Here's what an AI-first phone might look like

Some of the biggest players in AI — in particular OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon — are heavily invested in creating a world after smartphones. They're also all rumored to be building devices that sound a lot like smartphones. Verge contributor David Imel helps us figure out what these companies might actually be building, what an AI smartphone looks like, and whether anyone can unseat Apple and Google. Links: Elon Musk denies a report about SpaceX’s AI phone prototype OpenAI is reportedly launching a phone for ChatGPT Amazon is making an Alexa phone Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 5G connections. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about phones. Kind of. We're going to talk about this new set of AI devices that appear to be coming for us, that are not phones. At least, the companies who are making them claim that they're not phones. But they seem to be a lot like phones. They're AI-centric. They are, in some cases, made by companies who want you to use their AI products. And they're trying desperately to unseat the smartphone while seemingly discovering that the only way to do that is to make a smartphone. David Amel, who's with The Verge this summer, is going to come on and we're going to talk through what OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon, and potentially many others are up to, and whether any of them can build anything that isn't a smartphone that actually makes

• 0:47Speaker 00

  you replace your smartphone. All that's coming in just a second, but first, here's what else is happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, July 27, 2026. A bunch of big AI companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, and a whole host of others, are creating a new group called the Open Secure AI Alliance. It comes after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared an open letter last week arguing in favor of open models in general. It became a whole thing over the weekend, who signed that letter and who didn't. That particular drama isn't all that interesting. But the US AI industry is clearly concerned with how fast China's AI is improving. And in part, it's improving that fast because its models are so much more open. That means some big questions are left to answer about how we build and share AI going forward.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, it appears Amazon is gearing up to start competing for real with Starlink for satellite internet supremacy. It filed an FCC application over the weekend to deploy 5,105 new satellites starting in 2028, and said it plans to partner with mobile carriers to offer direct-to-satellite service, kind of like Starlink does with T-Mobile right now. Right now, Amazon's LEO service is way behind Starlink, way behind. But the company bought Global Star's network earlier this year and has said it intends to offer its own service going forward. There's even been a rumor recently that Amazon might be building a phone again? I wonder if those things are connected. And finally, The Verge's Antonio Di Benedetto just dropped his review of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, which is frankly, one of the most exciting things to happen to Windows PCs this year. It's modular, it's repairable,

• 2:15Speaker 00

  it has good battery life and performance, and almost everything else you would want. It is also, thanks to the ongoing RAM shortage, $3,100. That's up $800 since it was announced just in April. Ramageddon comes for us all. You can read more about all this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, July 27.

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• 3:42Speaker 00

  All right, let's talk phones that aren't phones. David Amel is here. Hey, buddy.

• 3:46David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  The Verge's David Amel, Waveform's David Amel, davidamel.com's David Amel.

• 3:52David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Just the David Amel. He's here.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Good to have you back. So, I've brought you here to talk about phones, but not actually to talk about phones. I've just become obsessed with this thing that seems to be happening, where a bunch of companies are looking for a way to put AI into a device that makes it the most important thing in your life. And basically, if you're not Apple or Google, you can't. You just, you just don't have an option, for a bunch of reasons we should probably get into here. But what you now have a bunch of other companies doing, I think most reported, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon are all believed to be, reported to be, in the process of making something that they would love you to believe is not a phone, but might have an awful lot in common with a phone.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  And what I want to try to figure out here is whether, A, that's possible, B, what it would be, and like, at what point is your not-phone just a phone? And what's the line you need to avoid crossing? And C, whether this could even possibly work? Does this all make sense to you?

• 4:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  This seems like a crazy moment that we're in, in not-phone-phone world.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  You asked me if it makes sense to me. The idea makes sense to me. The what would this even be does not really make a lot of sense to me. Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Okay, good. So, let's talk this out a little bit, because I think, if I'm OpenAI, I assume the thing I want is a ChatGPT-forward device available to you at all times. Is it, is there anything more to it than that? Do you think I'm missing anything here?

• 5:24David Pierce?

