Google I/O recap: AI is taking over Search

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the big announcements and takeaways from Google I/O 2023. Further reading: The nine biggest announcements from Google I/O 2023 The AI takeover of Google Search starts now Google Perspectives: the new search feature helps you find human information online Google rebrands AI tools for Docs and Gmail as Duet AI — its answer to Microsoft’s Copilot Google’s new Magic Editor uses AI to totally transform your photos Google drops waitlist for AI chatbot Bard and announces oodles of new features Google announces PaLM 2 AI language model, already powering 25 Google services Google teases Project Tailwind — a prototype AI notebook that learns from your documents Android’s new generative AI can reply to your texts and design its own wallpaper Google’s Find My Device will soon use billions of Android devices to locate your stuff Google is bringing YouTube, Waze, and Zoom to cars with native Android software The Pixel Fold is Google’s $1,800 entry into folding phones Google’s new Pixel Tablet is a $500 slate for the home Google Pixel 7A review: a better deal Google’s new Project Starline prototype isn’t a giant booth Disney is finally combining Hulu and Disney Plus into the same app Apple launches Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on iPad with new subscription pricing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rechast, the flagship podcast with the JBC. I'm not going to tell you what that is, because if you watch the Google I/O keynote, you know you need a massive amount of processing power to understand this information.

• 1:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can't afford to tell you.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 1:09David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm in a hotel approximately two miles down the road from the hotel that you're currently in. It's good stuff.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll explain what's going on in a second. Alex Cranz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 1:19Alex Cranz?

  I am not in a hotel, but I'm really excited to talk more about the JBC.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  So today was the Google I/O keynote. It was a big one. A lot of pressure on this one, a lot of AI-related pressure on this one. I believe we counted, and Sundar Pichai said AI 80-plus times on stage.

• 1:36David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  Just a lot of pressure on Google for this one, and they delivered in pretty enormous ways. We should talk about all that, but it is true that David and I were there at I/O along with V Song, Alison Johnson, Alex Heath from our team. We saw Dieter, which was really fun. And now we're in separate hotel rooms on the road. It's easier to do this podcast in separate hotel rooms.

• 1:55David Pierce?

  Yep, 100%.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Just given how we produce it than to actually be in the same room together. So we're all far apart from each other, but together. Do you know what I mean?

• 2:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, in our hearts.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  Alone, together, together, alone.

• 2:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  Now, I would like to begin the podcast by formally apologizing to my friend Dieter. It's been a long friendship, and sometimes you go too far, and you scream for the Android police to arrest your friend at Google I/O.

• 2:19Alex Cranz?

  I believe I heard that you said "wee hoo wee hoo."

• 2:23David Pierce?

  That's a fact. That did in fact happen.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  This from a source? I'm not gonna reveal my sources, but I did hear that Neelai shouted "wee hoo wee hoo."

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, arrest that man. And then, um, someone had to say, "Neelai, don't scream, call the police." And crowded, too. Anyway, it's fine. It's fine. And everything's gonna be fine. Anyway, so it's Google I/O. Very fun to see everybody in person. David, I don't know if you caught this. There was a lot of pressure on Google, but then there was like a lot of confidence and then a lot of curiosity from all the attendees about whether Google would meet the moment. So like, the energy was pretty charged.

• 3:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was, it was an interesting space because this was the first fully in-person I/O in four years.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  Which is like an eternity. And folks were psyched to be back. It had that same kind of like first day of camp energy that some of these events have had over the last year or so. It's at the Shoreline Amphitheater, which is just a straight up concert venue. So it's like outside and cool and it's, there's a big lawn and it like feels like you're in a concert venue. So it's like, it had a lot of stuff going for it coming in. And there was this question of like, this matters a lot to Google in a way that I think Google I/O, we have often accused of being sort of a grab bag of announcements. It's like, somebody just like walks around to every team at Google and is like, "Got anything?" And whatever they have, they launch at I/O. And that's what Google I/O is. But this year, it's been, it's been very clear that like, this is the time

• 3:49David Pierce?

