Apple OS betas, how to talk about AI, and our video game picks

Today on the flagship podcast of transformers (both the movie and the AI thing): 03:46 - The Verge’s Victoria Song, Chris Welch, Allison Johnson, and David Pierce discuss using the new features and tools in beta versions of Apple’s watchOS 10, tvOS 17, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17. 28:36 - The Verge’s James Vincent joins the show to discuss how we should think about using the popular vocabulary terms in AI like GPT, LLM, transformers, hallucinations, etc. Are we using them the right way? Does it matter how we use them? 54:20 - David is joined by The Verge’s Ash Parrish and Polygon’s Chris Plante to share the video games they are most excited about after a string of announcements from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Summer Game Fest, and others. 1:25:46 - We answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline Email us at [email protected], or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Transformers, both the movie and the AI thing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here catching up on Wimbledon, the best tennis tournament of the year.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Surely point of the tournament so far, that one. You have got to be kidding me.

• 0:20David Pierce?

  It's been a busy few days for me, so I'm a bit behind. But luckily Wimbledon.com has a pretty good set of highlights, so I can catch up on all the matches I missed in just a few minutes at a time. And I don't know if you know this, but Wimbledon is doing a thing with AI commentary in these highlights. It's part of some collaboration with IBM's Watson, and I can see how it's an interesting and cool idea. But oh, boy, it's so, so, so bad. Like, OK, listen to this one. A recap of Monday's match between Christopher Eubanks and Stefanos Tsitsipas.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Eubanks plays Tsitsipas for the first time in their careers.

• 0:55David Pierce?

  First of all, it gets one of the two names just wrong. And then that's all it says for like 30 seconds. This is not commentary. Actually, wait, this will be fun. Here is every single thing the AI says throughout the rest of this 3 and 1/2 minute highlight clip.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Tsitsipas wins the first set after Eubanks' unforced backhand error. Set number two, Tsitsipas is forced into a backhand error, loses the second set. Set number three, unable to return the forehand from Tsitsipas, Eubanks loses the set. Breakpoint opportunity for Eubanks. Eubanks wins the set after Tsitsipas cannot deal with his serve. Tsitsipas facing breakpoint. Eubanks wins the match point, defeating Tsitsipas 6 games to 4 in the last set.

• 1:39David Pierce?

  Did you get anything from that? I mean, what is the point of this? It's not commentary. I'm not really sure what it is. I am very intrigued in general by the idea of AI commentary, which could have access to data and insights and real time knowledge that even the best humans can't see. But this ain't it, folks. Oh, wait, one more thing on this, and then we will actually get to the show. Today's Vergecast is not about Wimbledon, I promise. But the most actually commentary-ish thing the AI has done for me, at least in the highlights I've seen so far, was in a match with Andy Murray from a few days ago, where it completely spoiled the play that was coming like three shots before it happened.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Pennington hits a backhand winner on game point.

• 2:26David Pierce?

  It's really ridiculous, right? AI has lots of potential in lots of areas. We're going to talk about some of it today, but it is definitely not stealing any commentary jobs just yet. Anyway, let's get to the show because it's a good one. We're going to talk about all the new stuff in Apple's new betas, because we're probably getting public betas soon, which means you'll be able to download the new software if you want to. And there's lots of interesting stuff coming to phones and tablets and watches and TVs and all of Apple's devices. We're also going to talk about how we talk about AI, LLMs, chatbots, and all this other vocabulary we've had to learn these last few months. And we're going to talk about the video games we're most excited about this summer, because there are a lot of them. All that is coming in just a sec. But first, I just heard that a tennis player named Andre Rublev

• 3:11David Pierce?

  did like the coolest shot anyone has ever seen. Let me watch this real fast.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  He can't believe it and we can't either. The crowd are up.

• 3:26David Pierce?

  See, now that is commentary. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I went back and just watched the AI highlight and it had literally nothing to say about that point. Great job, Watson. Cool future we're living in. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  That is one of the great shots we've seen here in years to get them to match point.

• 3:47Speaker 04

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• 4:57David Pierce?

  Welcome back. First up today, we're going to dive into all of the new Apple software coming to your devices this fall. The developer betas have been out for a while, so people who make apps can learn how to use the new features and tools, and we're pretty sure the public beta is coming soon as well. So we figured we'd go through the stuff that matters, the stuff that's unexpectedly good and bad and somewhere in between, and what you can expect either on the beta or this fall when you get the updates. We've got a bunch to do, so let's get to it. First up, let's do watchOS with Vsong. Hi, V.

• 5:30Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 5:31David Pierce?

  We're going to talk about watchOS 10.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  Yes, the great old watchOS 10.

• 5:36David Pierce?

  Which Apple billed as, what was it, the biggest change to watchOS since watchOS?

• 5:41Speaker 06

  It was billed as a milestone, and having used it for a couple of weeks, I get why. But just on the surface, it kind of feels like a, I think we should redefine what milestone is. At WWDC, I was like, what milestone? It's just widgets. But having used it, it's, oh, it's widgets. It's widgets all the way down.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Tell me more. What does it actually change about how you use the thing?

• 6:09Speaker 06

  A little bit of everything. It's one of those significant but subtle changes. I can now use watch faces that don't have complications on it and not feel like I'm missing out, which for me is huge because I aesthetically don't love the look of Modular Duo or Modular, which is my go-to watch face.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  But I have them because I'm a data girly. I need to see everything. I need to access my complications. I need things now. I need it yesterday. And widgets allows me to use something like this little Snoopy guy, which, by the way, Snoopy watch face, they undersold that.

• 6:46Speaker 06

  But basically, the widgets allow me to use all these watch faces that I felt were not available to someone like me before. So you basically get a lot more personalization because of the widgets. And I actually liken it to kind of reading Chinese and Japanese versus English, because you can absorb so much more, more quickly with a widget than you can with a tiny little complication or even just a little thing on your watch face. You can see it and go like, oh, I now know the weather conditions for the next six hours in an instant, which, you know, it's wild. You know, widgets are not a revolutionary concept on smartwatches, where OS has them, their tiles, whatever they want to call their particular brand of widgets.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  It makes a lot of sense to have, but watch OS has kind of been fumbling along without it since watch OS 3, I believe. So it's it's kind of odd to see it come back. And it's like dominoes. Because you've added widgets, everything else needs to change in small, subtle ways. So it's it's really kind of been blowing my mind at how natural, yet different, everything feels compared to watch OS 9.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  So the idea of the watch now, right, is that you have your watch face and then the stack of widgets kind of lives underneath it in sort of the the like mental model of the software, right? And so you, do you swipe up? Do you scroll the like, how do you get to the widgets?

• 8:05Speaker 06

  You can either swipe or scroll up. So what you would use to do to get to Control Center now will bring you the smart stack of widgets.

• 8:12David Pierce?

  Much better use of the space underneath than Control Center.

• 8:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, Control Center, you still have it. You just basically have to hit the slide button, which makes more sense when you think about it. But my muscle memory is completely effed up because I'm so used to doing things a certain way that now I'm always like, oh, no, wait. If I want to find my phone, because I use the Find iPhone button like 20 times in a day, I never know where my iPhone is. Like if I want to use that, I have to hit the side button. But now I'm bringing up widgets and just like, oh, I appreciate the widgets, but that's not what I wanted. So it's that type of small change that is really big when you think about it. But like, that's just because I've been using Apple Watches for forever. If you're new to it, you'll get used to it a lot faster than I am.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  That's fair. So the big thing I've been wondering about watch OS X is the thing I do probably more than any other activity on my watch is just like play and pause stuff. That's like the most I touch my watches if I'm like walking and I want to like change the song or go back in a podcast. Part of the reason I like the watch is I don't have to dig into my pocket. I can just, you know, hit the thing. Are the widgets interactive? Do they work that way in that you can like, I can just scroll up and hit pause in the Pocket Cast widget and this will solve all my problems?

• 9:30Speaker 06

  Well, right now I can't answer that fully because all the widgets are Apple widgets. It's all for the Apple native apps. We'll have to see what third parties do with it. But there is one widget that's basically three complications in one little widget stack. So that's neat. You know, that's, that one's kind of neat. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to use it, but I actually think that's pretty cool. But widgets are both like instantaneous information and an app launcher in one, which is interesting. So it's like complications magnified. And then at the same time, all the apps have been redesigned. So the way you use apps on the watch is going to change. So you can still do all of that pretty quickly.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  It's just, I think the way you perceive and process information in watch OS X is much different. It feels like an actual mini phone app as opposed to like, uh, let's just draw this phone app from memory and make it small. It's a very, it's a very subtle but significant change. And I think that's kind of the theme with watch OS X where you're really not going to notice how different it is until you sit and think about it, which is what I've been doing while writing my previews.

• 10:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, as, as one does.

• 10:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was like, oh, there's not much different. Actually, wait, uh, this app is completely changed. Like the weather app, completely different. I love it. It's so, it's so much better than it was because. You know, the weather app used to just be like this giant screen that you scroll down and you're just like endlessly scrolling because you want to know the chance of precipitation. Now you just like tap a thing and you switch to like, I guess I would call it the precipitation tab and there it is. And you can see for the next 12 hours, like what your chance of rain is. It's, it very much feels like a better adaptation of a phone app than it's ever felt like before.

• 11:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, thank God we're getting rid of the everything you need. Just scroll forever and ever on your wrist. That was not good app design. This is better.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  There's so much less scrolling and yet I use the digital crown a lot more. It's very weird. I don't understand why.

• 11:30David Pierce?

  This is how they get you, V. It's a revolutionary input device.

• 11:33Speaker 06

  It's, it's the mouse of the Apple Watch. I'm still scarred by that from the Apple Watch Ultra podcast we did. But it's, it actually is more useful and more intuitive to use than it has been because in previously I would just be like scrolling. And now it's just, it makes more sense to use it as I scroll between the different screens of, of the different watch OS apps. It's, I just can't wait to see what third-party developers are going to do with it because whether or not watch OS 10 does well overall, I think will depend a lot on that because the Apple Watch apps are fine. Like the workout app is basically the same thing. It's just slightly easier to read.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  But you know, you can just be a lot more creative with how you design the watch. Like the activity app is completely different. The weather app is completely different and the way I interact with those apps is much more creative and free flowing than it would have been in the past. So, you know, you know me, I love my focus modes. I'm gonna go ham. I'm gonna go ham on them.

• 12:34David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  So that's, yeah, but Snoopy watch face, totally underrated.

• 12:39David Pierce?

  Okay, well, hard disagree, but we'll, we'll save that for another time. This almost seems like good news. Is there anything that sucks about watch OS 10? Anything you hate so far?

