In truth, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t in as much tension as they might seem to be. The PR wheedling and the critical needling come from the same place: He loves this stuff. He’s just mad it doesn’t work better. “I’m actually kind of a lover,” he said. “I love my friends, and I really love the computer.” The problem is that “they’re fucking it up. They’re fucking up the computer. They’re making it worse. AI does not do what they say it will. The Metaverse didn’t. Crypto doesn’t. Just these lies. And then the products we use every day get so much worse.”

That’s the thing. LLMs are indeed an interesting technology and are quite useful in some circumstances. It’s this breathless insistence that it will change literally everything in the world, and the charlatans making fortunes off this hype, is the real problem. There’s no hypocrisy in this.