The AI guys were lying the whole time

The Emperors Have No Clothes

Last week, a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched their r1 generative-AI model via a free app that is now sitting atop the iOS App Store. Egg-shaped tech investor and former Clubhouse influencer Marc Andreessen called DeepSeek r1, “AI’s Sputnik moment” in an X post Sunday.

And, yes, it is causing a lot of panic. AI and chip manufacturer stocks are in free fall this morning as the market reacts to DeepSeek, which is both open source and basically as good as ChatGPT. Chip manufacturer Nvidia had the biggest market loss in history today and DeepSeek is also being targeted by a cyber attack. But if you’re looking for a real break down of what DeepSeek can’t do that ChatGPT can, it’s a lot of quality of life stuff. It can’t generate images, can’t talk to you, doesn’t support third party plugins, and doesn’t have “vision” like ChatGPT does. (I’ve actually been using that last feature recently to troubleshoot what’s wrong with my cactuses lol.) All that said, on Monday, DeepSeek released an open-source image generator called Janus-Pro-7B that is, once again, as good, if not better, than OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.

Limitations aside, the fact DeepSeek is essentially free, costing cents to use its API, open source, and was reportedly created by a team for only around $5 million (if you believe that) has, as Fast Company put it, raised “several existential questions for America’s tech giants.” Or as noted AI evangelist and OpenAI superfan Ed Zitron wrote on Bluesky this morning, “The AI bubble was inflated based on the idea that we need bigger models that both are trained and run on bigger and even larger GPUs. A company came along that has undermined the narrative — ways both substantive and questionable.”

But to put all of this in larger context, Andreessen’s Sputnik comparison isn’t totally inaccurate. Especially if you, like him, believe that artificial general intelligence is both possible and a genuine nuclear-level threat to our existence or space-race-esque quest to change the future of humanity. (Which we’ll get to in just a sec.) But I’d actually compare DeepSeek to something much more recent: TikTok.

If the 2010s was the story of American tech platforms eating the world then the 2020s has been the story of Chinese platforms biting back in a big way. Not just because users have, in the case of TikTok, liked them better or found them more addictive, but because they are, also, much cheaper. And in September 2021, when TikTok broke a billion monthly active users, the mistake — well, one of the many mistakes — Silicon Valley made in response was assuming that they could simply change the game they were suddenly losing. Meta, in particular, had lobbyists pushing hard for the TikTok ban as they, at the same time, renamed themselves Meta and went all in on, first, the metaverse, then AI, and now, some sort of vague middle ground between the two. But it wasn’t just Meta. Andreessen and every other grand wizard of the San Fransisco Dark Enlightenment decided that AI, not social, was the future and that future was assuredly still American. Instead of accepting the new bi-polar tech landscape increasingly shared by both China and the US, they shut out Chinese competition at home and immediately began throwing other peoples’ money into a furnace, promising it would eventually bring about the new revolution that they, coincidentally enough, just so happened to be early to. And, this weekend, thanks to DeepSeek, we not only learned they never needed all that money to build the future, but that they weren’t even that good at it at building it.

Now, we don’t yet know how the American AI industry will react to DeepSeek, but OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced on Saturday that free ChatGPT users are getting access to a more advanced model. Likely as a way to quickly respond to the DeepSeek hype. Meta are also frantically beefing up their own AI tools. But it’s hard to imagine how American AI companies can compete after they spent the last four years insisting that they need infinite money to buy infinite computing power to accomplish what is now open source. DeepSeek r1 can even run without an internet connection. So it’s possible that OpenAI, the biggest money sink of all, may, as cognitive scientist and AI critic Gary Marcus wrote today, “some day been seen as the WeWork of AI.” And that some day might be sooner than you think. The mood is changing fast. El Salvador’s hustle bro millennial dictator Nayib Bukele posted on X over the weekend, “So, [more than] 95% of the cost of developing new AI models is purely overhead?”

But, like TikTok, it’s doubtful that American tech oligarchs are actually capable of accepting how screwed they are because AI is not just a massive pyramid scheme to them. It has ballooned out into a psuedo-religion. And Andreessen has spent the last week frantically posting through it, doing his best impression of a doomsday evangelist trying to convince his flock that, yes, he knew that the roadmap was changing and that, yes, the promised revelation is still coming.

“A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,” he wrote on X, quivering in his shell. “Everything you need and want for pennies.” Everything, it seems, also includes AI.

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A Real Bad Startup Name

And, yes, it’s real.

