How Does OpenAI Survive?

Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed AtEdward Zitron

Technology is a fascinating thing. To me anyway, always has been. There’s always a danger of people working in Tech to focus on the ‘Thing’. Be that a deployment, migration, problem, KPI or whatever. What I’ve learned over the past 5+ years is it’s essential to balance Technology and Business. Sure we talk about it all the time, but talk costs and budgets and feet still shuffle more often than not.

“But what is the total cost?”
“But how does that add to revenue or remove cost?”

(That’s not a slight to anyone, we hire Techs to do the Tech things and Leaders to focus on the rest)

I am unashamedly challenging about GenAI. Primarily now because of sustainability and energy. There’s too much outside of Tech stacked against it. Face it - the power grid is not going to be miraculously fixed and upgraded in any country anytime soon. And I will always put Society’s needs before a cool toy. The legal side I understand intellectually and it offends the older me - but ohhhh, back in the day I downloaded so much from Napster. So bit hypocritical.

But the main driver has always been the cost/benefit equation just doesn’t work. You can add in environment, energy and legal to that if you want. But even without it. It doesn’t work.

“I recognize reading this you might dismiss me as a cynic, or a pessimist, or as someone rooting for the end, and I have taken great pains to explain my hypotheses here in detail without much opinion or editorializing. If you disagree with me, tell me how I’m wrong — explain to me what I’ve missed, show me the holes in my logic or my math.”

Exactly. Explain it in detail how it will work without the ‘hopes and prayers’ that the technology will dramatically improve all of a sudden, or the costs dramatically reduce.