Searching for the first great AI app

Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler talk about a big week in AI news. First, they go over all the latest on Google's Gemini 2.0 launch, and try to figure out whether Project Astra and Project Mariner will ever turn into products people use. They also discuss OpenAI's release (and un-release) of Sora, the new Reddit Answers tool, and what's new in iOS 18.2. Finally, in the lightning round, there's talk of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Sonos, and Cruise. There also is and isn't talk of quantum computing. Because that's possible now. Further reading: Google’s AI enters its ‘agentic era’ Gemini 2.0: what’s new in Google’s new flagship AI model Google’s AI-powered smart glasses are a little closer to being real Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code Google is testing Gemini AI agents that help you in video games Google built an AI tool that can do research for you Android XR_Keyword OpenAI has finally released Sora iOS 18.2 is out now, adding ChatGPT integration and more Apple Intelligence tools ChatGPT’s side-by-side ‘Canvas’ view is now available to everyone. Reddit’s new AI search tool helps you find Reddit answers without Google YouTube is still growing fast on TVs in the living room Instagram will let creators test experimental reels on random people It sure sounds like Trump would be okay with a TikTok sale TikTok failed to save itself with the First Amendment Sonos Arc Ultra review: don’t call it a comeback (yet) Google reveals quantum computing chip with ‘breakthrough’ achievements Amazon’s online car ‘dealership’ with Hyundai is now live YouTube’s AI-powered dubbing is now available to many more creators Searching for color at Pantone’s all-brown party Adam Mosseri on introducing Trial Reels From WSJ: iOS 18.2 Review: The AI Apple Promised Us 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.

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• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our chat. The flagship podcast of the agentic era. That's where you just sent us requests and David has to do them.

• 1:37David Pierce?

  But we say it's AI.

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Like every other AI company, I want to be clear. That is how they all work. Tesla's robot taxis, fleet of human operators waiting in the background to pounce. That's how it works. There's a lot going on this week. I'm your friend, Neil. I, David Pierce, is here.

• 1:51David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Waiting to take your commands. David, memorize this list of names and then make new names.

• 1:58David Pierce?

  What I want to talk about, which is just your bad websites made AI necessary.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  This is what I've come to.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Richard Lawler is here.

• 2:07Speaker 06

  I love AI. I'm a big AI guy now. I've moved on from crypto. It's all about AI now.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  Richard, big AI guy. That's what everybody says.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, Richard, you have not had AI change that car behind you from Mercedes to Ferrari yet.

• 2:22Speaker 06

  There is no Mercedes. There is only Ferrari. And but therefore, it is a Ferrari already.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Wherever Hamilton goes, that's a Ferrari. That is also, in many ways, how AI is being defined. Whatever this computer does is AI. They should get, they should get Lewis Hamilton to be this.

• 2:41Speaker 06

  I love just remembering three commands to be able to tell my computer to do one simple thing. It's just the best way to use it.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's a lot of like dumb crypto money in F1. Is there a lot of dumb AI money in F1 yet?

• 2:53Speaker 06

  Not yet. They've been kind of late on that. I don't know what's going on.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Well, it's coming. A new season is coming, and new sponsorship opportunities await. I will say that Chrome sponsoring the McLaren and then making the car literally Chrome, genius. It's very good.

• 3:09David Pierce?

  In terms of like, just pure, actual like branding of the thing inside of the actual product, like crushed it.

• 3:17Speaker 06

  And McLaren. Chrome wheels are a great idea, especially when they're not Chrome, but they look like Google Chrome.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but they added actual Chrome to the car. That was this year's vague innovation. They put literal Chrome on the car, which is not what you think about when you think of an F1 car. Like, what if this looked like a 1950s Cadillac? It's very good. That's all I'm saying. Uh, all right. There's a lot of news, actual AI news this week, not just Chrome in all senses of the word. Uh, and a lot of it is Google. And David, you wrote a bunch of these little bits and bobs. Gemini 2.0 is out. Google's making some mixed reality noises. There's an Android mixed reality thing yet again. What? Be honest about that. They've tried this before. They're back again. Uh, there's a new Jules AI for code. What's, what's all going on here, David?

• 4:05David Pierce?

  Okay, so let's, let's break all that into three pieces. Uh, and we should talk about all of them. And I think the three pieces are Gemini 2.0. There's Astra and Mariner, which are kind of like overlapping with Gemini 2.0, but are like products and they're interesting. We should talk about them. And then we should talk about the XR stuff at the end. It's called Android XR. I have many thoughts about the decision to use XR, but we should talk about this. But let's, let's start with Gemini. So the, the big news of this week was, uh, Google is starting to roll out Gemini 2.0, which is, uh, the successor to 1.5, which I think it first launched in February. So like nine months of development later, uh, this is the new thing.

• 4:49David Pierce?

  And, uh, what Demis Hassabis told me, who, uh, he runs DeepMind at Google and is in charge of all their AI stuff. And by the way, I talked to him earlier this week while he was in Sweden, accepting a Nobel Prize. He like called me from his hotel room before the Nobel Gala, which is like the worst power dynamic of an interview I've ever had in my entire life. It was really something. It was like, I don't know how to tell you you're wrong on any of this because you're literally, you're going to get a Nobel Prize tonight. But anyway, uh, what he told me is that basically what Gemini 2.0 Flash is, is roughly performance equivalent to what Gemini 1.5 Pro is.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 5:29David Pierce?

  So the way to think about it is he, it's, it's like a full step up in terms of like efficiency and speed and latency, which is stuff that really, really matters with still the same amount of performance as the pro level tier from last time.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, just to unpack some Google product names here. Flash is the little model that's supposed to run on phones?

• 5:48David Pierce?

  That's right. So they, they call it the workhorse model. Uh, it's the one most people encounter most of the time, basically.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  But so that's not the phones one. That's just the sort of like, here's the one you get, Flash.

• 5:58David Pierce?

  There's one below Flash that I can't remember the name of, but it is, it is like, it's the, it's the main one. Like when you use Gemini now, you're using 1.5 Flash almost certainly.

• 6:08Speaker 06

  Nano is the one on the phones.

• 6:09David Pierce?

  Nano is the one on the phones.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I just want to be Google product names. Also, I just want to point out, they named it Flash. Like in a history of technology names to reanimate, they picked Flash.

• 6:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's all.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  What, you didn't like Newgrounds?

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Look, Homestar Runner was great, right? And if these, if these AI systems can deliver me Homestar Runner, that would be amazing.

• 6:30David Pierce?

  If Google made Homestar Runner the official mascot of all of its AI and like that was the voice and personality I was talking to, I would be all in on AI.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  Honestly.

• 6:39David Pierce?

  Like, done, lock it down.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Get these woke AIs out of here, put Strong Bad in, let's make this happen. All right, keep going.

• 6:44David Pierce?

  Exactly. But so, so yeah, so it's, it's kind of a magnitude leap in power for them. It's also like natively doing a bunch of things that were separate in products before. So Gemini 2.0 can now do images natively, which used to be a thing Google did with a separate model. It can do audio natively, which is a thing it was doing in a separate model. So there's just a lot of this like multimodal stuff coming into Gemini, uh, which is a big deal for Google in a bunch of ways, but the main thing is like, this is going to be the model that Google tries to put everywhere. It's the one that they're going to try to sell to cloud customers who want to do all this kind of stuff. It's the one they're going to put into AI overviews and search. It's the one they're going to put into Gmail. It's the one that's going to be in Gemini.

• 7:25David Pierce?

  Like increasingly, Google is trying to do kind of the opposite of what OpenAI is doing. OpenAI is like, we have a bunch of models for a bunch of different things and you can use them all and they all kind of interoperate, but it is like different models for different needs and Google is just like, Gemini. And that is very much like how this company wants to approach AI. And I get the real sense, they see this as a big turn in that direction.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  Wait, let me ask just a foundational question here.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  There's a big conversation in the AI industry about scaling laws and whether training the next model will result in more capability. You wrote very disparagingly about OpenAI trying to redefine AGI down. I think you actually said we should just make fun of Sam Altman on this show a couple weeks ago.

• 8:08David Pierce?

  I still believe that.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  Right, so we're trying to drag the word AGI down to the ground and just be like, anything, this F1 car is AGI.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Then there's Google and it's their newest model is the same capability, but more efficient, which seems important, but it's kind of lost in the AGI conversation because all of that is like, can we make AGI out of a bunch of Nvidia chips that we have today? If we throw more data at them, will they get smarter? And Google's like, it's the same smart, but more efficient.

• 8:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I actually talked a bunch about this with Demis and I'm very glad you brought this up because I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of these announcements. And I think Google's stance seems to be that there is more headroom to be had. He kind of allowed that it's slowing down, that the idea of this stuff, just like linearly getting better with every new model is probably not true. But he did say, he's like, there are still performance gains to be had. There's new stuff we can learn how to do. And he also said that actually what we need is, is the new technique. We don't need more, we need new is kind of what he kept saying that like the, the way that transformers changed the way we think about this stuff, like we need another one of those. If we're going to unlock like the real next step change in AI.

• 9:25David Pierce?

  And he seems to think those are out there and exist and they're working on them. And he has some theories, he didn't want to tell me about them. But like, there is room upwards, but it is not just bigger models. What's next? And I think what we're seeing right now, both with what Google is doing and with what OpenAI is doing with this 12 days of ship missing thing is everybody is trying to figure out now how to make these things products. Like, how do I get these things in front of you in a way that is useful and valuable and worth paying for, or at least using? And in some like very meaningful way pays off as a business for these companies that are just pouring money down the toilet, making these things work. So for Google, one thing I liked about the way Demis was framing it is like,

• 10:10David Pierce?

  Google works on all this stuff at sort of a technological infrastructural level. And then Google. Is Google's biggest customer, right? So there's like, he was like, we, we think of this as, and this is like, you're, you're making a face. This is what everybody says about their stuff.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening to this in your car, just imagine me rolling my eyes so hard, your car crashed.