Garbage Day And Panic World Are Now On Bluesky

Welcome to Bluesky, @garbageday.email and @panicworld.com! If you’re on Bluesky and want to get basic updates on the newsletter and the podcast, you can follow those two accounts. My personal account is here if you want that one too.

Incidentally, Garbage Day’s Bluesky account was banned for a few days for being a “spammy, fake, or inauthentic account.” I didn’t immediately believe it because Bluesky moderation emails sort of look like phishing emails. But it was restored this morning after I complained lol.

CONFIRMED: Federal Employees Are Receiving Suspicious “TEST” Emails, Likely Connected To Musk’s DOGE

Federal employees have been sharing this now-deleted Reddit post about suspicious “test” emails being sent from email addresses purportedly belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, which is effectively the HR department for the federal government. You can read a copy of the now-deleted Reddit post here and there is now a backup Reddit post with screenshots and discussion, which you can find here.

A federal employee, who requested to remain anonymous, told Garbage Day this morning that they had received one of these emails recently. “I got the first of the two OPM emails and some of my colleagues for the second one,” they said. “Neither of [the emails] got to everybody.”

The theory, floated in the initial Reddit post, is that these emails are connected to an initiative being carried out by Amanda Scales, who was recently been named OPM’s chief of staff, according to Bloomberg Law. Scales, who came from Elon Musk’s xAI team, is reportedly building a list of federal employees that can easily be fired, whether it’s because of diversity rollbacks or the Trump administration’s new back-to-the-office mandate. As on redditor wrote, “What I'm taking from this is that there is an unsecured server with (at least) the email address of every federal employee on it. Nothing bad can possibly happen from that.”

Backing up the theory that this is connected to Musk’s DOGE department, former Twitter product manager Emily Price told Garbage Day that it is very similar to how he cleared house during the transition from Twitter to X. “He’s bringing in trusted folks from his company and asking people to fetch rocks to show loyalty — whether it’s code reviews or asking people to fill out surveys. I thought we had a month before we were all fired, but we had a week,” she said. “This shit is going to move fast and sloppy.”

If you have a tip for Garbage Day, you can reach me on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record.

Elon Went Full Blood And Soil In Germany

At a rally for Germany’s far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD), Elon Musk zoomed in to tell the audience that “multiculturalism dilutes everything” and that the AfD was Germany’s “best hope,” among other variations of the 14 words, concluding that “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents.”

Unlike, most mainstream outlets, I don’t really have any qualms about calling Musk a fascist, but he’s also, like most fascists, an egomaniac who uses identitarian politics as a cover for much more personal and petty impulses. Which is why I think his current fascination with full-throated blood and soil nationalism is likely tied to X’s dwindling revenue and the massive debt sell-off on the horizon. It’s also a power play, if you’re to believe Trumpian palace gossip, because President Donald Trump has reportedly already started freezing him out.

Unfortunately, all of this controversy has had a real impact on Musk’s sister Tosca, whose erotic streaming service Passionflix has been hemorrhaging users since his little “Roman salute” last week. Sad!

The Sealposters Of RedNote

X user @spilledcrawfish wrote recently, “Lowkey sleeping on xhs sealposters this shit is straight gas. ignore eye of rah.” Which, yeah, based on the screenshot above, best to ignore the eye of rah.

I thought this was a shitpost at first, but in the replies beneath it, many other users agreed that RedNote has a lot of good seal content. Which is neat! Are you on RedNote? Have you found a cool or weird pocket of it? Let me know what you’re seeing on there!

The Robbie Williams Hand Job Story

Even though Better Man, the musical biopic about British singer Robbie Williams, where Williams is played by a CGI monkey, has been a huge flop in the US, he’s still all over the internet right now. And Americans have largely been very confused at the idea of this genuinely very famous man that they have never heard of before.

I, too, was very confused when I first learned of Williams while I was living in London many years ago. I was even more confused by his Whole Deal, which I guess I’d compare to Mark Wahlberg, if Wahlberg never went into acting and, instead, blew up into a Justin Timberlake-level pop star. Anyways, if you’ve come across a bunch of Williams content recently, don’t really know how to deal with it, and are desperate for answers, this NSFW-ish story he told on Graham Norton in 2016 is a good place to start.

A Cursed French Oopsie

Some Stray Links

• “Keene man arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 rejects Trump’s pardon”

• “In This Putrid Hell, Connection Is The Antidote”

• “The Proud Boys Are Plotting a Comeback. And They Want Revenge”

P.S. here’s a good Tumblr post about AI.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***