Apple's Intelligence beta and more AI chaos

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song discuss Apple iOS 18.1 beta. upcoming Pixel 9 rumors, Olympics coverage, AI deepfake regulation, and more. Further reading: The best way to watch the Olympics is on TikTok Apple releases iOS 18.1 developer beta with the first ‘Apple Intelligence’ iPhone features Apple’s iOS 18.1 developer beta adds AI call recording and transcription A first look at Apple Intelligence and its (slightly) smarter Siri Apple’s new AI features will reportedly miss the iOS 18 launch and wait for iOS 18.1. Google Pixel 9 event: rumors and what to expect Pixel 9’s ‘Add Me’ feature puts you in a group photo even when you’re not there Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em Samsung hypes the Galaxy Z Flip as a great police bodycam Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber wants your next mouse to last forever Microsoft wants Congress to outlaw AI-generated deepfake fraud Google tweaks Search to help hide explicit deepfakes Lawmakers want to carve out intimate AI deepfakes from Section 230 immunity Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes. Senators will introduce the No Fakes Act to keep AI ... Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Saturday Samsung.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  The show where Samsung executives who have been forced to work six days a week until they make more money just have ideas. I'm your friend Neely. David and Alex are both on vacation, which I feel is very rude. Liam also on vacation. So this is just gonna be a wild episode.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  Allison Johnson's here. Hi Allison. Hello. V Song is here. Hey V.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Hello, let's do chaos.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  We've just been left to our own devices. I haven't, I'm like helpless without Liam and David and Alex on this show at this point. Anything can happen. I haven't been left to my own devices to run over a chest in years. For a good reason, I think. So we're just gonna see what happens. Thank you too for, for joining me. We're here for the ride.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I'm here for Saturday Samsung as the, as the local Korean gadget reviewer on staff. I am so here for Saturday Samsung.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get to what the Saturday Samsung is. This, I would say, you know, up until now, it's been stuff. Samsung will give you a free TV if you buy a TV is a real idea generated by Saturday Samsung. This week's is, I think, bananas in a different way, but we'll come to it. There's a bunch of other stuff going on. The iOS 18.1 developer beta with Apple Intelligence. Some Apple Intelligence features hit. Allison, you played with that. V, you reviewed the Galaxy Watch Ultra, or as I call it, the Apple Watch Ultra. There's some other gadget news. There's a Pixel 9 event coming up. We caused an entire furious news cycle about subscription mice. I'm sorry. And then because we have been left to our own devices, I am trying a new style of lightning round. Still unsponsored.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  But it's, you know,

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Get honest.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  David, David and Liam are not around to put me in a box. So we're gonna, we're gonna try something new.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Chaos.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's chaos. I want to start with, we should just call it the chaos round. Although one of the topics is a little serious. I don't know if we, oh, we'll get there. We're gonna get there. We're doing it live, everybody. Let's start, there's big news in the week, just outside of tech. It's the Olympics. It feels like the experience of watching, consuming the Olympics is very different this year than in years. Every other year, we run a story that's like streaming the Olympics sucks. We haven't really had to run that story this year.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  It's because it's on TikTok, baby. I have not streamed a single second of the Olympics. I'm telling you, I have not streamed a single second of the Olympics. Normally I'm all over the gymnastics, but everything I know about the Olympics has just come through doom scrolling. My TikTok feed and just going like, oh, actually that's kind of really wholesome. I really love chocolate muffin guy. And yeah, can't remember his name.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  She was explaining chocolate muffin guy. This is a foreign concept to me.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  It's, it's just this Norwegian athlete who has discovered the chocolate muffin from the Olympic Village cafeteria. And he gets increasingly weird with this chocolate muffin. It just like appears in his bedroom and he's in a thong and you're like, what is happening?

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Oh, that's what I'm saying. Okay.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  She really loves this chocolate muffin.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  You know what's happening.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, doom scrolling TikTok is a weird way to feel about America right now. This is hard to know how much American pride you have, depending on what TikTok scroll you're in. Like at this moment, it's like, I have immense pride in our gymnasts who've crushed it once again. Oh no, he's talking again. I have immense pride in this, like it's what is happening? That's a lot. We have an entire story about the Olympics and TikTok. Mia wrote it. I actually wanted the title to be the influencer Olympics. But I think that's what people think that's Coachella. So.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Both are fair.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought I thought it was a good pun, but it is true that the athletes are young by and large, very young, except for the 51 year old Turkish man who got a silver medal in shooting with no equipment whatsoever. A great photo. But it's true that the athletes are by and large, very young. The US women's gymnastic team, literally after winning gold, was caught on camera talking about what TikTok they wanted to make.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  Which is incredible. And so you just have this like very native population to this format in this platform in particular. And then there's just the universe of piracy that happens on TikTok. Like, if you want to watch clips of cool sporting events, the TikTok community has you covered and TikTok's lawyers also apparently have you covered because they don't seem to care about it. And that's like one really interesting way of consuming this, right? You're getting kind of the raw feed by people who are on the ground, who speak in the language of videos, speak in the language of social video. And then you're getting a bunch of clips of cool stuff curated by a community that does not care about NBC's exclusive rights to stream the Olympics on Peacock.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Is the commentary on TikTok is much funnier because you just have people filming their screen while they're watching it, like the the men's gymnast pommel horse guy. I don't know any of these athletes' names. I know them by their memes on TikTok, but just like I was watching these two women watching pommel horse guy and they're like, yes, yes, Peter Parker. Yes, you better work. You better work. And just having this very sassy commentary about this man doing the pommel horse. And I was just like, this is, I'm watching them watch their TV screen. And they're just better than like the NBC commentary people who are just like, oh, yes, he's on the pommel horse and he did the skill. So, yes, USA. So serious.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like watching it with your friends, except my, my husband doesn't give a crap about the Olympics. So I'm just like, oh, yeah, pommel horse guy. You can get it. Clark Kent of pommel horse.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  So I often say that almost every experience I have with TikTok should be a PhD in media studies. What you are describing is PhD in media studies, right? Like, the layers of abstraction away from the thing itself happening. And then the entertainment that random strangers and the internet are providing you, all of that is just very different. And it feels new this time in a way that two years ago, I guess, three years ago, at the last Olympics, it was it two years ago or three years ago, the last Olympics first

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Three. They were in 2021 because of, you know, COVID.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Events. Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  That's why the Olympics just has always felt to me like this big, serious, important thing. And like, that's kind of part of the appeal. But there's something great about, like, yeah, having it kind of distributed, like, you know, from people on the ground and having more fun with it. Like, it doesn't have to be this, like, big booming voice of, like, NBC will deliver you the Olympics, and that is how you will watch them.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. If you put 18,000 teenagers in the middle of France with cell phones, like, something funny is gonna happen.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That seems correct.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  You just learn more about different sports, because I don't care about rugby. I love Alona Mar. She's hilarious on TikTok. She's just all over. My entire feed yesterday was just lesbians crying that Alona Marv was not a lesbian, because they were just, like, in love with the women's rugby team. And I was like,

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  And that'll be it for the Chaos Verchass, everybody.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna end it here. But that, right, the idea that different communities, different groups can view the thing together in a different way as a community, is new. Like, that just is a new thing. But even like, sports Twitter doesn't accomplish. Right? It's the native video communication ability of particularly the younger generation that, like, is interesting and new. And that's one thing that's different about these Olympics. The other thing that's different is that actually NBC and Peacock are doing a good job. I must disclose that NBC is a minority investor in Vox Media, a parent company. They're owned by Comcast. I've rarely said anything good about Comcast, so I must disclose, I'm saying something nice about Comcast and NBC. That's the first time, I believe, in