• 12:49Speaker 06

  Nothing I hate so far, just like I haven't had as much time as I would like to get into the fitness stuff, just because it's mostly cycling. I am a public hazard on a bike. I should not ride a bike, so I'm going to rope somebody in to give a more informed opinion on that. And I haven't had a chance to go hiking with it yet, so I can't tell you how good the maps are just yet. But I guess if I were to hate something, I actually don't love the way that they've changed your activity app in the sense that they've grouped your trophies and badges in a slightly different way, and it's kind of obnoxious to me. I don't, I don't love it. It's weird.

• 13:28David Pierce?

  That's one place where I like all the scrolling. I'm like, look at all this cool stuff I did.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  Oh, it's, it's not like it's gone. It's just, you just, it's like switching between tabs in a mobile app. You just hit something and there it is. And you can scroll a little bit to get more, more data. But it's just, everything is much faster with less scrolling. Like, it just makes sense when you use it. You just have to use it and you'll get what I mean. But it's, it's very hard to describe is what I'm learning right now.

• 13:55David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right. Well, this is good news. This is better than I was hoping for. I was kind of expecting when we came out of WWDC being like, ah, this doesn't seem like all that much, but it sounds like it's, it all adds up to something. That's exciting.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I'm telling you, you're wrong about the Snoopy one. It adjusts to your day. It's very cool in ways that I did not expect. I don't even like peanuts. I'm not a peanut head. I don't like Snoopy, but I like the, the watch face. It's very strange.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  You're, you're a data girly, but not a peanut head. This is what we're learning.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Data girly, not a peanut head. That's me.

• 14:24David Pierce?

  I like it. All right, V, thank you.

• 14:26Speaker 06

  All right.

• 14:29David Pierce?

  Next up, TVOS, the Apple TV. Chris Watts is here. Hi, Chris. Hello. Good to be back. I feel like TVOS is more exciting than it was advertised at WWDC. It turns out there's actually like some stuff going on, right? What have you found so far?

• 14:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I agree. This seems to be one of the bigger years for TVOS in quite a while. There's FaceTime, obviously, which is one of those things that I kind of feel like would have been nice during the pandemic, but I guess better late than never.

• 14:55David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 14:55Speaker 07

  So that's gonna be on there. And I guess Zoom and also WebEx are gonna have their apps on Apple TV as well. So that's one of the big ones. They redid the Control Center, so it's a lot more dense with information now and shows the stuff you actually want there. There's like a sleep timer for your TV. If you're one of those people just nods off during Netflix, there you go. You can have six icons per row now instead of five. And of course, the most important thing is they have a lot more screensavers, those dazzling 4K screensavers.

• 15:20David Pierce?

  How are the screensavers? Like, I don't know if you're joking or not when you say that's the most important thing, but I genuinely believe that is like the most important. I don't know what it is about those screensavers, but there's something, it's those screensavers and it's Roku City on the Roku that have like really solved the thing where I will just sit and look at my TV and not watch it for long periods of time as a result.

• 15:40Speaker 07

  Same.

• 15:41David Pierce?

  Are the new ones up to par with the old ones on Apple TV?

• 15:44Speaker 07

  The new ones weren't in the first couple betas, so I think there's gonna be like a later addition, but I can't wait and I'm very excited like you. I don't know who does those, who's responsible for them, but that should be a story.

• 15:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, whoever you are, please come on the Vergecast and tell us everything. What have you been using that surprised you either in good and bad ways so far?

• 16:02Speaker 07

  I mean, the Control Center is nice. It feels more like the iPhones now. That's easier to get around or get to your home scenes and your cameras and whatnot or change profiles. So just a lot of like, just very small quality of life stuff. I mean, Apple TV, just like the overall UX and like interface. I'm still a guy who like likes the home screen of apps because I know where my shows are usually. And I can search if not or go to the TV app and up next and all those things. But yeah, they didn't have to add a lot, I feel like, but they kind of did. FaceTime, you can do like karaoke and see yourself on the screen now with Apple Sing and all that kind of stuff, and even add effects to it.

• 16:35David Pierce?

  How does the continuity camera stuff work? Have you been able to test it?

• 16:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, so you just start a FaceTime session on the TV and then you get like a prompt on your phone right away that asks like, can I use this phone for continuity camera? Just like your Mac, basically. And you say yes, and away you go.

• 16:51David Pierce?

  What's the go-to strategy there? Do you sit on the couch and kind of hold your camera, like hold your phone up to be the camera? Do you prop it up somewhere? Like, what's the move here?

• 16:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think you had to prop it on a table, maybe. I mean, maybe they'll sell mounts, because they have like all the same stuff, you know, like Center Stage on those like auto zoom and pan things.

• 17:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  Kind of just focus on you. You can put it pretty much wherever and it should be able to do a decent job, just finding you and putting your people on the big screen, which is pretty cool, I must say.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, one of my theories this year is that the iPad is turning into a sneaky, great video conferencing device. In part because like you're talking about, you can use it as a continuity camera thing for your TV. You can just set it down in landscape mode on your coffee table and it'll use Center Stage to follow you around. And I generally think Center Stage is ridiculous and stupid and bad because no one wants their webcam moving around as they talk on a video call. It's just distracting and awful. But in a case like this, it actually makes sense why it would exist because it can kind of solve for some problems that exist.

• 17:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure.

• 17:54David Pierce?

  I'm very happy about that. Any new apps? You mentioned the Zoom and stuff like, have we heard anything from developers doing stuff for tvOS yet? Any ideas?

• 18:02Speaker 07

  Not a ton yet. There's more small stuff, like there's VPN support now. You can use those right on the Apple TV. So if you care about security and privacy, like a lot of folks do, that's nice to have. A lot of small things, you can actually find your remote now.

• 18:15David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 07

  With your iPhone, which is another blessing. There's no E1 chip, so it's not quite as precise as like a AirTag or whatever. But you can, you know, find it easily enough, which is better than before where you just had to say your prayers and go hunt for it. But yeah, so far, so good.

• 18:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'll take it. Is there anything, anything you don't like so far? Anything still missing or not working properly? The beta, at least from what I've heard, seems to be pretty solid for folks so far.

• 18:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's pretty good. It's a low stakes beta. I mean, it's not the same thing as like putting like iOS 17 on your phone on your main iPhone or whatever. So if you're gonna play around, the TV is a pretty safe environment to do it. But yeah, so far so good. I'm looking forward to those screensavers and seeing what else comes up over the beta cycle.

• 18:52David Pierce?

  I like it. Yeah, the control center to me is like a sneaky big deal. I'm excited that that one has turned out because Apple is desperate to figure out how to make it like the hub of your home in all these interesting ways. And this is a good way to do it that isn't just put more app icons onto your TV screen. And I think that that seems to be they get getting that right.

• 19:12Speaker 07

  Right. It's there if you want it. If you're a power user, it's right there and easy to get to. If you just want to ignore it, you can do that too and just do whatever.

• 19:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, I used an Apple TV for the longest time without realizing Control Center was there at all. And I actually have come around to thinking that's a big win. Like, that's actually how that should work.

• 19:27Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah, same.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  I like it. All right, Chris, thank you. As always, we'll talk to you again soon.

• 19:33Speaker 07

  Yes, sir. Cheers.

• 19:36David Pierce?

  Now let's do iOS 17. Allison Johnson's here. Hi, Allison.

• 19:40Speaker 08

  Hello.

• 19:41David Pierce?

  You have the hardest job in this particular segment, which is just that you have by far the most to talk about because iOS 17, I was just going through the list. There's actually a lot of new stuff. Let's not get into everything. We have lots of time to get into everything, but you've been using it so far. And the question I'm most curious about is in using the betas, what have you found yourself using that's new most often? Like, what has actually sort of crept into your daily life of the new stuff?

• 20:09Speaker 08

  It's a lot of little things. And I think that's, yeah, there's just a huge laundry list of stuff that's updated like across everything you can imagine. But some things that stick out to me, and they're not like glamorous or exciting, but like the updates to the keyboard, you can write a swear word now. And it doesn't just swoop in there and correct it for you.

• 20:32David Pierce?

  I have found autocorrect is wrong much less often than it used to be. And it might just be anecdotal. I might be paying more attention than normal, but the number of texts that I have sent with autocorrect mistakes has gone way down.

• 20:45Speaker 08

  Right. I feel like I'm fighting it less where you're constantly having to go back and be like, ah, no, that's not what I wanted to write. There's like extra little tools in there where it underlines something that it changed. So you're less likely to like send the text and be like, oh my God, I that's not what I meant to say. Just like little, little pleasant things throughout the keyboard that will be hard for anybody to really like identify even or be like, wow, this is a great new experience, but it's just nicer. One that I know we're both fans of is standby.

• 21:17David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 21:17Speaker 08

  Which is a delightful little feature where you start charging your phone, turn it sideways, and it turns the display into like a little clock. Or there's a couple of options like a calendar with some widgets. And the idea is you put it on kind of your nightstand and it's there for you when you want to check the time in the middle of the night. It's so nice.

• 21:41David Pierce?

  I really like it. There's a version of standby that you can basically just use as a photo viewer. And the aspect ratio is not amazing, right? Because you're basically on a like long, short screen, but it's great. I just set it up to show my photos and I just have a photo viewer that sits there while my phone charges. It's awesome.

• 21:57Speaker 08

  It's so nice. I love that it works with any charger. You can use wired charging, you can use MagSafe, you can use whatever wireless charger you have lying around. That's just like kind of an Apple and lovely. Yeah. So thanks, guys. One that surprised me, I was not expecting to like as much as I do, is the new kind of interface for stickers.

• 22:18David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 22:18Speaker 08

  Got to admit, I don't use stickers a lot, but in iOS 17, you can, you know how in iOS 16, you could do those like image cutouts of someone from a photo or?

• 22:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, you just long press and it like pulls out.

• 22:32Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 22:32David Pierce?

  Whatever the thing you're talking about is. Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, takes it out of the background. Everyone was like, this is cool. What do I do with this? Now you got, there's just an option right there to turn it into a sticker and you can go into your iMessage chat and you can put that sticker all over the chat, like just on any message and it'll show up for everybody where you put it. And you can turn a live photo into a sticker now, too.

• 22:57David Pierce?

  That's awesome. I didn't know that actually is genuinely useful.

• 23:01Speaker 08

  It's fun. It's like a great new way to annoy your partner, which is I'm using it.

• 23:07David Pierce?

  I'm a big believer in anything that makes it so I can respond to a text message in like two taps. Uh, like the tap back stuff is so good for that reason. And having a bunch of stickers where I can just like anytime we're talking about the dog, I can just like press the dog sticker and just boom, there it goes. Love that. Into that. Uh, what have you seen with the phone call stuff so far? Obviously this will be easier to see once more people have iOS 17, but there's the contact posters, there's the live voicemail stuff. Any, anything jump out to you in that space so far?