• 10:28David Pierce?

  Everyone ever on Decoder has said that about their companies. But like, it's true in a lot of cases, and I think it's true in this case, too, that like, what Google needs is for Gemini and Gmail to not run Google out of business because it's so expensive to operate. Right? And so, so the idea of making this stuff faster and more efficient and lower latency becomes really meaningful, not only because Google is in this like incredible arms race with every other cloud company to offer AI services. And this stuff is being really quickly commoditized. So being able to say we are the cheapest and the fastest is becoming very powerful very quickly. But also, like, it matters to Google's own products in a pretty big way. So like, he kept getting really excited about efficiency.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  And I realized he's like, oh, no, like, you're, you're serious. Like, this stuff, this means you can build this into products in a way that is like, that works at scale without just absolutely hemorrhaging cash the whole way.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I mean, we should talk about those products and we will, but I just, I just want to say this very clearly. And I'm the person who interviews all the CEOs about their costs. I don't care. Right? Like, we made it cheaper to hallucinate is like a, I mean, honestly, there was a time in my life where that would have been a very compelling pitch. But like, they're not better. Right? They're just cheaper to run. And I, I feel like I'm just stuck there. Like, that's a big deal. I'm not discounting, it's a, it's not a big deal to put the thing more places and see what kind of product you can build. And maybe all anybody wants is to hallucinate some emails, like, great. But they're not more capable yet. Like, the big innovation here is that it, it got cheaper.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  If Google wants to save some money on AI, they could just turn off the AI overviews on my search results. Like, I don't know how many pennies that would, that would save them, but it's gotta be at least five cents considering the amount of searches I do.

• 12:14David Pierce?

  It was really funny, Google, I think it was, uh, Sundar Pichai wrote a blog post with all these announcements that was like, you know, there are now, more than a billion people are experiencing AI overviews. And I was like, that's such a different way of putting it than more than a billion people really are excited to use AI.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  We have foisted this upon a billion people.

• 12:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, this is, this is one of the fastest growing search enhancements ever. And I just kept thinking about YouTube being like, this is our most successful album ever because we shoved it onto everyone's iPhones. It's like, I don't know that that's the flex you think it is, guys.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, so we should talk about the product. I just, that's the thing that really leapt out to me is we have very quickly moved on from talking about the models getting more capable and like, we're worried that these are going to be super intelligence level extinction events for us to maybe Sam Altman will just say it's AGI because he wants to, because, because that'll get him out of a Microsoft contract or something will happen and it'll boost his stock price when they go public. To, we've made it cheaper. We can put it in more products and hopefully we can all start making some money. And that, that's fine. Like, great. Like, very cool. The products still aren't there. They're not very compelling yet. Maybe some, someone's just to figure it out. And then it, it just

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  feels like, I keep making the comparison to Bluetooth. It's like, they keep telling me Bluetooth is awesome. And I'm like, but these headphones are bad. And we're just stuck in that loop. So tell me, I guess, tell me about the headphones. Are the headphones any good?

• 13:40David Pierce?

  Um, well, okay, let me describe the headphones to you. Uh, Google launched four new pairs of headphones. Uh, one is, uh, Project Astra, which we've seen before. We talked about it a bunch on the show. It's, it's basically like the most sort of all encompassing, ambitious version of Google's AI idea. It's visual, it's listening, it has memory. It's, it's the thing you like, walk around your house with. And then you're like, where did I leave my glasses? And it tells you because the camera saw your glasses. Like, that's the idea. Uh, they're able to do some new stuff on there. It's also now connected to things like Google Maps, which is cool. Uh, so there's like, they're starting to be able to plug some of these things in. And that's where like, again, having Gemini

• 14:21David Pierce?

  underneath all of this stuff makes that doable in a way that's been much harder in the past. Uh, so that's one. Thing number two is, uh, what's called Project Mariner. And this is, it's a Chrome extension. Google calls it an experiment. They have a million different terms that all mean some version of prototype.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  We can kill this without you yelling.

• 14:41David Pierce?

  Right. This is like the most prototypey prototype, but it is like an agent in the way that we've been talking about agents for a while in that it can like go and browse the web and do things for you. Kylie Robinson and her team got some demos of this and her take was basically it works. It's really slow. It's kind of wonky. I'm not sure this is meaningfully better than me just like looking at some webpages myself. But one of the demos they give is like, look at these webpages and find the contact emails for me. And it will actually go and literally click around the pages and try to find the email for you.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Can we talk about that one for a second? That was the one I was talking about right at the beginning.

• 15:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  The request and you've got to see the video and we put a screenshot of it on the site. But the request is absurd to me. It just starts off with memorize this list. What does memorize mean to a bot? Like if I gave you a list, I assume that you remember it now. If you were a computer, because that's what you do.

• 15:39David Pierce?

  No, no, no. These computers are on drugs, Richard.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  And now I have to tell the computer to memorize. And then somewhere else in the command, it also said, remember again. So now I have to remind you to remember this thing, to go do a thing. And then in the context box, it tells you the results are unreliable, like right below it. So I'm telling an unreliable party instructions that it can't follow. If I was gonna have someone screw up a task, I would just do it myself. Like, what is AI doing for me?

• 16:06David Pierce?

  But no, this lets you screw up higher value tasks. Right? This fails to get a bunch of email addresses while you like, you know, crash a bike. Like you're doing something else. There was a good one on there too, in the, in the Project Astra demo video. It starts and ends with a guy trying to get into an apartment building. And the first thing he does is he's like, look in my email and find the, the code to this front door and then remember it. And it's like, I had the same reaction. It's like, first of all, it's just in my email. Like it can just look in my email every time. Who is remembering anything? And then at the end, he's like, what was that code? And it's like, the code you asked me to remember. And it's like, no, it's still just the code in my email. Like, what are we accomplishing? You just, just look at the email again, if you want to. It's fine.

• 16:51Speaker 06

  Like now I have to remember the conversation I'm having with the computer about the thing I'm trying to do.

• 16:55David Pierce?

  Right. I have to tell you what I've told you so that you can tell it to me again. And it's just like, what is, what is, just, just tell me the code. Just what is the code?

• 17:04Speaker 06

  We fixed this. You let me pin notes on my phone screen and then I had the code.

• 17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of weird UI around this stuff. And the question of like, what is this actually accomplishing that is AI and is new? Uh, hard to say. Again, I like, I can't stop talking about the fact that hacking your way into like, pretending to use a web browser on my behalf is not impressive and not interesting. Like, do other things.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, so let's split these two up. Astro is interesting, right? Cause we're, the same day that Google announced all this stuff, Apple announced iOS 18.2, released iOS 18.2 with visual intelligence.

• 17:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  And the, hey, look at something and tell me about it. We, that's the world we live in now. This is the new great AI feature, which, you know, other companies have had. But now it's built right into the iPhone and then Google is talking about Astro with it. It seems like Astro is very much the future of Google Lens, right? You're just like, looking at stuff, it's talking to you about it. You're having a great time. But it is very much like, I looked at a picture, I scanned all the text in the picture, or I did some visual recognition of what I'm looking at. And here's some information, you can have a conversation with me about it. That, to whatever extent that is super useful for people, I get it. I think there's still just what I keep calling the US Capitol problem. Like, you ask Apple Visual Intelligence what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th?

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, that answer is pretty dicey, right? And like, there's a universe of actors who would love to change what that answer is across the political spectrum. And none of these companies have contended with it. Astro's got the same problem, everyone else has the same problem. But they're headed that way. And Google Lens has been headed that way for a long time.

• 18:45David Pierce?

  Wait, do you think it's like a real mainstream use case that a lot of people are gonna walk by the Capitol and be like, what happened here on January 6th?

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  I think it's a real mainstream use case that you're gonna be wearing a pair of glasses in the future that purports to augment reality and everyone lives in a weird custom political reality.

• 18:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Whether or not you're looking at the Capitol or not.

• 19:01David Pierce?

  Granted.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, I mean, and I'm not gonna go into it, cause it's super dicey and loaded and we should probably just do an entire episode on it someday. But you can just think of the infinite questions that come about when you look at something that are ultra-loaded and that someone will start a culture war over. Right?

• 19:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Every, in your house, you can just look at stuff and be like... You know, like, are the Cowboys good? There's just like a lot of questions underneath that that are like really hard. Like, hey, is that Aaron Rodgers? Tell me about his ideas. Like, you just go for it. Like, just normal, everyday things. And that, to me, is it's great that we're building technology for it. Astro is just very much the future of Google Lens. But there's this whole universe of those problems that come with, I'm looking at stuff. Tell me about it. Who will augment reality is like a great question.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think there are sort of two separate pieces of this kind of thing. And I'm, I'm really bullish on one and kind of bearish on the other. And I think the like, how to logistically get through your day thing. I think things like Astro are going to be really useful for, right? Like, there's a, there's a moment in the demo video they just released where the guy holds up his phone and he points at a bus that's just going by. And he's like, well, this bus kept me to Chinatown. There are a lot of like complicated problems to solve technologically there. But that's a really interesting UI problem because that's a hard question to answer. And if the AI assistant can answer it, that's very cool. And the like, stuff around me and how I get places and like, just like how to do your day.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  This kind of thing can be really useful for it if it works.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Wait, but I mean, can I just hold on the bus example for one second? One, ideally, the will this bus get to me to where I'm going is not a culture war problem. Right? It's a question with an answer. Like, will this go there? And it's an answer that Google already has in a million structured databases with deterministic systems running them.

