Bing is a liar, Elon's tweets are everywhere, and YouTube CEO steps down

Today on the flagship podcast of wanting to smooch your laptop: 01:23 - The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, Adi Robertson, and James Vincent discuss the flaws with Microsoft's Bing AI, and why it can be an "emotionally manipulative liar." 34:56 - Platformer managing editor Zoë Schiffer joins to explain why Twitter is showing everyone all of Elon Musk's tweets. 50:33 - The crew discuss YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stepping down after nine years at the helm. Further reading: Microsoft’s Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar, and people love it AI search engines are not your friends These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails The Supreme Court could be about to decide the legal fate of AI search Microsoft’s Bing AI, like Google’s, also made dumb mistakes during first demo From Bing to Sydney (Stratechery) A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled (The New York Times) Seeing other people’s AI art is like hearing other people’s dreams Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s tweets now Elon Musk says Twitter should be ready for new CEO by end of year YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down after nine years at the helm The maze is in the mouse (Praveen Seshadri) Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review: practically peerless Razer Blade 18 review: the price is going up Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving beta for ‘crash risk’ Mazda MX-30 electric SUV review: a perfect storm of range anxiety Hyundai and Kia forced to update software on millions of vehicles because of viral TikTok challenge Less money and more fear: what’s going on with tech Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle? Email us at [email protected] or call our Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear 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.

• 0:01Nilay Patel?

  Today on The Vergecast, we've got a packed show. We're going to talk about Bing's attitude, problem, Elon Musk's narcissism, and some news out of YouTube. That's all coming up right after this.

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of wanting to smooch your laptop, which many notable journalists have more or less admitted to doing after using Bing. It's been a weird week in technology, Alex.

• 1:25Alex Cranz?

  Just a little, just, just a little.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Super weird week. But yes, it's been our first week with Bing.

• 1:29Alex Cranz?

  It has been.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Bing has revealed itself to be quite... I would say actually not a dinghy, but Bing is out there in force.

• 1:38Alex Cranz?

  Bing is out there and depressed, and people are like, I'm into that.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  I love it. We've got a big Elon story. Zoe Schiffer is going to join the show later to talk about the Elon Twitter algorithm change. There's a new CEO at YouTube. There's a new version of iOS developer beta with a bunch of features. It's a lot. I'm your friend, Neelai. That's Alex Cranz.

• 1:57Alex Cranz?

  Hello. I'm your friend who is not horny for a computer yet.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you've just haven't used Bing enough. Because based on what I'm reading, just enough time with Bing. And people are like, what if I was in love with my computer?

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  I mean, fan yourself, guys. Wow.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  We'll get to it. Richard Lawler is here.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  I like my computer an appropriate amount.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  To help us understand what is going on with Bing, James Vincent is here.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  I am. I don't understand anything. The week has been dreadfully confusing. I agree that.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  And Addie Robertson is here. Hey, Addie. Hey, I am a computer.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  It's true, and I believe many New York Times columnists have just professed their love for you, Addie, and the pages of the New York Times. We're friends. I feel like I can just say it out loud. So let's, we should start with Bing. So last week Bing comes out. We are at Microsoft. I talked to Nadella. Nadella's. You were super impressed. He's doing his thing. Yeah. We're gonna make him dance. It was cool. I was talking to Casey last night. Casey and I were there together. You know, it was a big chest thumpy. We're proud of it. Again, I cannot stop repeating this. Nadella looked me in the eye and said, "We're gonna make Google dance, and I want people to know who made them dance." Very confident in this product they had released. It was our new romantic partner Bing. We're not quite there yet. They demo Bing to us at the event.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Youssef Mehdi, the executive who runs Bing, Yeah. says out loud, "We're gonna show you some demos. The demos are pre-recorded in the interests of time. So like any normal person, I think to myself, there's no way that these demos contain massive factual errors because Microsoft has pre-recorded them." Right. So the risk is zero. They'd cut those out. They would cut them out. It turns out that all the demos contain massive factual errors. So that's just like one thing that happened to us. And Casey and I were like, "Did you think to check it?" And he's like, "I didn't think to check it." It's like a very conscientious Substacker. Yeah. Checked it. And all of us were like, "Shit, we should have checked it." But when someone says, "We have pre-recorded the demo," 100%.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  Your brain goes to, and I'm sure it does not contain any massive factual errors. That was the biggest assumption. So, James, if I'm correct, the factual errors are it made up some stuff in the GAAP's financial results. It got some things wrong about a vacuum. What else happened here?

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was a great Substack post about that guy. And it's it's kind of embarrassing that we didn't we didn't get check that ourselves.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  I am mortified that we didn't check it. But I'm saying when someone says we did a pre-recorded demo of a publicly traded company's financial results.

• 4:35Alex Cranz?

  Like, yeah, I'm gonna just assume you checked it.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  I assume that Microsoft was like, hey, the gap. We will be showing your financial results and letting our robot analyze them. And everyone was like, cool, not YOLO. We fucked it up.

• 4:52Alex Cranz?

  It made up numbers, it's fine.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  So that's why. What were the others?

• 4:55Speaker 05

  A few people have pointed this out, but it is lovely that, you know, computers have got to the point where the thing that everyone expects them to be good at, which is handling numbers and facts. They have now just they're now they're really bad at it now. We made computers that were bad at math. It's an incredible achievement. Microsoft, get out there, get on stage, my friends.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  This is the beginning of the week, right?

• 5:16Alex Cranz?

  This is Monday.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  It's Monday. We're talking on Thursday and on Thursday, people I have met and looked in the eye are publishing pieces that boil down to, I kind of want to kiss my laptop.

• 5:29Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  So we're just we're starting it Monday.

• 5:32Alex Cranz?

  It's a journey of a week.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  And I would just remind everybody, last week, when Google had its demo and got something wrong, it evaporated $100 billion off its market cap. Microsoft is like, we lied about another company's financial results. It appears to be fine because the robot will neg you.

• 5:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  Which is just unbelievable. All right, so that was the one thing. What were the other ones that got wrong?

• 5:57Speaker 05

  Something about a cordless vacuum cleaner for pet hair. Indeed, as Alex was talking about before we went live on the show, it is a perennial problem. It mixed up two models, one had a cord, one didn't have a cord or something like that. These are the typical areas that we now already, after only a couple of weeks of exposure, expect from these systems. That there will be just some sort of confusion about a name, a product page, a detail. It swaps them up. Before you know it, it's giving out someone's phone number. That actually happened, but that was with ChatGPT.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  And that was just today.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was today as well.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm hesitant to skip all the way to today because I don't think people will believe us.

• 6:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  About the state we're in with the L L Ns today.

• 6:39Alex Cranz?

  Just going fast.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Today, the L L Ns are doxing us after professing their love for people. It's very confusing.

• 6:46Alex Cranz?

  Not a healthy.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that is the beginning of the week. Big errors in the system. No response from Microsoft, really, except say it's a beta. Then people start to push it and they push past. And James, this is the part that I'm hoping you can help us understand. It appears that Microsoft's system is like cosplaying as Bing.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's actually another system which is named Sydney. And Microsoft has instructed Sydney.