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  history that that has happened. But they are doing a good job. It is actually like, refreshing and interesting to see a big legacy broadcaster just go for it with her app. And it's also, there's not problems. There are random ad breaks in the middle of stuff. There's infinite complaints about just how overwhelming it is. But it's like they had they had every idea and executed every idea. So if you want to just watch highlights of the sports, you can just watch highlights of the sports. If you want to watch the traditional gauzy 1980s style primetime broadcast with completely unnecessary human interest interludes about how the gymnast grew up, knowing they would be gymnasts.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  Those stories are always the same. It's like when they were four, they're like, I'm gonna jump on stuff. Every every four years, you can get that story from NBC if you want, but that's available to you. They have the gold zone, which is basically NFL red zone for the Olympics that they're doing 10 hours a day. And inside of the app, when you're watching stuff, you can just be like, I just want to keep watching this thing that we're whipping around to, which is fascinating. They have multi view, which is the more standard, just like fears four feeds at once. And they have Al Michaels doing AI powered highlights that you can just listen to.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is super weird. Like, it's just weird to have robot Al Michaels being like, the gymnast jumped over stuff again. But it's like all the ideas. I had someone in my mentions because I was posting my threads and they're like, all of this is stuff that a normal company would like de-scope to hit the deadline. And NBC just like did it all. And then on top of it, they're like, do all of it's like pretty good. Like Gold Zone is actually really funny. There's like very funny NFL trauma inside of Gold Zone. And so, you know, there's red zone where you like whip around all the games on Sundays. And there there used to be two red zones. There was the one on DirecTV and there was the one that the NFL did.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Google bought the rights to Sunday Ticket. They took the NFL red zone and they shut down the DirecTV red zone. So Scott Hanson, who does the NFL red zone, is like gonna do it with Google now. NBC realized they can't just have Scott Hanson 10 hours a day, 16 days in a row. So they hire Scott Hanson and the guy who used to do the DirecTV red zone to do Gold Zone. So they're like back together, not as rivals, but as friends. Like all it's like hilarious that they did.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  This is a PhD.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  But they had to do it like somebody at NBC had to be like, all right, let's like, let's do a red zone for Olympics. How will we do that? We should just get all the red zone guys.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  They're like, go get some contracts together, like make it happen. And it all is kind of working, like it's working better than if I suggested to you NBC was gonna make an app full of Olympics content. Your expectations would be very low.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  It would.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  And it's called Peacock, but they're actually doing, they're doing good.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I love that. I'm an Olympics lover.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Are you watching Peacock or are you, are you like full TikTok?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  So I am, I have to put an asterisk at like, I'm a Winter Olympics girl. And I, I don't know what it is this year, but I've been like shouted down by the Summer Olympics people about how the Winter Olympics is not the real Olympics. And I, I think I just like got tired of it. So I've kind of been missing out on, on this year's games.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  There's, there's Snoop Dogg, like in between everything.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  And like the genius decision to have Snoop Dogg and Flava Flav here. I'm like.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean by NBC just went like somewhat NBC is like, I'm, is there Snoop Dogg budget? And I'm like, yes. In addition to that, there's Flava Flav budget. They just like went for it. It's great. Um, I would, you should click around and it's like actually like fairly entertaining just as a tech experience. To be like, oh, they like tried this out. Like what if this was all happening? You can kind of see there's news this week that venue sports, which is the big mashup of Disney and Fox and everything. Um, ESPN, they're going to price it like $43 a month, which is crazy. And it's like, what would you get for that?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Peloton money.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Only you sit around. So it actually might be worth $50 a month.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  But it's kind of like, oh, this is the bar. Like if you want to be anywhere close to that much money, you've got to deliver a, a user experience that is at least this good. Cause if it's just a, well, if it's just like a minimum viable product list of things, like no, no one's going to pay the money. Um, all right. So that's, that's the Olympics. It's going on. I'm curious how people are watching and send us a note. Um, you know, there's, there's more time left in it. Um, one thing I'll say is it doesn't seem like the action is on Twitter, the way it is with other live sports. It is on TikTok and there's something happening there that I think is just fascinating. All right, we should talk about iOS 18. Allison, you got to play, you played with iOS 18.1, which is the developer beta, not the public beta yet, but I think that is getting pretty blurry

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  in that everyone is playing with it. I mean, no one was going to stay away from Apple Intelligence. So you played with it. What do you think?

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I think my kind of big takeaway is like, well, you get, you get the like visuals of the new Siri, the like glowing border and you can type to talk to Siri.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  And there's a couple of things that are new about Siri that like it follows context better, like between questions, which like Google Assistant has been doing for a little while now, but so that's kind of like setting the stage. And there's these other little things throughout the UI that are like, when and if it all gets put together, like that, that could be really cool. But right now it's just kind of like Siri lights up and then you can rewrite an email and you'll get email summaries in your inbox. And it was just especially funny, like when you open the mail app, instead of the like, each, you know, email has the first couple of lines

• 14:38Speaker 03

  of the actual email copy, there's just a little summary now. And that makes a lot of sense for like a long email, but most of my emails are garbage, like promo stuff. So it just summarizes the promotional stuff and it's like lunch boxes ship free. And I'm like, didn't need a summary of that, but thank you.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  That is very much like what's happening with Grok and trending topics on Twitter now.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Where like the AI just doesn't know that some things are jokes. And so the trending topics are like when I turned black in relation to like people tweeting about Trump, talking about Kamala Harris. And it's like, no, that's not, that's not right. That's not, that's not what people mean. That's just a joke.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you didn't get it.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, AI is just so sincere about stuff. It just like, it's funny. We have to laugh about it.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  So are those the only features that are out yet? It's the summarizing emails and rewriting.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Summary.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  I've seen a lot of pictures of people intentionally writing very mean notes and trying to get the AI to make them nicer, which is fascinating.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Oh, the one I did, you know, at the end of Willy Wonka, when Gene Wilder does that like fizzy lifting drink thing like you stole fizzy lifting drink.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Put that into a note and rewrite it like friendly and it was like, hey, just, just so you know, you can't be stealing fizzy lifting drinks. That's as far as I got with that. Very amusing to me personally.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, there's little bits and bobs here and there that are escaping me at the moment. It's in the emails. No photos. In the photos app, you can use like natural language search. So you can be like, you know, you could search for like food before or someone that you've tagged in your photos, but you can be like this person wearing glasses or the food we ate in Iceland. And it's like, pretty good. And it comes up with that stuff. So just getting a step closer to like, I just search for my license plate because I can never remember.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  So like, I have this one picture of a chicken that I saw while walking down a street in Brooklyn. So would I just be able, and I can never like, no one believes me when I told them I ran into a chicken on a sidewalk in Brooklyn.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe you now.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I only have one photo of it. So would I be able to go to like the photos app and be like, find me the photo of the chicken walking on a sidewalk in Brooklyn? With my foot in there.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  I think that's the most important use case of AI, like at all.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or it will just generate that photo for you.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could put a chicken on the sidewalk and then tell people that you saw it and be a liar.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  So when we saw it, W W C of iOS eighteen was AI everywhere, every app and every corner. It's just gonna make the phone better. And then that was like a one set of ideas. And then the other idea was, and then Siri will become your all knowing assistant. Is that the experience of eighteen point one in the beta right now?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Not yet. It's like, yeah, it's just little Easter eggs kind of throughout. And then the the thing that is missing from Siri is like the the big stuff where it's like, the the intelligence and the AI, I think, yeah. No, the like, it'll understand what's on your screen and you can ask for it. You know, you can be like, email this photo to my mom and it'll just go do it for you. Like, that is the stuff that's coming. And then the the third party app stuff, because developers are going to be able to hook into it. And and let you do Siri stuff in their apps. And that's the the AI dream on our phones. And that's still the like, no, it's coming because people have to develop it.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  Is the, but they changed the user experience of Siri, right? So now when you open it, like flashes the thing, you can like, you can type to it now?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, you double tap the.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  This, I learned this and I didn't know it, V. What's the, how do you do this?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Oh, it's it's it's an accessibility feature where you can type to Siri. So you can do it even if you don't have the beta. I just think it looks a lot prettier in the beta because

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  This is another example of them going like, oh, accessibility features. Actually, they work for everybody. Why don't we just like shine them up and make them useful?

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Right, make it glow.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  It is actually really interesting how many accessibility features have just made their way into the the main operating systems. Yeah, and she pinch, there's other ones. Um, but type to Siri is the big one with eighteen point one because it it's the thing that takes Siri from being timers and music player. To chatbot, to assistant, to intelligent agent that is taking action across all of your apps.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  And I, it seems like they've added the stuff, but they haven't added any of the backend to make it go yet.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I'm asking it questions and it's still just Googling stuff for me. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I could have typed this into a Google search bar instead of a Siri text box, but.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  And it seems they've added AI call recording and transcription, which is the feature that I want the most.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  Because if you're a reporter, not because I'm constantly spying on everyone, I'm Richard Nixon, everyone, I'm constantly recording everyone. No, I mean, we're reporters and like AI call recording and transcription legitimately useful in our jobs. And it's been, we've just been doing, either people are using their Android phones in our office, which lots of people do, or there's a set of weird third party stuff. Being able to just use my iPhone, which is my main phone would be really great. So that's here now, has it worked yet? Have you tried it out?

• 20:23Speaker 03

  I have not, because I didn't put my SIM card in that phone because of eSIM, because of nightmares. But I did try out, so like the voice memos app will do transcriptions now, and that's not an Apple Intelligence feature, like the recording a call, I think is Apple Intelligence. Could be wrong. But the transcription is good. Like I, I am a Pixel recorder stan. I always have a Pixel phone at a press event, you know, like it is just in my bag and I put it next to the iPhone and it was really good. It was like up there with the Pixel, so I am personally excited about that.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's the one, it's always a grab bag of which feature is the one that hits. And I just know that that feature for at least our little community of reporters is gonna hit the hardest.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Oh, they're gonna love it.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I'm so excited.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Can't wait to cancel my Otter subscription.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, talk about startups getting wiped out. There's like two or three that are gonna go away as soon as it sets. Um, it seems like the rest of the features are not coming for a while, right? Like Mark Gurman at Bloomberg said, some of these might not come until late 25 or even 26.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the last thing, I'm so confused on the timeline, but it, the last thing I read, I think, was that, like, they would all come to developer betas by the end of the year, but then as far as like being in the public beta, that's 2025. Yeah, it's just a really long, staggered kind of rollout, it sounds like.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  And that kind of makes sense, like the danger with the Siri that can do stuff on your behalf is quite, quite high. You have to make sure it works. We're also just not sure how any of the Apple private cloud stuff is going to work. Like, right now, is it clear that all this stuff is happening on the phone or in the cloud or where? Or is it all, we all, we know it's all happening on the phone?