  It seems like that. I mean, they're going through all the, you know, they make all of these things where they just build the UI on the fly, and they just move through intent-based operating. Like, the main, the main paradigm shift that I think a lot of these companies are trying to do is that they're trying to move from a tool-based model, where you use your phone as a tool, each individual app is a tool, you jump to the tools, to an intent-based model, where you can use natural language, and your intent becomes the thing, and then the apps become the piping for the thing. But if you make a wholly new device that just tries to ignore all of these apps, what are people actually going to be doing, right? Because we, we use ChatGPT, and we use Anthropic to like, create things

• 6:09David Pierce?

  to then put on the tools that we use every day. And this is where I get confused about what exactly are they trying to make?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think, even as a user, I struggle with the question of what this would look like in a way that I find compelling. And I think, I think you're right, that the thing they're trying to do is upend the idea that the first thing I do is open an app to do something, right? Every, every time I want to do anything, the first thing I have to do is open an app and log into that app. And I think there's actually a pretty strong argument to be made that that sucks, that actually it's really inefficient, and remembering where everything is is really complicated, and doing things that might exist between multiple platforms is vastly too complicated. I am, I am a long-term believer that Apple shortcuts is a terrible solution to a very real problem. So, the idea of saying, okay, we want to, we want to flip that on its head and actually just let you worry less about where things are

• 7:02Speaker 00

  and sort of the, the individual silos on your phone, and more about the thing you want to accomplish.

• 7:06David Pierce?

  Hundred percent.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Makes some sense to me, but I don't think, I just don't think what I want is for my phone to unlock into a chat window.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Is that, is there, is there something else you can imagine that might look like?

• 7:20David Pierce?

  Oh, that's hard. Um...

• 7:23Speaker 00

  This probably is like, the many-billion-dollar question that a lot of people are R&D-ing their way through right now.

• 7:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it probably is. I assume that they probably have a bunch of ideas in a lab somewhere, where you open your phone and they try to just guess your intent based on the things that you've done before. And the secondary model is to open a chat window, you know what I mean? They probably just want to try to predict what you want to do before you want to do it. But, but my question, again, becomes like, well, if apps don't exist, then what do you actually do with a device like this, you know? And then maybe apps do exist, you know, OpenAI, their device is apparently going to be an Android phone? Is that sort of the idea? It's like an Android-based device?

• 8:01Speaker 00

  That seems to be the, the running theory. But Android-based device can mean a lot of things, right? You can, you can run a version of Android that has absolutely nothing in common with what most people perceive to be an Android phone.

• 8:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Like, your, your dishwasher is an Android device at this point. So I think that, that could mean a lot of things. But I do think there is, there is a case to be made that it might be a regular, regular, normal Android phone with a very ChatGPT-ish launcher.

• 8:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could kind of see that. The hard part about that is like, it feels like the idea of an app and the buttons inside of an app are buttons for a reason, right? Like, if you, if you're typing a prompt, that takes like, so much longer than just like, tapping a bunch of buttons to get to the point where you want to be. If you're on like, a multi-chain, like, do this with this, this app, and then send it to this person, and then edit it this way, I could see it being, you know, based around typing or your voice or something like that. But right now, the like, input mechanism of buttons is actually quite efficient compared to anything else that they might want to use it for, so.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  It's very true. Yeah, one, one very simple way I've been trying to think about this is, okay, what if you unlock your phone, and the first thing it drops you to is not your home screen of app icons, but the Gemini app? And you can still, you know, you can swipe again and get to your apps. And actually, in theory, they're all there, but we've just sort of flipped the layers, right? That the, the thing on top is the AI system, and underneath it is all of the apps that you maybe want to tap on. Does that do anything for you?

• 9:33David Pierce?

  You know, okay, I'd say that the new Siri is probably a good way to look at this. Now, anytime I want to do basically anything, unless it's literally like texting the first person in my contact list, I just pull down from the top and I ask Siri to do it.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 9:47David Pierce?

  So in a way, that is kind of what you're describing.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  And that means you actually changed that behavior fairly quickly. This is the thing I was gonna ask you about is how much inertia there is in smartphones. But if you were able to do that, just in the course of a couple of developer betas, that strikes me as kind of a meaningful change to make.

• 10:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I will say that I was, at first, I was only doing it because I wanted to pressure test Siri as much as I possibly could and see like, can it do this? Can it not do this? I don't think it can do this. Could it do it? But it has actually changed my behavior. And a lot of the time now, I am just asking Siri questions. I mean, the biggest question is like, Google search revenue is gonna disappear because, you know, I'm just asking Siri all these questions, but Google already knows that.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Wait, give me an example. What kinds of things have you discovered you can offload to Siri AI?