• 20:56David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  So you can just ask Google Maps this. Google has all kinds of public transit infrastructure projects that have put sensors on buses. And there's open systems. You can build products and all that. And they've just built that stuff to enable Maps a decade ago. And so now you've got a conversational layer that is a new interface for that. Where you're just like, look at this. I'm asking about it. Figure out what that is. And then it parses that into a structured query for its existing Google Maps systems and delivers you the answer in a natural language way. And so really, you've just built a new interface for the existing good system that works. And I think that's very powerful.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  All the good AI stuff is exactly that.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I just, that's like one, and when people talk about it being a platform shift, like that's the one I see. Like, we made a click wheel, and now we have iPods. We made multi-touch, and now we have smartphones. We made natural language UI that is pretty good, and now we're gonna get a bunch of other stuff. We made a UI that can listen to a song and tell you about it. Right. There's, there's like a lot of that stuff that I think is cool. It's the next turn where it's like, because it's a conversational natural language UI, you expect it to have conversations with you and like be a useful companion. And that's where it just always seems to fall down.

• 22:07David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  Because the systems aren't actually intelligent. And that, like, that's to me is like, it, it, we keep sliding from one to the other. Like, here's a kick-ass way to use Google Maps into this is your best friend that will, you know, if you ask it nicely, we'll try to have sex with you. You're just like, well, that's a pretty, that's a pretty long road, actually.

• 22:28David Pierce?

  We assume because one, thus inevitably the other.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:32David Pierce?

  And I think, I think everyone needs to stop doing that. And I think one thing that Apple is doing right to its credit is like, it is, it is stuck on the idea that these are like features that should be useful and not best friend companions that you have. And I, I think, like, for the foreseeable future, that is, you should, A, pick one of the two and not try to do both. And I think the one you should pick is like, try to be helpful. Because we just keep seeing stories about the friends being weird and problematic.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  We just ran one of those stories from Josh, that's like a long.

• 23:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, it's, it's a mess. And it's, that stuff is real, but like, but in this case, like, again, I think, like, down every road lies a culture war. I, I agree, right? Like, if you, if you, if you follow it long enough, there's a culture war there somewhere. But like, there are things along the way that. Work and are useful. And I think Google is starting to poke at some of that stuff in pretty

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  But I'm like, the cultural war is like, not even, I'm not even saying it's like politically dicey. I'm saying you're somewhere and you're listening to that new choral version of Like a Prayer by Madonna. And you're like, is this song appropriate for church? And some people think the answer is yes, because they're performing it in churches in America today. And it's like, well, you gotta, you gotta just, the robots gotta unpack that box for you, right? Like, and I don't think these companies are ready for that, which is what will truly make them useful, is by giving an answer you might not like. And I, they're super not ready for that in the current political climate. And that's like, that's when you make the turn. Like, that's when it actually becomes a useful assistant to you. Go find me some information, even if I don't like it.

• 24:06Speaker 06

  As a slightly lower stakes version of that question, one of the demos.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, is Like a Prayer a song about doing it is like, not a high stakes problem.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Depends on where you are.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  I suppose.

• 24:17Speaker 06

  One of the examples that they showed with Project Mariner was someone pulling up a recipe in Google Docs and saying, add the veggies from this recipe to my Safeway cart. What if one of those things is a fruit and I forgot that it was a fruit, not a vegetable, or I just disagree?

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Now, that's a high stakes. Yeah. Add these sandwiches to my cart. One of them's a hot dog and the thing just like, a data center explodes somewhere in America.

• 24:40Speaker 06

  This is, is something that, that will happen to someone.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. So that's, I just want to like, call that out. Like the, there's the thing we want them to do, which is not just a technology problem, like a straight up culture problem, like a society level problem. And then there's like, the really interesting part, which is build a better interface for systems that already work. And then there's this weird middle ground, which I think Mariner is, which, you know, Copilot is at Microsoft, all these agentic systems, which is what if we just use the internet for you? And that's how we solve the problem of, we need something in the middle that works. And David, I think this is where you're getting to like, what a stunning indictment of web design. Because you're like, well, the internet's pretty broken. So it would be better if some unreliable who's saying we're about used it for me.

• 25:24David Pierce?

  Right. The the assumption is that you can't find anything, which is a very funny thing for the company that made Google Search to say. But yeah, we're we're at a moment where it is perceived to be easier to ask this thing to go find a contact email address than it is to just go find the contact email address. And again, like, I think a place we are landing that is very funny is that all these companies are slowly discovering that the most useful thing their tools do are really boring and really like back of house accounting firm kind of stuff. And that turns out to not be very interesting to like a mainstream public that you need to get excited about using your products.

• 26:08David Pierce?

  So they're stuck in this place of all these companies are actually playing like a thoroughly B to B game and just pretending that they're making like huge strides toward mainstream consumer products. That's all fine and good. And I think like, Neil, I think you're really like, you're right to be hung up on the fact that these things get some things wrong. But also like, people use them anyway. Yeah. Like it like the this thing will write my email for me and it will make two weird mistakes. But then I can fix them and send it. And that's better than having to write the email from scratch.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  Or not fix them. As we are learning every single day, the answer is not fix them. The answer to some extent is read them out loud on cable news.

• 26:47David Pierce?

  The answer is Hunter Debuts will will will save us. But yeah, and like, the Hunter Debuts will like go down in history as like.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  I refuse to explain. It's there. You can look it up.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. Ironically, if you Google Hunter Debuts, you'll get correct information about what we're talking about.

• 27:09David Pierce?

  But anyway, I just think we're at a moment now where the question for all of this AI stuff, just to bring it all the way back around, is what is any of this actually useful for? And I think the truth is the models that we have now are better than we need for a lot of things. And vastly like a million miles away from being good enough for what everybody keeps talking about. Right. So now the question is, okay. We're not going to build the perfect thing for a long time, if ever. What can we do with what we have now? And that's where things like efficiency come in, because at some point, like running a business costs money, and you have to be able to do these things. And if you can make them cheaper, more people can use them and find new things to do and like on and on and on.

• 27:53David Pierce?

  But the, the question is like, okay, if you just take the technology we have right now, and you don't pretend it's God, what is it good for? And that is like, that is the question Google is starting to try to answer. It's the question OpenAI is starting to try to answer. That is like the question of 2025 is like, what is any of this actually useful for? Because there are answers. They're just not as like, they're not God, and they're not fire, and they're not the industrial revolution. So what are they?

• 28:18Speaker 06

  It's like a tour guide and an extremely unreliable personal assistant.

• 28:23David Pierce?

  Which, to be fair, is not nothing. It's not nothing.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  And I can see why they're compelling, and I can see why. I mean, just the demo, I mean, Richard, you already brought it up, like the Google demo of Mariner, where you're just like looking at a recipe in Google Docs, and you just ask it to go build you a shopping cart on a grocery site, and it just like does it for you. Neat, like legitimately neat, very slow, so slow that the Google PM literally saw Kylie noticing how slow it was and said, that's the elephant in the room. That it's ponderously slow. Right, like they know, they know it, they're not hiding from it. It's a research demo, but like, I'm, I'm stuck at, the systems are not themselves capable, so they are free riding on other systems that can do the thing.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  The grocery site has to exist and work, and it needs to have a database of all the food in the grocery store. And then you need to be able to put it in a cart and like it, like all that has to work and be profitable and sustainable. And then on top of it, you're just like, and then this robot will cost $20 a month and like do it for you. And eventually you're just like, what if, what if this undercuts all of that? I keep calling this the DoorDash problem. Where DoorDash has to exist for a bunch of these services to get you a sandwich. And if you just sort of delete DoorDash's business by cutting them out of the equation and taking you, the customer, away from DoorDash, like, how is anyone gonna get a sandwich?

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, you need this big, traditional deterministic, logical computer with a database that is reliable, doing a bunch of work, so your natural language interface can be useful. And I don't think anybody has solved the problem of like, how do you keep DoorDash in business?

• 30:06David Pierce?

  Including DoorDash.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm not just speaking of DoorDash, whatever, Uber, right? Like, Rabbits, just like, we're gonna click around Uber's website. All of these middle companies, these like web 2.0 companies that digitize the interfaces for very physical things, like, they're pretty, they were pretty vultury in their times, right? Like, Uber is the biggest taxi company in the world, doesn't own a single taxi. Airbnb doesn't own a single hotel, like, that's the joke about those businesses. And now they're under pressure from AI systems that might use their interfaces and never show them to a user, right? And it's like, where, this has to go somewhere that is actually useful for people.

• 30:43David Pierce?

  Well, it's a weird thing, because you have, all of the AI companies would agree with you, but they see that as a strength and not a weakness, right? Where what they're saying is, okay, we are going to have an army of service providers who just invisibly do the job on your behalf, and you don't have to worry about who they are. You don't have to go to the DoorDash website every time you want to order McDonald's. You just order McDonald's and we'll get it done for you, and DoorDash or whoever will be our provider of choice to do that. They would call that a victory, right? Because I, as a consumer, I don't, I shouldn't have to interact with DoorDash to get McDonald's. I should interact with McDonald's. But what they've actually done is, A, insert another step, and B, completely commoditize all of these providers in such a way that they will eventually just crash them all

• 31:27David Pierce?

  in an incredible race to the bottom to be one of these providers. And so, it's, it's like, when all the carriers got really nervous about being dumb pipes, and so they bought content businesses, it's like, there, there is a, there is another turn of that coming, where Uber is going to be terrified of being abstracted away by all of these AI companies, and so is going to do more to try and get you to use Uber, and it's just gonna get really weird as a result.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Or it's gonna just raise the price.

• 31:55David Pierce?

  Or it's gonna raise the price.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  Or it'll raise the price for the AI systems. So Uber costs more if you book it through AI. Then if you book it yourself in the app and look at an ad for Uber.

• 32:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just the next generation version of the App Store tax.