• 23:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, I played with contact posters a little bit. It's very much like the lock screen on iOS 16, same kind of deal.

• 23:44David Pierce?

  Did you pick a photo or a emoji for your contact poster?

• 23:47Speaker 08

  Oh, I did a photo. I can't do emoji. I don't know. I think I'm too old or not old enough. Like I'm in a middle ground where like I missed emojis, but yeah, it's a lot of pressure.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  It really is a lot of pressure. I spent a long time setting mine up.

• 24:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I have like three different ones that I'm like, maybe I'll be on a different mood and I'll pick a different one. So those will be fun. It'll be really interesting to see like who adopts it and with the uptake rate is like everyone gonna have a contact poster all at once. So that, that one will get, I think, more interesting as the beta rolls out and the full release comes. But the live transcription on voicemail, a hundred percent love it. I'm never picking up my phone again. It's like, this is, this is what I need. And it's, should mention that Google Pixel phones do a similar thing. Where the assistant will kind of be like, this person is using a screening service. What are you calling about? But I kind of love that Apple is just like, you're just leaving a voicemail.

• 24:45Speaker 08

  And then you can just like spy on what they're saying as they say it.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  It is really good. It works surprisingly seamlessly too. I've had a couple where I'm just straight up screening calls. It's like being in the nineties again. It's the best.

• 24:57Speaker 08

  Oh, it's so good. I had a, some robot call me about Comcast offers and I was like, see ya.

• 25:06David Pierce?

  Love that. Anything you haven't liked so far in the beta? I've had some pretty real performance and battery issues, which is like normal for a beta, and so I'm not super worried about it. But have you had any, anything that's jumped out to you in iOS 17 you don't like so far?

• 25:20Speaker 08

  Not terrible. I'm running it, I've used it a little bit on a 14 Pro, but I have it on my own 13 Mini. So when the battery life is kind of crummy, I'm like, ah, this could be because the battery is sort of crummy on my phone. But yeah, yeah, just a couple of like bugs and things, you know, as we've observed getting onto threads, like there's some weird bug where you couldn't post a photo, but.

• 25:44David Pierce?

  The app would instantly crash every time you tried to post a photo on threads.

• 25:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, it was, it was fun. The first thing you do is get in there like, I'm gonna post a photo. Nope. Try it again. Yeah, no, overall, it's been a really positive experience and I'm, I'm excited. Like, I'm excited for people to download it and then they can see what I'm talking about. Cause right now I'm just telling my friends like stickers and they're like, what?

• 26:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is that awkward time of year where you're sending people like broken things that they can barely see. You're like, look at the sticker. And they're like, what is this tiny image that you just sent me?

• 26:18Speaker 08

  I kept trying to put them in Slack and they just looked like the grossest little PNGs. Where I was like, you guys have to trust me. It looks cool.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  All right, awesome. Well, yeah, there's, there's lots more to talk about in iOS 17. So we'll have to come back to lots of this, but good luck with betas and Godspeed as always.

• 26:35Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  The iPad. The last one we should talk about quickly is iPadOS 17, which is the one I've been goofing around with. I have it installed on an iPad Mini and an iPad Pro. There are lots of little new things here, most of them borrowed from iOS 16 and 17. So if you use an iPhone, most of the stuff on the iPad will not be surprising. But there are two things on the iPad that I want to mention. The first is the lock screen. iPadOS 17 lets you customize your lock screen, mostly like you can on the iPhone with different fonts and colors and stuff. But you also get a rail of lock screen widgets on the left side, which is super useful. And you can actually fit a lot of widgets there because you just have more screen space. I would much rather have more of them, though, since there's so much screen space here. It's just kind of being unused, putting just the tiny widgets on the left.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  Give me full-sized widgets. Give me the new interactive widgets on iOS and iPadOS. Let me like really do stuff from my lock screen. But hey, some widgets is better than no widgets, so I'll take it. The other thing is Stage Manager. If you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that last year, when Stage Manager came out, I hated it. Like, hated it. Stage Manager is the multitasking feature that lets you switch between collections of apps so you can have a few things on the screen at a time. But mostly, it's buggy and bad and pointless. I don't know. I don't get it. But this year, Apple did make some big improvements. And I still don't think it's great, but I at least see the potential. The big change is that you can now move apps more or less freely around the screen. They can be almost any size and go almost anywhere on your iPad

• 28:08David Pierce?

  instead of just having to fit into these predetermined slots like before. That alone makes it feel much more like actual multitasking and makes Stage Manager way more useful. If you're the kind of person who uses their iPad with a mouse and keyboard and external monitor, Stage Manager really is for you. It's a decent system for managing multiple apps on multiple screens, and it's a lot better now than it was. But it's still just awkwardly implemented on the iPad. You can't command-tab between stages. You can only have four apps in a stage. You can only have one app in a single stage. And you can't save stages as they are. So everything just kind of ends up awkward and strewn about unless you set up your stages and then never, ever change them or download new apps or anything.

• 28:52David Pierce?

  It's just still too much work for not that much gain, I think. I still don't plan to keep using Stage Manager, but I do at least think there's maybe a future in the idea as Apple figures out ways to integrate it more and more with the rest of the iPad. I still don't plan to keep using Stage Manager, but I at least think there's maybe a future in the concept as Apple keeps working to integrate it better and better with the rest of the iPad. Otherwise, on the iPad, there's a Health app now, which is nice. And iPadOS 17 actually does make the iPad maybe the best PDF editing device I've ever used. It actually automatically detects all the fields you can fill in, and you can either just type or scribble to fill it out. It's awesome. But mostly, you know, the iPad is the iPad is the iPad.

• 29:35David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about how we talk about AI. We'll be right back.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 30:06Speaker 10

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later, in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  This series is presented by EY. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  Welcome back. One of the weird things that has happened over the last, let's say, nine months, is that all kinds of AI terms have found their way into our vocabulary. GPT, LLM, transformers, hallucinations, all these things that no reasonable human knew about before are just words we use now. But are we using them the right way? And does it matter how we use them as we talk about AI and as AI changes so fast? I can't stop thinking about this. So I called up The Verge's James Vincent to help me sort it out. Hi, James.

• 32:07Speaker 11

  Hi, David. How you doing?

• 32:09David Pierce?

  I'm good. You're now three days into book leave on a very mysterious book that you're not willing to tell anyone about. How's it going? Do you miss us terribly already?

• 32:17Speaker 11

  I miss you terribly. I wake up every day. I see things in my feeds, in my Twitter follows. I genuinely have been lurking on Slack. This is so terrible. I've had Slack open. I'm already regretting somewhat my decision to take leave, but I'm trying to make predictions. Write some stuff down now, what I think is going to happen the rest of the year. And then six months' time, I'll check in and be like, oh, was that right? Was that wrong?

• 32:41David Pierce?

  Once you finish that list, come back on the show. We should do that in public so we can shame you for this. But the reason I have dragged you here today is because I want to talk about how we talk about AI. And I've been thinking about this for a while, but this was really sparked for me, listening to a podcast a couple of weeks ago, where they had this otherwise very interesting conversation about AI, but kept talking about it in just the worst ways. And it was talking about like, when you do something with the AI, and it just, it makes me cringe every time that happens. And then I've been reading all this stuff, and we're using all these terms like AI and machine learning and LLMs and ChatGPT and chatbots. And all this stuff just becomes

• 33:22David Pierce?

  so sort of interchanged to the point of being meaningless. So what I want to do... Here with you, my, my British pedantic friend, is try and sort this out a little bit, because I actually think it's really important. We're in this moment where this stuff is moving really fast and it's so transformative that I actually think the way we talk about it matters. And so I want to just, not exactly like define terms, but I want to just sort of think through how we talk about this stuff. Does that sound good? Is that a good plan?

• 33:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, perfect. Loved it. Love to be pedantic.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  I love it. So let's just literally start with the term AI, which is a thing we force ourselves to use and have to use all the time. It gets used for everything. It is, it is like so broadly defined as to be almost sort of meaningless now. It's not quite a technical term, because it's like to, to call something the AI is to refer to like the code, which is just not how we talk about things. But I am curious, like as you think about what you mean when you say AI at this point, both for you as a reporter, reporting on this stuff, and for you as just a person in the world living with this stuff, where does it fit into kind of your vocabulary correctly?

• 34:31Speaker 11

  You're completely right in that the definition of AI is so diffuse as to be sort of useless. It is such a broad term. It applies to so many different, uh, specific applications, technological methods, ideas, concepts, that it's very difficult to say what it is. What I like to do is not think about necessarily what the strict definition is, but think about how we use it in terms of how it fits into other frameworks and how we think about it conceptually. So you mentioned just now, one of the things you dislike is talking about the AI, like the AI did this, the AI did that. I hate that too. You know, I've spoken to Verge staff people about this and I, I tried to sort of give a Verge framework on it. And there's no official policy,

• 35:14Speaker 11

  but one of my big no-nos for covering AI is anthropomorphizing the AI. And that involves turning it into this discrete entity that happens when you use the grammatical form, the AI, an AI, AI did this. So I, I don't really mind the term. I know some people, some researchers are really critical of it. And they're like, you know, they put artificial in, and in Intelligence in inverted commas and they really hate seeing it used. And I respect that as a viewpoint, but it is not the one I think is the right approach. Because I think there has to be a language for people who are non-experts to talk about this stuff. And AI has become the phrase we use. Fine, let's just go with it.

• 35:55Speaker 11

  If we've accepted it is the phrase we use, then what becomes important is, yes, as I say, how we conceptualize it. So we don't want to anthropomorphize it. We don't want to give it agency when it has none. So we can, I think we can talk about AI as much as we like. We can talk about what people are doing with it. But that is the thing, yeah, we need to remember how it is being used and who is ultimately responsible for it. You know, there's that great, it's been a bit of a meme on Twitter for a while. A presentation card from an IBM sort of slideshow given to management in the 1970s. This is a great old looking presentation card, old sort of courier type font being used. And it says, machines must never make a management decision because machines can't be held responsible for management decisions. Something like that.

• 36:38Speaker 11

  I think something similar applies to AI in that we may say casually, AI is doing that or AI is doing this. But we need to remember who put those systems in place, who bears responsibility. You know, we live in a society where machines cannot be responsible, humans can be responsible. And if there is to be justice, if there is to be, you know, a sort of fair, a fair society to live in. Then we need to remember the humans at the heart of it, not AI. So that's, that's a terribly conceptual, over the top approach to that question. But in short, I don't think definitions matter so much as the context that you put those terms in.

