Can Artificial Intelligence Stir-Fry? | The New Yorker
In January, 2000, early internet startups (Pets.com, Epidemic.com) made up about twenty per cent of Super Bowl ads. That year’s game was known as the Dot-Com Bowl. Then the dot-com bubble burst, sending the Nasdaq tumbling more than seventy per cent by October, 2002. Twenty years later, Super Bowl LVI was called the Crypto Bowl, and featured ads from Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX. Soon, FTX was bankrupt, and Bitcoin was sputtering. This year, the Super Bowl was all about artificial intelligence, as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Salesforce ran ads showing off their A.I. tools.
Is history repeating itself? “It is such a bad sign,” Ed Zitron, an A.I. skeptic and the host of the tech podcast “Better Offline,” said the other day. Zitron, who has blue eyes and a British accent, wore a black leather coat as he stood outside a Chinese restaurant in the Sawtelle neighborhood of Los Angeles, ready to test (or, rather, taste) the fruits of A.I.’s labor. The restaurant, called Tigawok, uses A.I.-powered robot chefs that cook on woks. He was curious to see how it was working out. “I always ask why,” he said of tech innovations. “If you’re going to throw robots in everything, at least make there be a meaningful reason. At least improve it for someone.”
Tigawok’s doors opened, and Zitron entered to order an early lunch. “Is the kung-pao chicken spicy?” he asked a human at the register.
“It’s mild,” she responded. Doubtful, he settled on plum fried chicken, for $4.99. Visible in the kitchen, behind the counter, were three robot chefs that looked like front-loading washing machines. As they whirred loudly, Zitron muttered, “Welcome to the future,” then found a table.
Zitron is thirty-eight and lives in Las Vegas, where he runs a tech P.R. firm as his day job. In 2020, he began writing a newsletter about the industry, and three years later Cool Zone Media approached him about making a podcast. “ ‘A.I.’ and ‘robots’ are just words,” he said. “One of the more cynical things that you see people like Sam Altman, of OpenAI, do is try and use the umbrella term of ‘A.I.’ to connect” generative A.I. and large language models, “where not much is happening,” to robotics, “where stuff is actually happening.”
Around him, tables were filling up. “I can see why they’re doing it,” he said of the robot chefs. “They’ve got a more compact space—they’re able to cook more food.” Still, he added, “it seems like a gimmick.”
Last year, when Zitron started his podcast, he focussed his attention on Silicon Valley and the A.I. boom. He remembered thinking, There must be something I’m missing. Before long, he was hearing from programmers who were skeptical of generative A.I. and warning that it was “actively dangerous” for their work. “There’s a ton of founders in the Valley who do not like A.I. They’re mad that it’s taking up all the oxygen,” he said. “People are angry at tech, but I don’t think they’re angry at all tech.” He mentioned staples like smartphones, social media, instant access to nearly all the world’s recorded music. His main critique of Silicon Valley today is its addiction to endless expansion and profits, which has led to what he calls the “rot-com” bubble. “All these companies are obsessed with growth,” he said. “But we’re approaching the end of hyper-growth in tech, and it’s making them do crazy things.” A.I., he said, is just a “big, shiny bauble to say, ‘We have ideas.’ ” Investors have eaten it up.
In late January, a crack appeared in the façade. The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek released R1 (a rival to OpenAI’s reasoning model), and the company’s app quickly became the most downloaded free program in the iOS App Store. “They proved that you can make a reasoning model for cheap, and you can run it for cheaper” than Silicon Valley companies, Zitron said. It would no longer be necessary for companies like Nvidia to release an expensive new chip every year. In a panic, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index dropped about a trillion dollars in value in one day, with Nvidia alone losing nearly six hundred billion in market capitalization.
Remembering the insanity of that day, Zitron smiled. He described talking with hedge-fund managers and startup founders afterward: “Everyone was sitting around going, ‘Wait, why are we spending three hundred billion dollars on cap-ex?’ ” DeepSeek’s success showed that the narrative around A.I. was wrong. “It removed the sheen from OpenAI,” Zitron said. The market and the tech companies have not fully recovered, and Zitron said that people in the tech world are “unsettled—everyone knows that something’s shifted.”
Zitron doesn’t consider himself a tech fatalist. He can still find what he calls “genuine magic” in tech, such as the use of gallium nitride in batteries and chargers. “But then there’s all of these assholes who are making all of this money getting in the way of the cool shit that tech does,” he said.
He took a bite of his plum fried chicken. Then another. “Hmm,” he said. “This isn’t terrible.” ♦
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