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  And you're, I think we're just gonna see a bunch of this stuff play out. And every time everyone talks to me about these agents and Google in particular is in a very privileged position because they run Chrome and they run search and like one of their, their deep research preview that they released in the same set of releases where it's like, go research a topic for me and it comes with a research plan and then it goes, searches the web for interesting results and then delivers that research back to you. That's just perplexity, right? It's just perplexity by another name and perplexity is in a bunch of trouble because it's not paying any of the sources it's using to scour the web in that way. And it's like, at some point, all of the people who make websites, us included, and I feel like disclosure, the company has some sort of meandering deal with OpenAI that hasn't really resulted in as far as I could tell, but like, there it is.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, all of these companies are gonna say, well, we make the information. We make the interface to book a taxi or whatever it is. You, you have to pay us because if you just take the customers away from us, we will go away and the bots will be useless. And I think that just, that economic reality will result in some payments, whether or not, you know, the lawsuits or whatever results in payments or blocking robots on TXT. But it's come, it's, it has to be coming. And I think the, I think it's gonna like follow the same pattern everything else follows. Like Uber will be exclusive to Copilot and DoorDash will be exclusive to Gemini. And like, it's, that part's gonna suck for a long time.

• 33:33David Pierce?

  Yes. Or we're gonna, somebody is gonna figure out how to like do the hack to make it work, whether the companies want it to or not, and then we're gonna have an entirely different kind of mess.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  And then a new generation of college students who we radicalize by Napster. And then that's how we will be for Vendetta, my replacement. It'll be great. We gotta take a quick break, but talk about this XR thing really quickly.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, so, um, you know Android, how it's Android? Imagine if smart glasses were a thing.

• 34:00David Pierce?

  And if if Google just did Android again for those, that's what Android XR is. And basically, uh, Google has been at this smart glasses thing for like 15 years now, maybe, has tried a bunch of things. Uh, do you remember Daydream? Daydream is one I had forgotten about that I just randomly rediscovered today. Daydream existed. I wrote a whole thing about it for Wired a million years ago. I completely forgot about that. But anyway, so, uh, Google announced like a developer preview of Android XR. It's basically what you think. It's a, it's immersive versions of some Google apps and some Gemini stuff. Basically, the, the underpinning of all of this is the assistant Gemini stuff that you might want to wear on your face. That's sort of the big theory. Um, they have a bunch of hardware partners.

• 34:44David Pierce?

  Uh, I've been hearing from like every company that wants to sell you glasses over the last two weeks, being like, we're doing a thing with Google that we can't quite tell you about yet. Uh, that's Android XR. So, starting next year, I think we're going to start to see real development and hardware products. It sounds like Samsung is going to be the first out of the gate with like a real honest to God Android pair of glasses. But it seems very clear that like, Apple is trying to be the apple of your face with the Vision Pro. And Google is very happy being the Android of your face. I think the question of whether Google is going to make hardware is really interesting. Google's made a bunch of prototypes and gave us some indication this week that it is interested in them being more than prototypes. And if you want to do all this Gemini stuff and Project Astro, like you gotta have glasses.

• 35:28David Pierce?

  Like, if, if this AI future that everybody is imagining and trying to sell you on is going to come true, it's going to be glasses. It just is. I'm 100% convinced.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's a decade from now, there's an eighth grader. One of our children will be in eighth grade at some point. Uh, they're on their eighth grade trip to DC. They're wearing their glasses. They look at the Capitol and say, what happened here? What's, what are some notable events in American history? Does it say an insurrection or does it say it was a day of love? And are the answers on two different eighth graders different? And these companies are racing towards a future where they are going to have to answer that question, regardless of whether they make the hardware or not.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Aren't you just describing the internet, though? Like, everything already works like that.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  Right, but like-

• 36:13David Pierce?

  And like, is it ruining society? Sure, but like, I don't know that smart glasses are a new problem here.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  But you're not literally experiencing, maybe, maybe, like, that is more nihilistic than I want it, like, I was gonna say, not everyone's experiencing a bespoke reality, and then I just thought of a generation of Americans who super are, so, maybe, but I'm just, you can build, wanna build this stuff, and then underneath it is this very deep question of who gets to augment reality, and do we all experience the same one? And they're just not ready for it, fully not ready for it, especially when the answer is different, if you have Android on a Lenovo pair of glasses versus Android on a Samsung pair of glasses, and the Samsung pair of glasses is like, there's a second reality here that we made, it sits right next to Google's reality, and would, it has Bixby in it, like-

• 36:56Speaker 06

  It's slightly brighter.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back. That's, yeah, I'm just gonna, I need to walk around the house a little bit. We'll be right back.

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• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. My feeling is that Bixby would say it's a day of love.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  No, no further commentary.

• 39:05David Pierce?

  We should really do like a political alignment matrix of all of the different virtual assistants.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 39:12David Pierce?

  I feel like if I sat down and thought about it for five minutes, I would end up with really strong opinions. Who did Tay vote for?

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Yep. So my question is, do you want to go viral on X in this specific way? You're like, we're going to milk the last drop of traffic from this one dead platform. And it's up to political alignment chart of different AIs.

• 39:32Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you. All right. There's more AI news. It's it's just a lot of things got released this week.

• 39:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI released Sora. iOS 18.2 is out with ChatGPT integration, visual intelligence. Which what do you want to start with?

• 39:47David Pierce?

  Let's do iOS 18.2 first.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I mean, we've it's very familiar. I think we had a moment this morning where like, how much should we cover this? Because people have seen it. They've used it. It's been in beta. The release candidate was last week. But it's out now. If you have an iPhone 16 or up, or even iPhone 15 Pro, you get visual intelligence, you get Genmoji. ChatGPT integration is there. Joanna Stern wrote a very funny column where she's like, you invoke ChatGPT by saying like, secret words. Like, if you ask Siri one way, you get a regular Siri answer. But if you ask Siri, like, write me a list, ChatGPT is the list for you. Which is very funny. Um, I've been, look, I've been using the stuff, David, I think you've been using the stuff. What do you think?

• 40:28David Pierce?

  Richard famously uses Windows Phone, so he's got only those.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  It's the only way to live.

• 40:34David Pierce?

  I will say two things. I think, one, the single coolest thing about iOS eighteen point two is the ability to change default apps for various things. Like when you tap on a phone number, you can change which app it goes to. Everyone should go examine all of those defaults, because if you get that kind of thing right, it makes your phone a lot better. This is the sort of thing Android has been better at than iOS for forever. And thank you to occasionally confuse EU regulators for making this happen. The, the ChatGPT thing I think is interesting. What I've found is that when I ask compound questions, it punts to ChatGPT more often than not, right? Like if my question kind of has two parts or has a thing and then a modifier, like one I just did the other day.

• 41:19David Pierce?

  It was like, if I ask for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, Siri will just kind of pull it.

• 41:25David Pierce?

  And I'm gonna not say that word again, because it's just activated three devices. But if I ask for a chocolate chip cookie recipe that maybe will taste like I haven't tried before, then it punts to ChatGPT.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  And then it's, it's a relatively consistent experience. Actually, one thing that I've liked is that when it goes to ChatGPT, the thing that it brings down still looks like the normal Siri response. So I think in that, like, the, my mental construct of what's going on is very confused in a way that I don't like. But the actual user experience of it, I think is actually pretty good.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, in terms of like, this is a good way to get better answers from a Siri.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  And so you just get, I, I think that works to some extent.

• 42:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, do I have feelings about the idea that my stuff is going to ChatGPT over and over and over again? Sure. But if you don't, that friction should go away and there isn't actually as much friction as I expected. So I think that's probably on, on balance, a good thing.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, I've had the action button on my phone mapped to the ChatGPT voice assistant forever. So this is just like a slightly faster version of that for me with like more annoying animation. Like, I actually think the new Siri animation is so overwrought.

• 42:45David Pierce?

  I agree. I missed the little swirling ball, the thing where it like it now takes over my whole phone screen. I don't like it.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's very much like jazz hands. It's like, get ready for an experience. It's like, I don't need this to happen.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  No.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  But it just means that it's gonna take a little bit longer to load.

• 43:02Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then you talk and then it does the thing where it like fills out the words for you. There's there's some amount of like obfuscating how slow it was with the swirly ball.

• 43:12David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  Made it appear fast. You know, like how progress bars are, they're they're mostly designed to go really fast for the first part, and then they can be slow at the end, but you've already perceived it being fast. That's very much what the old Siri was doing. And now it's just like, everything's glowing and you can see the world's and it's like, I don't need, I don't need to see the mouse running the wheel, guys. Just like, let me know when there's an answer.

• 43:35David Pierce?

  I think that's right. I had actually not really ever thought about Siri as a as a spinning, like Mac style beach ball of loading things until it switched to this. And then it is like, it is so desperate to make it seem like something is happening at all times. Because it's slow. So it's just like, look at these beautiful pink and blue swirlies until it finishes, which it will do eventually.

• 44:01David Pierce?

  It's like, all right, this is actually like, pretty good design on top of a pretty bad system.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say, I mean, it's it is, again, the natural language capabilities. That is what AI is best at. So it I it understands me a lot better. And then ChatGPT is familiar. I don't know if it's hallucinating any, but like, it's all happening and there's some guardrails in there. It, to me, the ones that I, I don't think those are the Apple Intelligence is here features. The now Siri can talk to ChatGPT. I think that is table stakes and it's kind of weird that it wasn't there from the jump. The ones that I think are are big are image playground, Gen Moji and visual intelligence, right? Where the phone gets multimodal and it can now talk in pictures, like both in and out. But I like Genmoji is just purely silly to me.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  Image Playground is like 50 steps behind, although that's probably the safest way for it to be.

• 44:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, that seems to be deliberate.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  And Visual Intelligence is, you know, it's just the same thing we're talking about. We're like, look at, is this a flower? And it's like, it sure is. And like, the next turn isn't quite there yet. But like, maybe I'm just being a hater.

• 45:06David Pierce?

  Well, A, you're definitely just being a hater. That's certainly.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm in a real salty mood.

• 45:10David Pierce?