• 10:33David Pierce?

  Okay, so, uh, one big thing, I'm like, I was on Instagram yesterday morning. So I guess that's not like the first thing I do when I open my phone. But I'm on Instagram and I see that my favorite band is going to announce tickets for the show that they're gonna have in December. And it doesn't say anywhere on the screen when they're gonna release the tickets. They just announced the show. So I scrolled out, I scrolled out on the Siri thing and I said, can you remind me to buy tickets to this when they go on sale? So it like searched the web, found when they're gonna go on sale, and then it created a reminder to buy the tickets at the exact time that they went on sale, which was this morning.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  That might be the single most impressive Siri demo anyone has ever just, seriously, that is like, that's the dream. That's like the stuff they put in advertising videos that never actually work the way they're supposed to. That's awesome.

• 11:21David Pierce?

  It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. But the other question, though, becomes like, if it's using an Android phone or if it's using Gemini, like Google's kind of like paradigm for these AI-based, you know, for Gemini controlling your phone, is that it's sort of agentically clicking around. So obviously, like, how the phone is controlled is very important. You know, Apple's version of this is, we're gonna ask developers to put in all of these schemas and pipes to make sure that this actually works, whereas Google's just tapping around. And so if you land on like a Gemini, you know, you just land in Gemini, is it going to then swipe out of Gemini, enter another app, click on that app? Because the current version of that, as Alison has shown in her article, it like works, but it's very slow.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:08David Pierce?

  And I think it's also gonna require a lot of trust. You know, if you just ask the ChatGPT app on your phone to order you Starbucks, there's a lot of trust built in there. Is it my red address? Did it get my order correct? Did it remember to do one pump of vanilla instead of two? I don't know. I think it might take a little while longer. And I'm very curious like what these companies are thinking deep down in their labs on how these interaction paradigms would actually work.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think what's so funny about the Siri example is, I think you both just described exactly why every company is running at this idea. Because if you can do enough things like that for people, it starts to feel like a actually genuine paradigm shift in how we use our phones. And also, Apple is never, ever, ever, ever going to let anyone other than Siri do that thing, right? And so if you want to do that thing, you have to build something else. And this is, to be perfectly honest, like, I don't spend a lot of my time feeling sympathy for OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon, but I do sort of feel for them in this case because you talk yourself into this long enough and you get to the point where to say, oh, to do that for David Amel, we have to have an Instagram app.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And then you've built a smartphone. Like, you just did it. You do that three times and you have made a smartphone. And you can see why everyone talks their way into phones. Like, I remember talking to Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing, years ago when they were starting, and he was like, I have, you know, giant ideas about the future and we want to build lots of new things. I'm still waiting for any of those to come to fruition. But my question to him was, well, then why make a phone? But you think you know what's next. Why make a phone now? Just start going and doing the next thing. And his answer was just essentially, we have to make a phone. If we don't do the phone, we can't do any of the rest of this. We have to make the thing that's in your pocket. We have to figure out how to make all of this work. And their answer has been, build the ecosystem with, you know, earbuds and all this other

• 14:00Speaker 00

  stuff, then try to sort of back that into some stuff that only works on the Nothing phone, and then presumably start to try and flip the form factor. So you like have to do it in a bunch of steps, but you do kind of have to make a phone first.

• 14:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  So do you think it's possible that at the end of this, OpenAI and Amazon and SpaceX, if they all ship something, it might just be an Android phone? Or something essentially identical to an Android phone?

• 14:28David Pierce?

  I think it's essentially gonna be an Android phone. I mean, we saw the Rabbit R1 like try to do something. Now, given that was super early and it didn't work and what they said it did, it couldn't really do, but that was also just an Android phone. You know what I mean? It was like, we made it a different shape. And, you know, it's like, is, are there models embedded enough into your life for your daily interaction paradigms that you are going to want to use that model to interact with those things that you do every single day?

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:01David Pierce?

  I don't know. I mean, Google has the best shot with Gemini. Apple has a very good shot. You talked about the earbuds with the cameras. I don't know what their interaction paradigm with those cameras is gonna be, but they already, like, if Carl Pei said, we have to make the phone first and then we can make the smart things that attach to the Nothing phone later, that's exactly what Apple's doing.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:22David Pierce?