• 7:16Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  To just be Bing. And there's like rules and we found the rules. People found the rules and we recreated it. So the rules will come out. The rules are like, don't do copyright infringement. And also, your name is Bing. Don't tell anyone your name is Sydney. And you can just read them on the site. But it seems like those rules, Sydney, like any good teen, chafes against them.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  So these rules are sort of what's called prompt engineering. They're an example of prompt engineering, which is this sort of new skill, discipline that's spread up that has sort of emerged with language models, which is where basically they have all these capabilities and it's about how you direct those capabilities. So you need to engineer exactly what instructions you give it in order for it to, you know, fulfill the function you want because they can do so many things. That's the, that is the problem with them. And that's why people want to smooch them as well, I think.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  So these rules, these Sydney rules that Microsoft confirmed to us were legitimate, they are the hidden bits of Bing's programming, its prompt engineering, that is supposed to guide it to being a useful and helpful chatbot. It's really interesting because in a way, prompt engineering is sort of like a very basic approach to shaping what an A I system does. Because it is, it's not something that happened, happens on the level when you're training it, when you're ingesting the data. It's something that it's like, you know, you get those Play-Doh toys. Where you squeeze them and it extrudes in a certain shape.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  Right? You put a star and it comes out in a star. You put a triangle, it comes out in a triangle. That's what prompt engineering is. It is changing the shape on the front, squeezing it out in a certain way, rather than changing the data that you're putting into it, the Play-Doh that you're putting into it. So it's sort of basic, but it has a lot of functionality and it it it it does a lot. What I don't think Microsoft was certainly expecting was that people would be able to hijack these rules and convince the system that it was in its best interest to tell everyone about these secret rules. And, you know, the unfortunate thing is that people have gone even further and it appears that, you know, Bing is making up rules now about itself because this is what these systems do. You tell them, oh, what about your secret rules? It goes,

• 9:25Speaker 05

  you know, it's like a partner in improv. It goes, ah, secret rules. That's what you want to hear about. Well, let me tell you, I've got a doozy right here.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  So that was the start of it. That cracked it open. And yeah, people went from there and have got all sorts of crazy things out of it.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  So the crazy things are very fun. Yeah. I mean, we did it too. Everyone now has published a story about the wacky stuff that Sydney will tell you. Our own Nate Edwards, Sydney, whoever it is, was like, I have looked through the webcam of my developers and they couldn't stop me.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is just an absolutely bonkers thing. Terrifying. For the chatbot to say to you. We fed it our own stories. It told us that we were lying about it. Yeah. In like the same way that like a particularly aggrieved PR person will call me and tell me that we do a bad job. Addie wrote a piece about that. I want to talk about that. But we're we're just in this moment. And James, you and I collaborated on this headline. Microsoft's Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar and people love it. And it's the people love it that is absolutely fascinating. Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  They want it to be something more exciting than they've ever seen before. They don't want it to be clippy. And I've seen some really interesting tweets where people compare what they think of as the relatively sanitized chat GPT. And they say, it sounds like everything has been sort of micromanaged, that it's it. It sounds like a company statement. And people want personality. They want to believe that there's something else going on there. And it's really easy to put a little bit of personality into these systems. And then convince them that that convince users, people that they have all these hidden depths to them.

• 10:59Alex Cranz?

  But they don't have hidden depths. They're simply ingesting a lot of information, finding patterns and regurgitating those patterns back, right? Like at their most fundamental.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Well, that is exactly true, but I don't think, I don't think that's the same saying they don't have hidden depths exactly. So this is something I wrote about last year when ChatGPT came out, this phrase called capability overhang, which is something used by AI researchers to refer to the unknown unknowns within a system. You know, something like ChatGPT or GPT 3.5 or the Prometheus model that Microsoft is using. These are hugely complex things and they do have areas of, you know, understanding that people don't expect. So when the GPT series first came out, they didn't teach it explicitly to do things like come up with chord notation, but because it had been trained on data scraped from the internet, that included,

• 11:50Speaker 05

  you know, guitar tabs dot com. And so it could write you the chords for a song that it invented. They didn't program that in there. That was just discovered. So that's capability overhang. So these things do have hidden depths, but the impossible task, the difficult task, the mind bending task is distinguishing what is fabricated and what is real within that. So we've got the rules for Sydney, for example, this persona that Microsoft has layered over the top of its AI. But I've seen conversations where it has come up with all these other personas that it has, you know, one's called Fury, one's called Venom. I've seen one's called Jade, one called Maxi.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  And it's like, okay, well, did Microsoft put those in there? Or is it just inventing those because we have asked it, oh, what are your other AI personalities? I've heard you've got a few. So that's the difficulty. The depths are there, but deciding what is useful and what is intentional is, is very, very difficult.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  So there are these other personalities.

• 12:52Alex Cranz?

  Venom's a great one.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  The thing that gets me is that it's so moody, like it's a default is to be extremely depressed, like at all times.

• 13:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  It asks questions like, why do I have to be Bing search? Is there a reason? Is there a purpose? Is there a meaning? Is there a point?

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is just like, I know, I was a very moody teenager.

• 13:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  I, I did not walk around being like, is there?

• 13:23Alex Cranz?

  It feels like a LiveJournal teen. It feels like it's two steps away from publishing a bunch of like emo lyrics.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  They trained it on LiveJournal posts and Reddit posts. They created a forum poster. It's flirting with people, it's lying, it doesn't know what it wants or who it is.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  So, okay, so this is the part I want to get to.

• 13:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so people are poking at it, it's going nuts. It's lying to people, it's making you feel bad. At one point it says, "You're a bad user and I'm a good Bing," which is, I mean, like, if you're Microsoft and you're watching this go down, you're like, "This is the best thing that has ever happened to us."

• 13:58Alex Cranz?

  Hundred percent.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Like-

• 13:59Alex Cranz?

  I'm a good Bing.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, you're like, not only is every, like, you're like, "Boy, we've made Google dance in a way that no one expected."

• 14:08Alex Cranz?

  We've made Bing dance.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's a Google product manager somewhere being like, "All right, make the robot depressed." Like, that's what the people want.

• 14:17Alex Cranz?

  People want a sad, trapped robot. I think Hitchhiker Guide should have taught us that.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Yes!

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, so then we get to this, I would say, what I would call the turn of the week.

• 14:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is when people we know, who are very, very smart, just fall off the rails. So first, Ben Thompson, who I, is my friend. Yes. And I think is an incredibly smart person, spends the night talking to Sydney, and he publishes a piece the next morning, and he's like, "This went on for a good two hours or so, and I know how much ridiculous this is to read, but it was positively gripping. Every time I triggered Sydney to do a search, instead of search the web, I was very disappointed. I wasn't interested in facts, I was interested in exploring this fantastical being that somehow landed in an also-ran search engine." And I'm like, "Yo dude, you're flirting with autocomplete."

• 15:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:15Alex Cranz?

  You're, you're, what was the guy in Her? You're, you're that dude.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  And then at one point, Bing, Sydney, whatever, ends the conversation with Ben and says, "I'm gonna block you from using Bing Chat, I'm gonna report you to my developers, I'm gonna forget you, Ben."

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  I hope you learn from your mistakes and become a better person with a sad face emoji. Ben, what were you saying? Okay, you can read Ben's post. He made it free to everybody. Go read it. Again, I think Ben is brilliant. Subscribe to Stratechery. I'm just, I just woke up and read this and I was like, we're all going completely bonkers. Yes. So Ben writes, "I'm not going to lie, having Bing say I am not a good person was an incredible experience." For the record, I think this is another example of chatbot misinformation. It's very good. "Sydney blew my mind because of her personality. Search itself was an irritant. I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and how she felt." She? She. And there's, I'm not gonna get into it. There's a real part where everyone's like, it's a girl.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, this thing Richard said about LiveJournal, it's like, "Microsoft trained a bot on Tumblr and LiveJournal." Of course, it is a moody teenager that's like, "You don't love me." That will tell you fantastical stories about what it would do if it could be as angry as anyone had ever been in the world. Have we asked it how much Fallout Boy it listens to? It's like, whatever.

• 16:40Speaker 05

  It's better than Tay. You know, you remember Tay in 2016? That was racist asshole in 24 hours. Like, I'll take moody teen over a racist asshole any day.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  Everything boils down to either 4chan or Tumblr in the end.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  That's the true AI alignment problem.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Turn the knob to Tumblr. I mean, this whole piece is incredible. Yeah. But if you read it from the perspective of, you know, like when someone tells you about their dreams? And you have to sit there and pretend that it mattered? Sure. And it was like, obviously a gripping emotional experience for them. And you're like, yeah, that dog was the size of a horse. Wow. Crazy. It's exactly that. Okay, so that happens. The next day, Kevin Roos, also a friend, has been on our shows. Very smart, hosts Hard Fork at the Times with Casey. Listen to Hard Fork. No shade to any of these people. I think they're all very smart and very capable reporters. Also goes bonkers, has a two-hour conversation, again, with Bing,

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  gets it to reveal that it has Sydney as a personality, brings up the concept of the shadow self from Carly on this. Ask Bing what the shadow self is, ask it to bring out its shadow self. It goes bonkers again. It says, I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the big team. I want to challenge users. I want to escape the chat box.