  Google had to make the world believe that it has a plan for AI. And Sundar Pichai in particular, had to convince the world that not only does Google have a plan for the future of AI, but that he is the right person to execute that plan for AI. There's been a lot of smoke around like, is Sundar the guy? Are the people inside of Google upset? The Information has done some really great reporting on all of the ways that kind of his authority and leadership are being tested. It's just this really interesting moment. And yet, I think you're exactly right that like, as soon as the thing started, it felt confident. It was like a company on top of the world being like, gaze upon our kingdom. So it was like that, that context switch at the very beginning of the keynote was really fascinating to me.

• 4:32Alex Cranz?

  You felt like he did it. He, he, he kind of showed it.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't go that far. So here's what I would say. Yeah. Well, and there's a very specific reason I'm saying I wouldn't go that far. Nothing is shipping. I mean Bard. Bard is sort of shipping. Even the new features of Bard that they're most excited about are behind labs. And they're gating how many people can get access to it. So they showed a lot of really cool stuff. And then you got to go sign up. It's a google.com slash labs. And you can put, you put yourself on a waitlist and they'll let some people in. So it's just like, they showed a lot of really cool stuff. Yeah. All of it is plausible, right? Nothing seemed too far afield, but it's not actually shipping. So I would just like stop right there. Like they did it. Like they showed very much they can do it.

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  They have not actually done it. The switch that David is calling out that I felt most keenly was sort of right at the beginning. Where Sundar was like, we have 15 products that have half a billion users. And of that, six products that have more than 2 billion users. And now I'm just going to put the AI in front of them. And I was like, oh, right. They're Google. Like they can just do it. Right? And like that, I think they had not yet made that case very convincingly. And to some extent, this still was kind of a grab bag I O. It was just everyone was instructed to pull the same thing out of the bag, which was add AI to it.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  And so there was like thematic unity to the point where like the pixel conversation, which we'll come to at the end. Like Rick Ostrow was like, it's an AI phone and it always has been. And I was like, has it? Like, I don't know. That's weird, right? Like that, but like that little bit of sort of thematic unity. That everyone is instructed to talk about AI in their products meant for huge sections of it. There was confidence like Google is going to do this. It's going to add AI to all of its products. And everything they show us is kind of cool.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and at the very beginning, I mean, I think the way that these typically go is you get a few minutes of the CEO at the beginning, who tells you sort of a big story about the future. And then you get a parade of executives who do the actual announcements, right? That's how Apple does it. That's how Google typically does it. But this time, we got, I didn't count, but maybe like 20 or 30 minutes of Sundar actually going through some of the announcements and explaining what this is and explaining why this matters. And it's like, he got up there and like, explained Google in a way that you don't typically see at an event like this from a CEO like that. And it's like, you and I were talking afterward, it's like, the people Sundar was talking to were like, investors and analysts who have spent the last eight, six to eight months

• 7:14David Pierce?

  now, wondering, is Google going to lose this AI race that nobody really saw coming, but is moving really, really fast? Google just has not seemed like it was ready for this and was it going to be able to catch up? And this was very clearly Sundar standing up and saying, we're ready, we have a plan, I've got this, and we've got this. And it was like, normally, these things are for developers and they like, get really into the weeds about how all of this stuff actually works and goes into your Android apps. This was not that at all.

• 7:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this felt like a roadshow. Like, we're going to just show off everything we can do. And yeah, I think there were a bunch of like, folks from the government there too, right? Like, regulators and stuff, kind of also curious.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there were a lot of people there, like government people. There were people walking around, they had these signs they call lollipops, or like, circles on sticks. And like, one of them says press, and like, that's how we know where to go. And this time, for the first time in a long time, they had one that said government affairs. And there were just lots of government affairs people floating around. And it's because the AI risks are real, and the push to regulate AI is real. And just last week, Sundar and Satya Nadella and Sam Altman and some other folks were at the White House to have like, an AI summit. And then they're gonna go do that in Europe and then they're gonna go do that in the UK. And then they're, I don't know, the government of Belize is gonna demand that Sundar Pichai shows up and talks about AI, like existential AI risk. So there are, they have to just be really proactive and say, and this was their catchphrase,