• 37:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think as we talk about the AI, I've come to think of it as sort of synonymous with like the technology. That it's, it's a thing that you use if you don't sort of immediately further define it. You're just telling on yourself as somebody who doesn't understand what the hell you're talking about. Because what it is, is like, technology is not a thing. It's an umbrella term for lots of things, right? And I think AI is the same way, like AI is not a thing, but it is, it is a category of things. But if you're going to talk about it, you have to then talk about the more specific things right away. Or else I'm just going to assume you have no idea what you're talking about.

• 37:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, I agree with you. You it's fine. You can use the term and maybe you're against using the term.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  No, I I'm actually with you in the sense that I think there are lots of interesting arguments to have been made a very long time ago about whether artificial and intelligence are the right words. At this point, I think it's like the the toothpaste is out of the tube. It almost doesn't matter. That just is the term. And I think my hope would be that we kind of get to the point where AI is like, it's like SAT or MTV in that kind of the original definition gets lost and AI just means AI. And we all kind of know what it means, but artificial and intelligence doesn't really matter anymore. But again, I think I'm with you in the sense that like the time to have had that debate was a long time ago and it's over and it really doesn't matter anymore.

• 38:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, I I mean, that I think there is one argument to make, perhaps that AI is in many ways a fitting term in that it is as diffuse as the entity it describes in the world. And it also reflects and embodies grammatically the problems we have talking about AI. You know, AI is a difficult thing to describe because it is so multiformed. It has so many different variations. And in a way, just doing what we're doing now, I'm going to give both of us a big pat on the back right now. There we go. You know, talking about this stuff is useful. It puts it in context. People think about it and you obviously the, you know, the the worst, not the worst sin, but the sin with using words every time you use them, no matter what you're talking about them, is using them thoughtlessly and not thinking about the words you're using.

• 39:16Speaker 11

  And I think if we think about them, we're okay. AI can be okay.

• 39:20David Pierce?

  I like it. On the AI front, the the other one that I have come across a bunch in trying to report about this is AI versus machine learning. And I think they get used interchangeably in part because I think machine learning is perceived to be the less kind of magical sounding version of it. It's like if you want to make AI seem real, you just call it machine learning. But that's not quite the right distinction, I don't think. Where do you draw the line between those things? Are they synonymous with one another?

• 39:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is that like, there are distinctions to be made. So you could distinguish between machine learning methods and stuff like expert systems methods, which, you know, were based on creating AI. Both of them fall under the AI category, but were more about structuring and sort of hard coding the rules that were being used in these systems. And expert systems had a vogue decades ago. And, you know, what they're still they're still used now in many places. It's not it's not fair to say they've gone out of. Use, but it's been overtaken by the learning, quote unquote, learning methods, the deep learning methods, the machine learning methods, which are more reliant on letting, letting systems, you know, learn on their own, not on their own, but, you know, look at data and find rules in there, under the guidance of humans.

• 40:31Speaker 11

  I think machine learning as it's used generally now is just like being a little bit more fussy, a little bit more, as you say, no, a little bit more correct as well, to be like, well, let's just take some of the, let's just take some of the energy out of the room, let's take some of the hype out of the room and call it machine learning instead.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's one you want to remind people that this isn't some fake thing that's happening. It's just, it's just, you're, you're just letting machines do things for you. It's a reminder that like, this is just a thing that happens on a computer, it's fine.

• 40:57Speaker 11

  Yeah, but arguably, it's also sort of inflationary in terms of what it, what it draws our expectations from, you know, you talk about machines, you think about physical machines, you don't often think about software, that's one mistake, and that plays into AI myths. You talk about learning and then you imagine an autonomous system that is able to read and engage with and analyze information in the same way as a human does, but that's a poor elision of terms as well, because conceptually, these things work very, very differently, you know, and then you have the sort of self-directed aspect of learning. And then we've had this wonderful piece up on the site last week, Josh Jezza, this fantastic piece, looking at the huge amount of human labor that goes into it. Is that machine learning?

• 41:39Speaker 11

  If you need to employ thousands, tens of thousands of people around the world to click on pictures of fire hydrants and captures day after day, you know, is that machine learning or is that human rulemaking turned into machine decision making? So, yeah, machine learning is, to all intents and purposes, the less hyped way of saying AI, but again, I think defining the term is perhaps less important than the context within which you use them and talking about these other parts of, of the systems.

• 42:08David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, I've found myself trying to use machine learning less unless I am specifically referring to a type of system that is machine learning.

• 42:18Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  Because it is a thing that has a sort of strict, simple definition in how it is used in some of these systems. And I think I've definitely fallen under the trap of using machine learning as, as the less sexy term for AI, and I'm trying not to do that because I think it's unhelpful sometimes.

• 42:35Speaker 11

  What would you give as the definition for machine learning?

• 42:37David Pierce?

  I I think it's it's what you said at the beginning, right? It is it is the these automated systems by which a huge amount of training data is fed in and algorithms run and they learn what fire hydrants look like, right? And I think frankly, in my world, mostly covering products, I have very little actual reason to use machine learning as a term. So I'm just trying to use it less and less, right? It's it's I think you're right to say it is more useful as a way of talking about how these systems are built than the actual output of these systems.

• 43:06Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Which brings me to my next question. And this is the one that I have struggled with the most as a reporter, which is terms like L L M, large language model, and G P T, which is generative pre-trained transformers. These are things that if you had asked me a year ago, would I ever use these terms in a story? I would have said, no, you're you're insane, absolutely not, never. And all at once, these feel like they have become like mainstream terms. I don't think anybody knows what G P T stands for, but I think everyone has heard the phrase chat G P T now. And it's just kind of in the lexicon now. And I find myself wondering, like, are we good with this? Like, like, are we just gonna are we gonna get to a point where I can just say L L M and assume most of our audience and most of the people in the world know what I'm talking about?

• 43:49Speaker 11

  I mean, yeah, these, you know, oh, God, this is a lovely conversation about language. I love the I love these sort of discussions. I'm sorry to be so discursive in them. But, you know, I am very much a descriptiveist when it comes to language. Words are what we say they are, and they are the context they're used within. G P T, you're right, has become this completely denatured term. You know, I I made a joke when I had my last day that you were guys were gonna train a language on model on all my articles and you'd obviously replace me in my absence. And I always, yeah, it'll be called James G P T. And G P T is a sort of suffix now just means a program you talk to.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 44:25Speaker 11

  It just means like a chatty program, which is very unusual. And L L M is another one in that, you know, the large in it is completely subjective as a value in that the importance of having a large language model as opposed to a small one. No, you know, no one you can speak to in A I will give you a clear cutoff about what makes the difference between a large and a small one, especially as, you know, it scales. Go up and down and size itself, which is, you know, we measure a number of parameters, the connections within the model has sort of become more and less important. You know, there was this, obviously there was this push where you would scale it up and we just got larger and larger models. And now it's sort of going the other way and there are different methods of training them using fewer parameters.

• 45:07Speaker 11

  So maybe the large isn't important at all. And actually, I think there's probably a good argument there to get rid of large and just call them language models. And that is to me usefully generalized as an approach. The underlying methodology is advancing and mutating so rapidly that any term, any descriptive term, GPT or otherwise, is bound to become obsolete in a matter of months. But I think GPT will hang on because it's become a marketing term. And like AI, the point at which something becomes a marketing term, you know, you may as well give up on a technical definition. And then it just becomes about, well, what type of story are you trying to tell? What information do you need to give to your reader, whoever they may be?

• 45:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 11

  You know, I feel like ChatGPT, Nilay has said this in the past, he just thinks it's a awful name.

• 45:52David Pierce?

  Oh, it's objectively a horrendous product name. One of the things you're making me realize with all of this is that we kind of don't have middle sized terms in AI right now. We either have these like incredibly small descriptive things like large language model and machine learning or GPT, or we just call it AI. Right? And there's like nothing in between. And I wonder if the thing in between is like, we'll end up just calling it software because fundamentally it's just software created in a different way. And like, we're pretty comfortable just calling things software at this point. But it does occur to me that even as I'm describing this stuff, like I don't have an answer to if I'm not just going to refer to it as a large language model powered chatbot, which is messy and I think not how we should talk about this stuff forever. All I call it is AI and that's too much.

• 46:37David Pierce?

  And I, so I wonder like, we're sort of stuck between these two poles for now. And, and I wonder if our vocabulary needs some stuff in the middle.

• 46:44Speaker 11

  I think that's a really good point. I, I think something about the dilemma you're describing is due to where we are in the product cycle. You know, I've, I've been covering AI for not too long, five, six years or something like that now. And before this last year, the amount of products I talked about was fairly small. And you know, it used to be a thing where I would, some archive paper would be going around with some new sort of GAN technique involved with image synthesis generation, whatever it was, and we'd write, we'd write that up and we'd talk about whatever the specific name for that neural network architecture was. But it would never really be important again. And the realise was, was there was no continuity to those stories, that term, you know, unless

• 47:25Speaker 11

  it became a very successful model or approach like GAN itself, which started off as this, you know, obscure, well, not obscure, you know, it became very popular very quickly. But in terms of public knowledge, obscure term. And then, you know, I think a few, many of our listeners would recognise the term GAN and know it has something to do with image generation. But my point is that when we cross over from the research stage to the product stage, A, the idea of marketing gets involved and how you sell it, but B, you have these now narratives about these technologies and that takes on a life far apart from the research itself. And some terminology sticks around. I think a really interesting example is hallucinations. Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 11

  So hallucinations, for listeners who are not aware, is a sort of name given to essentially the mistakes made by language models. You know, you give them a question and they come up with an answer that is, you know, not derived from anything directly in their training data, derived from the patterns within it, but it's wrong in some way, it's factually incorrect. And a lot of scientists, a lot of researchers dislike the term hallucination because they think it implies a mental model that is akin to a human mind. Humans hallucinate, conscious beings hallucinate, machines do not hallucinate, they just make mistakes. But I think that's a really interesting example of how a term that starts off as something within the research world then takes on this greater meaning because it happens to describe

• 48:52Speaker 11

  something that is very common to people using these products. I love your suggestion that we need more middle terms, but I think, again, another reason for this, apart from the fact that we're in the sort of productisation stage of this development cycle, is that actually a lot of attention Is being focused on a relatively small zoo of different technical animals, as it were. You know, a lot of it comes down to language models, the differences between them. If we want to talk about, you know, specific structures with how they're trained. It's really just not relevant to the general population. You know, if we're talking about the difference between how GPT three, three point five and four were trained. We're talking about transformer heads and all this sort of stuff, attention heads. I've definitely got one of those terminologies wrong. I apologize.

• 49:34Speaker 11

  You know, this is what I mean, but a lot of that stuff is really not relevant unless you are, you know, you're sitting in a data center somewhere or not sitting in a data center. You're just trying to train this stuff yourself.