• 22:22Speaker 03

  There, so there's a, like, privacy report you can pull down now that will show you, like, and I think a lot of this is in the cloud, like, it can't, I wouldn't say that for sure, but you can, you can pull this privacy report that shows you everything over, like, a certain time period that Apple Intelligence has done on your phone. And I guess it's encrypted because it's just like gobbledygook.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  I downloaded it. I was like, well, this is secure as hell because I don't know what any of this is.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, still kind of unclear.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I would just say the fundamental architecture of this thing is very new. And what happens on your phone versus in the cloud, there's some stuff that Apple isn't very clear that Apple happens on your phone, like emoji and some of the photo stuff happens on your phone. Some of the other stuff we just, I'm assuming a lot of the Siri stuff is gonna go to the cloud because Siri goes to the cloud right now. So it, it just seems like this rollout is gonna be a lot slower and more deliberate than anyone anticipated based on W W C. And it might roll all the way, I mean, late 2025 is very close to when. We would expect iOS nineteen to be coming out.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm sort of curious how that will all play, but for now it seems like they've sprinkled in some AI in the places where you would expect it.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's all it does seem pretty safe. It's like, okay, we've been able to it is kind of the table stake stuff of like, write me an email that's friendly or professional or summarize this for me. And like, that's all kind of they're kind of laying the groundwork with that stuff.

• 23:57Nilay Patel?

  And then we're gonna get eighteen point oh first and then eighteen point one second. So this is pretty far away, it seems.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's always.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, they the AI overlords are coming whether we like it or not. All right. So that's iOS eighteen point one. That's it's interesting. That's out now and they're actually dual tracking it. Right. There's iOS eighteen in the public betas and eighteen point one in the developer betas. And you get the feeling they wanted people to be talking about the AI stuff because the Pixel nine event is coming very soon. And we know exactly what Google's gonna talk about.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break. Let's do that. Come back and let's talk about the Pixel nine event. We're right back.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright twenty twenty six Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. So like we were just saying, the Pixel nine event is coming up. It's August thirteenth, basically tomorrow.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing we're just gonna we've already seen the phones. I assume Google is just gonna talk about the software, which is the new trend, right? The phones look the same as ever. And now we're gonna, we're gonna just make you care about AI is how these companies are going.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, just hit us over the head with AI and we've seen every color of the phone, every size, like it's bigger, it's smaller. I don't know.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I'm I'm just in this like, all the phones have turned into iPhone design, which is like, fine. We've gotten to this like. The edges are flat. Colorful. Yeah, I mean, sure, but like,

• 26:06Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm good with this. We've gotten to the same place with the phone design. But Google's like, I think it's like Samsung and Google are like, how do we make this not an iPhone? And the answer is like a weird camera situation.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  And it kind of looks like Google's really leaning into the weird camera situation. And I don't know how I still feel about it.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  I think these are the Rivian headlights of phone cameras.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Oh, that's it. Yeah.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Like you can love them. You can hate them. They're not changing them. There it's, you know, and you can try to convince me that they look like snake eyes. They don't, you know? Just like you can try to convince me this phone doesn't have a weird forehead. It does.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  It does. It does.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  Super does. Um, but it's true. The, the, the colors are more vibrant, which is getting away from what Apple is doing. Or at least that's what the leaks indicate. So we're expecting a new Pixel nine, a Pixel nine Pro, the Pixel nine Pro Fold. My God, these names. Um, and then, uh, watch, right? Uh, Pixel Buds Pro two and a Pixel Watch three. So that's a pretty complete refresh of the Pixel line. It feels like the fold should be where the action is. But I, I just can't tell how much Google cares about these devices.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  That's the question, isn't it? It's so they moved the, like, the fold was on the product cycle with, like, it was at, um, I O last time around, right? And then they've like scooched it. So it's more part of the like main,

• 27:40Speaker 03

  refresh cycle, which kind of makes sense. This is like, is this a flagship phone? It's like the most expensive phone you guys sell, but it's a cycle behind, you know, with the like camera hardware and whatnot. So I think it makes sense. Um, moving the fold into this position, but, uh, it's, it's a lot of phones. I don't know. Do we need this many phones?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Like, how do you think it'll compare to, because you know, Samsung, you said like their foldables are just basically coasting at this point. So are we at a point where like the Pixel Fold is something that is like yay competition? Or is that just, it's here?

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm still of the mind that the OnePlus Open got it right. Like, that is how a foldable, like a book style foldable should be shaped. And then Samsung is just committed to this like, remote control shape thing. Every year, they're like, it's a few millimeter, like the screen is a few millimeters wider and it still feels like a remote control to use. So I'm curious how different this new Pixel Fold is, because there's a lot of rumors that it's like thinner and lighter. Because, boy, was the previous one heavy. But I do like that, that like wider aspect ratio for the cover screen.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  I don't think it needs to be like quite as wide as the, the first generation Pixel Fold, so we'll see.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then the, the, the point of all this is going to be the software, right?

• 29:18Nilay Patel?

  This is pretty iterative hardware across the board, some minor camera tweaks, a wacky camera bump. But if you're not paying close attention, I, it's, I think it's going to be fairly hard to distinguish the hardware from the previous generation. It's the software that's the game, so you can see they're adding Gemini sort of to the first layer of the interface. They've got this new thing called Pixel Screenshots, which is basically just Microsoft Recall, which everyone is scared about, only manual. So instead of constantly taking screenshots, you have to manually take a screenshot. Very good, a very good differentiation, but I'm kind of into it, right? You take a screenshot, you're like, what is this? Or like, save it for later. There's a chicken walking down the street, just like, hold on to that for me.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  And then, of course, there's Circle to Search, which Google's adding to basically everything at this point. I will, I will coyly say that a friend of mine. Just put like Circle to Search me in the face the other day. You might imagine who that friend is, who was showing me Android features. And he dunked on me with Circle to Search, which was pretty funny. But like, this is them saying, okay, there's a new way to think about how this phone works. Right. There's AI Gemini is like right here. And then you can just point at things or tell the phone to look at things and it will generate information for you, which is a very Google approach to it. The question is whether that's enough to make people switch. Not even from the iPhone, from their Samsung phones, which obviously are dominant.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  And of course, because it's Google, whether they'll stay committed to any of these ideas for more than 20 minutes. And I, I just don't know.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It's just a confusing time, I think, even just Circle to Search, like, and I use it on the Samsung phones I've been testing and the Google phones, obviously. But like, there's just kind of a lot of different ways to get at Circle to Search. You're like, so is this replacing these? Like, Google Lens is still a thing. I can translate something, but like, did I need to Circle to Search that? They, they just have a lot of ideas. Yeah. It's like, do you open up Gemini and like, take a screenshot of something or a picture of the inside of your refrigerator? I don't know. There's just a lot of like, input methods where it just sort of could feel overwhelming. But it's like, seems like they're in that position

• 31:39Speaker 03

  that we're kind of talking about with Smarter Siri, where it's like, okay, like you've made the promises. This is going to make our lives easier, blah, blah, blah. Right now, it's just a bunch of like, you can switch the faces in these photos or, you know, put a rain cloud in the sky behind you. And like, that was all nice and everything, but like, let's see something like, can they, the screenshot thing? Sure, that, that would be cool. I'm gonna take a screenshot of a recipe and I have, literally have the same like spaghetti and meatball recipe from America's Test Kitchen bookmarked in my Google Photos as a like favorite, as if it's a photo of my child. Like, I just look at it that often. I'm like,

• 32:24Speaker 03

  too cheap to pay for America's Test Kitchen and can't commit to writing it down. So I don't know. I think there's a, there's a real use case for, help me find this thing in a screenshot.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  I feel like. And I work with both of you very closely in the audience, so I know what it's like to work with you. But I bookmarked, I favorited a screenshot of a recipe that I make all the time versus there's a photo of a chicken that I can never find. Is kind of exactly the difference.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  A little bit, yeah. Yeah, that tracks.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  It tells a whole story.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  I'm just making my spaghetti meatballs and he's like, where's that chicken?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  I think about the Brooklyn chicken all the time. It's been so long, I'm not sure this chicken is alive anymore. I may have the only record of this sidewalk walking chicken. Like, it's important to me that this chicken lives in my memory.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  Please send us a note and describe how your photo storage approaches. Describe your personality, because I think there's, there's a lot in there. It's a rich zone to unpack.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  On a scale of like one to chicken.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  On the scale of I'm just scrolling for a photo of a chicken endlessly, I swear it's here. Speaking of photos, Alison, you've been covering what can only be described as the what is a photo apocalypse somewhat closely. You just wrote a piece about the Samsung Sketch B and they'll put a B in the photo for you. It seems like the Pixel 9 is just gonna continue moving inexorably down this path with this feature called Add Me that will just add you to photos that you're not in.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yep. That's what it sounds like.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's only from a leak, it's only from a leak.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  It was in a YouTube video that got removed. It was like an ad and it got, it was leaked to YouTube and it got removed. But it just feels like Google has to start communicating about how it will keep our information environment somewhat pure as it adds these features that just pollute it more than ever.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were really like tiptoeing up to the line, I feel like last year. And it was like, well, this is just something that people have been doing in Photoshop for a long time. And now more people have the tools. And then I feel like Samsung kicked the door down with Sketch to image. It was like, put a chicken in your photo. Put a blimp, like whatever you want to do, you can have it. And then, yeah, I feel like the. The floodgates are open and I don't know how like how aggressive Google will be like the add me to the photo thing. It seems like there could be guardrails on it or it could just be like pure chaos and it's an election year and what could go wrong?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  So many things could go wrong, but I also like, it just reminds me of this one family portrait I have. So like my family is half split in the US versus Korea. And so we all went to Korea to get this family portrait, except for one cousin who couldn't go because he was a dual citizen and his military service time was coming up because all Korean men have to do military service before they're 30. And he's just like, I'm just not gonna do it. So he had to get photoshopped into the family photo.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  If you look at it from a distance, you can't tell that he's been photoshopped in. But if you look up close, you're like, well, lighting on his hair is wrong. Coming from a different angle, you can really like, you can just, he's just textually not the same as everybody else.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  You can tell, you can tell. And it's just like this huge family portrait and Steve, who's like been photoshopped in. So like, I don't know. Not really, because we can all tell he's not there. So it's sort of like, I don't know. I feel like my auntie, my auntie would love to have him in this sort of situation, but I also, you know, having aunties with the power to just add you into anything, that seems also dangerous.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's not like an AI add me feature, at least from the ad that we see. It's like a compositing feature, like a very manual compositing feature where you take a photo with us and there's, you leave space for literally yourself in the photo. And then someone else holds the camera and it shows you the old photo and you like go stand where you would have been. And then you take a photo and it stitches all the photos together. So it's it's very manual in its way. I'm sure there's AI in the background to handle the stitching and alignment and probably the textures and colors and lighting.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Too many fingers. Yeah.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  But the idea that it's gonna, it's not like deep faking you to put you in the photo. It's taking another photo of you in the in the same space and then like making a composite. This is still weird.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's one of those features that like as a parent now, I'm like, oh, I completely get that. Like best take where it's like, you try and take a picture where there's more than two toddlers in it. Like, forget it. Then nobody's gonna have a good time. But then it's like, oh, you have all this data and you can just kind of like AI it together into one photo that looks right. The like, you get to be in the photo even though you took the photo thing. I'm like, yeah, I'm following along with that. I get that.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  So it's basically so you never have to ask someone, oh, hey, do you mind taking a photo of us? Because it's