  You are, I can tell. I'm enjoying this very much. You're like, what if everything was awful and woke and I hated it?

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Look, I know where the views are.

• 45:19David Pierce?

  I don't know what like, the Genmoji thing is one that I'm, I'm really torn on because I feel like we've been covering Apple's weird ideas about emoji for like, the whole life of The Verge. And I don't think I have ever once earnestly sent or received one of Apple's weird emoji. Other than like, to goof on another tech reporter. I think if like, if I just made a Genmoji and sent it to my wife, she would like, call the police. Like, it would be so weird as a thing to just do.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  Wait, has your kid discovered that you can hold on a face in a photo and make a sticker of a face?

• 45:57David Pierce?

  No, thank God.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  Because I have a camera roll full of those, or wherever they are in the file system on like, it just billions of stickers, like left and right. And those are very funny to send around because they're horrifying.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  But that's very much like, we use the walkie talkie feature on Apple Watchers and we're the only people who use it. The walkie talkie feature on Apple Watches.

• 46:17David Pierce?

  And I just feel like all of this stuff, Image Playground, Genmoji, like, and this is true of lots of other people's products too. It's like, I'm convinced that the, all of the AI image generation stuff is more of a meme than a product at this point. And I just don't, I don't know that there are actual reasons that they exist, other than somebody made them. I don't know. Richard, am I crazy? Are you, are you just like sending Gen emojis to all your pals every day?

• 46:46Speaker 06

  I am not. I unfortunately do not have a device ready to run Apple Intelligence in my home. I probably never will because I do not want to send Gen emoji. I don't want to do this.

• 46:56David Pierce?

  With Gemini 2.0, you're gonna be able to generate some weird stuff too. So get ready.

• 46:59Speaker 06

  When you open up Instagram, I just want to like, search for an account and oh, now I'm in the AI window. Thanks.

• 47:07David Pierce?

  I really do hate that.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  But I, I, it's bizarre because I, I've never wanted to generate an emoji. Not that, I don't know if all of the emoji that are into the phone exist and cover every feeling I've ever had. But whatever feelings I have that aren't covered by those emoji, I'm not in touch with yet. I just haven't considered it. It's not something that's just dying to get out of me, that I cannot, I must, I must find the zebra of many colors with, you know, anatomical incorrectness that represents how I'm feeling right now. I just, I haven't gotten it yet.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  I think it's very important for everyone listening to this right now who has access to Apple Intelligence to pull over in their cars. Send in that prompt and then send us whatever it generates.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Like I, I, I issue a lot of instructions on this show. Ask your phone to make a zebra of many colors. It's anatomically incorrect. That is, expresses a feeling that you don't know you're having, or whatever it is that Richard just said, and just let us know what it gives you. I'm dying to know.

• 48:12David Pierce?

  I feel good about that.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  Look, I, I think ultimately, Apple wants it to seem like the phone is very capable. And AI makes, whether or not it actually is capable, AI makes it seem like the phone can do more stuff than it could do yesterday, right? Now you can press camera control on your iPhone 16 and look at something and it'll be like, here's a flower. You, it can write for you in a way that I think those ads are doing it a massive disservice to because it just seems like everyone's a jerk at work.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, every one of those ads is like, hey dumbass, would you seem like not such a dumbass?

• 48:42Speaker 06

  They have a real problem with those ads because they have to find something that is so important that you have to send the message, but also not so important that you need to write it yourself.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  And what is that?

• 48:53David Pierce?

  And also, how do you find? That you could conceivably be hired for even though you're dumb as a rock.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  The one where the guy rolls his chair out of the meeting to summarize whatever and rolls back in the meeting? I get it. It's a very funny. It is, is, uh, it is attention getting, which is the purpose of advertising. But it's like, oh, that sucks. Like, I would like, get out of this meeting. Like, I don't need to waste my time if you haven't done the reading. Um, you can tell what our meeting's like. Uh, I, I just say like, they've made the phone slightly more capable. But this big Apple intelligence is here moment. I don't know. It, it's not the same as the chat GPT moment that everyone talks about. Like, no, your mind is not expanded. Because the, the messages, notifications are 8% better than they were in iOS 18.1.

• 49:37David Pierce?

  If, if there's going to be that thing anytime soon, it's going to be agents. And even, even Apple agrees with that, right? Like you talk about the, the intense stuff that they're starting to build into iOS. That's going to get Siri more access to apps. So it can actually go and like, get information and do things inside of those apps. Like, that's what everyone is trying to build. And if somebody gets it right in a way that is useful and doesn't cause a culture war, Patel, that's going to be the next thing. Because those will be the moments where people are like, oh, I, I, I now understand a thing I can ask this to do. That is useful and new.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  The culture war, I just want to point out, is in AR. It's in visual intelligence.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  I see. Okay.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  App intense is money. Right? Cause Apple is counting on a bunch of app developers to do what they say, which they usually do.

• 50:25David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  Cause their customers are on the iPhone and they're in the App Store and to say, you have to do app intense. Just like they said to a bunch of app developers, you have to do in-app purchases. So we can take our 30% cut. That's how you get a Siri that can actually use the apps that you have to build the features in. A bunch of developers are gonna say no. I don't know why DoorDash would say yes to that. The answer has to be money and like no one has figured out that money yet. And I, I, I do just keep picking on DoorDash if anyone from DoorDash wants to come on and tell me that they're going to happily let everyone disintermediate their service. Like, that's great, but I just look at that part, put any company in that mix.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Well, look at Netflix.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you don't have to participate if you have your own audience.

• 51:03Speaker 06

  And what they've done with the Apple TV and Vision Pro. If you're big enough, you can just say no.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I, I, I just see that coming, but everyone wants to build these agents. And the, the systems they want those agents to use do not have to play ball. And we just haven't sorted that out. All right. So that's 18.2. People get it. Let us know what you think. Send us your multicolor emotional zebra. Please, uh, let's talk about Sora. Sora is fascinating to me. Uh, and that it doesn't appear to be great, but it's super good enough to be like ultra interesting.

• 51:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's about my read of it. I mean, I think the Sora is so bizarre because it is another one on the list of things that OpenAI is like, this is too good. We should barely even be allowed to launch this. We're desperately afraid of all the things that this will visit upon the world if we release it. And then they're just like, here, it's a person doing gymnastics whose body explodes in a thousand directions every time they do a flip. And it's like, this is another one where like, does this exist for any reason other than so that people will post about it on the internet? I, I sincerely don't know.

• 52:10Speaker 06

  Also, it's not exactly available. Uh, they very quickly ran out of capacity and stopped accepting signups.

• 52:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. Wait, can you explain to me what happened here? I was away from the internet for several hours and it went from Sora is available to Sora is not available while I was gone. What happened?

• 52:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, uh, pretty much what happened in, in like, it was like a shoe release, like, oh, it's out. Now it's not. And then Sam Altman was like, ah, you know, we just underestimated the capacity and we'll, uh, be opening it up at some point. So how much capacity do they actually have? How much capacity can they support to run this thing? We don't know. You do have to pay to use it. You have to have either the $20 or $200 plan. Uh, if you have the $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan and you got access, then you can make 1080p videos that are up to 20 seconds long. So I mean, pretty good deal, I think. Like 20 seconds of 1080p video for just $200 a month.

• 52:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, 200 is a month?

• 52:59Speaker 06

  Everyone doesn't have two accounts, $200 a month on the ChatGPT Pro plan. I mean, you can use on the ChatGPT.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  That's the one they just announced, yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, you can use the ChatGPT Plus plan, but like, that's a 720p 5 seconds. I mean, who's gonna do that?

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's nothing. You can't destabilize one country with 5 seconds of 720p video.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, I, I watched Marques Brownlee's video about Sora. The most fascinating piece about it is when he asked it to make a tech review video and then it had his plant in it.

• 53:28David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Because it has clearly trained on his videos without any permission.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing, guys? Like, that, I, I can't tell if Google's gonna file that lawsuit or the YouTubers will file that lawsuit, but that lawsuit's coming, just from that alone, that lawsuit's coming.

• 53:44David Pierce?

  I mean, yeah, there, there, there is so much obvious, clear, clean evidence that a lot of OpenAI is just built on YouTube. It's pretty horrifying. Also, Richard, I would point out, you forgot one key difference between the $20 and the $200 ChatGPT subscription, which is that if you pay more, you can download the videos without any watermarks.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. So that's. You can definitely destabilize a country if you pay more than. That's.

• 54:12Speaker 06

  That's worth $200.

• 54:13David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Marques also said something really interesting in his video that I have just been ruminating about ever since. He said, I had it make a bunch of CCTV footage because it's so bad that people would assume it's real. Like, he intentionally generated footage that was already low quality of like cars driving down a street, but in like black and white security camera footage. And that's like, super interesting, right? Because they are 20 second clips with no sound. And people experience a lot of grainy, low quality clips with no sound that they take to be reality in a lot of contexts, particularly, hey, we found some security frame footage, or we found some ring footage, or whatever it is. So you can pay to get rid of. The visible watermark you pay to just crop it, whatever.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Are they doing C2PA, the like the fancy embedded one?

• 55:02Speaker 06

  Yes, OpenAI says that videos generated with Sora will have both the visible watermarks. If you have the cheap version and C2PA metadata to indicate that they're made with AI. We hope that that works and save civilization.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  I will say, we've written a lot about C2PA, the Content Authenticity Initiative. Jess Weatherbed has done incredible work, just trying to understand what it is and how it will play out and whether it will actually mean anything to anyone. And every time we write about it, we get a bunch of angry notes from readers who have been deep in it, who are like, this is a total fraud. Like, this will never work the way you want it to for infinity reasons. But it's the thing that we have. And that's why I keep writing about it, because there's nothing else. There's there's no other choice. There isn't like market competition to this metadata standard. Like, there's this one. And Google has chosen to use it, and it sounds like OpenAI is using it, Adobe is using it. The platforms have to start using it. Right?