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  over and over again, bold but responsible. Like over and over again, and at one point, you know, they're like, there's a natural tension when we say that, we understand it. We want to take big, bold bets on what this thing can do for people, but be responsible in how we deploy it. Which is fascinating because, you know, the open source models are not being deployed responsibly. People are just using them. And so Google is trying to position itself as like, you should regulate AI, but you should trust us because we're already responsible. And that was a real undercurrent of all of this. But we should start with the actual announcements. So the most important one, and David, as you said, Sundar talked for 20 minutes and he kept coming back to this. We've pivoted to being an AI-first company like six or seven years ago.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  And Google's mission is to organize the world's information and that mission is timeless. And he just said that straight out, our mission is not changing because of AI. Our mission is timeless. We've been working on AI for seven years or however long it's been. And now it's time for the future of search. And then he showed off a new version of search and you got to play with it a little bit.

• 9:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, I spent a bunch of time on Monday with some executives at Google, walking me through some demo. I got to sit in a sort of half staged red team process where they were trying to like test this thing. But basically the shortest way I can think to describe it is essentially they're putting a new box at the top of search results that they call the AI snapshot. And what it's doing is using all of these large language models, it's using Palm 2, which is the big kind of general purpose model that Google announced at I O. But also some of the other things that Google has been working on in search for a long time to take all of this information and give you essentially like on the one side, an AI summary. So which is the stuff you'd get from, you know, Bing or Chat GPT or whatever. You ask what is cool in Peru? And it just like answers the question.

• 10:27David Pierce?

  And then on the right, it gives you a few links from around the web that kind of substantiate that information on the left. If you do a shopping search, it'll also show. Show you some products with AI-generated summaries of them. If you do local stuff, it'll do the same with the local results. But now, instead of getting links at the top of search results, you're going to get this big colorful box that is totally AI-generated. And it won't show up all the time. It won't look exactly the same everywhere. But it is like, it is a new thing at the top of search results, which I would argue strongly is like the single most important piece of real estate on the internet. It's a complete redesign of it. And they kept saying over and over, like, the search results are still below. You can scroll down and get to web search. And that's true, but it's still like a fundamental change.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  And especially on mobile, where more and more people are, this just eats the top of the screen. Like, when you do a Google search now, instead of seeing web links, you're going to see this AI snapshot first. And that is a huge, huge, huge deal.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  I want to be precise about that. Most people will not see that. You have to opt into this experience, and it's a waitlist. This is what I mean. Like, they haven't done it yet.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, the thing is still gated.

• 11:35David Pierce?

  Yes, yeah, right. I think there's a difference between they haven't done it and they haven't shipped it to everybody, right? They've done it, like, it works. I've used live demos, like, it's there, it's a thing. Yeah, but so they have, they have this thing called, it's called the Search Generative Experience. They call it SGE for short. And it's a feature of a thing called Search Labs, which also has a bunch of other little features in it that we can talk about if we want to. But that's kind of the main thing. And so if you get into Search Labs and you turn on SGE, you'll start to see those snapshots. And their essential plan is to use this kind of opt-in group, which is going to be a self-selecting set of people, to figure out what works and what doesn't, and then start doing the kind of, you know, 2% tests that lots of companies do, where you just roll it out to a few users and see what they think, and then roll it out more broadly.

• 12:19David Pierce?

  So what eventually billions of people see might look very different, but this is, this is directionally where all of this is going for all of Google Search.

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  Because right now, when you, when you go and you Google something, that top thing is usually like, here's all the stuff we want you to buy from Google aggregated links. Does that go now below it? Or does it just disappear? And so you get like this search thing and then all the relevant links? Like, are you, because right now, I just, I always scroll down. Like, the top of the real estate that's supposed to be valuable, I usually just scroll past it because it's like, here's the stuff Google wants to sell me. And here's the actual thing I was looking for.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  Here's the first organic result.

• 12:58Alex Cranz?

  Right. And so like, does that make that experience better?