• 49:44David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:44Speaker 11

  Are there particular areas of AI that you think we are deficient in language to describe that we're missing terminology?

• 49:51David Pierce?

  I think you're right that right now we're doing an okay job just because there aren't that many things to do. But the thing that catches me the most, the two things everybody thinks about with AI are sort of generative image platforms. And I think that's a slightly messy term, but is at least kind of understandable, right? It's like use AI to make new art out of nothing. I can sort of understand what that is. I suspect we'll have pretty good vocabulary for that pretty fast. And then the other one is the chatbots. And I actually think chatbots is like a fine term for that. It's it may not be perfect, but it works and everybody kind of understands what it is. And that's the other side of things. The one where I get tripped up is like, I feel like I read a hundred press releases every day that a company is like, we put AI into our product. And I'm just like, what does that mean?

• 50:34David Pierce?

  And and to me, it's like, I just read that now. It's like, we put technology into our product. Congratulations. Like, I don't know. Did we? Is that anything? And so I think, and that's where I get to the point where it's like, okay, I think we we might just need more words for this. And maybe what will happen is we'll get to the point where this stuff is just sort of unsexy enough that we don't talk about it. It's like, it's like talking about like you added a new file to your code base. Like it's, that's nothing, right? And this was back when everybody was saying like, we're all in on web three. And I was like, well, what does that mean? And they're like, we don't know either. And so maybe this is just kind of how the hype cycle works, but it does feel to me like we just need a larger set of ways to talk about what it means to put some of these tools into your product.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  Because what you're not doing is putting ChatGPT or an image generator into your product. And if you're not doing either of those things, we need a third thing to call it.

• 51:26David Pierce?

  And I just don't know what that is yet. But, okay, I have, I have two more things, I have two more terms I'm gonna throw at you and then I'm gonna let you go here.

• 51:31Speaker 11

  Sure.

• 51:31David Pierce?

  One is, where are we on spicy autocomplete as a descriptor for some of this AI stuff? I've been seeing this for months. I loved it at first. I like it less and less over time, but I want to know what you think.

• 51:42Speaker 11

  Okay, so, I mean, I think this is, again, a fascinating example of the limits, the benefits, the drawbacks of certain terms. So autocomplete as a way of describing language models and their abilities. I actually, I tweeted about this a few, a few months ago, because I was trying to, I was trying to work out where this term first started getting applied to these. And actually, I think it was Robin Sloan, I don't know if you know him at all. He is an author, he wrote Sour Dough, Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore. But he also has a fantastic newsletter he does, and he's very like involved in technology. He's done like, he's got a side music project that uses AI. You know, he's been experimenting with these tools for ages.

• 52:25Speaker 11

  This was the first instance I could find of it being applied to language models. And I think it was like 2016, 2017, something like that, a while ago. Then, of course, it became attached to essentially criticisms of these models. I mean, particularly the, the, the stochastic parrots paper, I think, did a lot about connecting these things. And because it got attached to criticisms of these models, it's then become somewhat politicized term within AI communities. And if you use it, it can put you in camps in people's mind, camps of political or ideological belief or thought. So it's a very, it's a very interesting term. And, you know, if you, if you're someone who derides language models as just fancy autocomplete or whatever it is.

• 53:08Speaker 11

  Some people in the AI community who, let's just say, you know, are more likely to believe in existential risk problems, for example, will be quite dismissive, or they can be quite dismissive, because they'll think you don't fully understand the qualities that these systems have. And the thing is, I think it was a really useful term for a long time. It was a really useful way of. Quickly explaining, I'm communicating, sorry, the abilities of these systems and also something about the way they're trained. You know, it is a statistical predictor, that is definitely true. The problem with the term, and I'm still, I don't have a decision, I haven't, you know, made a decision in my head about this, is that it doesn't quite convey to people now the full capabilities of these systems,

• 53:49Speaker 11

  which, you know, you get something like the famous Sparks of AGI paper, the one that came out from the Microsoft Research. And I say famous, also very controversial. A lot of people disagree with the contents, the conclusions of that paper, which was basically saying that GPT-4 had abilities in it which were not adequately described by our current mental models of language models. And it was something perhaps closer to, as the title suggests, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence. And I haven't come down under sign on that. I still think autocomplete is a useful term in many contexts when talking about language models. But it's also sort of lacking now because it does underplay the fantastic breadth of capabilities that these systems have. And the fact that there may be, you know, aptitudes within them

• 54:34Speaker 11

  that just don't apply to our model of what autocomplete software does. So I think it's a term that we're going to see phased out in the years to come because it's been slightly lacking. Or perhaps it's a term that's going to become increasingly politicized in that using it will align you with one or other political camp of beliefs or research camps of belief. But a really fascinating term. Do you, do you like it still, spicy autocomplete?

• 54:55David Pierce?

  I liked it at first because I think it's a really helpful kind of kindergarten level understanding of what's actually going on, right? Like it's because everyone, everyone has had that experience and you type something and it throws up the three options. And sometimes they're insane and sometimes they're great. And it's like, that is not a terrible metaphor for what's happening in a lot of these systems. I think it's becoming an incomplete enough metaphor as to not be useful very, very, very quickly. So I kind of like it less over time. And I agree, I think the way that people use it has gotten, people are either very dismissive when they use it or very dismissive of people who use it. And I think both of those are kind of annoying and for that reason alone, I'm ready to move on to something else.

• 55:36David Pierce?

  But as a, as a first run at making this stuff really understandable to people, I think it kind of worked. It got us, it got us six months of decent metaphors, so I'm not mad at it.

• 55:47Speaker 11

  No, absolutely. I'm glad to hear we're staking out the radical centrist ground here, David. We're annoyed by people on both sides of this argument.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  I'm really, the Vergecast's official position is everybody should just calm down for five minutes, I think.

• 56:00David Pierce?

  But here's one I suspect you and I will aggressively agree on, and then we can go.

• 56:04Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 56:05David Pierce?

  Which is that the term "magic" to describe AI, like in Magic Eraser and Magic Editor and Magic whatever, that needs to die in a fire as quickly as possible, right?

• 56:15Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 56:16David Pierce?

  Like, we gotta stop with the magic. There's no magic here. I'm done with this.

• 56:19Speaker 11

  There's no magic.

• 56:19David Pierce?

  We're good on this, right?

• 56:20Speaker 11

  Well, but, you know, when you deliver a product... David, David, listen to me. Listen to me for a second. Dave, when you deliver a product that uplifts your customer's heart, that brings delight to them, when they get rid of that obnoxious pug dog that was leering at them in that family photo in the background, is that not magic? Is that not a type of wizardry, of sorcery? No, you, sorry.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  Did Johnny Ive just come into your room? How did that? That was amazing.

• 56:45Speaker 11

  Terrible. Yeah, but, but the context you've just described it within a purely marketing context. So I think people already know that magic is bullshit, for want of a more polite term.

• 56:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Hopefully it stays that way. All right, James, you've got a book to write. We need to take a break, but thank you as always.

• 57:02Speaker 11

  Thanks, guys. Bye.

• 57:04David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna come back and talk about all the video games we cannot wait to play. We'll be right back.

• 57:52Speaker 12

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• 58:24David Pierce?

  We're back. So usually, the gaming world has a couple of big moments a year, with the E3 conference usually in June being the biggest by far. But E3 is no longer. So instead, we've had a string of announcements from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, there was the Summer Game Fest, and a bunch of others, all detailing what's coming to a console and computer near you. This year's actually a big year for games, it turns out, and it's a lot to keep up with. So I asked The Verge's Ash Parrish and Polygon's Chris Plant to come on the show and tell me all the new stuff that they're most excited about. Ash, hi.

• 59:00Speaker 13

  Hi, great to be back.

• 59:02David Pierce?

  It's good to have you back. And speaking of coming back, Chris Plant, welcome back to The Vergecast. It's been a while.

• 59:07Speaker 14

  Hi, thank you. It's been six years, seven years. Obviously, you missed me, and you're just so happy to have me.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  Listen, you were just here. I don't know, I opened up the link and you were just here.

• 59:17Speaker 14

  That's true.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  And we're just swirling with it, it's fine.

• 59:20David Pierce?

  Okay, so, the way we wanted to do this is basically, there's been a lot of video game announcements. There was no E3, so there was no one, like, moment for video games. Instead, it's been the summer of video games. And I just wanted, like, rattle through some of the coolest stuff that people have been talking about. So, the way we set this up is, the homework we each had is, we each had to come with two games that we are excited to play this summer. Ideally, brand-new games, but if you want to cheat on that one, I'll allow it. And then, two games you're excited about coming this fall. So games you can't play yet, but will before the end of the year. Are you guys prepared? Are you ready? Does this sound like a plan?

• 59:57Speaker 13

  This sounds like a tentative plan.

• 59:58Speaker 14

  I think we're gonna maybe be okay.

• 1:00:01David Pierce?

  This is The Vergecast. Maybe be okay is the best we're ever gonna do.

• 1:00:03Speaker 14

  Great.

• 1:00:04David Pierce?

  Let's start with this summer, and we'll just, we'll just go around in circles here. So, Ash, you go first. What's the first game you're excited about this summer?

• 1:00:10Speaker 13

  So my first pick is Baldur's Gate 3.

• 1:00:19Speaker 13

  I am really excited about this game. It has been in early access for about forever. I remember the first time it went to like early access and I got to play like an early build of it. And I've never played the Baldur's Gate games before. I kind of really haven't dabbled with like the Dungeons and Dragons games that have been, you know, made into video games. But Baldur's Gate was like the first time I had an experience with a game like that and I loved it. It was really fun. I got such a kick out of not like doing anything for like my class. I think I played like a Paladin or something like that. I don't remember if that's not one of the classes. Don't, don't at me on that. But I got more fun out of like pushing people off of things and lighting them on fire than

• 1:01:00Speaker 13

  I did doing anything else that was like class based because they just do so much damage and it's so much fun being a little chaos gremlin that like pushes people off buildings and stuff like that. So I'm really excited to see what a full version of that game looks like, especially because there's romances and I haven't had a good game with romance in it since Mass Effect 3. So I'm really excited to get back into that like real crunchy CRPG type experience that has like 50 million lines of voice dialogue and 20 million different things that you can do. I am jazzed about that.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  I love that. Chris, any feelings about Baldur's Gate?

• 1:01:37Speaker 14

  I mean, I'm just intimidated, you know? Intimidated by what it could do to me if I allow myself to enjoy a game like that because it's definitely one of those games that you start playing. I'm like, you know, I'll put 20 hours into it. That's a reasonable amount of time to play a video game and then 300 hours later you're like, what did I do?