• 55:56Nilay Patel?

  The Youtubes and the Facebooks and the TikToks have to agree to display this metadata. And they are not uniformly agreeing to it. And Apple hasn't chosen to use it on the creation side.

• 56:08David Pierce?

  Meanwhile, all those platforms are furiously building AI tools of their own and have exactly no incentive to point out when things are made with AI. Like, I just, I, who benefits from doing that other than regular people? And thus, why would they do it?

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're just headed towards, I think what we're going to end up with is a series of more closed platforms that basically guarantee you stuff from like real people. And then open platforms where it's a free for all. And maybe that's going to be good. Like, honestly, maybe it's good to be like, if I open this app, I know it's a bunch of like Hollywood movie directors who have actually made the thing. And if I open this app. Who knows what random AI-generated slop I will get and like, maybe that's fine. Maybe that's the thing that breaks apart the internet in that way or like causes that fragmentation. I just, I don't know, but it's, we're just at a point now where all of the channels we're used to are gonna get completely infused with AI-generated.

• 57:09David Pierce?

  I think the only problem with that outcome is I think the audience split between those two uh, different kinds of platforms would not be what you hope it would be.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think, yeah, one will be expensive.

• 57:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  One will have a small audience and cost money. Like that, that, that seems correct, but I, even now on TikTok, I see videos and it's just like silly stuff. It's like, here's a big wave crashing over a building and it's like pretty obviously real. And then all the comments are like, this is AI.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  And we've just destabilized that entire information economy.

• 57:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  LeBron was never dunked on. That was AI.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  A little more, there's more AI stuff. Um, uh, chat to be launched Canvas View. What's going on there?

• 57:50David Pierce?

  Canvas is basically the, the slightly more sort of interactive thing that you can do where like, if you have it write something for you, it can display the thing that it's making next to the conversation you're having about it. And you can sort of edit the thing in real time with the bot. This is the thing that Claude has been doing Anthropic Spot for a while. Uh, and I think it's actually very clever, right? Like if, if you allow for the possibility that maybe generating several paragraphs of nah text is the best thing a chatbot can do. This is actually a pretty good version of that uh, interaction where like you can have it do a thing and it generates it in the right column. And then you can, you can go back and forth with the bot, tuning it and changing it.

• 58:32David Pierce?

  And you can make changes to it and it becomes this sort of interactive thing rather than just blocks of messages, which is what we've had before. This is like the big trend here with all these chatbots is everyone has run up against how much you can do inside of a back and forth messaging system. So they're all trying to tack on little bits of UI and little bits of features that don't feel like that, but still work inside that kind of basic construct. So I think in, in that case, like Canvas is, is a good idea, whether you're, you know, writing stuff or writing code or whatever. It's been, it's been out, it's been tested for a while. I, I haven't heard a ton about it, but the people I've heard from seem to like it. So it seems good.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  This thing you're saying about UI across all of these products is super interesting to me, like.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  ChatGPT was the moment, right? Everyone talks about it like my eyes were opened. I could see the world in color. And then like two years later, we're like, actually that interface isn't. But we have to build all these other kinds of products to make this useful. And the arms race of like, what will the chatbots themselves look like? Fundamentally, I think they're going to get subsumed into operating systems, the way that Apple is subsuming them into Siri. And then there'll be more specialized for other tasks. That's my guess. But it's interesting to see them rev it.

• 59:47David Pierce?

  I think that's probably right. I mean, and I think like, the, the way that I've come to frame, the way that I'm thinking about AI for next year is the last two years have been like, running towards the point of diminishing returns for the actual underlying technology. And we're there, right? This stuff will keep getting better. There might be some incredible physics miracle that changes how all of this stuff works. But on the path that we're on, this stuff is going to keep getting better, but much slower than it has before. And so now the question is, is any of this useful for anything? And we have not had to ask that question because we've been on basically a two-year run for all these companies of novelty.

• 1:00:29David Pierce?

  And they've made it a really long way, just by finding slightly new seeming things to do. And just the fact that I could take a picture and say, is this a flower? And it would say, yes, it's a flower. It was like novel and cool and exciting. And we are at the end of that moment. And, and I think you're starting to see it, like the disillusionment with what all these things are attempting to do and whether they're actually good is coming and it's here. And so the question now is like, let's assume the technology is not going to get several orders of magnitude better next year. What else is there to do with a technology that we have is the question.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So here's my answer. This is the last one of this section. The most useful thing I've seen of AI yet. Reddit built Reddit answers, which lets you just search Reddit without having to go through Google and it has AI in it. So it'll summarize a bunch of Reddit threads. So when you search for whatever, it'll show you a bunch of Reddit answers, but summarize them with AI. That might be the best thing yet.

• 1:01:25David Pierce?

  This might be the best AI feature of all time. I haven't used it. Uh, Jay Peters used it a little bit and had, I would say, sort of mixed experiences with it, but uh, the idea of being able to kind of poll all of Reddit with a question that you have, sounds amazing. And it doesn't work quite as well, even in Google search, which made this very expensive deal with Reddit to get the data, because it just, it just isn't compiling them the same way. But like, if I could just quickly be like, okay, what, what baby gear does everybody on Reddit think you should buy? Like that, that information exists inside of Reddit. And if it can go and actually like compile

• 1:02:06David Pierce?

  all of that stuff in a way that works and makes sense, kick ass dude. I will use that all the time.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Now that I've said that, I do agree. This is very good. There, of course, the supplied examples are like-

• 1:02:18David Pierce?

  What does Reddit think happened on January 6?

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  The, the, uh, the one, um, uh, Jay put in was tips for flying with the baby for the first time. Hmm. Pretty good. Like a perfect Reddit query, right? Like, and, and honestly, I, what I want out of that Reddit experience is like, give me 5,000 stories about this. Right? And so it summarized everyone's stories and the answers were, consider car seats, fly in first class. Some parents find the extra space in first class helpful.

• 1:02:50David Pierce?

  Solid.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  Cool. Uh, I personally find my private child very helpful with our baby. Feed them during takeoff or landing. Classic advice, by the way. Uh, and then bring plenty of snacks and drinks to keep your baby occupied. And it's like, boy, that's just stuff.

• 1:03:03David Pierce?

  Okay, wait. This is very fair. I might just immediately take back everything I just said, because if you go down to the next screenshot, which is the Google searches, the stuff in the previews from the Google searches is dramatically better. Like, let me just read you some of this stuff. Uh, it says, change diaper before getting on the plane. Don't board first. Good tips. Uh, being strapped into the car seat is the safest way for baby to fly. Good tip. Baby will need to be in a car seat. Uh, baby will also need to be held by you the entire flight. That seems confusing.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  You're holding the car seat?

• 1:03:33David Pierce?

  Take some sanitizing wipes to clean the areas and plane your baby will be touching. Have a light pad you can use for changing a plane. All of that is more useful than this stuff that-

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  By the way, can I say none of that is the most useful tip that we found with Max? Which is just bring five packs of differently colored Post-it notes and let her go crazy.

• 1:03:49David Pierce?

  Oh, that's good. Mine was just snacks. We bought, I would say, 40 different snacks on a two hour flight.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  It's not a parenting podcast. I'm just saying, uh, it's just funny, right? Cause if you take the world's body of information on Reddit, which is a lot of personal experiences, which are kind of useful and like for this kind of thing where there's not an answer. And then you try to shove it into the form of this is the right answer. You end up with put baby in chair.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is the problem that we've run into with Apple Intelligence, like notification summaries. Like notifications were already summarized. Like the people who wrote the post already wrote them to be read by someone who wasn't really paying attention and didn't have a lot of time. And they, they laid it out in a way, they were upvoted because they were written well and they got you the information they needed. You didn't need to summarize them and extract further value out of one particular line. You needed the whole thing.

• 1:04:40David Pierce?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  We did it the wrong way.

• 1:04:43David Pierce?

  I mean, this is, this is the, the like ongoing, it's like, it's not quite context collapse, but it is, it is just the pure, like lowest common denominatorism of AI. Which is that if you take everything and you try to shove it into two sentences, you're going to get two incredibly uninteresting sentences. And I think what we've seen from some others, like I think Notebook LM from Google does a pretty good job of this. If basically it, it goes and finds stuff and then just hands you a bunch of sources, right? Like what I want from this Reddit thing is not pat answers in paragraphs. I want a bunch of links to like, here are, here are the 10, like you said, Neil, I hear the 10

• 1:05:24David Pierce?

  most loved and contentious and funny responses that we've ever gotten to this question that everybody replied to, oh my God, I tried this and it worked. That's how you do this right, not by saying, here is the rough summary of 12,000 Reddit posts. And that's what too many of these services are trying to do.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's it. I do think Reddit is, it's where I see the most opportunity because Reddit is vast, right? And like you can burn a lot of time hearing every version of everything on Reddit. And having a tool that helps you like get through that better is kind of interesting. I'm just- Yeah, it's like, that's one example. I'm sure there are other ones, but the glory of Reddit is that it's a bunch of people telling you what they experienced. It's very rarely that there's a right answer, right? It's just like, I'm going to synthesize all this information from all these people are telling me about whatever, or just talking about their fandom, or whatever it is. And that makes me feel like part of a community. It makes me feel, it makes me feel like part of a community. It makes me feel validated that like, I might have some experiences too, not, I need, I just shove her in a car seat.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay, we have to take a break. We'll be back with a lightning round. Boy, this is, this is an action-packed lightning round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with the lightning round. Liam, who is the lightning round sponsor?

• 1:08:58Speaker 10

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• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's so good. Have we started adding the cash register sound effect?

• 1:09:09Speaker 10

  Uh, I think we only did it on the first one, since you asked for the effect, but if you, if you want that to be a regular thing, we could.

• 1:09:16Nilay Patel?