  A third party coming in and doing that, it's just like, is anybody that invested in Grok? That they want a Grok device? Like, I don't, I just, I, you know, I don't like being pessimistic and being like, there is a duopoly, but there is a duopoly.

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• 17:46Speaker 00

  At this point, particularly in the US, there are only two phones that matter. There's the iPhone and there's whatever Samsung shipped. That's it. The people, like, I love the Pixel. I think more people should buy the Pixel. People don't buy the Pixel. People buy Samsung phones and they buy iPhones.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Is it even conceivable to you that OpenAI could show up with a pretty good Android phone and make a meaningful number of people switch?

• 18:10David Pierce?

  What was the positivity rate around AI in the United States again? Like, lower than the Democratic Party?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Real, real, real bad.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  I don't think they can do that. They might get like a quarter of San Francisco, maybe.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:23David Pierce?

  But they're not gonna get anybody else. And also, you know, the, the problem that that puts you into as well is that if you buy a device made by a model maker, it's inherently, if not only going to work with that model maker, or works best with that model maker. And it doesn't really feel like a lot of people have allegiance to any particular model. I guess there's a little bit of allegiance to like Claude, but that's because they're supposedly the company that's trying to do the right thing.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Well, ironically, I think the allegiance to Claude is as much a referendum on people don't like OpenAI as it is anything else.

• 18:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is also very true. That is also very true. But, but either, I mean, as soon as I'm, I don't know, I, I'm a big believer in like these open source models are starting to get crazy. And as soon as RAM gets cheaper again, I think people are gonna start running their own, especially at business scale. You know, if you can, if you can buy RAM cheaply again, a lot of these open source models are almost as good. And you just really don't need to use any of these model providers. So, I don't know, a, a device for me makes no sense. I, I think a smartphone running the, what these companies want you to use makes sense. And it is the most basic thing that we've always had. But disrupting that, that interaction paradigm is like, I don't see how you do it.

• 19:42David Pierce?

  Especially like you were saying, you either open up to a chat box, which is, is kind of annoying to open up to every single time you unlock your phone, or you have to talk to it. And the reason that things that you have to talk to in order to interact with them don't work is because we live in a society. So, you know, the Vision Pro, very isolating, everything's isolating. Isolating things don't work.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  I will say, I am, I am extremely bullish on doing more things on your phone with voice and fewer with a keyboard.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Good dictation on a smartphone is life changing. Like I, I did this big experiment earlier this year where I tried desperately to get rid of my iPhone, uh, tried all the other Android phones and then came back to the iPhone because I'm a like deeply broken person. But

• 20:28David Pierce?

  You and everybody else.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  The biggest thing I discovered, my absolute favorite thing about the day to day experience of Android is how much better dictation was.

• 20:37David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Gemini is better, voice recognition in general is vastly better on Android. But my ability to successfully type text messages on an Android phone leaps and bounds beyond what I've ever experienced on an iPhone. And it was wonderful.

• 20:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  And I think in general, I've been testing all these dictation apps on, on the Mac too. And the idea that they're starting to understand which app you're in and actually communicate and transcribe differently based on the apps. I think that's, A, that's pure AI and that's very powerful and is going to be very exciting. That is, OpenAI showing up and being like, we have a better dictation model on our phone. You should buy our phone instead is not gonna work.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  No.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  But I, Amazon is the one of these that I'm the most stuck on because right? Amazon, 2014, tried the Fire Phone.

• 21:18David Pierce?

  Uh.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Obviously didn't work and it was, it was full of bad ideas. I think the most bad idea being that what people mostly want is a closer connection to amazon.com all the time. That is just not correct. And then there is, there's been this reporting that Amazon is building a phone again. It's internally known as Transformer, which is a rad name for a phone. They should just call it that. But let, let me just read you two quotes. This is from a Reuters story about this phone.

• 21:45David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm ready.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  It says, "The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day," the people said. Quote number two. "As envisioned, the new phone's personalization features would make buying from amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music, or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever," the people said. Amazon has learned nothing, David. They're just doing it again.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  Dude, does anyone really want capitalism OS? That's basically what that is.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Truly.

• 22:16David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. I, I don't watch TV really at all. But I was over at a friend's place and they had a Prime TV show on. I think they were watching Fallout or something. I did not know that there are literal buttons on the ads that you can just buy an ad to your Amazon cart while you're watching the TV show.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:36David Pierce?