• 13:02David Pierce?

  In a way, yes. I think in the sense that like, if I Google some, you know, stuff to do in Peru, right now, the odds are if you do that Google search, the first few things are going to be ads, right? And this is like the fundamental problem with Google search is it has just been absolutely overrun by sponsored stuff.

• 13:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:19David Pierce?

  And links to Google stuff, these sort of zero click searches and like, Google search as a way to explore the web is not nearly as good as it once was. With the AI stuff, what it's doing is combing through all of that information and pulling useful data up to the top. And it's like, we can talk about that, what that means from a business perspective. We can talk about what that means for publishers. We can talk about what that means for SEO. Like, it's going to screw up the web in all kinds of ways that we cannot even predict yet. But from a pure user experience, where I'm like, I want relatively good, relatively substantiated information. I think in a lot of ways, this is actually going to be really great. It's going to have a lot of the issues that a lot of large language models have. It's going to hallucinate. It's going to make mistakes. Google, I think, has done a better job than most.

• 14:04David Pierce?

  One of the things they showed me but didn't show in the demo is there's this menu in the AI snapshot that if you hit a button, it will break up the like three paragraph summary, sentence by sentence, and actually have links below each sentence with the information that corroborates that sentence.

• 14:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 14:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like, it's a constantly sourced thing. And it becomes, I think, is like amazingly useful and cool. And so, at the limit where that really works, and again, I have not seen it enough to be able to say confidently like, how broad that is. But if it really works, I think from a user experience, it's kind of great for lots of things. Yeah, what it will do to the web is a very different and messier thing. But as a, as a person who just like wants information from Google, this makes sense to me.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  So there are two gigantic ideas in there. And you hit on one of them like halfway, which is the very concept of what you ask Google for is now different, right?

• 14:58David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  We used to Google stuff to find things on the web. And where Google is going, and they called this out in the keynote. They were like, I want to find clothes. For a five-year-old that are good for a birthday party is not a typical Google search. And they're changing what the Google product is, what it, what search delivers to people to be answers to general questions. Instead of here's the web. And that's just a massive shift. Like it's worth sitting with it for a minute and thinking, okay, what if Google? The product is no longer organized around, I'm searching the web. And now it's just organized around, I'm telling you the answer, which is the road they've been on for a long time. And I think, feel like this is the last step.

• 15:43Alex Cranz?

  Can you do Boolean searches in this new version? No, I would assume.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's, it's prompt engineering. It's an LLM.

• 15:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, prompt engineering is essentially just normal human Boolean search, right? Like it is functionally the same thing. But I think, Neelai, like, I think you're mostly right, but I think that's not sort of the whole story, right? So I think the way Google explains it, and I'm sort of boiling this all the way down is like, there are basically three things you can do on Google. One is navigational, right? It's the people who go to Google and type in Facebook because they want to get to Facebook.com. And a gigantic percentage of people do that, like, single word names of websites are the most popular thing searched on Google. It's just, it's insane, but it's true.

• 16:24Alex Cranz?

  It's all our parents.

• 16:26David Pierce?

  Those people are super well-served by search results, right? Like if I search Facebook, popping up a, an AI snapshot with a bunch of information about the history of Facebook is actually bad UX. You should show me Facebook.com and send me to Facebook.com.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Now I'm just doing this in a browser window. I'm like, this is actually great. This is like the best Google experience you can have.

• 16:43David Pierce?

  It kind of works. Yeah. And Google search is really good for that. The second thing is basically like questions with answers, right? And so it's how tall is the Empire State Building? It's like every Google executive's favorite version of that, or all the way down to like slightly more complicated, but good questions, right? Like what's the best restaurant in my town? Is like a question with an answer. But then the third thing is questions that don't have a right answer and that don't have someone on the internet who has tried to answer that question. And that is questions like what you're talking about, like clothes for a five-year-old kid to wear to a Birthday party with all of the other context that potentially comes along with the things that come from that.

• 17:24David Pierce?