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  No, you have to ask them that, but in a much more complicated and ethically challenged

• 38:04Speaker 02

  No, I mean, like, it's in your group. It's in your group.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  It would be in your group. So like, yeah, like you, you two would take a photo and then I would, I would take the photo of you two. And then I would hand one of you the phone and I would go stand next to where you had been standing and you would take another photo and the pixel would composite those photos together. So it's like all three of us are standing there.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  I hate talking to strangers and asking them to take a group photo for me and my group. So this is, this is really going to help me not grow as a person and not talk to strangers more is basically

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, see, I love being asked that question because then everyone's like, oh, you know what you're doing, which is great.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Oh, people don't know what they're getting into. I'm like, so you've got the pixel phone. Tell me about your choices here. They're like, who's this lady?

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The second someone hands you a phone and you turn it to landscape, they're like, oh, my God, we got a player here, everybody.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  But even that's weird, like even the thing I'm describing where it's pretty manual, right? It's not just AI deep faking you, but you have to, you're making a composite photo. What is a photo? Like, it's not a moment in time. That, that moment quite literally never happened. And we're all gonna, we're gonna pass it off as a photo. And I've been thinking about this parents thing, because Alison, every time you write about it, you, you put it in there. Like, the experience of being a parent is just trying to, is, is like, I would like a statistical average of this moment in time that makes me feel good.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:32Nilay Patel?

  Is like the goal of, of like kid photography.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the reality is too scary.

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  If I could just round off the edges and be like, this felt great.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, at several moments throughout this day.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, that would be fine. I don't actually need a pixel perfect recreation of this moment in time. And it's, it's kind of weird. Like, that is sort of the goal. And I, I understand in particular, our parents want that. But it's right next to, are you showing somebody an image of a thing that actually happened? Or are you just creating an illustration? And is that illustration, like, in the age of influencers, Instagram, is that, is that illustration gonna lead to all kinds of weird outcomes? But what people's expectations of their own experiences should be like? Because they don't know they're looking at something fake. And the entire ecosystem, we, we talked about a show in the context of like, the, the, the images of the Trump assassination attempt. The entire ecosystem

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  of validating these images, saying what's real, what's not, which ones are AI, which ones aren't, is just not ready. Like, it, it, that we've talked about it a lot. There are initiatives and alliances, and there's labels on meta platforms that are being applied seemingly randomly. But none of it works. Like, no one trusts any of it. And I just, like, we're just barreling towards this future of completely synthetic images coming off these phones. And I just don't, it doesn't seem like any of the companies give a shit.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like there's this, just shared understanding we have, especially with a phone camera. It's like, you just pointed at a thing, you were there, you took a picture, it happened. You put it on, you see it on Instagram. It's like, we just have this shared understanding of like, yes, that was a thing that happened, exactly, you know, like, more or less as we saw it. There's, we, we all understand that people pose for photos with. Big hats on in front of gorgeous landscapes or whatever. But yeah, we're, we're just like coming straight at that moment of like, okay, we're gonna have to start asking some different questions when you're scrolling through Instagram or just like shifting your mindset. And it's not even like,

• 41:39Speaker 03

  when I did the, the sketch to image, um, I did, you know, mess with a bunch of photos, added cats and pirate chips and like nonsense to them. And I posted a bunch to my Instagram like grid in a post. And I went through the requirements they have for like, when you need to add an AI tag. And it didn't even meet them. It was like, you, you can, you know, it was like something about it was my like, my own personal photo and I wasn't, um, the way it manipulated it was like, it's kind of up to you, you know, put a tag on there or don't, whatever. Like, okay, that's fine. It's all fine.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, see, the other thing I've noticed a lot of, um, is even just the basic AI features in phones now, they're over correcting and over sharpening. And this is beyond like, it looks bad. It's like, if you zoom in too far on a lot of modern smartphone photos now, you will see that the text is all AI wonky and like signs in the background because AI has tried to de-noise and sharpen and you've gotten some weird stuff. Like really small faces at far away in a lot of smartphone photos now, look incredibly distorted and demonic. Cause there's like three pixels and it's like, well, what if I put a face here? And it's like, I don't really know what a face looks like yet. So here's a face, a vaguely face shaped de-noised thing. I think Samsung phones are more

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  egregious with this than iPhones, but they're all doing it to varying degrees. And that is already confusing people. Like they're like, these photos are AI generated. It's like, you're not wrong, but you're also not right. Like that moment in time did happen. And then,

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  A, you know, a smartphone interpreted this demon face instead of just not having information there.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  It's weird when it kind of comes like, comes to the surface where, what was the, the photo of the lady trying on a wedding dress? Where, yeah, in the mirror, she's like making two different poses and like, everybody lost their minds and it turned out to be like, it was accidentally in panorama mode or something like that. But just even that is like, you know, this stuff has been going on behind the scenes and just sort of like, doing everything it can with that data to make a photo that it thinks, thinks you will like. And then when it kind of goes sideways and is obvious, then it's a real weird moment of like, no, yeah, actually your phone's been doing this. Like you just, it just didn't look like a demon until right this moment.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there's going to be some moment where

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  the industry, probably not the industry, governments, the EU, they tend, they, they're always doing stuff. They're gonna say, if you enable these features, you have to like hard watermark these photos as being partially generated by AI. Cause if we don't get all the way there, then we're, we're going to end up in this extremely weird moment where only professionals with like cryptographic signatures in their DSLRs uploading directly to Getty are the source of any truth. And I don't think that's, that doesn't seem sustainable, right? Like only if you buy this one like a camera and you have a contract with Reuters, can your photos be trusted?

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Like $10,000 camera.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just doesn't seem, that doesn't seem like what anybody wants. I'm, I'm hopeful that like consumers correct this first. But I suspect that some government somewhere is going to have to make a rule and people are going to have to comply because we're just headed. Every time, and I'm, I know the Google people are going to yell at me because every time I'm like, the what is a photo apocalypse is here because of some Google feature. They're like, no, this is just what people want. And I'm like, but people also want sugar.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  We want a lot of things.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what do you want me to do?