• 1:01:54Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 14

  You know, and that's not to say that's a bad use of time. It just, it slips away. I played a little bit of Divinity Original Sin 2, same kind of game. And yeah, it was definitely that thing where I thought I had only played for 10 hours and it had been about 40 or 50.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, that feeling of, oh God, I cannot afford to lose my life to this game is a running theme through all of my picks, which you will see very shortly. But Chris, what's your first one? What are you excited about this summer?

• 1:02:25Speaker 14

  So I'm cheating and I'm using California summertime, which means it goes to the end of October.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  And hasn't started yet.

• 1:02:32Speaker 14

  Exactly. I mean, definitely correct. So there is a week in October that has like three huge releases and I'll be picking two from them. One of them is just a very old video game, which is the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection.

• 1:02:46Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 1:02:46Speaker 14

  Coming out on October 24th.

• 1:02:52David Pierce?

  Okay, are we giving you that first? That feels like October 24th is a stretch.

• 1:02:56Speaker 14

  I said the end of October. I created the rules and then I used the rules. That's how this game works.

• 1:03:02David Pierce?

  You were just here when I clicked the link, man. That's all. That's all I know.

• 1:03:05Speaker 14

  Here's why it matters. There are a bunch of like flashier games coming out. Metal Gear Solid is one of the most important video game franchises in the history of the medium. And you effectively cannot play it right now legally. And that is absolutely absurd. There was a documentary at Tribeca Film Festival about Hideo Kojima. He has new games coming out with Death Stranding 2. And yet if you wanted to go play Metal Gear Solid, or Metal Gear Solid 2, or 3, or any of the original games, good luck. You will need to go get an original system because they're no longer available on Windows PC. They used to be on good old games and they're not on modern consoles.

• 1:03:44Speaker 14

  It doesn't make sense how hard it is to play these games. And this, this isn't exclusive to Metal Gear. But I think it is kind of the shining example of video games' terrible habits of erasing or legally blocking out its past. And I am very glad that this is going to become available. And then everybody can play it and realize, you know what? Death Stranding is actually a better game than all of them.

• 1:04:07Speaker 13

  Oh, that's a, that's big.

• 1:04:09David Pierce?

  And this is, is it the whole collection coming to basically all of the major platforms?

• 1:04:14Speaker 14

  So this is Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3.

• 1:04:17David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:04:18Speaker 14

  And some, I believe, like the NES or...

• 1:04:20Speaker 13

  Metal Gear, not the solid, just Metal Gear.

• 1:04:22Speaker 14

  Yes, thank you. Thank you. But sadly, I do not think Metal Gear Solid for the Game Boy Color is part of this, despite being a delightful game. And Metal Gear Solid 4 and 5 are not on this, though. I think it's pretty safe to assume that there will be a sequel collection in the next year or two to make sure that people can buy those two.

• 1:04:41David Pierce?

  And then he's, and Kojima's very busy getting all his stuff to work on a Mac, so it's gonna, it's, it's all gonna be very exciting. It's all coming up Metal Gear. All right, my first pick is comparatively very small. It's the new Mario Kart DLC for the Nintendo Switch, Wave 5.

• 1:05:02David Pierce?

  Mario Kart is the only game I can play for any amount of time, whenever, for any reason, and be very happy about it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 13

  It's a very good appointment game.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 1:05:12Speaker 13

  Yeah, you can just sit down, pop in, have like a bespoke 20-minute experience, get everything, like, experience an entire gameplay loop and stop, and you don't have to worry about falling behind or anything like that. Mario Kart is a perfect game for that.

• 1:05:24David Pierce?

  And the thing that they've done really well is I feel like every Mario Kart game before, I've, I feel like I've sort of played through, and then it gets a little bit repetitive and I have to kind of take a break and go. But they're, they're doing these waves at just the right cadence where it's like, oh, I have a new character, that kind of makes everything feel new. And then, oh, there's a new course, that makes everything feel kind of new. And this one, there's a handful of new characters, and it's going to give me endless reasons to play this game a lot more.

• 1:05:49Speaker 14

  You buried the lead. Kamek is one of the new characters. And this is huge in the plant house because my five-year-old thinks Kamek is the star of Mario. He's very misguided.

• 1:06:00Speaker 13

  You know what? I would believe that. If I had not ever played Mario, if I didn't know what Mario was, I would 100% believe that because this is a guy that comes in on like the cloud, right? He's Bowser's Harold, right? This is the first person who shows up and is like, given this like outsized importance, he is, he is talking to you. I would 100% believe that. Your, your kid is 100% right, and you can tell him I said that.

• 1:06:22David Pierce?

  Wow. That's kind of deep, honestly. Like, I was about to come out firing about how wrong that opinion is, but I think you might be right. I take it back. All right, Ash, what's your next one for the summer?

• 1:06:33Speaker 13

  Ghost Trick.

• 1:06:38Speaker 13

  Ghost Trick is a Switch game. It's kind of like a Phoenix Wright kind of game where you go through and you have to solve mysteries and things like that. And it has this weird mechanic where you're a ghost and you have to stop people's untimely deaths. And you have these weird Rube Goldberg-like device way of going about that. And I'm looking forward to getting into that because that looks like a fun, nifty little game that'll scratch that Ace Attorney itch.

• 1:07:02David Pierce?

  I had not seen this before, and I'm looking at it now. And it also has this amazing kind of retro animation style that I'm very into.

• 1:07:09Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 14

  Yeah, for people who want to try it right now, it's on iOS. And yeah, it is a delight.

• 1:07:14David Pierce?

  All right, well, there goes my summer. Chris, what's your second one?

• 1:07:18Speaker 14

  I'm going to follow the rules this time. My pick is myhouse.wad or myhouse.wad. And it is a mod for Doom.

• 1:07:31Speaker 13

  Oh.

• 1:07:32Speaker 14

  And I'm just targeting the Verge audience.

• 1:07:34David Pierce?

  Wait, tell me everything about this. I don't know about this.

• 1:07:37Speaker 14

  It is an absolutely bonkers mod that in the canon of the forum post where it was published, two friends were making it in 1999. And then they grew apart. And more recently, one of those friends passed away. So the friend who is still alive found this mod that they were working on and decided to touch it up and just release it out onto the world. And it is just their house. It is the passed away friend's home. That is not the mod at all. And you should keep playing it. It is a very different thing. And it is the kind of prize nesting doll toy.

• 1:08:17Speaker 13

  Is it inscription? Is it like inscription?

• 1:08:19Speaker 14

  I mean, as somebody who didn't like inscription after the first act, I would say it's better than inscription.

• 1:08:24Speaker 13

  Oh, you know what? That's OK.

• 1:08:25Speaker 14

  I admire inscription a lot. I think the first third of that game is fantastic. But I think what this is doing is, I hate doing a Lynchian thing because that is such a meaningless comparison. But it is not trying to ascribe a meaning to every decision that it makes. It is, I think, a lot looser and more playful than that, which is why it's a mod and not a retail game, because it probably would make a total of $5.

• 1:08:52David Pierce?

  But instead just show up for random insanity and see what happens.

• 1:08:56Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56David Pierce?

  I love that. I do really appreciate it. I'm just reading about this now and one of the things that says is, "Are you expecting to battle demons? Yes, this will happen, but first you must uncover the secrets of what seems to just be a suburban house."

• 1:09:07Speaker 14

  Yes.

• 1:09:09David Pierce?

  Sounds amazing.

• 1:09:10Speaker 13

  That does sound amazing, especially because this is in Doom.

• 1:09:12David Pierce?

  Sold. I'm in. I will play this.

• 1:09:14Speaker 14

  Can I give you like one little spoilery thing?

• 1:09:17David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:09:17Speaker 14

  Like no story or anything. There is a point in the game where you come across two dogs. And one of the dogs is like a three-headed hell beast with like borderline infinite health. And the other dog is like a cute puppy with like two health. And whichever one you kill, it kills the other and that's the only way to move on.

• 1:09:37Speaker 13

  Oh no.

• 1:09:38Speaker 14

  Which really puts a like choice on your platter.

• 1:09:42David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:09:42Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's like, it's not even a Charlie problem. It's just an awful problem. I swear the game is not that dark in general, but that, that certainly, um, yeah, it leaves a funky taste in the, uh, in the palate.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, real, real summer vibes coming out of that one. My pick, because unlike the two of you, I followed the rules, is out now and it is F123, The Racing Game.

• 1:10:06Speaker 14

  Oh, wow.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Specifically because, well, A, I love racing games, as you can tell from my two picks so far. Uh, and I like them because I can just like sit down for 10 minutes and do it like in between things or go somewhere else. Like the main thrust of my life right now is I have a six month old kid, so I get like 15 free minutes at various times. And I'm like, I'm gonna sit. I had a friend who bought me a steering wheel for these games and I love them. But F123 has this new mode called F1 World, which is basically for anyone who's ever played like 2K or like FIFA Ultimate Team, it's one of those where you get to just like build up your team and you play over time. And instead of just like beating the game over and over and over again, which most of these games just make you do in career mode. This one, you can just like hang out in the world and keep racing and getting better and doing new things.

• 1:10:55David Pierce?

  Which again, for me will keep me interested much longer than just like trying to kind of achieve the same goals. Over and over again, and people seem to really like F1 World, so I'm very excited about it.

• 1:11:05Speaker 14

  Have you gotten into many of these? This always just seems so intimidating. Intimidating not in the "I'll get sucked in forever," more intimidating in the like, where do I even start?

• 1:11:16Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16David Pierce?

  The challenge I have with these games is that if I don't get in early, I'm so far behind everybody else. Like, I've been playing sports video games for a very long time. I'm like, pretty good at most sports video games, but I just don't grind like the people who grind. And I think this is true of sort of any competitive, like, pay-to-win game to some extent. There's just like, people with credit cards who are just like, buying their way to the top of all of these things. So I've had to learn to just have a very zen approach, and I lose most of the time, and it's basically fine. And I just like, tell myself stories about these all being teenagers with their parents' credit cards who are beating me, and I'm morally superior to them.

• 1:11:51Speaker 14

  I had lunch at a friend's house last night, and he is the person who is always beating you in this game. And I had no idea. These friends, they build decks. And I didn't even know that they liked video games, because they never have talked about video games. And then he showed me his garage, and he's like, "Oh, by the way, I do play one video game. I play F1, and here's like, a steel rig I built."

• 1:12:12David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:12:13Speaker 14

  Like, a like, full, like, it's like, half their garage. And it's like, oh, this is who, this is who plays this game. It's like, fighting game fans. They're like, that hardcore.

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  I bought a steering wheel and like, anchored it to my desk, and I thought that was like, very impressive. And then, and then I had the same experience. People are like, "Here's the $10,000 rig with three giant wraparound screens that I got." And I was like, "Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna beat me in all of our races, aren't you?"