  And I really feel like that's so blackmail and I just don't.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  Does any, nobody actually wants that. Like, nobody wants to have their escapism and just inject consumerism into their escapism. I don't see that working.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  You know who wants that? Every ad executive in the world. They want you to want that so very badly. But yeah, this to me is Amazon, and there, there's even a line in that Reuters story that says Amazon understands that putting AI front and center in this way is actually not what people are looking for. So they decided to put Prime Video there.

• 23:11David Pierce?

  What?

• 23:11Speaker 00

  This, this to me is just like, this whole idea is just completely doomed on its face to me. I've only come up with one theory about what might work here and why all these companies might be doing this. And I just wanna run this by you and I want, I wanna know what you think.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  Let's see.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  I think there's a world in which, a few years from now, most of the job of our phones, or if not most of the job, a lot of the job of our phones is essentially to be a brick of compute and network connectivity. And that actually trying to put a lot of, a lot of LLM stuff and a lot of battery and a lot of processing into your headphones or your watch or whatever else is a bad idea. But if you can just have a, a brick full of battery and LTE in your pocket at all times, you don't need that. You, you can, you can do all the stuff you wanna do with your nifty headphones through the phone. And that's actually, no one will feel like that's weird because that's how we've been doing it for a very long time.

• 24:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  So maybe if I'm OpenAI, what I'm trying to do is not sell you a thing that makes phone calls and sends text messages and open Instagram at all. What I'm trying to sell you is literally just a box of ChatGPT, but that's not even the point. The point is just to be compute, battery, network connectivity. And that if they can figure out a way to do that, that is slim and good looking and does give you some kind of readout when ChatGPT needs to show you something, that maybe that can work. This is the only theory I've come up with that makes any sense to me. I wanna know.

• 24:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. My question becomes, why didn't they just move forward with the earbuds that leaked that were fake with Skor and Iverson or whoever that guy was?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  It's fair.

• 24:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. You know, that makes a lot more sense. I think making earbuds that are specially tuned to work with ChatGPT in some way and having them like connect to your phone and work really well with the ChatGPT app. And when you set it up, it recommends that you change your default model to ChatGPT. Like, why do they need to work into building the actual box themselves? Like, that, that is the hardest part. Building the box and getting people to buy the box is by far the hardest part. It's easy to just build an accessory, like, and an accessory is like lower cost, easier to get people to buy, easier for people to use, change their, changing their paradigms with, you know, if you already have to buy earbuds, just buy the OpenAI earbuds if you're really into ChatGPT. I don't, I don't know.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  I don't see any sort of acceleration mechanism in a dedicated device. You know, Google made the Tensor chip specifically because it really wanted to accelerate AI workflows and that was before generative AI. It was when they were just doing all the, you know, machine learning stuff. And that has worked out well for them. Part of the reason that the voice dictation you're talking about is better is because Tensor is very good at voice dictation. So it's like, I don't know, I still don't understand this hardware. I, they might be thinking something that I just am not even aware of, but it makes no sense to me. I think they should all make accessories. I would love, I would love to see, you know, Anthropic Ring or OpenAI earbuds or Minimax

• 26:22David Pierce?

  shoes or something. I don't know. Anything, anything.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. AI shoes is an idea whose time has come.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. You know, it will happen. It will happen.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  I mean, I do think the problem with that theory, again, especially in the US, is that a lot of people use iPhones and you just can't get that kind of access to an iPhone, especially for free, right? Apple, Apple is happy to give you lots of things for 30%. And I think the, the obvious, like, the animating principle at Meta right now, I, I earnestly believe this in my bones, the main thing Meta is working on is ways around the Apple tax. That is like the leading product at Meta is how do we get around the Apple tax? And I think there's a lot of that going on at these other companies too, where there is a sense that if we give, you know, if, if we build an accessory to the iPhone, actually

• 27:13Speaker 00

  what we're doing is that we're inviting Apple to just Sherlock us with AirPods. And that what we need to do is we need to get around it entirely. And many have tried for 15 years. This is, this was the idea behind the Metaverse. There was some of this in all of the blockchain stuff. We've just, this is part of the animating principle behind smart glasses. We've been at this a long time and. It's kind of why I think this question of what are these non-phone phones is so interesting. Because I do think if there is a way around them, it is not to invent some completely new thing. It's to make better phones. It's possible, again, that they're so entrenched that everybody just buys the next iPhone or the next Galaxy phone, that none of this matters anyway. But like, if I, if I sort of galaxy-brained my way into this, right? We're, we're doing flip phones again, we're doing fold phones again.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  There is more energy than ever for people to get away from their phones. So that maybe there is a sliver of saying, we have a new way to do it, that might be something.