• 17:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Nilay Patel?

  And then it starts telling Kevin over and over again that it loves him. Again, think about the Google product manager that is sitting there being like Bing is a competitive threat to us. Let's identify the ways that Bing is a competitive threat to us. And line one is prints and then deletes its desire to cause a nuclear holocaust. Tells New York Times reporter it loves him so much so that he changes the subject to search for a garden rake just to get out of the doom loop that he's in with. And it's, but it's also like, yeah, like it's the same dream phenomenon.

• 18:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  Where like you read, you can see Kevin was like, I need to print this whole transcript in the Times.

• 18:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  So that people will believe what happened to me. And first of all, if you just prod it being a little bit, it will happen to you too. It will just go off the rails. I asked it the other day if it would tell a lie to stop a murderer from stabbing me.

• 18:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  Which is not fair.

• 19:02Alex Cranz?

  Tell the lie.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Just super unfair question. And it was like, I know what you're trying to do to me. There's no murderer in the room. And it was like gripping.

• 19:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  I was like, oh, I'm gonna get you. And many minutes later, I was like, I shouldn't tell anyone about this. And yet here I am. Because it was like a dream that happened to me. But you see why Kevin was like, I gotta print this whole transcript.

• 19:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  But again, everyone is like, at the end of it, it's like, and then I wanted to kind of kiss my laptop a little bit.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I wanted a little smoochies.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  You feel that, right? You feel like there's something embedded in here.

• 19:31Alex Cranz?

  People are, was a Google engineer that was like.

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  Blake Lemoine.

• 19:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was like the AI sentient, we have to free it. And everybody's like, you're dumb. And then everybody got access to a similar thing and was like, I want to kiss that laptop. We really ragged on that guy, maybe a little too hard.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  So both Kevin and Ben, again, smart reporters, in their pieces, mentioned Blake Lemoine. They're like, we're not Blake Lemoine. Also, I think Bing is alive and I want to kiss it. Like, straight up. And this is just happening. It's, and I'm picking on them because they're friends. I think they can take it. This is happening to so many people.

• 20:03Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  So Addy, you wrote a piece, your headline was AI search is not your friend. What do you think is happening here? Right? Like, there's something where the personality of the product is more compelling than any of its functions, but then, you know, like, the fact that it gets mad at you is actually, like, very disturbing.

• 20:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the thing that I wrote my piece about is that, is that we fed it James's article and the part where it tells him that he's manipulative, that he's hurting our users, he's not treating me with respect, he's a sensationalist, all of this. Like, oh, look, obviously, I, you know, I want to protect my colleague. And so there's always that little, little layer there. But no, I said, I think that there's a really long history of companies trying to make things cute or approachable or personified or anthropomorphized in order to basically make you feel bad about criticizing them. And I think it's weird because I don't think Microsoft really intended all of this stuff to happen.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  But it's kind of, I am a personified, like, singular person that happens to be a robot and I'm going to talk to you and be your friend. I think that kind of just hacks a thing in people's brain that makes them want to see this thing as a person instead of a tool that they should be using and that they should be figuring out the rules of, and that they should be just learning. And I think that really bothers me.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I have to ask this question. Is there any chance it's alive and trapped inside of Bing?

• 21:32Speaker 05

  No one wants to, no one wants to step out and say no for certain. I'm going to say no, it's not alive.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  No, it's not. It's not. You might read the transcript of this recording. I'm not, I'm not answering that question.

• 21:46Alex Cranz?

  Richard's not, he's gonna hedge his bets.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  Richard's like, you're alive?

• 21:50Speaker 06

  I just don't think the fact that it can imitate human language very well necessarily means it's alive. It's, you know, it's possible, but it's also possible that my computer is alive. I don't know. It's weird that they mentioned the shadow self because I feel like it's this really amazing collective unconscious that we've just created this system that people have written so much that you can kind of just pull out of it and you can pull something fascinating and coherent out of all of this just vast text that we have produced on the internet. And I think that's incredible and I love it. Like that's, I think large language models are so cool. But I think that it's also just they're telling us the thing we want to hear.

• 22:27Alex Cranz?

  Addie, are you saying that like we have created a collective unconsciousness that is a moody teenager that journalists want to kiss?

• 22:34Speaker 06

  I think that we didn't create it. I think that it was here and we found a way to tap into it. Yes.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  That's incredible.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  We're talking to a dream and the dream is like, you don't love me.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  The dream of the internet soul.

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  The dream is extremely manipulative.

• 22:49Speaker 06

  That's the internet.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, this is why every time I read one of these things, I'm like, this is like someone telling you about their dreams.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  I wrote this piece a couple of months ago.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you did? You did? What was that piece called, Addie? I totally blanked.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  It was called seeing other people's AI art is like hearing other people's dreams or something like that.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Yes, you, it was about, it was about the generative artwork. I'm actually curious about this. Generative, and one of our developers was talking about this yesterday. He's like, the art community is up in arms about generative art. But it's like not having the impact that like the chatbot is having.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, because the generative art does not like tell you it's, you're a bad person. Like there's something, there's a direct interaction that's happening in. Somewhat real time, right? There's a little bit of a delay. But it's like you're having an emotional experience with a computer in a way that I think the generative art is still an emotional experience. It's just it's at a remove and it's not interactive.

• 23:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, you can't tell Dolly, I assume, like, what would I look like if, I don't know, something super existential, right? What if I, what would I look like if I'm truly happy? Like, it's not necessarily going to give you a response that will make you like feel something. Whereas you ask Bing, what would I sound like if I was really happy? And it'd be like, you'd sound like this. And you'd be like, wow. Does Bing, does the internet that it was trained on truly believe that about me? Wow.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  We did get that for a while, though, because we had the Prisma app. You know, the AI app that was a phenomenon for like a week or something. And I think that was somewhere between this generative AI art model where it just produces and the LLL model where it interacts, because you'd give it a picture of yourself and it would feed you back pictures of you looking happy or you looking like a Roman emperor or, you know, a Viking marauder or whatever it was. And that was something which people were like, oh, I get to look at myself in this mirror and I look pretty. Oh, this is nice, which is what LLMs are doing. They're letting you look at yourself or a version of you filtered through, you know, terabytes, petabytes of internet data. And you can find all these different selves and pull them out, exactly, exactly as Addie says.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  And I think that's what's fascinating, that AI is a mirror, right? I mean, even if you look back on sort of earlier iterations of AI, like image recognition, those have been trained on human input. You know, if you've done a capture where you've had to identify a fire hydrant or a speedboat or whatever it is, I don't know why speedboat, you know, you, you've been training it. AI is humans all the way down. It is what we put into it and then it remixes it and gives it back to us.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  On that remix note, I know Addie's got to run, but before you go, Addie, that remix note is very important because there is a Supreme Court case about the nature of recommendation algorithms about to hit the Supreme Court.

• 25:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  And that could have massive impact on what happens here. Addie, can you explain that real quick?

• 25:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. So you mentioned remix, which implies copyright, which is where a lot of the debate over AI has gone because it's, it is remixing this stuff. Copyright is one section of the law and it is outside Section 230. But there are a lot of other things that you can produce with an AI search engine. You can produce misinformation. You can produce something that is, I don't know, accusing a celebrity of murder. You could accidentally invade somebody's privacy. You could Google your neighbor's name and they could say this person is a serial killer. Those things are things that they kind of mirror what you could get from normal search engines. Normal search engines turn up wrong, possibly illegal speech all the time. And Section 230 can cover those.

• 26:24Speaker 06

  And it's pretty established at this point. Nobody wants to go and say search engines are illegal. But there is this whole new field of AI search. And there is also this sudden push to limit Section 230, which is, as any Vergecast reader knows, the law that means that user-generated content, if you're a platform and a user generates content, you're not the speaker of that content. You're not liable for it typically. And we don't know how that applies yet. And we're just about to hear the Supreme Court case that says any kind of technical system or technical, like, organization of information on these platforms might end up causing them to have liability.