• 1:12:39Speaker 13

  One of the things that I remember most about attending Summer Games Fest last year was they had this like, rig setup. I don't even remember what game it is now, and I feel bad, where you kinda like, it mimics sitting in an F1 car. So it's really low to the ground on the floor, like, you're fully like, recumbent, and you use like, your feet to press the pedals and everything. And it like, it had a line like, really long for people to try it out, and I just was so intimidated for trying it out, because Summer Games Fest, or at least what it was last year, was like, it's this open space where all these game demos are. So people are like, walking. Looking around and you've got like Twitch influencers on those like little standing

• 1:13:16David Pierce?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 13

  Roomba things where they have like a Roomba attached to like a screen. So like influencers who are not there can walk around the floor and like look and like, oh, this is cool. You know, that kind of stuff. And there were so many people there with like cameras and stuff. And I was just so super intimidated of getting in that thing and looking like an idiot. That's so I never tried it, even though I was deathly curious about it. And that's one of my bigger regrets.

• 1:13:37David Pierce?

  Those games are tough. They do a better job now of making the racing simulators a little more sort of approachable to get into, but like they're so accurate at this point that every time I play one of these games, I sit down and the very first thing I do is crash my car like 30 to 60 times.

• 1:13:54Speaker 14

  So you're saying they don't send 30 streamers to your house with video cameras to shame you?

• 1:14:00David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:14:01Speaker 14

  Great, great, great, great. I'm on board now.

• 1:14:03David Pierce?

  All right, let's shift and go to this fall, which I guess for Chris Plant means the months of November and December.

• 1:14:09Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09David Pierce?

  But any, any game that's not out yet or won't be out until the end of the summer, we'll, we'll say is fair game here. Ash, what's your first one?

• 1:14:17Speaker 13

  So this was what I was holding on to from the previous segment, thing that I am looking forward to the most that is supposed to come out by the end of 2023 is Sonic Superstars.

• 1:14:34Speaker 13

  Big, huge Sonic fan. I was jazzed as hell to see that they're making another 2D Sonic platformer. I'm not really a big fan of the 3D Sonic platforms. Sonic Frontiers broke my heart famously because it was like, I was so excited for this game. And then I played it and it was just like such a mess in terms of how they implemented systems that it, it literally broke my heart like, because I wanted to like this game so bad. So I'm really excited to see that, you know, even though Sega won't give me Sonic Mania 2, they'll give me Sonic Superstars, which, you know, I consider that a fair trade. So I'm really excited to get back into like these 2.5 2D side scrolling Sonic platformers, because those are just fantastic, perfect games in every way, and I can't get enough of them.

• 1:15:19David Pierce?

  I almost picked this one too. I'm very excited about this. And I was trying to think, when was the last really great Sonic game? I feel like it's been a really long time since true Sonic fans have had a real winner.

• 1:15:31Speaker 13

  Sonic Mania was 2017.

• 1:15:33Speaker 14

  Okay. Yeah, okay. This is the controversial thing amongst like Sonic fans. We're a Sonic house out here. And the truth is, you could both say that there have never been good ones. Because going back and playing Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, they're designed to be headaches. The pleasure of the game is to like get a, your speed going right, you're getting a flow. And the game does everything it can to prevent that. And I felt like my, I was a diehard Sonic kid as a kid, then really, really fell off it. And now like with my kid, now I'm like re-falling in love with it, kind of meeting it on its own terms. I'm like, oh, it's actually just a traditional platformer. And I think once you start thinking about it like that, a lot of these recent Sonic games have been

• 1:16:14Speaker 14

  pretty okay. Sonic colors, it happens. I think that there's kind of like weird, some weird rose colored glasses for what people think Sonic was in the past versus what it actually was. But also the short answer, like actually, it's just Sonic Mania.

• 1:16:27David Pierce?

  I guess that's true. I was thinking Mania was longer ago than it actually was. And I guess Mania did what I hope Superstars does, which is just be a Sonic game.

• 1:16:35Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 1:16:35David Pierce?

  Like, like you're saying, Ashley, don't, don't try to do other things. Just could be more Sonic.

• 1:16:39Speaker 13

  Yeah. Give me more Sonic and Knuckles 3 and we're good. You can keep making that game forever and ever with new stuff and I will always buy it and I will always be happy.

• 1:16:48David Pierce?

  And you barely even have to update the graphics.

• 1:16:50Speaker 13

  No, not at all. Exactly.

• 1:16:52David Pierce?

  All right, Chris, what's your first one?

• 1:16:54Speaker 14

  Super Mario Brothers Wonder.

• 1:16:56David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 1:17:00Speaker 14

  Uh, which actually comes out before Metal Gear, so I am seeing the flaw in my plan. It comes out on October 20th. And I just love that, this is the most Nintendo thing to do on the planet, that Nintendo spends decades making a, and like refining an image of Super Mario, to the point where they finally make a movie. And they're like, cool, great, we nailed it. Now we're gonna change the entire aesthetic. And they're like, no, are you sure you don't want to make a game that looks like, you know, Mario? Like that movie that just made a gajillion dollars like, no, no, no. We're gonna make it look like a DreamWorks movie now instead. And they're like, god damn it. I am so excited. I am so glad that Mario was going to turn into an elephant. It's gonna be a delight.

• 1:17:42Speaker 14

  And I kind of don't want to see another image or trailer or anything from this game. Because as the wonder in the subtitle suggests, like, I think the surprise of it all. And the hint that it could be a little bit like Super Mario Brothers 2 in the US. That's enough to get me to play it.

• 1:17:59Speaker 13

  I wanted to ask, like, how do you feel about people saying like, this just looks like a updated version of new Super Mario Brothers, which, you know, as I was a Sonic household. I was not a Mario household. So looking at this from the outside, like, this just looks like a new version of new Super Mario Brothers. But instead of, I don't know, being a cat. I know that's not new Super Mario Brothers. Don't like, don't at me. I know that's not it. Instead of being a cat, Mario just gets high, right? Like, it just seems like, okay, Mario drops acid. That's what the thesis of this game is versus something like Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Odyssey, or, you know, where they definitely innovated on that formula. This just looks like, yeah, a newer game was, not that new of a game, rather,

• 1:18:41Speaker 13

  with like slightly updated graphics and maybe one twist that doesn't really feel as different as it should, which though, sounds exactly what Tears of the Kingdom was. And then you played it and it was a completely different experience on the level that is like media shifting, like earth shattering. So I hope you're right in that we don't get to see anything else about it and they just release it, which is kind of what Nintendo kind of does is like, okay, yeah, wait till they see this shit. It will knock the fucking socks off of them. So, yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 14

  I think also to your point that like, loving video games is a lot like being a wine connoisseur. No matter like what your franchise is. So if you're inside of it, you're like, oh, I love Sonic or I love Mario. And you taste the difference and it feels more substantial than it probably is. Like, if every Mario game is red wine, this is like Lambrusco or like something sugary and like bubbly. And it's like, I didn't know that a wine should do that. I don't know that much about wine, so I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants here. But I, yeah, I think, I think we've searched for those, those like slight variations. Because we both want the thing that we're familiar with, but also want just that little hint of something new.

• 1:19:53David Pierce?

  I mean, it also feels like we're, I don't know if this is a bigger trend or not, but there is definitely in a lot of these franchises, a sort of pullback to like, let's do the thing that works. I think everybody, everybody has been brought in by the, the lure of the battle royale and the open world, everything. And now everybody's just like, what if we just like made a cool game that's fun to play?

• 1:20:12Speaker 14

  Hmm. Which is why you're gonna tell us about Mortal Kombat 1? Is that an alley-oop?

• 1:20:16David Pierce?

  No, it's why I'm gonna tell you about Assassin's Creed Mirage.

• 1:20:18Speaker 14

  You're right, the other one doing it.

• 1:20:23David Pierce?

  The two series I have played most completely in the course of my life are the, the Arkham games of Batman, which I absolutely loved to pieces. Uh, and I'm very excited that they're coming to Switch and the Assassin's Creed games. And the thing that happened with the last two, with the last few really Assassin's Creed games was they just got too big. Everything got too open world and it was just like, do you just wanna be on a ship for the next five days? And I was like, no, I don't. Like, give me something to do. Give me a task. Let me go and actually play this game instead of just sort of aimlessly wandering yet another ancient town. Like, I don't know, that got old for me. And the story about Mirage so far is that it is a return to form in the sense that it is still big and interesting, but more sort of straightforward. And it's like a game you play rather than a world you

• 1:21:07David Pierce?

  explore. And I've just never been the like wander the world video gamer. I like appreciate those games and I understand why people like them. It's just never been for me. And Assassin's Creed is, is like a puzzle solving game at its best, and I'm very excited for that to happen again. Uh, I'm very hopeful for Mirage. The last two have been very disappointing, but I have high hopes for Mirage.

• 1:21:26Speaker 14

  Eh.

• 1:21:27David Pierce?

  No, you're out on Mirage?

• 1:21:29Speaker 14

  I mean, it's a Ubisoft game in the year of our Lord 2023. I, I hate to do that because a lot of talented people work at this publisher and everybody's trying their absolute best, but everything coming out of Ubisoft right now just feels so completely mismanaged. I would love for it to work. I really, really would. And it might be like my surprise of the year because everything you're saying is like spot on. That is what I want. I just, I just feel like I keep getting burned every time I let myself get excited for one of their games.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  It's fair. And the worry would be that this is basically just, they just release, you know, a 10-year-old game with slightly better graphics because they're like, well, we couldn't figure out a new story. People like the old one, we'll just do that again. And you're not wrong that that would be potentially the most obvious thing for Ubisoft to do here. So we'll see. Uh, all right. Let's keep going through. Last round here. Ash, what do you got?

• 1:22:19Speaker 13

  So I have a couple of things that I want to mention. So the one thing was the Prince of Persia side-scroller that was announced at the Ubisoft Direct that looks really, really cool.

• 1:22:30Speaker 15

  The prince has been kidnapped and taken to a forbidden land.

• 1:22:36Speaker 13

  I don't really jive with the Prince of Persia games, like the newer ones. I kind of really like the Xbox one where the girl like shoots flowers out of her butt when you know, you unlock a thing. That was fun. That was a fun game. But beyond that, like the Prince of Persia, like that original trilogy and all that, that really didn't jive with me. But seeing like the side-scroller, I guess there's something about like side-scroller platform puzzle-solving action that just really gets me. And seeing that game was like, oh, okay, yeah, I think I would like that a lot. So I'm really excited about that. There was another game that was kind of like that, but gives me more Hades vibes. It was shown during Summer Games Fest. It's from this, I don't know actually where it's from. It's just like this, it had this like one-off thing. It's called Lishfanga, The Time Shift Warrior. What happened to me?

• 1:23:21Speaker 13

  I'm a kid.