  I feel like we got in a lot of trouble with an episode recently by asking for sound effects that we didn't deliver, so.

• 1:09:21Speaker 10

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• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  Right next to our, our emotional zebra. All right, lightning round. David, you wrote about this, this week. YouTube is still growing fast and TVs and living room, what's going on here?

• 1:09:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, so I would say statistically, if you are absorbing this podcast right now, I don't even know what word to use anymore. If you are experiencing this podcast. There is an increasingly large chance you're watching us on your television in your living room. If you are, hello. Oh, it's only if you're watching this on some janky side lit LCD. I still love you. You should actually watch it. Watch it like several times, actually. Yeah, watch it on all of your different TVs just to check the resolution differences. I would say. But no, basically YouTube put out a bunch of stats this week about how fast its living room stuff is growing. 400 million hours a month of podcast viewing is happening on TVs. Sports stuff is way up. They launched this new feature that I think

• 1:10:19David Pierce?

  is kind of cool. It's called watch with. And essentially, what they discovered is that a lot of people are watching a sporting event with live commentary from somebody streaming and talking about it. And they're now smashing those things together. So creators are going to be able to actually like, do their own commentary over top of something that they're watching. And they're starting with sports, but also made it pretty clear that that's going to come to other things. So like Kurt Williams, the guy I was talking to who runs product for YouTube's living room stuff, specifically mentioned like, what about an Apple keynote where there are all these creators who want to talk about it and comment on it? That's just a thing we can offer that you can get all these different commentary streams. I think that's very cool. I'm sure Apple will have some, some very interesting thoughts about that. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Who's going to be mad about new commentary on

• 1:11:03David Pierce?

  every movie that exists in the world? But more broadly, like YouTube is now huge on TVs and has gone or gotten this shift, I think, really in the last year. Like, I follow this company pretty closely. And they used to talk about the TVs as just kind of another place people watched YouTube. And now they're like, really thinking about it as like a primary platform for YouTube. And they're building features for the TV, kind of for the first time. Like, they have this shows thing where you can put up a bunch of videos in seasons and episodes that makes it feel more like a streaming service. They're doing the watch with stuff. They're doing a lot of work to sync your phone with your TV. Like,

• 1:11:44David Pierce?

  YouTube has always kind of wanted to be Netflix in a certain way. And I think we're starting to see it pushed to be a little more premium, a little higher end, a little more TV centric. They're convinced they can do this without killing YouTube as a product elsewhere. But that that tension feels very real to me, and I think it's really fascinating.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will. Can I say one thing on YouTube very quickly? We've like talked about enough about our business in the past couple of weeks. I don't want to overdo it. But I have a story on the website this week. A lot of people complain that our YouTube videos on our website don't let you click the title to go to YouTube. And everyone thinks that's our fault. Because it makes sense that the publisher would want you to keep you on the website. That it just, it makes sense to people.

• 1:12:28David Pierce?

  Well, and because forever, every YouTube video on the internet, you've been able to you. You hover over it, you click the title and it takes you to.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  And in particular, on phone, you want to open the YouTube app. There's all the stuff you want to do. I I hope people know that the Verge is like very pro links. We have links everywhere, like links on the homepage all the time. That's not our fault. It is a YouTube decision to disable those links. And if we want to re-enable them, we have to make less money on our YouTube videos. You can read the whole story. I was very annoyed that I spent months being like, can you turn on these links back on? And the answer at the end of the day was a hard no, unless we choose to either not use YouTube at all or make less money. And I'm not really part of the business side, maybe the business side make a different decision. I was like, that sucks. I'm just going to tell everyone about this. And all the YouTube people just made a very sad face at me.

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  If the internet goes back to every publisher having their own like awful bespoke video player again. I'm going to be so angry. Like feel however you want about YouTube. It's a good video player and the internet was filled with bad video players for so long.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the links worked and we made more money since 2016. It was all fine. And then in the start of this year, they changed it to quote, remove their branding. And they think the link to YouTube counts as branding.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  That's dumb.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  It's dumb.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Let me tell you how much of Brad I've been for the past two and a half months. And the answer is a hard no. And I was like, I'm gonna write about this.

• 1:13:49David Pierce?

  Still around? Can Vimeo fix this?

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Sure. All right, here's a really weird one. I'm obsessed with this one. Instagram is going to let creators test reels on people that don't follow them. So like Adam Mosseri made this really should go watch it. It's a very interesting as a as a sociological document of how Adam thinks Instagram creators think about Instagram.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, watch this video through that lens. He's like, I know a lot of you are stressed when you upload a reel that it won't perform. So now we're gonna let you upload a reel. We won't show it to anyone who follows you. We'll show it to people who don't follow you. So you can see how it'll do before you publish it to everyone. And it's like, that's not how, that's not how you should feel about your creative work. Right? Like, I'm gonna focus group my video before I show it to the people who follow me is a weird thing. It is correct. I think if you're making like advertising, you run the pressure washing business. Like, is my pressure washing business gonna do better? Because I made, maybe that makes sense. But that's what I'm saying. Adam thinks everyone is making commercial videos.

• 1:14:57Nilay Patel?

  And they're trying to optimize them for reach as opposed to making stuff on Instagram. Richard, what do you make of this? This makes perfect sense to me.

• 1:15:04Speaker 06

  I think it explains, like you said, it explains a lot about the way that Adam Mosseri and Instagram kind of see the world, especially what we've seen with threads, for example. The way that you could have a post that you, you would put up and it would go viral with strangers, but not be seen by the people who follow you. And in particular on threads, go viral with strangers who don't like what you said. It was very, very, very good at identifying people who do not like what you said and making sure that they see your post.

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  But, but this is kind of just the way that they see it. Okay, so you made something you would love to be seen by whoever. Random people, not your community, because you would be, you'd be deming them in your channel if you wanted that.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  You know, but they're saying you don't want to blow it with the people who follow you. So we'll like focus group it with people who don't. And then you can decide if that data makes you confident to show the people that follow you. And like, maybe, I think that's interesting. I'm like, that is legitimately one of the most novel features a social network has released in forever. Super interesting.

• 1:16:09Speaker 06

  I think the, the idea that you kind of can't trust the people who follow you to judge whether your content is good is just a really weird way to think about things.

• 1:16:17Nilay Patel?

  And that might permanently down rank you in the algorithm. Like, that's what I mean. Like, the, when I say, watch this video from the perspective of how does Adam think about creators thinking about Instagram? It's just purely commercial. It's like, what you want as a creator is to do great in our algorithm. So here's some tools that will help you do great in the algorithm. And it's like, actually, what I want as a creator is to make art. Like, those are different things, wildly different things.

• 1:16:44David Pierce?

  This is gonna sound more cynical than I mean it, but I would, I would take pretty strong

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  bets on that more people are interested in making money than making art.

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that's what I think those platforms.

• 1:16:55David Pierce?

  Just where we are.

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  I think creator platforms are commercialized in that specific way. People want to win them. And here's a feature, and you know, he even says in that video, we made this with creators, like what we've gotten a lot of feedback, they've been working with creators. But there's just something very commercial about everything that's happening there that is very far away from, this was a photo sharing website for like me to talk to my friends.

• 1:17:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  Go watch the video.

• 1:17:14David Pierce?

  There's something really specifically Instagrammy about this that I find really fascinating. Like, Richard, like you were saying, what this says to me is that you are always on a knife's edge of losing everything on Instagram. In the way that like on TikTok, everything you make is like a new pull at the slot machine, right? Like Instagram cares so much more about who follows you and who you follow than TikTok does. TikTok is just happy to shove stuff into the algorithm and see what works and you'll randomly go viral and sometimes you won't. Instagram lets you build something that is like much more sort of understandable by you as the creator, but also if you make two videos in a row that your audience doesn't like and respond, doesn't respond to, you're toast.

• 1:17:54David Pierce?

  And that, this is like every creator's desperate fear is if you miss once, it can, it can kill the whole thing for you. And, and what this is, is Adam Mosseri basically saying, yeah, that's true. So we're gonna give you more tools to make sure you never do that.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  It's weird.

• 1:18:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Nilay Patel?

  Weird. Speaking of, it can all vanish in an instant. TikTok lost its court case, challenging the law that would force it to either ban itself or be sold. Lauren Finer wrote up the decision in that case, complicated, but the court basically said, the Congress made a national security decision, we're not gonna override that. Many complicated First Amendment questions, we'll deal with them probably in the decoder episode down the line, but. Donald Trump, incoming President of the United States, asked about this by Kristen Welker on NBC News in an hour and a half long interview. Uh, I'm just gonna read this quote because it's a lot of words from him. I used TikTok very successfully in my campaign. I have a man named TikTok Jack. He was very effective, obviously because I won the youth vote by 30%, which he did not do, but whatever, I just wanted to say TikTok Jack.

• 1:18:54Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, uh,

• 1:18:56David Pierce?

  TikTok Jack, email us. I need to know everything about you.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  And then he said, I use TikTok, uh, so I can't really, you know, I can't totally hate it. It was very effective, but I will say this, if you do that, meaning ban it, something else will come along and take its place and maybe that's unfair. And what the judge actually said was you can't have Chinese companies. They have the right to ban it if you can prove that Chinese companies own it. That's what the judge actually said. She has to follow up. She said, will you protect TikTok? And he said, I'm going to try and make it so that other companies don't become an even bigger monopoly. And specifically what he means is Facebook. He has often complained that Facebook would just become a bigger monopoly if TikTok is banned. And then during the campaign, he obviously said to a bunch of young people, uh, I will protect TikTok. Biden wants to ban TikTok, I'll protect it. This is in my mind, a massive walk back. Right? All he's saying is I don't want Facebook monopoly, not I will protect ByteDance owning

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  TikTok in America. And I'm, I'm just betting, I think we, we've done this a million times, David, like who's gonna buy TikTok? Because that's the out. The out is he negotiates a deal for Amazon or Walmart or Subway to buy TikTok.