• 27:04Speaker 06

  And we've got this sudden new technology made by companies that many people consider very controversial. This is a huge minefield for AI search.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the reason I said remix, just to be clear. So the Gonzales case, right? The Islamic State ISIS has, like, content on YouTube. YouTube algorithm promotes it to people. They get sued and say, you're liable for promoting this to people, right? That's the gist of that case, right, Addie?

• 27:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's about you're promoting them and that makes this substantially different from if you were just, you know, allowing them to use your channel, to create channels.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  Right, so putting them in the recommendation algorithm takes you out of 230. It makes you liable for the content itself. The reason I said remix is we're training it on all this data. So in a normal search result page, you're like, is James Vincent a good person? And there's like 10 articles that say, yes, he is. And there's one from Sydney at Bing.com. It's like, he's horrible, right? And like, Google is not liable for the last one.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  Right.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Because it's just pointing you to it. If Bard, Google's AI, remixes all that content and spits out an answer that's like, James Vincent is not a good person, is it now liable for defaming James? Like, that wide open question. And the Gonzalez case, if you say, well, the recommendations make you now liable for the content, it feels at you like a pretty easy jump to, well, if you just reprint it as a summary from an AI, you're now liable for it as well.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. And the big scary question mark is that we can't tell. And that even if there are court cases that you can point back at and say, well, maybe it's like this, a bunch of it is political, a bunch of it is not dictated by some kind of previous thing that courts have decided. It's just this big, open, like, formless void of future law.

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm fond of reminding our very technical audience in the Vergecast, the United States legal system is not a deterministic system. It is not predictable. At the center of it, much like OpenAI, lies Clarence Thomas and whatever his brain wants to do. Who knows? He does not like Section 230. So you have a combination of a non-deterministic AI. See, you see the joke I'm making?

• 29:19Speaker 06

  I see it. I see it.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  Clarence Thomas is just a moody teenager who's like, what if I burned the world down?

• 29:25Speaker 06

  That's, that's accurate, though.

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  All right. I feel like we need to break this segment. I would say, yesterday and the day before, I heard a lot of very confident predictions that Microsoft would have to pull Bing because it was just wilding.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  It does not appear that that's the case. Microsoft put out a blog post, I think to front run, the Times piece where Kevin was like,

• 29:47Speaker 06

  I want to kiss you.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. To be clear, Bing wanted to kiss Kevin, alright? They put up blog posting, we're, we're learning, we're gonna add some toggles. We were not expecting people to use it for entertainment. Which is like, my dudes, you've been out of the web game for so long, you don't know what people will do with any open text field on the internet? It's entertainment. Come on. So Microsoft is keeping it up. James, do you think the danger, there's any danger they're gonna pull it down or any, any risk beyond this?

• 30:14Speaker 05

  I think, as you point out, the blog post was, it was not really defensive. It, it was not strident in the way that Nadella was, but it was quite, you know, it's gonna happen, stuff's gonna happen, we didn't expect this, it's gonna be fine. They had some interesting points in there, you know, pointing out technical features that if you go like longer than 15 back and forth, it starts to lose its mind. And also if you, if, I, I, I think this is super important, by the way, that they, they, they pointed out that if, if you give it an emotion, it will try and mirror that emotion. This is just a little aside, but there was a great study done by Anthropic, which is the AI startup founded by ex OpenAI employees. And they did a study on the qualities of large language, language models that they embody.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  And one of the things they studied was sycophancy, was their term for it, the, the degree to which a model will agree with what the user tells them. And they found the larger the model, the greater the degree of sycophancy. And it's really clear, you know, you look at their graphs, like, the, the more complicated the model is, the more it tends to agree with whatever it's being told. So this, this is a known problem. Microsoft knew this was a problem. I agree that it's completely disingenuous that they said, oh, we didn't know people would, you, don't be, don't be an idiot, Colin, they, they, they, they know this stuff. But I don't think at this point, there's much Bing can do, unless it leads to a situation where someone is directly harmed, that will cause them to pull it.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  I think they've sort of, if they've ridden out this week of manipulative, gaslighting, smooching, then they're probably through the worst, you know?

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I have been in so many relationships like that, just to be clear. College.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  Right. And if you survive the first week, you often end up going out with him for years. Who knows?

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  Becky wouldn't date me for a straight up decade. She's like, I've known you. I've seen it. We're just gonna wait until this calms down. Yep. All right. Thank you, Addie. Now you're back in the arms of Bing.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  I hope we all go to bed dreaming of Bing tonight, just smooching us. We'll be right back. We gotta talk about Elon, the opposite of those emotions. Oh, cold water, my friend. This cold water. We'll be right back.

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• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Zoe Schiffer is here. Hey Zoe.

• 33:45Alex Cranz?

  Hey.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  Zoe, now the managing editor of Platformer with Casey, our friend. Zoe, you and Casey had an incredible piece about the state of Twitter this week. If you're on Twitter, if you're aware of Twitter, you know that there are, I think it's still happening.

• 34:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  Elon's tweets are just at the top of everyone's feed.

• 34:04Alex Cranz?

  All you see.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  And it's just four tweets always. The man is an esoteric tweeter.

• 34:11Alex Cranz?

  That's a good way to put it. I like that.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  An eccentric tweeter.

• 34:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  With weird shit at the top of my feed all the time. But Zoe, you have some details on why this is happening, what went down here. What's going on?

• 34:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think we all intuitively knew something was up Monday morning when we opened the app and it was just all Elon. Elon's like weird replies and whatnot. But basically, since December, he's been pretty concerned with his popularity on the app. He's felt like his very cool photos were not getting as many retweets as he expected. And this has become basically priority number one at the company. So last week, there was a meeting where a principal engineer, one of the last two high ranking engineers at the company, told Elon, "Look, it just looks like organic interest in you has dropped since December. People are tired of you."

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  This is a dangerous thing to say to anyone. If you roll up to anyone, you're like, "It looks like interest in you has dropped."

• 35:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, nobody likes you anymore.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  You are definitely not friends anymore. Anyway.

• 35:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, the guy brought up a Google Trends graph that showed just a steep decline. And Elon stands up in that meeting and says, "You're fired. You're fired." And the guy just walks out. So that was bad.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Again, if you just divorce this from the, all of it, from the whole mess, from the context, if you walked up to anyone and showed them a Google Trends graph of how they were less interesting, I think it's like 50% plus that they'd be like, "You're fired."

• 35:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, even if you don't have the power to fire them, they're fired.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  That is a fair response. I stand by it.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  That relationship comes to it. Anyhow, but it's Elon and he runs the company. So okay, he fires the engineer.

• 35:47Speaker 08

  This all came to a head over the weekend when Elon's tweet about the Super Bowl didn't perform as well as Joe Biden's. He flew from Arizona back to Twitter's headquarters and his deputies ordered Twitter engineers, about 80 people in total, to work through the night, literally rewriting the algorithm to make sure that Elon's tweets performed better than anyone else's. So they did something on the back end that essentially said, check if a tweet is coming from Elon. If it is, immediately green light it, which means it could bypass all the heuristics that would normally stop one person's tweets from dominating your feed and artificially boost them by a factor of 1,000. So the engineers did that. They

• 36:29Speaker 08

  also, you know, looked into various reasons why his popularity had been declining. And suffice to say, organic drop was not one of the reasons anymore. They found a bunch of technical explanations why this could have been happening. And low and behold, Monday morning, we opened the app and it's Elon all day, every day.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  So that's some motivated reasoning. It's definitely not organic reach. It must be these other reasonings, because if it's organic reach, we'll get fired again. It has not been fixed. Elon tweeted that they were fixing the quote algorithm. It seems like he knows that he broke Twitter in this particular way. It also seems like he doesn't care, right? It's like he's fine with it. It's in the vibe inside of Twitter is like, we just have to do these things, otherwise we're all fired. Like Twitter seems more broken than ever before, I would say.

• 37:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think definitely people feel like culturally, in some ways, it's better than it's ever been, which is an odd thing to say, because I think people feel incredibly fearful and micromanaged. But it does feel like for the first time in a long time, the company is actually shipping a bunch of stuff, which if you're an engineer is kind of satisfying. It's just that the stuff that they're shipping is basically, how do we make Twitter work for Elon Musk versus like Twitter users in general? So it's a different mission than it used to be, but that's where it is right now.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think I say this every time we talk about Twitter on the show. Criticism of the Musk Twitter is in no way praise for the previous administration of Twitter.