• 45:42Speaker 02

  It always does feel like they have the best case scenario in mind of that humans are not goblins who do horrible things to each other. Sometimes they're like, oh no, everyone will use it in the way that we intend, which is the nice way. And it's just like, no, you only need one jerk. You only need one jerk to ruin everything.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, look around. Uh, all right. Other reviews. Uh, V, you reviewed the Galaxy Watch Ultra this week. What's, uh?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  What kind of, what kind of Apple Watch is it? A good one or a bad one?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  It's an Apple Watch Ultra. That's sure. That sure is what it is. But like, I, well, actually, what it really is, is that like, if you took the Apple Watch Ultra and drew it from memory, that's the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra. Or if you like, took the Apple font, it's, it's, it's like the Apple Watch Ultra 2, but like, in an Android font is just basically what you're doing with this. It's, there's just, I was writing the review and then I was like, you know what? It's actually just expedient if I tell you what's different and bullet point everything that is the same, because there's too many things that are the same. And then I started doing the major things that are the same. And then I was like, oh, but then there's this, and then there's this, and then there's like, all these tiny little features that only a psycho like me would know and remember are on each of the watches are there.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Like, oh, you can run against your last race performance. If you're a runner, yeah, Apple did that and watch it West 9. And now he's here on the Samsung. And like, why is it here on the Samsung? Because I don't know, it was on Apple. Uh, they have an orange shortcut but button that is the quick button on Samsung and the action button on the Apple Watch. They, it's the same thing, just in a different font. And that's, that's like, you could sum up the watches that and also it's, it's a squircle and I don't like it. I don't, I, I was, had mixed feelings about the squircle going in. And then after two weeks of wear, I don't like the squircle. It is just too chunky on my wrist. I can fit three chopsticks into the gap between the, the, the watch and the, uh, and my wrist and.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  It's just a chonker. It's a very chunky. It's a very chunky boy and so orange. Like the Apple Watch Ultra was orange. This is so radioactively biohazard orange. It's a little upsetting how orange it is. It's, it's, I don't have it on me right now, but it looks like a Halloween watch. I actually ended up appreciating the regular Galaxy Watch seven, which I am wearing right now, a whole lot more because I was like, oh, it doesn't hurt me to wear it. Cause it's just too big. It's too big for my wrist and like the Apple Watch Ultra is also big for my wrist. I can stick a bunch of stuff in here. There's like a gap. But something about it being a square just made it a lot harder for me to wear.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  When I was testing the sleep apnea feature, it was just like, nope, we can't get readings from you. So I actually had to wear the other one to get the readings and test that feature out. So it was, it makes it sound bad, but it's actually a really great Android watch. I would say it's like one of the best Android watches that are available. I just, there's a little part of me that hurts that Samsung decided to bake an Apple Watch in order to create this excellent Android watch. It just felt wrong. It felt wrong to me because I truly do love how weird and unique the Samsung smartwatches have been with their rotating bezels and just Samsung being weird about how it does health stuff. The ages metric is just completely bonkers. I don't understand why it's there.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  I was definitely gonna ask you about this. By the way, you said age and that stands for advanced glycation end products. Have they yet told you what that means?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  So you can, there's, there's a whole like informational section that you can read and the, and the Samsung health app about what it is. And it's basically measuring compounds when fats and sugars in your blood oxidize. How is it doing this? Samsung won't say. It just says there's a new three in one active biosensor with more LED colors and whatnot. And there's a little spectrum and it goes from low to high. And if you're low, I guess you're metabolically younger than your age. And if you're high, I guess you're not your metabolic age.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  They're measuring this through the skin?

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Are they, they're not like pricking you. The watch isn't like taking your blood.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  No, everything is not invasive.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  There's not like a chemical sense. It's like in your sweat. They're just doing the thing that everyone does.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  They're just shining light into your skin and based on like how it reflects back, they're just telling you things that have not been FDA cleared. It's very experimental. Like I did not know what this, this actual feature was. So, you know, when I was getting briefed on it, I went up to Samsung and I'm like, so what is this? And they were basically like, well, we have this new sensor, so we thought, why not throw this also in here?

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  This is the Samsung answer of all time.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  And, and I was like, oh, okay. So like, how, how do you intend people to use it? And they're like, actually, we don't know. Like, we're just kind of, we just kind of want to see how people use it. And so a lot of the new features are quote unquote AI powered and you're getting these AI insights and they're telling me things that I don't know what to do with because on the one hand, the watch was like, hey, you have not been consistent with your sleep, little lady. You should work on that. And then I refreshed the app and it's like, great job staying consistent with your sleep schedule. And I was just like, so which is it? Which is it? Which is it? I had one night where I didn't like have my sleep schedule completely perfect. So I guess that's what it was reacting. That's not helpful.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  And then the ages metric, they're like, well, if you want to improve your score, I'm smack dab in the middle. So I don't know. I guess that means I'm my age. Uh, metabolically, who knows?

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just wait. Can I just stick with the age thing for one second? So they have a metric called age, which I think most people know what a metric called age is meant to measure.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's a well-known label for a thing. Uh, and then it measures. Uh, first of all, let me just quote your own review back to you, V.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  Meanwhile, the age metric is baffling, is what you have written here.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yes, it is baffling.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  So then it, it's shining a light through your wrist. And then, and then somehow from what it, the reflections of that light, it is tracking how protein and fat are oxidized by sugar. And then telling you whether that's a low, medium or high. And then they're saying that is something called age. And I just want to point out how deeply, meaningfully confusing that is.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  It's your metabolic age. So they love to do these things. Get out of here.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  But like, but there's no.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  But is it's like a new metric. Is this a metric that exists in like the literature?

• 52:31Speaker 02

  It is a metric that exists in research and scientists are studying it, but in a consumer watch, it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing in a consumer watch. So it tells me that I'm like, kind of in the medium, neither low or high in the yellow section, so to speak. And it's like, okay, so to improve your age is metric.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  Does it know how old you are?

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do. I did put my like demographic information.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  So presumably if you're it's, is it all related to your actual age?

• 53:07Speaker 02

  It's

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're green, is your metabolic age younger than your actual age?

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yes, that's basically what they're telling you.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  This is the idea.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  That's so messed up. This is the idea.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay, and then how do they?

• 53:17Speaker 02

  It's not messed up. It means nothing. It means nothing. So it doesn't have to be messed up. It's just baffling. It makes no sense.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  I like new, I like new metrics. I'm just, I'm just trying to understand this one. So somewhere, someone, somewhere is like, a 25 year old has a metabolism of X. And if you tell us you're 25, by shining a light from a smart watch into your wrist.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  This is a new, this is a new, this is kind of a new thing that they're doing in wearables. It's not just Samsung, like, uh, basically Aura recently did a thing where it's like, we can tell you what your cardiovascular age is and whether it's aligned with your physical age or not. Um, and so there's just like this obsession with telling you whether you are like physically speaking aligned with expectations for your actual age, or whether you're quote unquote, physiologically younger than your actual age or older.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are Shrinking the blood of the young in order to live forever. And I'm not trying to draw a straight line to the Galaxy Watch Ultra. I'm just saying, there's a path, perhaps a winding path.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  There is.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  But a

• 54:26Speaker 03

  But it's I do. It's I do not want a smart ring to tell me if my heart is dying faster than I am.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Well, listen, listen, listen, there are, there are health nuts who want this information. I don't necessarily think it's actually good for their mental health to have this information. But the app was just basically like, hey, so here's how you can improve your ages index, a metric that means absolutely nothing. And you'll never guess what the advice is because it's to eat healthy, sleep well, and exercise. So I'm just like, oh, thanks.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  It's always that last one.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Never.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  It's always that last one.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Like all Samsung devices, this, this, all this works best if you're in the Galaxy ecosystem.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming none of it works on iPhone. What gets worse if you have a Pixel or you have a OnePlus?

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Well, do you, would you like to have your EKGs and AFib detection? You will not get that unless you have a Galaxy phone. Would you like to know if you have sleep apnea? You will not get that unless you have a Galaxy phone, because that requires the Samsung Health Monitor app, which is separate from Samsung Health, meaning you're just not going to get that. And some of the AI features are Galaxy phone like only as well, which actually I think that's great for you because the AI was very hit and miss for me. And all the advice it gave me, it would be like, hey, your ages is not ideal, exercise more. And then the AI was like, you're exercising a little too much. You should rest because it's affecting your sleep. And also, you're sleeping well and

• 56:02Speaker 02

  not well at the same time. So it's like, cool, great, thanks.

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  I feel like it's a big ask to be like, you need a new watch and a new phone.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  And a new ring and all of that stuff.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  So I did last week, we asked listeners to send us a note if they were all in on the Samsung ecosystem. I would, I'm just going to guess and say that if I asked listeners to send us notes about why they were all in on the Apple ecosystem, we would crash the internet, right? Like, we would just get a lot. I, I like say in a breath, like, I don't think CarPlay is very good. And we emails for days.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  All day long, people are like, how dare you? We asked for Galaxy ecosystem users, we got two emails.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Just putting it out there. So one person, Sean, thank you, Sean, for emailing. They wrote in, they're upgrading from a Fold 4 to a Fold 6. Which is, you know, great. They're doing it because the Fold 4 broke, the warranty on the device is cached, and they found a way through the cellphone warranty to get a Fold 6. Yeah. Right, they like, they tried to use this licensed Samsung repair company, You Break, I Fix,

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  that cost money. So then they tried to use their Amex warranty, they were denied. Then Amex called Samsung, they said no. And then they went to cellphone insurance, which they had, and that replaced, they got them a Fold 6. So that is one way to stay in the Samsung ecosystem, is a nightmare repair journey, because your Fold, the seals in your Fold 4 broke. I would not say this is the type of email we get when we ask for people to stay in Apple ecosystem. So that's one. We got another one, thank you so much for emailing from Israel.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  This one says, you asked to hear from a Galaxy ecosystem user, I am that user, which is

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  truly appreciate that one. They wrote to us, I'm typing this in my Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, I upgraded from Z Fold 4 to Z Fold 6. I use the tablet form factor much more than the phone fold factor, which means I have both a Galaxy tablet and they are constantly using their phone in tablet mode. This is the most Android tablet usage I've ever heard of in my entire life. You're breaking, you're, you're, whatever you do, everyone's like, that's 90% of the usage. They have a Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, and they're waiting on their Galaxy Watch Ultra. And then they have four TVs, including a Frame TV, their washer and dryer are Samsung. They have the air dresser, the fridge, the oven, a robot vacuum, a Smart Things hub, a Blu-ray player, you're my people, and then it says, and something else, I'm forgetting, I'm sure. And then Are they Korean?

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  And then at the end, it says, my husband uses an iPhone and an iPad. Oh, wow.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  There's a case study.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  So like, so my family.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  Thank you. I love this. Um, I just, I'll, I'll write back, but, um, uh, you, you've neglected to say why?