• 1:23:25Speaker 13

  It has this like Prince of Persia aesthetic, but this woman can like split herself into different copies of herself to like solve puzzles and stuff like that and fight enemies. It looked really cool. It was one of the coolest things that were shown off during Summer Games Fest and like one of the only games that like featured a woman. Sorry, I had to get that in there. And then finally, this, this one really does not fit within the purview that you set out for us, but it is a thick game that is always on my, I cannot wait for this list. And that is Dragon Age Dread Wolf.

• 1:23:53Speaker 15

  But now, he wanted to tear down that veil and destroy the world. And we're the only ones who can stop him.

• 1:24:05Speaker 13

  We have been waiting for this game forever. Every so often Bioware will pop up and be like, hey, we're still working on this game. It's still coming. Development is fine, we promise. Here's a little tidbit. And then they go back into their hole for like another three years. And we're about that time where it's time to pop out of their hole and say, hey, this game is still in development and it's still coming. Here's, I don't know, here's crumbs. For you Dragon Age freaks and then go back into their hole. So I'm really excited to see what that next little tidbit is. But I I'm excited. Dragon Age is a series that saved my life in so many ways. So I'm really excited to get a chance to play another one.

• 1:24:43David Pierce?

  All right, I like that. That one isn't like a game you're excited about so much as it is like a YouTube video that will happen at some point.

• 1:24:49Speaker 13

  Eventually.

• 1:24:54David Pierce?

  All right, well, yeah, none of those count technically under the rules, but I'll allow it. It's OK. Chris Plant, last one, what do you got?

• 1:25:00Speaker 14

  I have one that's in the rules and one that transcends the rules.

• 1:25:03David Pierce?

  It transcends. It doesn't break the rules, it transcends the rules.

• 1:25:06Speaker 14

  Yeah. The one that follows the rules is Alan Wake 2.

• 1:25:10David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:25:10Speaker 15

  I'm trapped here.

• 1:25:13Speaker 15

  In this nightmare. I write to escape.

• 1:25:18Speaker 14

  Because Remedy makes interesting games. They made Control a couple of years ago, which I think was one of the top five games for Polygon's end of the year list. And Alan Wake continues. Creator of the Alan Wake games, Sam Lake's fascination with Stephen King. And by fascination, I mean borderline stalking obsession. I just think the games are a delight. And I think that they understand the limitations of video game storytelling while actively wanting to push them. I think video game stories tend to have a bad reputation pretty understandably. And that's because they have a really tough task of both giving the player some sense

• 1:25:58Speaker 14

  of freedom and choice while then also having a thorial intent, which those things seem to conflict. And I think that they enjoy toying with that, knowing that like, almost thinking of a story as an experiment, and then less as like, oh, I need to make the greatest thing ever. Because they kind of know from the beginning that that's not entirely possible within the strictures of a video game.

• 1:26:21David Pierce?

  Wait, just real quick, how do you feel about the fact that Alan Wake looks absolutely exactly like Bradley Cooper? What are your thoughts?

• 1:26:27Speaker 14

  I like that, but I like Max Payne better because Max Payne actually has the face of the creator of Alan Wake.

• 1:26:34David Pierce?

  No way!

• 1:26:35Speaker 14

  Has his face, and he looks like he's painting like the world's biggest dump. Oh my god!

• 1:26:40David Pierce?

  That's great.

• 1:26:41Speaker 14

  It is such a good, good thing. And then my like transcending the rules is I am ready for the game of capitalism to come to an end and for this Microsoft FTC charade to just be absolutely over with, because I am just so done with it. Do you care at all? I care because, living in Irvine, there are so many Blizzard and Activision people in this area. And my personal stance on this is I think it's like a parody of government action, where things were not done when they mattered, so now it's going to be done over the people who make Call of Duty and Diablo. And I think it's going to blow up in the FTC's

• 1:27:20Speaker 14

  face, which is bad and embarrassing for them. The good news is I think a lot of people who already work at a place that is notorious for being a difficult place to work can like get out of this like purgatory period and start moving on with their lives, which I think is like a better thing than whatever the past six months has been for all these people.

• 1:27:42David Pierce?

  Fair enough. That does in fact transcend the rules. I will grant that one. My last one is Spider-Man 2, because I loved Spider-Man 1.

• 1:27:53David Pierce?

  Venom is the villain, you can play as multiple characters. It's just one of those things where they're like, "We took a game that you love and we made it slightly better, would you like to play it again?" And my answer to that is yes, always, every single time. And they're gonna be like, "We made swinging through buildings 6% more fun." And I'm like, "Yes, I will play it 500% more often now."

• 1:28:12Speaker 14

  He just flies, right? Like, I feel like on that trailer, they're just like, "But what if he just flies?" And I was like...

• 1:28:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, he has like flying squirrel wings now. It's like, I don't think that's canon, but I'm cool with it.

• 1:28:25Speaker 13

  As a across the Spider-verse enjoyer person who did not play Spider-Man 1 or the Miles Morales DLC. I, well, I can't say I'm excited for Spider-Man 2. I'm excited to, I guess, try it to see if it can sell me on what it is, because it seems like a good experience. But beyond that, like, I don't know, man, those, I get it, but I just don't get it.

• 1:28:47Speaker 14

  It's a certain type of, of game, right? Like, I mean, we were talking about the Ubisoft thing earlier, but I feel like it, it demands a certain thing of the player, both in terms of like, well, the politics.

• 1:28:59Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:29:00Speaker 14

  Also be like, the open world of the game and the, and the kind of to-do list. But that said, I get it, as somebody who I feel like I could really use a good to-do list game. I cannot, I should have said this earlier. I'm so excited to get deeper into Final Fantasy 16, because after Zelda, I am so happy to have a game that's like.

• 1:29:18Speaker 13

  You are on rails. You cannot go anywhere except where we tell you to go.

• 1:29:22Speaker 14

  You'll do this and it will be pretty.

• 1:29:24Speaker 13

  And you will like it.

• 1:29:24Speaker 14

  And it will confuse you.

• 1:29:26Speaker 13

  And, yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 13

  Exactly. Totally get it.

• 1:29:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm glad to have a game that doesn't feel like a creative exercise all the time, sometimes.

• 1:29:36Speaker 14

  Yes.

• 1:29:37David Pierce?

  All right, well, we need to take a break, but thank you both for doing this. This was, this was really fun and we're, we're gonna have to do this periodically, because God knows the games don't keep coming. But thank you both.

• 1:29:45Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 1:29:46Speaker 13

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  All right, before we go, let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866 VERGE11. Call and ask us all of your deepest, most personal, most chaotic tech questions. We love it. Here's one that seemed fitting for today's episode from AJ.

• 1:30:08Speaker 16

  Hi, Vergecast. This is AJ from Minneapolis. I'm curious to know, what advice do you have to keep an iPhone feeling fresh and performing well as it gets closer to its third year and beyond? A little background, I've been a mostly happy owner of an iPhone 13 Pro since that device launched about a year and a half ago, but the battery quality has gotten significantly worse recently. Some days I'm charging it twice fully, just to make it through one day. I've made all my past smartphones last at least three years, but I am not looking forward to another year and a half of this phone. I'll probably tempted to buy their latest device in the fall. Any advice to keep my battery in tip-top shape and keep this iPhone 13 Pro going strong? Thanks.

• 1:30:49David Pierce?

  AJ, I asked around, did some research, and I have good-ish news, I would say. The first thing that I tell everyone to do, and is just generally good advice, is reboot your phone more often than you think. Every few days, just turn it off and turn it back on again. It's good advice, frankly, for any gadget that you own, but you'll be amazed at the number of things that stop running in the background, that stop trying to access your location, that stop trying to access your microphone. These things just drain battery and they really add up. So reboot your phone every once in a while. A clean start always helps. Also, to the same end, delete some apps. Apps you don't use might be running in the background, might be refreshing every now and then. Apps that you genuinely don't use or care about, just get rid of them. The Ticketmaster app on your phone that you use two times, you're better off just downloading that and re-logging in every once in a while

• 1:31:34David Pierce?

  than letting it linger on your phone. If you ask Apple how to help your battery, the first two things it will tell you are: Use Wi-Fi whenever possible and turn down the brightness on your screen. Those are only really doable things in certain situations, but take that for what it's worth. As little brightness as you can, Wi-Fi whenever possible. The thing I do to save battery life that I've had really good luck with is turning on low-power mode on the iPhone. In theory, it turns some stuff off, mostly background refreshing and push email and that kind of thing. The place I notice it is it turns off background iCloud syncing. So if you use apps that sync through iCloud to other devices, you might notice it not syncing quite as often or successfully. But otherwise, I can have low-power mode on all day and frankly, barely notice the difference,

• 1:32:17David Pierce?

  but actually get significantly better battery life. One thing you should do for sure is make sure that on your iPhone, you have optimized battery charging on. It's a setting, I think, under Battery Health in the Battery Settings in the Settings app. And basically, what that does is not fully charge your iPhone until you're gonna need it. And there are a lot of people who will tell you that leaving your phone at 100% for a long time, especially plugged in, can be bad for your battery health. So turn that on. I'm generally not of the mind that you need to really babysit the way that you charge your phone. I just think that's too much work, but you can at least turn that setting on and have the device do it for you at some point. But ultimately, the honest truth is you're just gonna have to get a new battery at some point. I think we keep our phones longer and longer.

• 1:33:02David Pierce?

  And the idea that you can keep your phone for several years, but replace the battery somewhere in the middle of that range is not a terrible trade off. I checked Apple's thing and it said that it'll be about $89 to put a new battery in the 13 Pro, which to me is totally worth it and certainly a lot cheaper than buying a new phone if you're otherwise happy with your phone. I think it's a bummer that you're already experiencing battery troubles with a 13 Pro, which is not an old phone. But if that is the case, you can check the battery health also in the battery settings in the Settings app. And if it's below 80% of its original capacity, that's when Apple recommends and will actually work with you to replace it. So get a new battery, low power mode, reboot your phone every once in a while. And otherwise, good luck.

• 1:33:45David Pierce?

  You can be one of those people who obsessively charges your phone between 40 and 80%, which is what a lot of people will tell you to do. I think that's too much work. Do with that what you will.

• 1:33:55David Pierce?

  All right. That is it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who was on the show and thank you as always so much for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about, AI, Apple stuff, on theverge.com, lots of Apple things coming in the next few days, I think. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also, you know, read theverge.com. It's a website. We like it. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other tips on how to make your battery work better, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline, 866-VERGE11. We are already building a bunch of episodes based on your hotline questions. So thank you so much for that. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minthers is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:34:36David Pierce?

  Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about threads, Reddit, Apple, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:34:52Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare Is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:35:14Speaker 10

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:35:38Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:35:54Speaker 17

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