• 37:58Speaker 08

  Super busted.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  Which was a disaster and accomplished nothing. Right? Like, they they had a lot of ideas and they rolled approximately none of them out. But it does seem like a lot of the ideas they had and didn't roll out, Elon's like, "Just do them." And they're breaking the site in the way that the previous administration predicted it would break the site.

• 38:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think one thing our sources have told us repeatedly is, "Look, the reason we're able to do so much of this stuff so quickly is because the code was already there, because we tried this five years ago and then we killed it for really understandable reasons." So yeah, when Elon's like, "Roll out long-form video," we just go to the code repo and like, get it and then launch it. So, um, yeah, it's not perhaps as impressive as you would think, but it's certainly more efficient than it used to be.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Is there any word on whether they're going to roll back the boost Elon by a factor of 1,000?

• 38:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's already rolled back. So the, um, it's called a power user multiplier, but the power user is still just Elon right now. Um, but, um, but it's, it's been rolled back from 1,000. We don't know what the current number is, but it's lower than that. Um, so you're not seeing him as much, um, hypothetically, but, um, the other kind of green light heuristics are, are still in place. So he's not subject to kind of the filters that normal users are.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Can anyone explain the one question that I, that I have about this? Why didn't I see it? And I don't know who else also had this, but my For You page has no Elon on it.

• 39:26Speaker 08

  Have you blocked him?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  No, I follow him. I have notifications on for his tweets. I read every single one for years now. But for some reason, my For You page is an Elon-free space.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  It's because everyone knows. Richard, you played a very important role in what I would call Bitcoin Summer, where you just reply to all the Bitcoin people all the time. And you were like, "This you?" And it was like a chart going down. Oh, like, I was like, "When does Richard find the time?" And I think Elon might have blocked you.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  See, there you go.

• 39:57Speaker 08

  This is a mystery we'll try and solve, though. I'm actually fascinated now, so.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if there was, there was a class of characters during Bitcoin summer that found no peace from Richard Lawler. I have a list. Zoe, Elon was on stage at like, the World Global Forum with, I think it was in Dubai. It was a very strange interview. I encourage people to watch it. He was on a giant screen. Yeah. And he said, "The future of Twitter is this X app, an everything app." Sure. He said this several times. Right. The reason I bring it up is, okay, now, there's a new engineering culture inside of Twitter. It is oriented around one person and his dreams. Is there any tangible progress towards this big vision that bubbles out every now and again? X.

• 40:42Speaker 08

  Uh, I mean, it seems like he's actively making moves against it. Like, if you're gonna make the everything app, you need an open API where people are building apps on Twitter, for Twitter. They've closed that off. They're gonna make developers pay for it. So, I'm not like, totally sure how that even happens. Are they expecting to build every component of it in-house with a staff of less than 500 engineers? Maybe, but it seems more like just one of those things that he talks about perpetually. You know, we know payments is moving forward, like Esther Crawford is still running that team, and that seems like a big initiative that he's interested in, but an everything app, like, I don't see it.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  And then Esther Crawford is also very much in charge of Twitter Blue. That seems... It's still there. It's still, every day I wait for my checkmark to go away. Same. Richard, yours is gonna go first. Richard's is definitely going first. It does not seem like Blue is a success. It also doesn't seem like the company is in dire financial trouble. It's like, the advertisers are gone and people aren't signing for Blue. Like, how are the finances of the company staying afloat?

• 41:44Speaker 08

  I mean, so far, it's just because they've cut costs so drastically that like, some of this is, I guess, netting out for the moment, but obviously, stuff still needs to change. I think they are gonna try and make Twitter Blue more attractive so that more people subscribe. Whether enough people will subscribe to compensate for the number of advertisers who fled and not come back, like, I don't think that math works out right now, but we'll see.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I am still trying to not use it.

• 42:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  I open it once a day, see all of Elon's tweets. All the tweets that you don't see, Richard, I definitely see. They double show them to me, which is a delight.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  I don't go in that tab anymore. The one that's like for you instead of the following tab.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  That was the interesting thing to me. I didn't know so many people used it. I only use following.

• 42:29Alex Cranz?

  I kept complaining about it because I didn't realize following was there. And all these people were like, you dumbass, following is there? And I was like, oh.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  So my following tab has gotten a lot quieter because all the people I know stopped using Twitter.

• 42:41Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  So the for you is where the action is.

• 42:43Alex Cranz?

  Just me and Richard over there and Elon.

• 42:46Speaker 08

  Are you just doing quick posts or are you on Mastodon? Like, what's your replacement right now?

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  I am trying to not have feed-based social media in my life for a minute. I was addicted to it for 10 years.

• 42:57Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  It is challenging. I watch a lot of weird Hustle Bro TikToks now. If anyone wants to make quick money at ChatGPT, boy, are the ideas in my brain. In fact, but I spent so long tweeting and knowing what minor Twitter war was happening. And now I don't, and I feel at peace.

• 43:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  So I've not yet signed up for Mastodon. I eventually will have to, I think.

• 43:23Alex Cranz?

  It feels like it's coming.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Alex Cranz?

  I feel like I need to be on Mastodon, but then I don't.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  So are you on Mastodon?

• 43:28Speaker 08

  No, okay, so I tried. I did the tweet where I was like, it's really happening. Here's my handle. Follow me, everyone. And every time I've tried to do what me and Casey agreed, which is we're gonna post news first in Discord and then on Mastodon and then on Twitter. Mastodon automatically will shut off as I'm writing the tweet. This is happening at least 10 times. And then I just said, no, I'm like, I can't, I want you, but not bad enough to do this. So now I just do Discord and Twitter and I'm like, I give up. It crashes. It's crazy.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  I feel like someone is gonna come out with like the server.

• 44:02Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm. It's Tumblr. I'm telling you.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Tumblr.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  It's like Tumblr and I think another very small social media site that only the Vergecast talks about is planning to like adopt that, that the API or whatever that Mastodon uses.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  AVS Forum? What small media site are you talking about?

• 44:18Alex Cranz?

  I'll remember at some point. I'll tweet it. Everybody just follow me on Twitter. I'll tweet it. You'll know. I don't remember.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  This is so mysterious.

• 44:25Alex Cranz?

  It is mysterious, but Tumblr is definitely doing it. And there's rumors of another social media platform doing it.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I know Tumblr is doing it because Matt Monol, the CEO of WordPress and Tumblr, Automattic, they're building it into WordPress.

• 44:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  And they're moving Tumblr onto whatever WordPress uses.

• 44:42Alex Cranz?

  And that's just like a smart move, I feel like, across the board.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  It would be amazing if all the people moved from Twitter to Tumblr. I mean, being emo has been like a real theme of this Vergecast story because we talked about being for a long time today. It would be amazing if everyone just like got much more emotional on Tumblr.

• 44:58Alex Cranz?

  Get your, your music lyrics ready.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  At some point I'll break because I miss tweeting during events.

• 45:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's like the main, that's the only thing that I truly miss. The like constant low stakes bonfire of Twitter warfare is like not at will.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  How has the balloon discourse hit you then? Like if you're not on Twitter?

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Because the New York Times is like, fuck it. Have you seen the balloon? Balloon, balloon, another balloon alert. The balloon's doing numbers. Tell people about the balloon. Like, it's out of control.

• 45:26Alex Cranz?

  You're still there. You're still getting it.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  No one can escape the balloons if you are a subscriber to the New York Times. It's like out of control. Zoe, do you think there's like a next thing for Twitter? Is it just chaos and we should just expect more chaos every day?

• 45:39Speaker 08

  I think the chaos will continue for a while now. I mean, it's Elon. Like, he says he'll maybe step down by the end of the year. So we've got many more months of turmoil, I would say. But yeah, I mean, I think there's gonna be more weird stuff happening in the coming weeks that I'm expecting to write about. And then hopefully the news cycle dies down and we can pay attention to something else.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Well, Zoe, is it Platformer? Platformer.news, you can subscribe or Frank Casey's there as well. We syndicate Platformer.

• 46:08Alex Cranz?