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  So I would love to know why. Um, and if anyone else is out there and wants to send us a note with, with their list and why I'm, I'm dying to read them. Because we know so much about the Apple ecosystem and how people feel about it. Trust me. I, we know so much. You are not quiet. I'm dying to know how people at other ecosystems feel about it. Uh, and it's like, really interesting to get this, these notes. So keep writing in. I'm, I'm very curious. That said, my husband uses an iPhone iPad is very funny, like deeply funny. Yeah, that's, there's something going on.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Someone is very excited about RCS. Oh my gosh.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's so good. Yeah. I mean, look, it, there's a bunch of Samsung devices in this house. Somehow I've ended up in the LG Think Q ecosystem. Because that's our washer and dryer and fridge. Oh boy. God only knows why. And now I'm like, man, I better, I got an update the other, I got a notification the other day that, uh, new songs for summer were available for the washer and dryer. And I was like, yes, this is the dream. Oh my God.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, songs for your washer and dryer to play?

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, every quarter LG, uh, sends new little icons for the seasons and then issues new like songs. Espresso on there?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  They couldn't make phones anymore. They've like, we have to divert those resources to the washer and dryer.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  There's 50 engineers with Casio keyboards being like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, and once a quarter, they send them to me. And it's great. I truly, I truly love it. This is incredible. We can't wrap up the Samsung conversation without talking about Saturday Samsung. Saturday Samsung. So if you don't know, this is, uh, what we have started calling Samsung's relentless attempts to sell more products, which are all born of the company losing some money, sales are flat, and they issued an edict saying everyone had to come to work six days a week until they recovered.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  Crazy and it's it's their corporate employees, which means a bunch of suits are sitting around Samsung headquarters on Saturday being like some bullshit. They're not making it, but they're the suits. They that that what are they gonna do? So that it's only weird promotions. So we have covered you get a free TV if you buy a TV, which is amazing. Um, we have covered you get a free TV if you buy a phone, also amazing. You would think it would continue in this vein, uh, but no. Last Saturday, I guess. Burst of creativity, uh, and they decided that the best way to market the Galaxy Z Flip. In America. Would be to say that.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  The Z Flip, it's a folding phone, a little flippy guy is ideal for busy police officers to wear as body cam.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  That's so Samsung.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so bad. Like, I have put a folding phone on my shirt. I think I'm safe to say I'm one of the few people who's tried that outside of these police officers. It's a dumb idea. It's not a good idea.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  But it just doesn't seem secure. Also, like, where are they? Don't they wear vests? This.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  They worked, so they didn't just like issue them like T-Mobile phones. They partnered, there's a, there's a post on Samsung's website. It's titled Samsung technology is helping police authority protect the public safety. Which is a lot. Um, they partnered with a company called Visual Labs, which is quote, a leading body camera solution provider.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  Capitalism. Um, and then two police departments in Missouri did a pilot program with all of this. They have a customized Z Flip. Um, that has like slightly different buttons. Uh, the, the phones can be set to automatically begin recording when the phone detects a pursuit. Or if you're in the car, when the emergency lights are turned on and then the video footage is sent to the Visual Labs cloud.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  This is all very good.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  This, looking at this, that's ridiculous. That is so.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, get ready, V, because 25 more police departments are gonna start wearing the Z Flip as body cams.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Oh, Lord. Oh.

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and I was wrong. It, there's a partnership with T-Mobile. Uh, so they are T-Mobile phones.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Like, what do you, what do you need the rest of the phone on your person for? Like, you just need a camera.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  I just like the idea that people are gonna like flip it open and then like make a TikTok.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They're gonna start doing some dances and yeah, no, it's not okay.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  There is a, there's a, this whole, this whole press release is great, but um, uh, there's just like other benefits, which are basically like this phone has a camera in it. So one of the benefits is in addition to their use as body worn cameras, Z Flip devices can help improve evidence gathering and transparency by clearly documenting details of arrests and other interactions.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely not. There's literally a feature on this phone to draw stuff that wasn't there.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Body cameras do not have that. This is such a bad idea. Draw, draw in the, the drugs.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Put the cocaine here.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Put the cocaine here in the dash.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the Galaxy Z Flip, quote, "The Galaxy Z Flip additionally functions as a digital camera needed for taking pictures of crime scene evidence, an audio recorder for witness interviews, and a personnel locator for tracking the officer's location through GPS." This is just a phone. Like, I just want to be very clear. What they have described is a phone. They're like, have you thought about using a phone?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  On this body camera. Incredible.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Draw the suspect in the bushes.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  I just want you all to imagine the high fives this Saturday afternoon. There's like, you know, there's like one slice of pizza left in the box. The cheese is getting a little weird and they're like, what if we just gave it to cops? Like, you know, it was like a lightning bolt moment.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  They were out the door in their cars like, we did it.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Day's over.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Sales are up. Sell 25, 25 police departments.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  They still have 25 more phones. Oh, God.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's very good. It is truly very good. Saturday Samsung. It never, never gets old. All right, we should take a break. We are cruising our way way over here. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. As ever, unsponsored. I feel like the rudest thing David did was leave for the week and not pay to sponsor lightning round.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Honestly, if you're gonna leave me hanging, bro. Sponsored by David Pierce, you know what I'm saying? Like, set the tone. Sadly, it's still unsponsored. We're still in the market. We've got a lot of weird emails from people who are like, I'll do my crypto startup. We're not gonna let you do that. Sorry.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  That's just not happening. But if you have a, you know, like a real company and a lot of money, talk to us. Some, some will talk, not me, that's the other side of the house, but someone will talk to you. All right. Here's how I want to do lightning this week. We have like three topics. Two of them just have a lot of headlines. So I'm just gonna read all of the headlines and then we'll like, figure out what's going on. The first one though is just one headline and it's our fault. Logitech's new CEO, Hanukkah Faber, was on Decoder this week. She's the new CEO. She just started like late last year. We'd had the old CEO, Bracken Darrell, on several times. I like, one of my ideas with Decoder is there's more than five companies in the world.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  And so we should talk to all the companies and pay attention to them. That generally goes well. And Logitech is one of those companies, I think is undercovered, right? Like, they're just around. You don't think about them very much. And it turned out under Bracken Darrell, like how Logitech worked was bonkers. Like, he's like, I have 23 direct reports. Everyone's just allowed to do whatever they want. I buy companies, I leave them alone. There's no overlap. So like, everyone have a good time, which is how you end up with them buying like 50 headphone companies. And they're all just kinda like doing their thing. Like, I wonder if they have a strategy? The answer was, they do, which is leave everybody alone, which worked, just to whatever extent. Bracken leaves, Logitech.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  He now works for, I think it's called VF Brands. They own Vans and Supreme and the North Face. So the guy who ran Logcheck is now the CEO of Supreme. Incredible. We're gonna see how that goes. And we're gonna, I'm gonna try to get him back to like, so Supreme, that's the whole thing. And they have a new CEO, Hanukkah, who came from like Unilever and Procter and Gamble. She has this background in consumer goods and like marketing. Really interesting. And I, you know, I was like, are you gonna change this wacky corporate structure? And that was what I thought Decoder was gonna be about. Truly, that's what I thought we were, and then we did talk about that for a while. And then she's like, I wanna build a forever mouse. And this keeps happening to me on Decoder where I'm like, what?

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  Explain. And she's like, I wanna build a really beautiful mouse. It's like very heavy, very premium. And we'll just do software updates forever, and that will be your forever mouse. Like, you'll just have it forever. And I'm thinking, well, I've had this mouse forever.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Same.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like 10 years old.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Are people replacing mice?

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so very confused, very confused. And I, you can hear, if you listen to it, the transcript reads one way. But you've actually go and listen to Decoder, it's very, you can, I'm just laughing. Like, I'm like, what are you talking about? Uh, I'm like, there's only two ways to monetize hardware over time. It is subscriptions or it is ads. And she's like, yep, those are the two ways. I'm like, so you're gonna do a subscription mouse? And she's like, I am. And I encourage you to go listen to this, because I'm just like, losing my mind, like laughing.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  What am I subscribing to with a subscription mouse?

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. So we, uh, it's AI software.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  No!

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  What is AI software for my mouse?

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  What, are you gonna change the DPI based on what I'm doing?

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no, no. It's not even, it's not even that. It's like, you were like, that, here's an idea. No, no, it's worse than that. Um, they're, they're putting the buttons on the mouse so that when you see a field, like any text field on your computer, the mouse will do the prompting for you.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  So they've already rolled this out in Options, in Options Plus.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  This is like a thing, this is a thing in, in Logcheck Mice today for like newer mice. Why older mice are not allowed to have the software? I didn't even get to, because I was just, what? Right? Like, you can listen to me, like, dewire my brain in this conversation. So I was like, so a mouse and she's like, yeah, this is how our video conferencing software works. And I was like, but it's, that's a service. This is a mouse. And she's like, yeah, massive, like a beautiful, and I believe she said diamond encrusted mouse. So that was Decoder. These things happen to me on Decoder all the time. What I was not expecting was the idea of the subscription mouse has just like, it's a news cycle.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  And it was just like the new CEO riffing, but now there's a full news cycle. A lot of stuff doing subscription.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you, not since like HP was like, subscription printers have people been this unhappy about any idea that I've ever heard.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  There are YouTubers for making YouTube videos about it. I've seen TikToks about, it's like crazy. It's like, it is, it's living its own little life.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  People are throwing away their Logitech mice, like, no, no, we're not throwing away. This is really gonna be my forever Logitech mouse now. I'm never giving it up.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  I will say the mouse on my other computer there is easily 15 years old.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, like you just get one out of a box.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying it's not a little gross.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  They get disgusting, but like, you're just in an office, you find one out of a box, someone put it there 10 years ago.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  Thumb sweat. You can see my thumb sweat on this mouse.

