Let's See What's Going On Down At The Piss Factory

Imagine a world just like this one, where lemonade is a moderately popular drink. Making and selling lemonade requires lemons, sugar, clean water, bottling facilities, workers, health and safety inspections, marketing, and so on. The ingredients and labor are pretty cheap, but not free, so it’s a modestly profitable business but not one that anybody gets too excited about.

Then imagine that some deranged technologists notice one day that lemonade looks a lot like piss. You could almost confuse the two if you overlooked the taste, the smell, the source and the ingredients, and if you had no compunctions about drinking a lot of piss. By this point in Silicon Valley everyone has been guzzling piss for so long that most of them have forgotten they were only pretending to like the taste. And the tech industry has been in a bit of a funk since the whole “expensive numbers” market collapsed, so everyone has plenty of free time.

Pretty quickly someone invents the Generative Piss Transformer, or “GPT,” which can pump out unbelievable quantities of extremely realistic piss. Can it do this cheaply? No, not at all, it requires the electricity supply of a medium-sized nation and rack after rack of specialized computer chips called “Generative Piss Units,” or GPUs. Is the piss being generated by this new technology in demand? Also not really. Some people are amused by the ability to ask their phone a question in plain language and have it respond instantly with a hot blast of realistic piss. But most people try it a few times and then think “why would I want my phone to spray piss at me when I could just look something up on Wikipedia instead?”

But the last innovation in the iPhone was “charge it with USB-C,” which was mandated by the European Union, and Microsoft hasn’t really had a win since it copied the idea of spreadsheets from Lotus 1-2-3. So tech is quickly all-in on the piss revolution. In what is otherwise a globally slumping economy, the world’s wealthiest investors have nowhere else to dump their useless trillions of hoarded dollars. It’s Artificial Piss or nothing. Every tech company jams piss hoses into all their products and announces that piss is the future and you better get drinking it, or urine trouble. Tech companies rapidly refashion themselves as Artificial Piss, or “AP,” companies.

Now GPUs have been around for a while—they’re popular with a small market of recreational piss enthusiasts known as “gamers.” The company that makes the most popular GPUs, let’s call it Npeedia, suddenly finds itself sitting under a golden shower. Everybody needs its generative piss units to power their bet on the future. Investor dollars flood in and the stock pumps like crazy. Insiders have billions in shares to unload but need to keep those prices up while they do it. How should they manage this?

One way would be to continue to innovate and sell a best-in-class product at the highest price the market will bear. And sure, you can do that, but this ain’t a lemonade stand buddy! This is the boiling hot Artificial Piss industry, and we have access to not only the world’s best engineering whiz kids, but the best financial engineers as well—the smartest guys in the room, as it were. There’s more we can do to make sure that our generative piss unit company remains the market’s darling, while also putting that extra funding to work.

See, the leading AP companies like OpenPP, xPP, and Meta are run by people who were around for previous bubbles, and are by no means stupid. That’s not to say they don’t believe that piss is the future, and that one day soon someone will achieve piss of a fully human (or even greater!) quality—Artificial General Micturition. Obviously they do believe it, since they personally drink more piss than almost anyone. And this isn’t just a retread of the monkey jpeg bubble from a few years back. Lol, that was weird, huh? What were those guys thinking? But the fact remains that while you’re selling the picks and shovels to a new gold rush, your customers are still somewhat risk averse. They want to market themselves as piss-first companies, without necessarily committing to the full cost of a robust generative piss infrastructure just yet.

One thing you could do to provide the appearance of a booming market while also de-risking the piss economy transformation for these tech giants, who currently have all the cash you would like to have, would be to stand up a bunch of middleman companies who promise to build out piss-native cloud platforms. You can loan them some startup funds—loans that get booked for you as “receivables” (i.e. loan money that’s owed back to you) and also “revenue” (because they use the cash to buy your chips). These piss clouds can even leverage that loan money to raise more money from other investors, so your $2 billion in startup funds might come back as $20 billion in new chip revenue. And with your connections to the tech giants, you can help them get bigwigs like Microsoft and Meta to sign agreements to purchase a certain amount of the piss flow from these new specialist piss clouds. The agreements can be pretty flexible, of course—their purpose is to provide hot piss on tap for the established tech companies without requiring them to build out their own piss clouds, but also leave them the option to build in-house and cancel those contracts if and when that looks more economical.

Ok we’re more than 900 words into this excruciating extended metaphor and I think my flow of piss jokes has finally run dry. Oops, there’s always a little more you didn’t expect, right? But that’s probably it. The point of all this is that according to Liz Lopatto in The Verge, this revolting thought experiment accurately describes the state of Nvidia and the AI industry at the moment. Liz took a close look at one of these piss clouds called CoreWeave, and “I’ll tell you something,” she wrote:

“SVPs” are “special purpose vehicles,” a kind of less regulated and tax advantaged subsidiary that, infamously, Enron used to hide debts. But “Nvidia’s relationship with CoreWeave is all happening in plain sight,” observed Liz. “So are all the relationships with the other neocloud companies.” If you do an Enron but tell the truth about it… it might be legal? That seems to be position Nvidia is taking, in a “We’re Not Enron” memo it sent to investors last week stating that its business “does not resemble historical accounting frauds.” And they might be right! One day this might just look like a smart way to bootstrap a capital-intensive new industry into existence. All they need now is a lot of customers willing to pay a few trillion dollars to drink all that piss.

There will certainly not be any future developments in this story, so don’t stand by. But do prepare yourself for the worst segue in Tabs history. Ready?

Also Today in Piss: The journalism industry was left drenched in questionable metaphors by Lizza/Nuzzi blogs part 2 and part 3. “I haven’t yet described the most bizarre, consequential, and newsworthy events” claims Lizza in the intro to the third paid blog post in his slow “drip, drip” campaign to expose Nuzzi’s alleged ethical lapses more than a year after they allegedly happened. I wonder how he’s managed his overweening concern about ethics in journalism in the intervening months. The Ringer’s Brian Phillips wrote the state-of-scandal recap you’ve been waiting for, if you have been avoiding the daily flow of all this. And Max Tani reports that Vanity Fair’s new Global Editorial Facilitator (or whatever fake title Anna Wintour finds sufficiently unthreatening) is wavering on his commitment to the magazine’s contract with Nuzzi. I don’t know where else he’s gonna find someone to have a messy affair with Gavin Newsom but good luck.

Matt Novak: “Trump-Backed Crypto Company Promotes ‘Shit Piss Skin Can’ Coin.” Sometimes all the streams cross at once.

Today’s Reward: You made it all the way down here to the bottom of what is, let’s be honest, a lot of rough chuckles. Your reward is this 2014 blog post by James Somers about how John McPhee uses the dictionary, and specifically what dictionary he uses.

This came to me this morning via Chris Vermilion in a Bluesky thread, so thank you Chris.

Today’s Song: 311, “Amber”