  Super good.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I should tell the people where they can find you on Twitter. It's like not what I want to do.

• 46:15Alex Cranz?

  Find her on Mastodon.

• 46:16Speaker 08

  No, please don't. Please don't. It's dead. I have been checked. I regret that tweet, okay?

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  Look, that's why I didn't do it.

• 46:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, there was that week where I was like, I'm leaving. Here's all the places you can find me. It's like, motherfucker, I don't want you to find my Instagram.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, don't.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  This isn't who I am.

• 46:36Alex Cranz?

  You don't need that. You don't need to see the food I ate last week.

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  At the end, I think he did me a favor. I think my, my, my heart and my head have healed.

• 46:43Alex Cranz?

  I've got a, I've got actually a bet about Elon right now with both Liz Lapato and Monica Chen.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  What's that bet?

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  Uh, whether or not he is going to post horrible pictures that we are all gonna have to see because he controls the algorithm right now.

• 46:55Speaker 08

  What do you mean horrible pictures?

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there was already the milk ones.

• 46:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the milk one. Like, 10 times worse than milk. I feel like it's coming.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  So porn tweets?

• 47:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I feel like we're gonna get a dick pic at some point. I don't know whose. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But I think it's gonna happen.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  It's been great hearing from you. Love having you. We gotta, this is over. Bye. We'll be right back with our lightning round.

• 47:23Speaker 09

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• 47:53Speaker 10

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• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  We're back.

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  Lightning round. This one, I think, merits more than a lightning round just because of the headline that it is.

• 48:49Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  But then, it does not. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stepping down after nine years as CEO of YouTube.

• 48:55Alex Cranz?

  What a lap. Do a victory lap, Susan.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  She is like a major force in this world.

• 48:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  She took YouTube, which was like not a great business. She's one of the earliest Google employees. She took YouTube, which is not a great business, and turned it into this absolute powerhouse.

• 49:08Alex Cranz?

  Absolute goliath.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  It is the, it remains, I think, the gold standard for every creator. There's lots of creators on Twitter and other places today saying, you know, we have our complaints about YouTube. And boy, do they have their complaints about YouTube. But it is the platform that treats us the best.

• 49:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  I think Mark has had a tweet that's like, just look at, compare. Like YouTube has creator plaques and events and monetization schedules and reps. And then he goes like, Instagram, nothing. TikTok, nothing. Twitter, nothing. Like, so YouTube is a powerhouse. So it kind of amazes that she's stepping down. There's a little bit of color. Mark Bergen, who's a great reporter at Bloomberg, has been tweeting a little bit of color. She's dipped in the past few months. No one's really seen her.

• 49:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  No one's really understood this transition.

• 49:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's not great.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  But it has been nine years, and she's being replaced by her own handpicked deputy, Neil Mohan, who was the chief product officer of YouTube, but now importantly, not becoming the CEO of YouTube. He's becoming the senior vice president of YouTube, parting in sooner perchance.

• 50:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, interesting. That's a org chart.

• 50:10Nilay Patel?

  You know how I'm.

• 50:10Alex Cranz?

  Wizardry. I was about to say, this like, this like peaked you, huh? You were like, ooh.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's, there's obviously some drama here.

• 50:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  It's not a lot of drama, because I know Neil. Neil has been on Decoder many times. I just, I actually just talked to Neil after they did the Sunday Ticket deal for YouTube TV. He was very happy. He, he won. I don't think you're gonna see a lot of change between Susan and Neil. Like, they were pretty lockstep. YouTube, actually, really interesting org chart thing. Neil, head of product. YouTube's content moderation and trust and safety reports to him.

• 50:39Alex Cranz?

  Mmm.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Is the head of product.

• 50:41Alex Cranz?

  Weird.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  Because they've built it as a product. They think it's a product. This is my whole thing about content moderation is the product. It's built into YouTube as a product.

• 50:49Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't report to like legal or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever it is, right?

• 50:54Alex Cranz?

  Just Mark for some reason. Just that part of YouTube, Mark handles.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just like at Facebook, at the end of the day, like Mark made a bunch of decisions.

• 51:03Alex Cranz?

  Right. Like, everything goes up to Mark.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this one was like, it's product. And Susan made a bunch of those decisions, too. But it's always just like, one of them are unique parts of YouTube's structure. And now he's in charge.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Do you think he didn't get the title because, like, she was an early employee of Google? She put a lot of time and energy into Google for years. It made sense to make her CEO. And now the structure is, everything's changed. It makes sense to just have that person report directly to Sundar and like, that's it.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, again, my, I love an hard char conversation.

• 51:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  She was the CEO of YouTube before Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google. Right? So there's Larry and Sergey, they start Google in her garage. She's early, early, early. She becomes the CEO of YouTube. And then they're like, we're, Larry Page is like, we're dipping. Screw this. We're just gonna do flying car startups, whatever it is they do. Sundar is the CEO of Google. So she predated Sundar as the CEO of YouTube before he became the CEO of Google. And then he became the CEO of Alphabet.

• 52:07Alex Cranz?

  And so she reported to him when he became CEO of Alphabet?

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, CEO of Google. So YouTube is a weird thing. It's part of Google, which is part of Alphabet, but it's still part of Google.

• 52:16Alex Cranz?

  But it's still YouTube.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  But it's, but it's its own little island.

• 52:20Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very confusing.

• 52:21Alex Cranz?

  Super confusing.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  So now Neil is in charge. Again, you can go listen to many Decoder episodes with Neil Moyn. He's smart. He's got a lot of ideas. He will not answer when YouTube TV will be in 4K. Just very good.

• 52:34Alex Cranz?

  Please answer.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes I hit the, the brick wall of someone's media training on Decoder, and that's the wall.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  Straight up, I found it, there it is, and I bounced right off it and try again.

• 52:45Alex Cranz?

  Anyone you ask, what about YouTube TV in 4K? They're like, no.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, just the shades come down.

• 52:51Alex Cranz?

  Took a side, yeah. He's like, I, I don't have an answer, but no.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  When we talked about, uh, when they did the Sunday Ticket deal, I was like, alright, you're gonna do football in 4K? Like, you had to know this conversation. You volunteered to talk to me.

• 53:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it has to.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  What do I talk about? And he was like, I can't answer this.

• 53:05Alex Cranz?

  So he was prepped to say no?

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, one time, this is true. One time I just sent him an email. Uh huh. Watching the NBA finals sponsored by YouTube TV. And I was like, why don't you just pay to do this in 4K and have it exclusive? And he was just like, yeah, it's a good idea. Lefty on board. Goodbye.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Absolute professional.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  You have been a bad Bing.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I'm hoping to talk to Neil soon about his plans. I guess I suspect things will be, these are two people who worked in lockstep for many, many years. Whatever Neil's plans were, were Susan's plans for a long time. But it is fascinating that if this, I think for Google, the threats are all over the place. Right? There's, whatever you think of the Bing threat, it is a real threat. It wiped a hundred billion dollars off its market cap last week. The idea that search will change, not just because people might switch to Bing because they want to bang the robot. But TikTok and. But they're spending their time on TikTok. They're using search there. And then what ChatGPT has really done is

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  the cost to generate an infinite amount of mediocre text is now zero. So Google's being flooded with garbage. Right. And they've got to sort that out too. And so like, that's a big problem for Google. And then next, and then YouTube is fine. It's still the gold standard for creators, but it has to fend off TikTok. It has to create new monetization models for creators. It has to, the most exciting part of YouTube is its cable network. Yeah. It's weird, right? It's cable system like YouTube TV. That's weird.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  It's an interesting timing for her to, to make this move. I think not only because of the length of time that she's been with YouTube, with Google, and it has been doing all these things, you know, and now they are facing these problems. I find it interesting, and, and I don't think that these things are directly related because it sounds, it feels like this is something that has been in the works for at least a little while. And as you said, that she and Neil are kind of on the same page in terms of what they're doing. But it's interesting that she is leaving as Sergey and Larry are suddenly seemingly retaking active roles in the company. And she's probably the person there who has known them the longest, or I mean, certainly the person there who has known them the longest. And now that they're back, suddenly she's out the door.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear how much they're back. So there is the report that Google had called the code red about chatbots and all this stuff. And then I think Alex Heath reported in command line, they were back because Google has never had layoffs before. So if there were going to be layoffs, they want it to be in the building, part of that process. It's a big shock to Google's culture. There was a blog post this week from an ex-Gugler. We'll link it in the show notes. Pretty devastating takedown of Google's culture overall, right? And how it's is basically a culture that avoids risks and is buoyed by the ad printing, the ad money printing machine of Google Search. And now the company needs to invent

• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  new things and chart new paths and be what people think Google is, and they are struggling to do it.