• 1:11:28Nilay Patel?

  It's a radio show. Stop showing people your thumb sweat.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  It's just, you know.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  Describe it for the audio listener. I will tell you, I rarely, rarely get deeply surprised by what happens on Decoder. It's mostly a show about org charts, as the listeners know. And then every now and again, these past couple of months, the Zoom CEO came on and was like, we're building AI clones of everyone to put in Zoom meetings. And again, I just encourage you, you can just listen to me try to, try to respond to that in real time. And look, I'll take the heat on Decoder. People are like, you're too nice, whatever. Like, I'm always trying to be better. I'm always trying to ask harder questions. Just imagine what it's like in real time to be faced with someone being like, the future of Zoom is AI clones and meetings.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  And you have to like acknowledge that, like not die. Uh, and then formulate a series of follow up questions that make any sense that like tell a little story. It's, it's harder than it looks is all I'm trying to say. And they're serious. Right. They're dead and you have to, right. And you have to keep them talking. It is, it's just much more challenging and subscription mice, you can hear me just, what are you talking about? Record scratch. Yeah. So I was not intending to cause a full news cycle about mice. It was truly not my intent, but um, I hope. Here we are. Doesn't do subscription mice. I, I tried very hard to be like, I don't think that's a good idea. Please don't.

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  But you know, logic has this really interesting problem. Like it is interesting to think of their big problem. Which is if you believe that AI is going to be important, and we've talked about it in this episode. It might be that you just talk to your phone a bunch more. Right. And it just like does stuff for you. It might be that natural interfaces, natural language interfaces, using the cameras interface, all this stuff starts to take over from traditional PCs more and more and more. This has been the dream for a long time. There's a, you know, there's a reason that Google and Microsoft, everybody else calls AI a platform shift. And if that happens, like my sales go down. Right. We, if we use desktop computers left and we talk to our phones more or whatever. Maybe the, like PC sales will go down and then my sales go down. And then we just like,

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  if you're logic, you're like, well, how do I preserve the revenue? And you're like, gold plated diamond encrusted subscription mice. And like, maybe that's not the right solution.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  But you can see the pressure. It's like, it was, it was a good conversation that I was not expecting just that little bit to, to resonate as much as it does. That said, we have to find the brother laser printers of mice. Oh, I will, the other thing, there were TikToks about subscription mice and that put me into like people complaining about subscriptions TikTok. And then I got to one where a very nice, like young woman was like bitching about her, a very nice woman. It got me to one where I think an influencer, she was just complaining about her subscription printer. And all the comments were like, buy a brother laser printer. And I was like.

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  I did it. Like The Verge has accomplished its goal.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  One thing we stand for. Yeah.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Buy one piece of hardware that lasts forever. I think The Verge stands for that. All right. So that's Lightning Round one. It feels like we're in a consensus that we're not going to do AI-powered subscription mice.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  No, like it. Don't want it.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  The idea that your mouse is the one that creates the prompt for OpenAI is like, it's bold, you know?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  It's an idea that sounds like a mouse wrote it.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  If you're a diehard options plus ecosystem person, right, it's a note. All right. So, okay, here's, here's the other two, or I'm just going to read a bunch of headlines for Lightning Round. The first, very much related to what we've been talking about with photos. There's just a bunch of deep fake news this week. Everyone knows it's a problem. We know we got to stop it. And then some people are like, screw it, we're doing it anyway. And by some people, I mean Elon Musk, who posted a deep fake video of Kamala Harris that violates X's own policies about deep fake that were implemented under his ownership. This isn't like there was an old rule that he disagrees with and he's bulldozing it. He made a rule about deep fakes because everyone knows this problem.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  And then he posted this ad with Harris. It's like Harris's campaign ad with the Beyonce song. But they replaced the voiceover with her saying Biden is too old. Hmm. Okay. You know, like in many ways, this is like, this is just standard political parody. Like if I hired a Kamala Harris impersonator to do this, would it be a problem?

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. But if you already have the rule, it's like, don't do this. You should not, you should not, as the owner of the platform, do it. So he doesn't care. He doesn't give a shit. And but that's where we are, right? It's like already happening. There's already these like weird moments occurring because of just bad faith actors on both sides. On in particular, one side. But it's already happening. Then here's the rest of the headlines. Microsoft wants Congress to outlaw AI-generated deep fakes. Google tweaks search to hide explicit deep fakes. So if Google de-ranks your website or knocks your website for having deep fakes on it, especially, especially explicit ones. Search won't show them to people anymore. They're just going to go away from search.

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  Congress wants to carve out intimate AI deepfakes, which is basically what you would. There's a, there's a language conversation here about what you should call these. So you might call these like AI revenge porn.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  Revenge porn is like a very loaded word for a lot of reasons. So now we're going to try AI intimate AI deepfakes. Um, so you carve that out from section 230. Right? So that means right now, if you post stuff to a platform like Facebook or X or Instagram or whatever, those platforms are not liable for what you post. That's section 230 and makes the internet go around. And they're saying, no, actually, if you allow intimate AI deepfakes, you are now liable for them. But you is, and that basically means you have to moderate them. So that's one idea. Um, and then the copyright office, um, just issued a huge report on AI and copyright, which they've been working on for quite some time. And their first chapter of this report was about deepfakes. And they're, you can read, it's very long, it's very good, it's very easy to read.

• 1:17:51Nilay Patel?

  We'll, we'll link to it in the show notes here. Um, but they're basically like, yeah, copyright law can't do this. We need a new law. This is a disaster. Here's how we think the new law should work. So we're just at this moment where everyone is seeing the problem very clearly. And then lastly, uh, in the Senate, the No Fakes Act has been introduced. It's not close to passing, but yet another bill to ban deepfakes. It's a regulated deepfakes. So we're at this point now where everybody sees the problem. Right? Google as a platform is doing some stuff to stop it. Microsoft as a company is asking Congress to outlaw it. The government is like, we don't have the laws to do it. Some parts of the governments are saying we need to do it. It feels like this is the first big AI regulation that's going to happen.

• 1:18:36Nilay Patel?

  It feels like it's also the first one that has to happen.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Deepfakes bad, deepfakes bad. So yeah, I, yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  It's like the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme and we're like, what, what's going on? Who is in charge here? Like Elon Musk is making rules about deepfakes and then not following those rules.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  Following them.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  The government is like, yeah, we don't know.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  I agree. Deepfakes bad, especially the, the ones that are being used to harass people and intimidate people and bully people. Like those are, I think, fully bad. And if you read that copyright office report, they're like, a lot of our law right now is set up to protect famous people. Like the patchwork of state likeness laws and publicity laws are all basically like, if you're a celebrity and Samsung uses you to sell refrigerators.

• 1:19:22Nilay Patel?

  You can't do that. And I say that because that is a real case that happened in our justice system where Samsung made a robot that looked like Vanna White to solve refrigerators and Vanna White sued Samsung and won because the robot looked too much like Vanna White. Real case. This is a real thing that happened. And that's like all of all of our law right now is set up to deal with that problem, which is wonderful. But it's all for famous. Like you have to be famous enough so that people can be confused about. But it regular people have no protection because none of them are famous. So the copyright office is saying, no, this problem is going to affect regular people. It's going to affect teenage girls in schools. It already is. It's going to affect teenage boys in schools. It's going to affect everybody. It's if you don't like your teacher and you can depict that like all of this bullying that can happen with defects

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  is real. It's happening now. We don't have the laws to stop it. So then you say we could stop it. But that brings you all the way back around to, well, what if I just hire a Trump impersonator to look at a camera and be like, I'm bad. You know, like, that is straightforwardly like political speech. It should be protected. The line there is really blurry. And I think we're we're in for maybe a pendulum swing pretty far in the direction of all of that is not allowed. And then over time, we're have to swing it back to, well, you should probably be allowed to hire the Elvis impersonator. Right? Like, he's dead. Right. But should the should the Taylor Swift impersonator at the one casino be allowed to act like Taylor Swift? Like, probably. How are you going to draw that line? It's pretty unclear right now.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  What will SNL do at that point? Because then their whole thing is just like, man, I don't envy the people at the copyright office or anywhere just trying to like proactively think about how to deal with this because it's it's a lot easier when it's reactionary. When you're like, oh, bad thing happened. We need to do something. But then to actually think of it in a proactive manner and be like, how are people going to use this? Well, I don't know. We're only as good as the we're only as good as the most unhinged teenage boy in the classroom, just thinking up of the most crazy way to use these things like.

• 1:21:24Nilay Patel?

  I was that boy. And don't allow me to have access to computers. That was a real mistake the whole time.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  Allison, we talk about photos and cameras and device makers all the time. You know, Google is changing search to hide explicit deepfakes. Microsoft wants regulations. Do you see that expressed in the products that they're making at all? It's like, it's funny that they're kind of like asking for someone to make rules on what they can and can't do. And if they don't have the rules, they won't stop themselves.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a weird thing of like, they're all sort of like, well, we definitely agree that, you know, fake bad stuff is bad. So, but here, draw a chicken into your photo, or you know, it's sort of like, there's no agreement between like, and we're going to slow down and wait till we've figured this out. Or, you know, like, have some kind of industry standard that these things are like, abiding by. It's just sort of like, well, we're just going to run as fast as we can over here. And then like, some people will figure out the laws.

