Blain’s Morning Porridge 30th May 2024: Big Tech – Overpromised and Underdelivered.
“The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.”
There is nothing so dispiriting as dealing with a bank online. The experience will leave you frustrated and furious. Yet we all expect the AI revolution is going to absolutely change tech for the better. Wake up. Smell the Coffee. Prepare to be disappointed.
This morning’s porridge is a bit of a stream of consciousness thang… but bear with.. eventually I get to the point… All that glitters is probably not gold…
Yesterday was not a good day. I came very close to losing it. She-who-is-Mrs-Blain spotted the signs and removed all the sharp objects from my office. I am not particularly tech savy, but I can navigate my way round a website, a keyboard, and know how to “clear my cache and history…”. But nothing, absolutely nothing… can prepare anyone for the soul-destroying experience of trying to sort an account problem at a British Bank online.
Later, when a client called to ask my opinion of the Nvidia everything bubble (more on which below, but I have to vent my spleen first) I found myself rather unenthusiastic about tech… I thought about it. Tech over-promises and underdelivers. The internet, digitisation, fintech and each new pixelated love, peace and happiness concept that assures us it will make everything so much quicker, faster and better online – always disappoints.
Tech’s greatest achievement thus far has been driving the absolute enshittification of the whole customer experience. Why worry about a super-AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity, when dealing with banks online will give 2/3 of the population strokes, heart attacks or the urge to jump out of high windows.
The issue was simple: I have subscribed my new business, Wind Shift Capital, for a data/info system from a large, very well-known US firm. I had to pay for it. I instructed my bank to transfer the cash to my Revolut account so I could make the transfer quickly, cheaply and efficiently. The money never arrived. I tried to instruct the transfer again and found my business account blocked. I tried to sort it online. Nope, computa said no and told me to call them….
Nooooooo!
Calling a British Bank on the phone is much like making the grand futile guesture of “going over the top” in World War 1. You know it’s unlikely to end well. I was spun the usual lies like: “due to a higher than expected volume of calls”, links that didn’t work and the ultimate insult “your call is important to us” – which it is not. If it was important, they’d answer the phone… Finally 40 mins later I got picked up, and about the third thing he told me was his computer had frozen. The guy eventually looked at my account and said I had to speak to the Business Fraud Prevention team…
Double Nooooooo!
Bitter experience, (garnered while working in the Middle East over the last few years and the bank blocking my credit card every time I tried to use it in a surfeit of concern it might have been stolen), has taught me the Fraud Protection teams at my bank don’t pick up the phone. You have to call or email your private banker and ask them to ask the team to call you… which is a fecking hassle on a Saturday evening in Dubai and you have no way to pay a restaurant bill. (Which is why I use multiple banks and credit cards.)
Yesterday I left my phone on terminal death hold to the fraud team for hours – unanswered. Eventually my private banker got the team to call me. It was all my fault they told me. Making a payment to Revolut… tsk, tsk, didn’t I know Revolut is used by fraudsters? Really? Are they? That’s a pretty serious accusation for a British Bank to making about a competing fintech. Eventually, after I assured them I was not being held under duress by a gang of Albanian sock smugglers, they agreed to unlock my account. But then the bank’s website would still not let me make the payment.
I gave up. I paid the bill with my Amex card – meaning lots and lots of BA Avios which I will never use because flying British Airways is the equivalent of banking with a British Bank…..
It was not the best experience. Yet, every single UK bank has closed branches, ditched customer facing staff, and is forcing us to use their KGB designed on-line systems…. which are designed to frustrate us to death. No one is happy. Online banking works right up to the point it doesn’t. And then it becomes a killer.
Which gets me to the stock market.
Or, lets be honest.. there isn’t really a stock market anymore. There is just Nvidia. Nvidia and a couple of other names… and the rest is piffle. If Nvidia’s CEO yawns the stock might go up or down more than the total capitalisation of every single US oil and energy company. The reason the stock market is now Nvidia is because, apparently, Nvidia is AI and AI is everything.
No.
Get past the hype around OpenAI, ChatGBT and all the other noise and firms jumping on the bandwagon, and the figure out if AI is really the massive paradigm shift that’s going to completely rewrite and rewire economies, or is it just the latest evolutionary tech advance that might change the world a bit. I suspect the latter because it will over-promise and underdeliver.
Personally, I think better MedTech will change the world much more dramatically than AI. I don’t expect the new Surgical Sewing Machine I’m doing a small Series A+ raise for will be worth more than the whole US energy sector – even though it will likely be used by every medical practitioner on the planet. It will be a success, but because its dealing with and being tested by sober, rational, highly qualified medical doctors, rather than an AI something being fairground-barkered by quasi-hippy Silicon Valley hipsters who understand the value of spin and hype over usage cases…. Guess which will be worth more?
Let us not forget Nvidia is just part of a complex AI ecosystem that ranges from the picks and shovels hardware of chips, the language models and applications. That’s a market of many, many niches.. each looking for the right solution. While everyone is fixated on Nvidia because it produces the chips… where does the real value in the AI revolution really lie?
Is Elon Musk’s xAI really worth $18 bln on little more than Musk being involved in it? Can anyone explain Elon’s mission statement on xAI to me: “a mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” That’s not a business plan, that’s BS grandstanding…
Does the amount of energy required to drive generative AI programmes actually make sense? Yesterday I was surprised to learn Red Funnel, the ferry company that sails between the Isle of Wight and Southampton, is ordering new diesel driven boats because there is not the energy available in Hampshire to charge electric ferries….
That’s reality… before we start dreaming about the AI everything economy.. lets get the infrastructure fixed…
Out of time and back to the day job…
Bill Blain
Author of The Morning Porridge
Wind Shift Capital
5 Comments
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Ai = Blockchain 2.0. Still waiting for the revolution. The economy is now a hype cycle.
I think you just summed up the last 25 years… perfect.
Although it did help me write my end of term reports very quickly 🤣
Hi Bill,
I sympathise with you about the banks. I’ve been using Wise (formerly Transferwise) for international transfers for years and couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Efficient, secure, reliable and cheap. For day-to-day banking I had to switch banks after Intelligent Finance (whom I’d been banking with for more than 20 years) suddenly decided to close my account. In the end I opted for Nationwide and couldn’t be happier. Reliable and friendly and they have a great app, so I do most of my banking on my mobile. It’s also good for less run-of-the-mill transactions. Both my wife and myself receive pensions from abroad and there are never any problems with the payments. If you need to talk to someone face-to-face, no problem, They’re friendly and efficient. What’s more, while most banks are closing down their branches, Nationwide has pledged to keep existing branches open until at least 2028.
By the way, love the Morning Porridge. Makes a refreshing change from the usual insanities and inanities offered up by most market commentators. Keep up the good work!
Paul Skinner
Nationwide is aquiring the sh*t-show that passes as my bank. It’s either inspired or a sign of delusional madness..I hope the former.
BB