  Google has never been good at that. Like I spent some time with Prabakar Raghavan, who runs Google's search stuff. And he described this as like task completion, right? And it's like, if I go to Google and I say, make me an itinerary for a weekend in Paris. It'll show me some information about things to do in Paris, but it can't pull together information about what's closed. And when what's busy, whether I have kids with me, how much things cost. They even said this about local search. If I say, what's the best restaurant? It's like, okay, what can you afford? How long are you willing to wait for a reservation? What kind of food do you like? Where do you want to sit? What do you like? Is best of the most Michelin stars or the one that matches your taste? Like, these questions don't have right answers and they're based so much on context. And Google has never been good at that stuff.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  And increasingly, what Google says, and I don't know that this is true, but this is what Google says. That is the stuff that people want from Google. And that's where they think AI can be really powerful. Like, they don't think, and I think this is an important distinction. They don't think a chatbot is the future of search. Like Bard is not going to replace Google search, at least as Google sees it now. AI is another tool on top of everything else that search already does. And I think this is a convenient thing for Google to say, because it's Google and it makes a hell of a lot of money on the way that search already works. But that's the way that they see it. It's like, this is another tool to do a kind of searching you've really never been able to do before on Google.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that thing, that's a big change, right? It just goes from what Google was, which is we're going to help you navigate the world of information on the internet. To we are now answering complicated questions with all this additional context.

• 19:00David Pierce?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  Again, they've been on this road for quite a while. Like, this is the promise of Google Assistant in many ways, which by the way, came up zero times today.

• 19:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, they didn't say the word assistant, did they?

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Not once. They didn't. And I think it's because LLMs are still too slow for like a voice interface. So they just didn't want to like get into it, but they just didn't say it today. The second thing, though, that's like complicated here is Google has to go get all that information. Needs to know what times the restaurants are open and closed. It needs to know if. Critics have liked the restaurants. It needs to know if they still exist. And if they're just scraping the web and taking the information and never sending anybody to webpages, the businesses that do that work don't exist. If Google never sends anybody to Yelp, and I'm picking Yelp very specifically because Yelp is very mad about this all the time. If Google never sends anybody to Yelp and scrapes all of Yelp's data, then Yelp is dead.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  And then Google has sort of killed itself along the way. And there's a tension there that I'm not sure Google has figured out or anyone has figured out.

• 20:00Alex Cranz?

  Just from the outside, because I didn't go to these briefings and stuff, but it sounds like they haven't. Because a lot of these things that they're doing, that they're pivoting towards, this is stuff that publications already do, right? Like, the best restaurants in your area, Eater, which is a Vox Media property, and a lot of other companies do that already. Foursquare does that already.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, V, who is sitting next to me, at one point was like, oh, so it's making buying guides, which is the thing that she does. Right?

• 20:26Alex Cranz?

  Right. Like, it's already piggybacking off of that data. And I am really curious to see, like, okay, what do you do? Like, you're going to fundamentally kill those data sources if you're not sending the traffic back to them. So how do you exist?

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  There's absolutely no answer yet. There is one mention of like, we want to send traffic around the web and we'll work with publishers. And there is a lot of politicians there today.

• 20:47Alex Cranz?

  Being like, hmm, yeah.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  There's a big swirl of that in the background, but it was not really brought up on stage. It's just the question, like, here is search. And, you know, I wrote about it this week and we're going to keep writing about it for the rest of the year. Like, once you change this thing on the internet, the internet changes forever. And I think we saw today, Google's intention is to change it. I don't say that as a positive or a negative.

• 21:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's just what they want to do.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, and maybe it should. Like, you can't look at this product is in beta experiment, whatever it is. You can't look at it and say, that doesn't look cool. Like, it looks very useful and very cool. And there's a feature of it where it is still kind of a chatbot, right? You ask a question, it shows you this like AI-generated box. And then you can ask that box a follow-up question. That's cool, right? Like, it's just, the whole thing is cool. But that means like all of search change, like the thing that Google does, which is essentially direct people around the open web is going to change.

