In another twist of abysmal AI politics, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just admitted that we are in an AI bubble, and AGI is losing relevance. You may find this baffling or hilarious, or you may be wondering where does that leave the AI influencer types.
But despite the absurdity, AI and the associated narrative have gotten way too important to dismiss. Connecting the dots to make sense of it all calls for long-standing experience in AI, engineering, business and beyond. In other words, for people like Georg Zoeller: a seasoned software and business engineer experienced in frontier technology in the gaming industry and Facebook.
Zoeller has been using AI in his work dating back to the 2010’s, to the point where AI is now at the core of what he does. Zoeller is the VP of Technology of NOVI Health, a Singapore-based healthcare startup, as well as the Co-Founder of the Centre for AI Leadership and the AI Literacy & Transformation Institute.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Zoeller, we addressed everything from AI first principles to its fatal flaws and its place in capitalism. Today, we discuss regulatory capture, copyright, the limits of the attention economy, the new AI religion, the builder’s conundrum, how the AI-powered transformation of software engineering is a glimpse into the future of work, AI literacy and how to navigate the brave new world.
Picking up on where we left off in part 1 of the conversation, Zoeller argues that OpenAI will never deliver the ROI promised to investors because their competition arrived at the same point spending 100X (or more) less. The underwhelming release of GPT5 seems to support this thesis, prompting Altman to backpedal. But, Zoeller goes on to add, in a way that does not matter:
“When you invest in the right people, you get regulatory capture in the US. You have the president of the United States host your fundraisers, you have the vice president of the United States go to Paris and to the AI summit and dance the no safety dance.
The chickens will come home to roost because it is backed by the United States government. It owns the United States government. We know that a lot of money is flowing into these companies now”.
Zoeller points out that the embrace of the US government with the AI bros is so tight, that it even includes feeding the social media histories of every single person who crosses over the border into Grok and getting an assessment.
It’s an entirely non transparent process and the technology is not explainable. That would be a rights violation in every normal country, but we’re not in a normal scale anymore. To wit, whether we like it or not, the technology is already transforming our economy and society.
Unregulated use of AI has broken copyright, Zoeller argues. There are numerous reports of AI-generated copies of original content flooding marketplaces like Amazon. Creators put a lot of time and effort, only to have their work stolen before their eyes – same content, different words.
“The people who made those on the cheap for three dollars of ChatGPT, never spend any money [creating]. They’re spending the money on advertisement. The more volume there is, the only thing that matters is: will anyone actually see my product?
As someone who created a book or an app, you will always be at a disadvantage towards the grifters who take what you did. They are pushing the app or the book out there, with social media amplification and paid ad spend”, Zoeller notes.
Zoeller does not have a rosy view of copyright. He believes copyright was created to incentivize creators to continue to create, not because the world liked artists, but because the world liked publishers. Publishers lobbied hard, and they had a lot of money and power. Now copyright is broken, not just for books, but for the Internet at large.
Many of these models are trained on Web 2.0 concepts such as Stack Overflow. Places like this, where every software engineer would go to check for answers to questions and share knowledge freely was a Web 2.0 phenomenon that no longer works in the world of AI, Zoeller thinks.
He also thinks that with the incentives system being broken, we can no longer expect that you just need to make the right app and people will come. Attention is the underlying primitive for everything, more valuable than money, because it represents opportunity. We have failed to regulate the attention economy, and surrendered full control of all attention to a handful of platforms who will benefit massively from AI.
Facebook isn’t giving a Manhattan project’s worth of AI away for free because they love open source, Zoeller opines. They’re doing it because accelerating content creation means more and more content on the supply side. This means creators need a platform, and they have to pay to get through the door to customers.
The public market on the digital economy is mediated by a handful of companies. The cost of user acquisition for SMEs is often hundreds of dollars per user. This is a silent tax on every item sold, because advertisement is baked into the cost of every product. AI is now commoditizing knowledge economy digital products, just like the industrial revolution commoditized physical goods.