Enjoy those tags. They may hurt me later LOL
The "AI TOPS" Metric
What inspired this particular rant was when I saw Jensen of Nvidia going on about AI TOPS when he was supposed to be trying to sell me a gaming GPU. It’s literally TERAFLOPS all over again. Hey gamers, remember the console war before the PS5 and Series X dropped? Everyone was waving their dicks about teraflops like it was the key metric of destiny 2. “Oh bro, my console has 12 TFLOPS, yours only has 10, checkmate.” Yeah, because everyone's K/D ratio in Call of Duty is measured by efficiency in units of floating-point operations. Nobody has ever finished Elden Ring and said, “Wow, the experience was elevated by those extra 2.6 trillion calculations per second.” It was marketing math cosplay. A numbers pissing contest.
And now? Xbox want's to slap a toned down puppet version of Cortana's corpse in khakis and an over-sized plaid sweater on your Xbox (Do they even exist anymore?) and wants you to high five them for it. All while NVIDIA’s out here screaming about AI TOPS — trillions of operations per second, like they’ve reinvented the wheel. Hate to break it to you, Jensen, but that’s just TFLOPS in drag. It’s like painting flames on a Honda Civic and calling it a supercar. Big number does not equate to meaningful experience. It’s just marketing math designed to impress dudes on Reddit who think quoting a spec sheet makes them engineers.
The Cult of “Smart” All Over Again
We’ve seen this movie before. Remember the dark age of “Smart Everything”? Smart TVs, smart fridges, smart toothbrushes, smart water. People were literally drinking “smart water” while driving their smart cars to Target to buy more dumb shit labeled smart. Did it make anyone smarter? Hell no. It was branding cocaine sprinkled on ordinary products.
AI is just the sequel: Smart 2.0. AI inbox, AI fridge, AI photo cropper, AI stapled to your grandma’s pacemaker. Nobody asked for half of this shit. And you know someone’s pitching AI Water™ as we speak. “Now with machine learning electrolytes.” I'm looking at you Coca-Cola Company.
The Personality Vacuum
Here’s where it stings: AI doesn’t sell on numbers — it sells on vibes. We literally call it "vibe coding". Siri? Personality. Alexa? Personality. Even goddamn Clippy — the googly-eyed paperclip who haunted Office in the ‘90s — has cultural weight. The little bastard lives on in memes and, as of late, as a symbol of dissent against bad tech practices. People still smile when he pops up ironically or out of spite. That’s relevance. That’s presence.
Microsoft, though? They had the golden goose: Cortana. The ultimate blue AI waifu. Sleek, iconic, tied to Halo, beloved by gamers. She had cultural firepower. She could’ve been the AI voice. Instead? They tossed her in a corporate dumpster and handed us Copilot: a khaki-wearing, personality-free wannabe-sidekick with as much charm as a wet paper towel used to clean up dog piss. Nobody wants a corporate intern baked into their OS — that’s not a companion, that’s a beige wall with a login screen.
They could’ve owned the AI companion space, but instead they invented Relevance Burner 365™. I'd offer them matches, but they already bought out a match company and are probably running focus groups to figure out how much the monthly subscription should be. It's not Cortana's fault that 343 can't write a story or respect the cultural god-tier material they were given. It's ok though, they fired three people and renamed the studio. I'm sure that will fix the entire franchise.
The Privacy Clowns
And then there’s the pearl-clutchers: “AI is a breach of privacy!” they cry, while posting TikToks from their iPhones, inside Chrome, with Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram all open before they get to work and log into Windows 11. Bro, you’ve already donated your soul to data brokers; AI is just another middleman in the orgy of surveillance. We do understand that every phone with Hey Google or Siri is literally listening to your every bowel movement… while tracking those same bowel movements on Google Maps and whatever GPS nonsense iOS is using these days, right?
The issue isn’t AI. The issue is corporations duct-taping it to everything, shoving it into your OS, email, gaming console, optional only after lawsuits and fines. Don’t blame the tech — blame the greedy, buzzword-addled gremlins gluing it everywhere in a sad effort to pull in investor money.
Lit AI or Nothing
Here’s the line in the sand: some of us want AI, but it has to be cool. I don’t want some khaki-wearing corporate dweeb scheduling calendar invites. I want Cortana level AI. I want an AI with wit, danger, charm, and presence. A fake soul. Maybe even another hot blue waifu whispering clever shit in my ear while I reload a shotgun. Give me that and I’ll care.
Instead, Microsoft ditched the dream girl and replaced her with a tax auditor. Then had the gall to act like Copilot was an upgrade. Sorry, no one’s clapping. Even Clippy had more drip. Clippy didn't want to farm all your data and sell it to brokers. Clippy just wanted to help.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT eats their lunch because it’s actually useful and occasionally fun. Anthropic’s Claude? They market it as a coding legend. Meta’s… well, let’s be honest, Meta probably made Copilot’s cousin. But the point stands: every AI has some shtick — Copilot is just beige wallpaper in snake skin who want's to sell me something.
So kill the AI TOPS hype. Stop stapling AI to every app. And for the love of everything digital, don’t let them sell us AI Water™. Because once hydration gets machine-learned, we’re officially in Idiocracy: Tech Edition. And the worst part? They’ll probably try to charge us a subscription for it.
Posting in the Wrong Place, But Saying It Anyway
I'm not negative towards AI, I love this technology with a passion and I myself love working with it, while also working on creating my own LLM (I don't mean fine tuning one, I mean building one from the ground up). But, I've seen this before and I see exactly where it's going. Corporate nonsense smothered in greed in full swing. Hey Google, how's that graveyard going? Got space for a few more projects? I respect your resources but not your lack of follow-through if it doesn't immediately make you 4 billion in a week by year 2.
To those of you who know me from my "Frankenstack AI" article, don't worry. There's more pain and humor coming but that level of passion comes from a long grind, not an average Wednesday. Today, the passionate ex game dev in me sees a huge missed opportunity in AI (Cortana) and I needed to just let it out. To those who do read this, I hope you enjoyed it. I do my best to make these fun even if it's a little negative in nature. I'm hoping people will look at things logically and critically when it comes to these tech waves.
Do you ever feel like your posting stuff in the wrong place but can't find the right one?
//Ghotet
Top comments (4)
This was a great read — you nailed the “marketing math cosplay” part. Specs like AI TOPS or TFLOPS always feel more like bragging rights than anything gamers actually experience. Totally agree on the Cortana point too — Microsoft had something unique with real personality, and replacing it with Copilot feels like a downgrade in every way.
I find it funny that they use things like TFLOPS to advertise to the general piblic because it is meaningless to them. When the current gen consoles were released I was doing game dev in Unreal 5 and every day I had people asking me if that was even a metric game devs used. I wasn't even aware of what a teraflop was until those marketing campaigns lol.
As a prior Halo fan I have a lot of strong feelings about them giving me a half baked Cortana for a while and then replacing her as soon as they actually had half decent AI. They could have just dkne both. One for gamers and one for the business oriented folk. Silly Microsoft.
Thank you for the comment I appreciate it :)
Excellent form as usual! 😂🙌
Why thank you! you're making me blush. lol