• 28:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  But then, but then you go back to what you just said. People don't like AI. I just, I don't know. I'm so, I'm completely lost here as to what, what avenue in these companies could find. I understand why they're looking for it, and I cannot, I can't find it.

• 28:23David Pierce?

  I mean, OpenAI is trying to build their own chips, right? So like, maybe in this fab, they're gonna build smartphone chips. And maybe those smartphone chips will have accelerators for specifics, AI-based tasks. Maybe. But then, you're still using Android, right? So like, if you use, and if you wanna use Android, and if you want to interact with the apps people use every day, you still have to use the Play Store, which also takes a percentage. It's not like the Apple tax is the only tax on the highway. But, you know, you couldn't just not use the Google Play Store, but then if ChatGPT is the only app on your phone, what, what can that even do? I don't, I don't, unless OpenAI decides to build like, a competitive ecosystem for every single thing that you do on your phone every single day.

• 29:07David Pierce?

  Are they gonna build a Venmo that like, enough people will use, that they don't have to think about? Like, I just, I mean, maybe this is Elon Musk's idea with X being the everything app, and like, they made a Grok phone, it next could do your social media and also your payments.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I guess. That's where we're going, apparently.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  People also don't like Elon Musk. So what's the, you gotta get people to like you. This is like, I feel like they, they've really, um, I don't even know what the right term is here, but the number one thing they need to do is get people to like their product before they try to sell a bunch of said product.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. So to that end, actually, I want you to rank these three companies for me. Let's, let's just say, Amazon, SpaceX, OpenAI, all ship something that is just a very AI-centric smartphone. Like, you define that however you want, but we're, we're gonna say they all sort of ship. I want you to rank one to three, how you think they'd do.

• 30:01David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Um, I think this is actually, this exercise is very easy for me, which is why I'm curious.

• 30:07David Pierce?

  Okay, okay.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  I found it, I, I immediately know the answer for me, and I wanna know if we agree.

• 30:12David Pierce?

  Would the SpaceX AI phone only have X on it? Or would it have other?

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 30:19David Pierce?

  That's the question.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Ironically, I, like, I wanna say yes for the purposes of this exercise, but also, given the way that Elon Musk has systematically kicked every other platform out of X, there's, I, I just feel like there's no shot Elon Musk lets you install Instagram on your SpaceX phone.

• 30:36David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  I just don't see it. But let's just say, for the purposes of our exercise, yes, these, these are sort of feature-wise, functionally the same kinds of devices.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm close on OpenAI and SpaceX AI being number one. I think, funny enough, it seems like SpaceX AI being like, four to five companies bundled into one, kind of diluted their individual hate for any of the individual companies a little bit. You know what I mean? Like, now when you think about Twitter, you're thinking about SpaceX, and people don't dislike SpaceX that much, like, some people do, but, so, I would say SpaceX AI would be number, would be the most likely to win, in my opinion. Uh, the OpenAI phone would be number two, and I just, I just do not see the Amazon phone. Unless it was like, on sale on Prime Day for like, $20, you know?

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, they did that with the Prime, with the Fire Phone, turned out nobody wanted it.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  And it's still, nobody wanted it, yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was my list too. If only because Elon Musk, for, for all of his flaws, has a long history of being able to just horsepower things like this into existence. And there are enough Elon fans out there that they would buy it. And I think, I think you're exactly right, that, about the dilution of branding problems. And I think that is a big, giant part of the reason that all of this has happened. Because for, you, you can say whatever you want about this company, but it is objectively rad that they launch and land rockets.

• 32:03David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  That just, it just rules. And so, all they need to do is keep that image in your head, and don't think so much about the rest, and everything will be fine. And, and I think they can possibly do that successfully enough, and tell a story about Starlink, and I think Starlink might end up buying a carrier, put the phone on that carrier. Like, you, you can sort of see how that thing works. I don't think it becomes the iPhone, but I can, I can sort of see how it would work. I also think they would make, they wouldn't make that thing, they would make a Grok phone, and it would be a disaster.

