While the normies were resting, we mainlined tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the most manic corners of the internet. This week: OpenAI’s influencer retreat, the real-world limits of the so-called AI revolution, and two public intellectuals debate capitalism (wow!).
This is Manic Monday.
The people have chosen a favorite new AI billboard
They said it couldn’t be done: Someone put up an AI ad that locals actually like! Last week, a billboard appeared at the corner of Sixth and Shipley Streets, just off Folsom, advertising ChatTJB, a new chatbot powered by AI (read: “average individual”). Tucker Bryant, a keynote speaker and former Google product manager, is the man behind ChatTJB, and for days now he’s been manually responding to thousands of ChatTJB users messaging his so-called chatbot about everything from what color to paint their homes to what to make for dinner to how to be less awkward when flirting with your crush. “This fucking rules,” wrote one person on Reddit, whose comment was echoed by a parade of compliments from others who had tried out ChatTJB.
Of course, the outpouring of love proved overwhelming for a solo human: As of this morning, ChatTJB is on pause. As Bryant wrote on his site, his project has been “getting way more traffic than anticipated and the site is struggling to keep up.” It won’t be for long, but perhaps now it will be supported by the ghostwriters, English teachers, and other lovers of whimsical community projects who offered to help respond to the tidal wave of folks looking to chat with their neighbors and give “real” AI the finger. —Cydney Hayes
Wet hot American (techie) summer
A summer camp hosted by OpenAI sounds like a bit out of Silicon Valley, but it went down this weekend, and we’ve done the hard work of finding the camp’s exact location: the super-luxe Wildflower Farms in the upstate New York town of Gardiner.
Details on the retreat are scant. Product designer and techfluencer Marisa Chentakul, also known as @meshtimes, published and then deleted an X post showing off guests at a long dining table (adorned with a big OpenAI logo at the head), a beautiful bedroom trimmed in sleek blond wood, and a gift package that included a fancy tote and a monogrammed shirt with her initials. Meanwhile, startup founder and influencer Sreya Halder posted a video of the retreat tagging Wildflower Farms but with no mention of the OpenAI affiliation. The same type of room and monogrammed white shirt is featured in Halder’s video, which remains live on Instagram.
“Consider this your permission to relax, create something cool, meet some great people, and have a lot of fun — with ChatGPT along for the ride,” the note in Chentakul’s photo reads.
Based on Chentakul’s deleted post and Halder’s insistence on only referring to the host as “a tech company,” I thought there was some sort of code of silence on attendees. Apparently not: Influencer Grace McCarrick had no issues naming OpenAI in her rambling videos about how nice the bathtub in her cabin is.
Taylor Lorenz claimed influencers were “getting cancelled” for attending, but frankly, I think any public shaming is chuckle-worthy: “Can’t wait to show this to the millions of folks who are begging to not have data centers in their backyards because of air and noise pollution but your robe looks cozy,” TikTok comedian Meredith Lynch quipped in McCarrick’s comments. —Eddie Kim
The limit does exist
It feels like every other day someone asks me, “When is the AI bubble going to burst?” While I never have a good answer for them (I am a reporter, not a soothsayer), one story that dominated the timeline this weekend may illuminate for those inquirers the limits of unchecked AI spending: Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund that, just last month, was managing $45 billion in assets, suffered massive losses and was forced to sell all public stock last week in response to falling semiconductor stocks and declining investment in AI infrastructure. Most of the coverage of this admittedly wonky finance story revolves around the fund’s founder, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old ex-OpenAI researcher who, according to a Wall Street Journal profile from June, had no professional investing experience before launching Situational Awareness.
This isn’t the bubble bursting, at least not in the way that everyone who pays rent in San Francisco is waiting for, but one truth to take away from this development is that there are indeed limits to the so-called “AI revolution” tech boosters are always going on about. Those limits include, say, regular degular market volatility and physical constraints, like the Earth’s finite resources. That said, the other truth is that tech’s big players generally land on their feet: Amid this chaos, Aschenbrenner is said to have gotten married this weekend to a key Anthropic employee, Avital Balwit, Dario Amodei’s chief of staff. The wedding apparently included a pre-ceremony “colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions,” which, commenters online noted, hopefully included some discussions on risk management. —C.H.
We’re arguing two sides of a pretty shitty coin
The only thing surging more than Nvidia’s debt obligations is social media discourse about What It All Means®. In the blue corner, we have Abundance co-author Derek Thompson; in the red (as in socialist red) corner, we have Palo Alto author Malcolm Harris.
On Friday, Thompson jabbed at how critics of Big Tech in the 2010s bemoaned the industry’s hoarding of capital “as a major failure of late capitalism,” and now seem like hypocrites. “So it’s kinda funny that, now that the hyperscalers have torched their cash flow on AI, Big Tech’s critics seem to hate them more than ever,” Thompson wrote on X.
In classic online-debate-guy form, Harris countered Thompson with a sassy “lol” while recommending he read the Marxist economics tome: “The over-accumulation of capital in high tech firms and their need to reinvest in finding new tech monopolies is the same systemic problem!” Thompson then asserted that Big Tech hoarding capital for self-enriching stock buybacks and Big Tech firehosing the AI industry with borrowed cash are two opposite phenomena, but then tells Harris that “they are different sides of a coin!” (Does Thompson understand the idiom he’s using?)
While the duo bickered over semantics, other money experts waved red flags about “circular financing” that creates an ouroburos-like loop of tech giants feeding borrowed cash to other tech giants to chase AI profits. The 2008 financial crash came after mortgage markets crumbled under the weight of bad investments built on a pile of shit analysis. Sounds familiar to me, but which side of the coin is that again? —E.K.
Breaking news: Startup founder reprimanded for bad behavior
This weekend, one founder may have taken the startup-world virtue of “naughtiness” a little too far, even for the accelerator that first entered it into tech canon: A Miami-based founder named Alex Slater got hit with a cease-and-desist email from Y Combinator after Slater used the YC logo in a bait-and-switch advertisement for his startup Soar, which styles itself as Uber for flights. (The ad, which was displayed on a truck driving around San Francisco, told viewers to scan a QR code for instant acceptance to YC, only to have the QR code lead to Soar’s website.) Slater, who not part of the YC community, didn’t seem that worried about YC’s response, posting the email on X with the caption “fuck around and find out.” One commenter suggested his next marketing scheme, saying “Now put this email on the truck.” —C.H.
The week ahead: Anthropic attempts to one-up the ChatGPT summer retreat by sending techfluencers on an Everest expedition.