• 1:22:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  See, Allison, I told you, the blurry bumblebee, it absolutely can destroy the fabric of our society. You said it wouldn't, but it can.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  It all started with the bumblebee.

• 1:22:49Nilay Patel?

  Most like the, I'll just like use the No Fakes Act, which I think by the time you listen to this should be in the Senate.

• 1:22:57Nilay Patel?

  This is basically a reaction to OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson.

• 1:23:03Nilay Patel?

  You know, the new voice is out with OpenAI. It's actually really impressive and like very cool ways. But obviously they made a voice that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. She's really mad, she might sue them, a little kerfuffle. That's a great time for politicians to act, be like, a kerfuffle? Here's some stuff that I'm doing. And so they had a discussion draft last year, they updated it, they have it this year. And now, the goal is to give people a federal property right to approve the use of their voice, appearance, or likeness. And create liability to people who use their voice, appearance, or likeness without permission. Okay, that's like a lot, but again, SNL exists. Again, like, Trump impersonators exist.

• 1:23:48Nilay Patel?

  I sometimes do a British accent. I don't know if I sound like a British person who's real. Like, there's, there's, I, I think we're probably in for a moment where the pendulum swings way, way too far. And that might be fine, but I, we just need to like be alert for it because that pendulum swing too far might be appropriate. Given how damaging defects can be, especially for younger people, especially in these non-consensual intimate ways. But it's also like, oh, man, like you might go, you might just out impersonation along the way. And we just like, don't know the answer yet. Uh, but there's a lot of that action happening. It seems like a company. So that's lighting around one. Lighting around two, sort of related to this, um, last week, uh, last week, David, I'm just gonna call David off this. He titled the episode, the end of Google as we know it. And I was like, bro.

• 1:24:33Nilay Patel?

  You just mean search generally is like, yeah, I'm going on vacation. He changed.

• 1:24:39Nilay Patel?

  Um, so we changed it, but we were, we're basically at a moment, and that was the real thesis of last week's episode. Is that the entire like web and search market is changing. And we keyed that off of Reddit, getting Google to pay it for to index the site and then blocking everybody else. So there are some backlash to that, right? That's the closing of the open web. So suddenly the only way to search Reddit with a search engine is Google. Weird. That's a weird new outcome that we didn't have before. Uh, Microsoft has, you know, been blocked, perplexity is blocked. Uh, Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman talked to our own Alex Heath this week. Um, he's like, everybody needs to pay me. Um, he's like Bing, Anthropic, perplexity. We've all been at after them. And then the big quote is, it's a real pain in the ass to block these companies.

• 1:25:23Nilay Patel?

  So he just wants money and this looks like the future, right? We just want money if you want it, if you want to build an AI powered search engine, a crawler site. Uh, similarly perplexity, which has gotten itself into a lot of trouble. Uh, especially showing paywall content without paying anyone. They're just scraping sites and a lot of trouble about scraping sites, even though it's blocked. Which they keep saying like, you don't know how the web works. And I'm always like, tell me. Um, tell me how you think it works. Uh, and they won't say, um, but perplexity has started cutting checks to publishers. Time, Der Spiegel, which is a big German publisher and Fortune are in the first batch. I assume there will be more. I think I need to disclose, uh, uh, OpenAI pays our company Vox Media for its search GPT product.

• 1:26:07Nilay Patel?

  You can just put that on the list, right? OpenAI is paying the Atlantic and a bunch of other publishers as well. New York Times is suing OpenAI because it wants more money than it's presumably been offered. So like this thing that's like, you've got to pay, search engines have to pay to index our content on the open web, is not just like a blip. It's the thing that's happening. Like, it is the change that is happening across the industry. Everybody wants to get paid, especially from the new breed of search engines, because everybody made the mistake with Google, where they didn't ask for money, and now Google's like, we're doing AI anyway, and no one can turn Google off. Right next to that, I mentioned Circle the Search is everywhere. Desktop Chrome is getting something that looks a lot like Circle the Search, where you see Google's building AI search-ish

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  experiences right into the browser, and then Chrome is also getting an AI product comparison mode, where if you have a bunch of products open in tabs, Chrome will just synthesize the tabs and build a comparison for you, which is legitimately very cool. And at least you have to load the webpages.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, a good step.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:11Nilay Patel?

  But you see, the web is just fully changing. Like, whatever you think AI is doing to productivity or workers or whatever, right now, at this moment, how we think about the web, and in particular, search on the web, it's already, the past is past. Like, it's gone. It's in the rearview mirror. We might only be a little bit far away from it, but it's not coming back. Like, we're just in a mode where you're gonna sign up to use a search engine, and maybe it will have a different set of sources than the next search engine, based on the deals they have made, which is gonna be really weird.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  It just strikes me every time, you know, Reddit comes up, is that like, we're racing to have, you know, Google wants to answer your question without you clicking on anything, chatbots want to answer your question, or like, robots can answer your question, but then also, like, Reddit is incredibly valuable, and it's just people talking to people. Like, that's the thing that, you know, we want to get to in search now, where I'm like... You know, I have a question about my plant or whatever. It's like I, I don't want the AI generated answer. I don't want whatever blurb. Like, I want to read an answer from a person. And it's just strange to me that that's at the center of this like,

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  what if you could just talk to robots?

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  But the robots need to listen to a person who knows the answer.

• 1:28:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, and Reddit is itself being polluted with AI generated text. So that's the next turn. And then on top of it, all the new information is a bunch of kids talking to TikTok.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:53Nilay Patel?

  And we found, we found out this week that TikTok is one of the biggest customers of OpenAI. Because they're using all that for their recognition algorithms and sorting and like, and you're like, oh, this is a weird little circle. Where it's, there are going to be more silos on the internet than ever before. Because the open web did not make enough of the people who make the original content enough money. And so like, no one wants to repeat that. So now it's like, you gotta pay us. And like, whether that actually comes back to individual Redditors who are contributing remains to be seen. But Reddit itself, Steve Houghen's like, I'm just gonna block you. Like, I got my money from Google and now everyone else is blocked unless they pay up. And I think he can do it. Cause he just needs Google. Like, Google's gonna send Reddit a lot of traffic and that's fine.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  You can block Bing and be like, pay up or you're dead. And I think eventually they're all gonna end up paying. Because if you have an AI search product that can't look at Reddit. I think a lot of people are like, where's the good stuff? And you're gonna, you're just gonna end up in a weird loop. We've been covering this a lot. Like, we, over a year now, we, we covered sort of the end of the SEO industry and what that did to the web and all this stuff. Cause we wanted to mark, like, this is what it looks like now. And I didn't, I honestly did not expect it to feel as different as fast as it feels today. Like, the, the end of the search era that we knew is, I think, just firmly here. And you can see even this week, it's just like, here's six more headlines that are just like, here's how it's changing.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. I keep thinking about a friend who she was buying a new mattress and she's like, I just asked Claude. Yeah, Claude did it for me. Claude's like, yeah, which is the, oh, which one? It's not perplexity. It's anthropic.

• 1:30:33Nilay Patel?

  It's anthropic.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  And it was just like, my eyes get wider. I'm like, put the little mattress review dot com that it was scraping. You know, I don't know. That's a whole minefield too.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  No, my husband does it. My husband is like an avid chat GPT as a search engine user before it even had this project. And he's been using Gemini and all the other stuff. And he'll be like, oh, yeah, I just asked that. This is how I built some code for this. And this is how I like, because he just, Google just doesn't give him the answers that he needs anymore. And so like, I've just been watching them just completely shift how they use the internet over the last year. And I'm just doing the same things that I have always done. And I just am like, hmm, this, this, this feels like getting left behind. Maybe I should try using it. Maybe I should try using it more in the ways that they do. But I just run into the same problem as you do, Alison, where I'm just like, I just,

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  I don't like the source that they pull from in these, in these things. So I'm just like, oh, that's, I don't trust rando blogsite.com. Give me the other one.

• 1:31:35Nilay Patel?

  I started rando blogsite.com.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Not our rando blogsite.com. Respect your elders.

• 1:31:43Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that was my first website. You know, I've been using chat G P for Olympics trivia because I assume that the, you know, like, it's like, what's this cable on the fencer is like, that answer has been the same for a long time. And so you're just like, I have chat G P mapped the action button on my iPhone 15 Pro and it works. Like it just delivers an answer to you. And you're like, I didn't even know that's right.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:06Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like, close enough.

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's part of the scoring system. I hope that's true, you know?

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  You're not like judging the fencing.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Judges are not using that.

• 1:32:21Nilay Patel?

  Actually, we have a big feature we're on this week about AI being used to judge gymnastics. You should read that. It's very good. Um, I mentioned that because we are way over. Thank you. Uh, we got, we got to wrap this up. Thank you for indulging in chaos for a chance to be announced. And that was great.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  It was fun. It was fun. It was good times.

• 1:32:38Nilay Patel?

  David, if you're listening, you're dead to me. You'll never come back. Um, so it goes. Like a goldfish over here. Um, all right, that's it. That's our cast. That was really fun. Thank you for listening. Back and roll.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

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