• 1:20:01David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:20:02Nilay Patel?

  And he gets to say, he saved it. I made a great deal to save TikTok. Aren't you proud of me? I'm doing what I said I would do. And I'm, I just, you can watch the clip. We have it on the website. It feels very much like that is the door he's opening.

• 1:20:15David Pierce?

  I think, I mean, it's, it's, it's the escape hatch, right? It's, it's the closest thing he's gonna find to a win-win at the end of this. He gets a, he gets an America first win. He gets TikTok to still be here.

• 1:20:27David Pierce?

  He gets to like poke a knife at Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  Time's running out though. Uh, ban goes into effect on January 19th. TikTok has filed with the Supreme Court to appeal. We'll see what happens. Notably, January 19th is the day before January 20th, which is when he takes office.

• 1:20:44David Pierce?

  So, wait, Neil and I have, have been on the record about what we think is gonna happen many times. Richard, you have to make a prediction right now, what happens on January 19th?

• 1:20:52Speaker 06

  Oh, uh, TikTok actually turns into a new app called TalkTik.

• 1:21:00Speaker 06

  Something. It won't be owned in China, it'll be owned in like Malaysia or something like.

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  But you know, by a very mysterious company that just happened to come into a lot of money. Who knows where it came from?

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, next one, Chris Welch reviewed the Sonos Arc Ultra. He says the hardware is great, particularly the new transducers from Mate. Uh, it's a company that Sonos bought to make smaller transducers and make more bass. Loves those. App is still little, little something. Richard, what do you think?

• 1:21:30Speaker 06

  Uh, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's Sonos and they still have the problem of the app that they messed up. It made everyone mad. So, uh, how's that going?

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  Medium. I would say the answer is medium. Um, but I will say that as a soundbar, seems very cool. If I, Chris was basically like, this is worth upgrading, which upgrading from one expensive soundbar to another expensive soundbar is almost not, like no one has that thought. Like I'm a person who likes to buy speakers and I'm never like, I should upgrade to soundbar like, uh, and Chris thought it was worth upgrading, which is fascinating. So hopefully, hopefully this is a beginning to turn around. Uh, this was big news this week. Uh, GM shut down the Cruise robot taxi service, laid off a bunch of people. The former CEO of Cruise, uh, just flat out posted GM is a stupid company.

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  Which is great, but it feels like-

• 1:22:23David Pierce?

  I think the word he used was dummies, which I like very much. Dummies is a, is a surprisingly powerful-

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  That's powerful.

• 1:22:29David Pierce?

  -mean thing to say to somebody.

• 1:22:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. David, there's just like a lot of action in this world and obviously GM is like up and down. What do you, what do you think is going on here?

• 1:22:37David Pierce?

  I think it, it just is starting to seem like all of these car companies got out over their skis on technological revolutions, right? There was the sense that EVs and self-driving were going to happen really fast and that they were going to be immediately mainstream and they were going to become a big business. And everybody got really excited about the idea of robot taxis, because then you have a really interesting like diversified business from your own vehicles. Like

• 1:23:09David Pierce?

  you can see how they get there. But we're not there. And like unless you're Tesla and people just keep giving you stock price money with which to have weird ideas about where to go from here. You're still fundamentally running a car business, which is not getting higher margin. It's not getting less complex. You still have to make the things that people are buying now. And it just feels like one by one, these car companies are starting to say, okay, we made these big giant future bets that just aren't coming true as quickly as we thought. And we just have to get out of it. I also think

• 1:23:47David Pierce?

  a lot of people who cover this space more closely than I do, think there is something weird going on with this one in particular. That the way GM is handling this suggests that something else is going on inside of Cruise. That it basically just like pulled the plug all at once, which is a very odd thing to do. When you're this kind of company that is this invested in Cruise. But the macro thing actually kind of makes sense to me. It's just, everybody made a bet 10 years ago now that they thought was going to be true in five years. And now it looks like it might be more like 25.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  I think it's just hard to lose money, the way Google has chosen to lose money on Waymo for this whole time. Right? I mean, that's just like, Google's like, we're just going to lose money until this thing can make it through Phoenix. All right, we're going to keep losing money until we can make it through Austin. And it's just like.

• 1:24:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, GM just doesn't, literally doesn't have that money.

• 1:24:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just not a thing. Richard, you're the one who put quantum computing on this list. Google reveals quantum computing chip with breakthrough achievements. Tell me, tell me why this one made Richard happy. Cause most of the other stuff did not.

• 1:24:48Speaker 06

  I fully understand quantum computing. I understand everything about it, actually. The quantum computing chip.

• 1:24:55David Pierce?

  Richard is currently both here and not here.

• 1:24:59Speaker 06

  As I have said many times, my coin, RJCC coin is quantum locked. It is both launched and mint and pre-mint at all times. That's how it works. That's how quantum works. That's what we do here at RJCC coin. And we're going to do it on Willow because it can perform a task in five minutes that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years to complete, which may be evidence that we live in a simulation.

• 1:25:21Speaker 06

  Or a multiverse, maybe, or maybe not. I don't really know what any of these words mean, but it happened. They have a chip, they're doing a thing. And now they're trying to find, basically now that they've done this thing, they're trying to find something to do with it that you will actually find a use for. So they could prove how fast it is because right now, all the stuff they can do is theoretical.

• 1:25:38Nilay Patel?

  The answer is breaking crypto.

• 1:25:41Speaker 06

  RJCC coin.

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  That's what's gonna happen.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  You're already in, it's quantum. You're already in.

• 1:25:47Nilay Patel?

  You already have it.

• 1:25:48David Pierce?

  I have three very brief things to say about this whole thing. One, everybody should read the research paper that Google did because even Google's own researchers are basically like, we, this thing we did is cool, but I don't know what it is that we just did.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  That's all quantum computing.

• 1:26:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're like, we did an amazing, unprecedented mathematical calculation that no one cares about and has no bearing on the real world. Like, they, they say that. Like, it's amazing that we did it. We don't know why we did it or what it actually accomplishes. Uh, and then they're like, uh, the main thing that we've solved here and our real breakthrough is that we've made it make fewer errors.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25David Pierce?

  Uh, like, like, imagine if your computer was just like, sometimes when you try to move a file, it just explodes, but now our computer does that less. It still does it.

• 1:26:37Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:26:38David Pierce?

  Less.

• 1:26:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, the, the main purpose of quantum computing is going to be to break cryptography in specific ways. Get ready.

• 1:26:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Nilay Patel?

  Get ready.

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  But then the third thing is that they just very casually are like, this might be evidence that we're living in a simulation. And that's just like the end of a, they just, they don't address that anymore. They just say it.

• 1:26:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's the last one, which is pure evidence. We live in a simulation. You can now buy a Hyundai on Amazon. It's very weird. You could, like, it's very weird to go on Amazon and see something listed for a price of $67,000. Uh, but there's no one click buy. It's start, the button is like, start now, and then you get kicked to a dealer. And I feel like we're, we have to buy a car to test out if the dealer actually plays ball.

• 1:27:20David Pierce?

  Wait, that's less exciting. So I was really hoping there was gonna be like a Amazon warehouse somewhere that's just full of cars.

• 1:27:27Nilay Patel?

  That's Carvana. Right? There's the, the vending machine.

• 1:27:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, the car vending machine.

• 1:27:32Nilay Patel?

  This is, they're, they're, I think they're just doing some pricing games with Hyundai. Right? Where Hyundai sets a price, Amazon sets a price, and the dealer just delivers a car and everything gets a cut and is happy. But there are still car dealers involved. And I assure you, at some point, they're gonna be like, and we've, uh, we've marked this one up. We filled the tires with nitrogen. So now that's an extra $6,000. Like, that's car dealer stuff, right? If anyone wants to buy a car on Amazon and tell us how it goes, I'm dying to know. If you just wanna cut me a check for $65,000 so we can buy a Hyundai. We will accept that money as well, but I'm kind of dying to do this because I want to see if the dealers play ball.

• 1:28:07David Pierce?

  This is so bizarre.

• 1:28:08Nilay Patel?

  It's weird.

• 1:28:08David Pierce?

  Amazon will give you a $2,300 gift card if you buy a car through Amazon.

• 1:28:15Nilay Patel?

  It's the future, man.

• 1:28:16David Pierce?

  It's like, kind of like a tax break, but it isn't.

• 1:28:18Nilay Patel?

  The weird thing is, uh, the car only works on Kindles. And that.

• 1:28:24Speaker 06

  But I want, I want them to link up and bring a trailer so I can just go on Amazon. Somebody's more core XR4 TI is up there and I'm just like, yeah, buy it now. And then it shows up at the house next day and I have to explain that. That's what we need.

• 1:28:36David Pierce?

  They just, they bring you the whole thing and then the delivery driver just hands you the keys and walks away.

• 1:28:40Nilay Patel?

  My cousin in New Jersey has absolutely impulse bought a car and bring a trailer and had like a 1980's Mercedes roll up in his driveway and his, his wife is like, what's going on here?

• 1:28:53Nilay Patel?

  Like you can absolutely.

• 1:28:54Speaker 06

  I've been so close.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  Impulse buy a car and bring a trailer. That's a real thing that happens. All right, we gotta get out of here. This is a great one, Richard. Thanks for being here. And I want to call out one story, which is maybe my favorite story of, uh, the month so far. Kristen Radke, our creative director and Amelia Halliday Crails, our photographer, went to Pantone's launch of the color of the year, which is called Mocha Moose, which is brown. So they went to a party for the color brown. Kristen was horrified because she was accidentally wore brown on that day. But then she has a party, everyone else is wearing brown. It's like a perfect Verge story. Everything's great about it. Go read that story. Photos are amazing. Uh, that's it. That's for a cast.

• 1:29:34Speaker 10

  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 Liam James, Will Pore and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:29:54Speaker 11

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