Ed Zitron Writes Where's Your Ed At, a newsletter on the AI industry's finances, and hosts the Better Offline podcast covering the same territory in audio.

“It is not a moral good to be correct about how much AI can do.”

The Tech Report · September 2026

Context

Zitron had spent the segment arguing that a thin slice of heavy customers carries almost all AI revenue, and that boosters answer that argument by demanding you admit ChatGPT is better. This is his objection to the demand itself: it treats a paid software product as a position on right and wrong. He goes on to say they want the argument kept there so nobody looks at who is actually paying.

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Transcript

The Tech Report Around 18:22 into the episode

Ed Zitron

…fact that Broadcom's largest customers are going to be Anthropic and OpenAI, that's also bad. So we just have all of these consequences waiting around the corner and everyone just saying, it's not a big deal. We'll deal with it. Like, stop thinking. Stop asking questions. Nothing bad ever happens.

Isaac Pound

I mean, so if we take that 80% from 1% statistic and we kind of extrapolate it out, what does it mean for the narrative that AI is this inevitable thing that has such broad demand and such broad use cases that you got to get on board or get in the bin?

Ed Zitron

…a. A ridiculous thing right now where AI boosters will come to you and they will talk to you like a religious fanatic and they will say, Admit it! Admit that ChatGPT is better! Admit to me, you must concede that ChatGPT is better. First of all, none of these idiots will concede a single damn thing about the finances, so screw them. Second of all, this is software you pay for. This is not morals. It is not a moral good to be correct about how much AI can do. On top of that, they're not correct on it, but it's not like liking or disliking a software product you pay money for is not a ideological thing. It's stupid to see it that way. And they want it to be like that so they can push this through so that you'll all stop thinking about one thing, which is that most people will not pay for AI. Even though it's got better in the last year, most people…

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