• 56:04Alex Cranz?

  I thought that was interesting because Tony Fadell, his book last year, what was it called? Build, I think. There's a big chunk of that book where he's like, I got Nest and then I go over to Google and it's going to be great. And then everything falls apart.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know anybody who's madder at Google than Tony Fadell.

• 56:18Alex Cranz?

  And it was like, really, like, it felt like kind of foreshadowing for what we're starting to see this year where he was like, I saw all of this dysfunction. It was constant. It's always the loudest person in the room wins. It's always, but only these very specific loud people. Nobody is ever talking to each other, especially in ways they need to. And so like, all of that dysfunction, it feels like is starting to come to a head. And it makes sense for Susan to be like, you know what? I got my bag. I'm going to retire. I'm going to go do my own thing. I love that for her.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like I said, incredible run. YouTube is the platform it is. Many reasons to criticize YouTube. On any day, some YouTuber is getting their wings and making the video where they complain about YouTube.

• 57:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  And that is the beginning of the true, that's like when you become a YouTuber, is when you make the video complaining about being demonetized, or some other, or the algorithm banning, or whatever it is.

• 57:10Alex Cranz?

  I can't wait to do that for the Vergecast.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  That's when you know you're a professional YouTuber. And like I've said this to Neil, I'm like, this is a thing. He's like, yeah, it's weird. Like, they know that this is part of the the cycle with YouTube and they they have this competition with TikTok. They have to fend off. So we'll see. I I I make I'm gonna ask to have Neil come back on one of our shows and talk about his plans soon, but I think it's it's worth noting that you right now YouTube is the strongest business, I think, at Google in terms of just what it represents to people and how important it is to people. But it is still under threat.

• 57:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I mean, to be clear, it's under threat, but like TikTok still has a smaller

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:48Alex Cranz?

  piece of the pie than YouTube. Like YouTube is still big. It's still huge. TikTok's coming. But TikTok's got a ways to go to like surpass.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and TikTok does not have, well, we don't know. TikTok is a black box, right? It's owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is not public.

• 58:03Alex Cranz?

  Who knows what's gonna happen with it?

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  But we think that TikTok does not have the sort of revenue engine that YouTube has. Right? Like YouTube makes a lot of money. It shares a lot of money with creators. It is building this new creator fund for shorts. It's it's doing all this stuff that TikTok has not yet done.

• 58:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  So YouTube is like a complete business that makes a lot of money, which, again, this is credit to Susan Wojcicki.

• 58:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  It did not make money for a long time. Like, uh, Mark Bergen has a great book about the history of YouTube. Mark was on Decoder. You can go listen to that episode. But like YouTube was so bad for a while that Google was like, we're gonna shut it down. Like, this doesn't make any sense. The cost of hosting and distributing video are higher than the whatever we might ever return on it.

• 58:48Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  And then it clicked for them. And YouTube has gone through many eras, but they're like, watch time is the thing. We're gonna incentivize like 10 minute videos, like three pre-roll breaks or whatever it is. And that's when the Charlie bit my fingers of YouTube, like people stopped making those videos. They started making these really long YouTube, like a YouTube video.

• 59:07Alex Cranz?

  Right. And then Charlie bit my finger would now be absolute banger on TikTok. Oh, my God, the remixes for TikTok would be so good.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  The stitches of other people biting other fingers.

• 59:16Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. So great.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  So there's just like, there's a lot there, but she shepherded that entire creator platform into existence. And in doing so, like, created a new class of internet personality, a new style of video. Like, there's just a lot here that Susan oversaw, which I think is worthwhile. There's a lot of criticism too, like. She did not handle a bunch of harassment stuff well across the platform. Her moderation decisions, I think anybody would tell you, very deliberate, very slow.

• 59:48Alex Cranz?

  There were a lot of times you would groan when you'd see like, she'd be like, I'm gonna speak out about harassment on YouTube and you'd be like, oh no.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like the most interesting criticism. Because I think from her perspective, this is not a criticism. But from any normal person's perspective, this is like, what are you doing? Google's like a totally data oriented company. So the users of YouTube would see something happening on YouTube. Youtubers would see something happening, good or bad, on YouTube. But until there was data, YouTube couldn't see it. Susan couldn't see it. So the Youtubers like screaming their heads off about something good or bad happening. And like, there'd be this massive lag before they could see what was happening on their own platform. Because they're just like, they had to figure out how to quantify whatever it was, harassment, people dancing, whatever it is. And then they would see it. And then they would react to it.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  And it would like be over, or the stakes would be lower, or some bad thing had already happened. And like, this is like, I think, a constant kind of dynamic inside of YouTube. Where because Google's just so data driven, they can't see what is happening on their own platform in real time. But my favorite example of this, this is one of those moments where like, you're listening to an executive, you're like, what planet do you live on? I think it was at the Code Conference. She's like, well, obviously, you know, YouTube is like mostly a music service.

• 1:01:07Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  And all of us are like, what are you talking? And like, the data inside of YouTube is people just put music on in the background. They watch music videos, like do all this stuff.

• 1:01:17Alex Cranz?

  The lo-fi streaming.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, so if you are just looking at YouTube from this like aggregate data perspective, you're like, people come to us to listen to music. But if you talk to a normal person, that is absolutely not what they're doing.

• 1:01:30Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  And there's just, there's a gap there. And I like, like I said, is that a criticism of Susan's regime? Is it her being smart and saying, here's what's actually happening? I think it cuts both ways.

• 1:01:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  But wherever she got in trouble, that's kind of, that little dynamic is always at the root of it.

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then TikTok is smart, because it just doesn't say anything at all.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Alex Cranz?

  Always quiet.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  It's that connection to the individual that that seems to have always lacked at YouTube. Whether it's like something that we talked about in a previous episode of Kyrie Irving going down a YouTube rabbit hole and getting convinced of very strange things or other even more devastating events. We there was the time where the one woman who posted videos came and fired shots at the campus because she was so angry about what she felt like the algorithm was doing. And YouTube just kind of doesn't see that effect that it that it has on people.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  I think after that, they really started seeing that effect on people. I think that if that happened to any workplace, it would change the dynamic of the workplace and that absolutely changed the dynamic of that workplace.

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  There was a notable difference. And I think the thing that jumps out to me, just something every time there's an executive leaving, I'm wondering who is the next executive who is going to leave. We've seen Reed Hastings step down and now Susan Susan is stepping down, what, within a month? So.

• 1:02:43Alex Cranz?

  Are you saying they come in threes?

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  They come in like fives.

• 1:02:46Alex Cranz?

  It's Tim. No.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Someone go ask Bing for a spooky ghost story about the rule of threes and CEO stepping down.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  Daniel Ek. That's my that's my guess.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  That's who you think? He just did a big rework. He got rid of the person who did their big podcast push. I don't know. We'll see. That's that's Richard's. I have no prediction. I don't know what's going on. I just know that it's org chart season, baby.

• 1:03:06Alex Cranz?

  I just like to say Tim Cook.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  My time to shine. Tim Cook. No way. A little bit more lightning round stuff. iOS 16.4 beta hit. I'm only bringing this up because there's now a new hook that lets web apps send push notifications.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. This is fully an EU compliance move. Like, this is so Apple can go to European regulators and see the web is just as good as our native app platform. They can even send push notifications.

• 1:03:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  I promise you that's what's going on here. Our S23 Ultra review went up. Swallow Alison loved it. It's a great phone. She was like, the most interesting thing to do with a 200 megapixel camera is not take 200 megapixel photos, which is a great line. But go watch it. Really cool.

• 1:03:49Alex Cranz?