• 32:31David Pierce?

  That's what I was about to say. Less people, like, less people know about the Grok child porn image stuff than people know about the fact that they dislike Sam Altman. But, less people, even less people know that Grok actually exists. So I don't think that they're gonna be necessarily swayed by Grok. I think the dilution of rocket company makes a phone is probably more interesting to people. And Grok is just a side thing, they'll just say, oh, it has AI capabilities.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 33:03David Pierce?

  Which is sad, cuz Grok is like, the worst model in terms of what is done for the world, but, you know?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yes, Grok is a horrific disaster that no one should ever interact with, ever.

• 33:13David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  But rockets are cool. And it is possible to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time. And this is, this is what we have to do here. Yeah, and then I agree, I had OpenAI second, because I actually think if OpenAI had made a ChatGPT-centric phone in like, 2023, it might have had a real chance. Because the, the adoption was so huge, it seemed so exciting, there was so much enthusiasm about what was going on.

• 33:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  We hadn't really had time for, A, people who are going to develop these workflows, who already develop these workflows. I think even, even if they ship this thing, there are going to be a lot of people who say, well, I have ChatGPT voice mode wired to the action button on my iPhone, how is this more useful and ChatGPT-centric than that? And that's a set of power users who are already starting to learn how they do these things, and are going to be hard to get to change. And everyone's opinion about Sam Altman, OpenAI, and AI in general has changed in the last three years. And I think that is a, it is still a hugely successful, very-used product that I think people don't like nearly as much as they did a few years ago. And then, Amazon, object disaster.

• 34:19David Pierce?

  I just don't even know why they're trying. Just don't build a phone.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  I admire, I admire the codename, I admire the effort, just kill the project, guys.

• 34:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just don't even think that people associate SpaceX AI with data centers, which, you know, they're not, they probably don't have as many built out as OpenAI, et cetera, but they do have the mega data center thing that they're leasing to Anthropic.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, Colossus.

• 34:43David Pierce?

  Colossus. They are a major data center player, but people don't associate them with it, because there's just too many things to associate with that company, cuz it's X, and it's, and it's a rocket company, and it's an AI company, but nobody thinks about the AI company. So yeah, OpenAI is directly, like, people's grievances are directly associated with OpenAI. When they think about artificial intelligence, it's like, they're the ones building the data centers in my backyard, they're the reason RAM is so expensive, they're the reason that everyone's getting noise pollution in small towns.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:16David Pierce?

  It's, uh, it's not, it's not great for them.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  It's a big branding hole to get out of, if you wanna sell somebody a smartphone.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  Maybe just merge with forever companies, and you'll be okay.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 35:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  McDonald's, Taco Bell, OpenAI.

• 35:27David Pierce?

  Taco Bell.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Everybody loves Taco Bell.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  You could never, that's true, that's a great point. That's a great point. That would help a lot, honestly.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  I think so. It's, it's an idea whose, whose time has come, for sure. All right, David, thank you for being here. If anyone out there has worked on one of these phones, has ideas about how these things should work, if you think you've figured out the next UI paradigm, if it's not a bunch of apps on a screen, and it's not a chatbot, what is it? I honestly wanna know. Send us concepts, send us your ideas, send us weird things that you've worked on that you think are rad, uh, I wanna hear all about it. And then, David, as this stuff gets more real, you and I are gonna have to talk about this again.

• 36:03David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely, we're gonna get into it.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Good to see you, bud, thanks for being here.

• 36:06David Pierce?

  Good to see you.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to David for being here, and thank you, as always, for watching and listening. I was serious, by the way, if you have even thoughts about this, I would love to see ideas, see concepts, if you've built something funky that you think might be the future of AI on a smartphone, how to marry this idea of, I wanna open apps and look at them with, sometimes I wanna use an AI agent to go do things on my behalf. This is the interface question, I think, of like, the next decade. And if you have thoughts, I would absolutely love to hear all of them. Call the hotline, 866-VERGE11, send us an email, [email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything The Verge is up to is to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters, it gets you all of our coverage of whatever these weird phones turn out to be. Whenever they launch, we will be there, and so can you. Theverge.com/subscribe. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron LaCassio. We'll see you tomorrow, rock and roll.

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