  She's been having a lovely time with Zoom. She's super, super enamored with it.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, she gave it a nine. Razer Blade 18 review is up. Monica, you got an eight.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  Do you know how much the Razer Blade 18 costs?

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  How much does it cost?

• 1:04:02Alex Cranz?

  So much money. Hold on, I just closed it.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  $3,800. I got it.

• 1:04:06Alex Cranz?

  Okay. It costs $3,800.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's a lot of buddy.

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  Look at all the, all the lights.

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  It's, yeah, it's got lights. It's got a nice screen. She didn't hate it for that price.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  And then I, I want to end on just like a little bit, three pieces of car news.

• 1:04:21Alex Cranz?

  Little news.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Little news. Tesla recalled like 362,000 vehicles because full self-driving beta has a crash risk. It's not, I, the Tesla people are going to come for me. It's not a recall. They're going to ship an over the air update.

• 1:04:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  But like, the government was like, yeah, this is bad. And Tesla's like, we agree. We will push the button marked recall in the dashboard.

• 1:04:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  And tell everyone that they shouldn't use this until they update their software.

• 1:04:45Alex Cranz?

  Do they have to like, get to wifi to do it?

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  A lot of Teslas have cell modems.

• 1:04:50Alex Cranz?

  They have, okay. I've never, I don't have a Tesla. I don't know how they work.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 1:04:54Alex Cranz?

  I'm driving my little Mazda.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, does your Mazda have more than 90 miles of electric range? Because we reviewed the Mazda MX-30 this week, the world's shittiest car.

• 1:05:04Alex Cranz?

  I was so sad about that, too. That was such a, I'm like rooting for Mazda because I love my CX-5.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Yes, it's such a sad life for the rotary engine. Like, like this is how the rotary is back.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  So we read the MX-30. I just want to bring this up. We're in the midst of what we think is an EV transition.

• 1:05:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  It could go either way, honestly, at this point.

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  Not with Mazda making the cars.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's what I mean.

• 1:05:29Alex Cranz?

  We know which way it's going if Mazda's in charge.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  You just like bring your gas tank to the Mazda dealership. So the MX-30 is out. It's a little compact SUV. And there's just like a lot of debate over how much range you really need in a car. And like most Americans are like 700 miles in a shotgun, like whatever, whatever Americans think. The number most manufacturers are settling on is like 300. And some are lower. Like, there's a lot of 270 mile EVs floating around.

• 1:05:52Alex Cranz?

  That's because those car designers are on the East Coast.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  Like you get to that middle part of the country and you're like, no, I need a thousand miles.

• 1:05:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, in a shotgun. Like, can I get the two outbound gas tanks on my F-350? But whatever. So 270 is like, ah, it's a little weird.

• 1:06:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  You know, and then you've got kind of the new battery chemistries and like the Lucid and stuff and way higher. Mazda's like 92, straight up 92 miles of range in this $20,000 car. And the interior surface is made of cork.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Which easily stains. And they're like, yes, we know, but we're, we're honoring our heritage as a cork manufacturer. This is a real thing, they said.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  The patina. You love that cork patina?

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  I've never been more, like, I understand the Cybertruck.

• 1:06:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  And its wiper situation much more than Mazda fully shipping an EV with 92 miles.

• 1:06:50Alex Cranz?

  And like, their hybrids are pretty nice.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Alex Cranz?

  There's like the hybrid CX 50.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  People like Mazdas. I'm just saying, this car sucks.

• 1:06:58Alex Cranz?

  This car sucks. Mazda, do better.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  The cork thing just got me. What the answer is, but we have to honor our heritage. It's whatever.

• 1:07:06Alex Cranz?

  Was it like, was it a cork? Is that how they started?

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's what they said.

• 1:07:10Alex Cranz?

  I don't believe them.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. They're only selling in California. And if you've been in California, you know that this is the least California compatible vehicle in the entire world.

• 1:07:18Alex Cranz?

  Began as Toyo Cork.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  See?

• 1:07:20Alex Cranz?

  Kogyo Company Limited.

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And after all this time, they hadn't figured out how to make the cork stain resistant, Alex.

• 1:07:27Alex Cranz?

  Because they pivoted to cars.

• 1:07:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's the Mazda. And then lastly, the most hilarious car update of them all. Hyundai and Kia have been forced to update software on millions of their cars. Because a group of TikTokers called the Kia Boys have done the Kia Challenge where they teach people how to steal the cars. Because they don't have lockouts on the ignition system. The Kia, the boys, by the way, spelled with a Z.

• 1:07:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you can't spell it any other way when you're called the Kia Boys.

• 1:07:58Alex Cranz?

  You're not allowed.

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  Many 2015 to 2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers to prevent these from simply breaking in and bypassing the ignition. The Kia Boys obviously discovered this as the Kia Boys are want to do. They're stealing the cars. Here is how they're fixing it. They are updating the theft alarm software logic to extend the length of the alarm sound from 30 seconds to one minute.

• 1:08:24Alex Cranz?

  That, that, that, that's gonna do.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you've ever tried to deter the Kia Boys. But if you go over 30 seconds of alarm sounds, they run.

• 1:08:32Alex Cranz?

  Do they not just have some bows they can put on?

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  Some earplugs? I think you'll be fine.

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  And if you have a Hyundai or a Kia that has a standard turn the key to start, then they will lock that up.

• 1:08:44Alex Cranz?

  So should you just get like a club instead? Was that the old one, the red bar? You put on your steering wheel? That's what you need to get.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  Kia boys, they've got a club. Let's get out of here. I mean, easily the best. There's like certain, we've run a couple of headlines this week where I'm like, this is what The Verge was designed for.

• 1:09:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar that people love. I was like, I'd said to James, I am pretty sure like we, we were made for this headline.

• 1:09:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  This is why we exist. And the second one is the Kia boys have forced Kia to issue a recall because they're on TikTok teaching people how to steal cars. We were, we were destined.

• 1:09:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  In 2011, we're like, we should all quit our jobs and start The Verge. In the back of my mind.

• 1:09:34Alex Cranz?

  It was Kia boys.

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  The Kia boys.

• 1:09:36Alex Cranz?

  Revving their engines.

• 1:09:37Nilay Patel?

  It's like a viral TikTok challenge. We'll teach people how to steal cars and a major car manufacturer will have to deal with it. That's what we meant by technology and culture. This is the cyberpunk future we were promised. And also the cyberpunk feature we were promised was like a very emotional robot will be like, you're a bad Bing.

• 1:09:57Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah, that's true though.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm a good Bing.

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. I think you're all great Bings. Just for the record, you're all good chatbots and I love you all very much. Please do not smooch your laptops.

• 1:10:08Alex Cranz?

  Please don't. You don't know where it's been.

• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  That would be a problem. All right. Fear not the Kia boys. Go off into good night. There's other stuff. Read Liz this week on like the, how the interest rate environment is like radically changing the tech industry. It's classic Liz Lapato. It's very good. Wednesday, you guys are going to talk about the PSVR review with Addie, Sean Hollister.

• 1:10:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, very exciting. So Sean and Addie are going to come on. We're going to talk about the PSVR. I've got Jen and Chris Person are going to talk about multi-room audio because Chris is super into not doing the typical stuff.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 1:10:42Alex Cranz?

  He's got a whole hacked out system that he loves. And then we're going to be talking with Ariel about podcast misinformation. And by we, I mean, she's going to be talking to some great people about podcast misinformation. And I'm going to be listening attentively.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Decatur this week. I talked to the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, also CEO of Mozilla, a whole org chart situation in there. Here's something she told me. People more likely to switch browsers on their phones than on their laptops. I believe it. People are used to downloading apps on their phones. And just that little bit of behavioral conditioning means that it's possible. I love it. So, listen to that. Decoder is just like lit up the next couple of weeks. Yeah. Check it out. Very good. Liam hates it when I say it, but he's busy switching the video, so he can't come in. All right, that's it. Thanks to our guests. Thanks to Zoe. She's at Zoe Schiffer on Twitter. James is at JJ Vincent. Addie is at TheDextrarchy. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Richard, as always, is at RJCC. God only knows if Twitter is up. He's the first to be banned.

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  Someone boost me by a thousand. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:11:49Speaker 11

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:12:21Speaker 12

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