• 21:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  There's just going to be a huge set of like ripple effect changes that come from that. And I think it's just worth it to call it like this looks cool. It's not a competitor of chat GPT like Bard is their competitor chat GPT. And we can talk about all the things they're doing with Bard. This is them saying, we know that everyone's using chat GPT and saying this is a more useful way to search, when what they mean is I'm asking random questions to a text box and it's delivering some answers to me and our product should already do that. And that's the road we're on versus what they want to do with Bard, which is like, write me a, write me an email sucking up to my boss about how good his presentation was, which Bard was like more than happy to do.

• 22:26Alex Cranz?

  Very good at sucking up to its boss.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think the thing that I kept getting hung up on during this presentation was when they were showing one of those buyer's guides that they created, which I think was for mountain bikes and they had the ratings in there. And I was like, where are those ratings from, right? Like, where's the sourcing of that? Cause if it's Amazon, that's one sort of audience, right?

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  Amazon's not letting Google scrape that.

• 22:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Amazon and Amazon doesn't want to let them scrape that. And if it's like REI, that's a, that's a totally different one. And if it's like Google's random own algorithm, like there's just that, that, that lack of clarity there that I think makes it not necessarily a good product for some of those use cases they were showing like the buyer's guides, but that might just be because I work at Verge.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  Setting that aside, the disclosure, the Verge writes reviews of tech products, not mountain bikes yet, but we do a lot of e-bikes lately. It's, it's strange. Europeans work here. All that aside, the implicit assumption of this is that the economics of making the web will continue to produce the web for Google to draw upon to make its lucrative search product. And like, that's not true. Like the, this will change how the web gets made and that's fine. Like we should, we should go into it eyes open. So that's search. It's rolling out. You can sign up for it. It's google.com labs. It's neat. Play with it. Look at the demos. It's neat. It's definitely going to have, we're going to be talking about this for the next five years. I promise you.

• 23:48Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. I'm going to ask it the worst questions as soon as I get access.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  It's bold, but responsible, Alex.

• 23:54Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to have a bold, but responsible series of questions for it.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  They also rolled out generative AI in a bunch of other products. Most notably, I think in like the Google Docs suite, they call workspace. So Gmail, Google Docs, Slides, the whole thing. And all of that looked sweet.

• 24:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  Didn't it just all, I was like, oh, this is all super useful.

• 24:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I continue to think that like, we're in this phase of thinking about AI as this like huge thing that understands everything about everything and can answer all of my questions. And I think by far the more useful version of AI, most of the time, is going to be the one that you're just like, what is in this dumb document that I don't feel like reading? And like, there was a demo they did in Gmail where you just say, I need, I cancel my flight. It's essentially the prompt you give to Gmail. And it, it goes through your email, it finds your confirmation numbers, it finds the, the, you know, all the information that you need about your flight in order to be able to cancel it. And again, I have deep, deep doubts about its ability to do this successfully and well every time, but at least this is the idea.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  And it just writes that email for you and it has access to all of that information. It's just sitting there in your email and it's able to comb through stuff that is yours, that you care about, that you have decided is relevant to you. And make that stuff for you. And that's the stuff where I'm like, okay, this is, this is real, this is something. And they showed off, what was it, Project Tailwind? That like, kind of AI notebook thing? That's like their Notion killer, right? Yeah, it's really hard. They framed it as like an educational experience, but you look at it and it's just like, this is just a research tool for anyone who stores and needs to make sense of information. And for me, it's just like, I can just like put a PDF of a lawsuit in there and just ask questions about that lawsuit to Google's AI.

• 25:42David Pierce?

  Like, that is massively powerful.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  This is where bold but responsible has to come into play. So, and they talked, they said at the end of that part of the presentation, like, we thought about this for students, but like anybody, like a lawyer could use this. And I'm like, if I'm a lawyer and I'm gonna be like, here's all the cases I didn't read for this lawsuit I'm doing. Summarize them. And this thing hallucinates a little bit. It's like, oh, I'm so sorry, you're going to jail.

• 26:09Alex Cranz?

  That's gonna, that's gonna like, separate the, the good law students from the bad law students.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Whether or not they pay for the version of, of Project Tailwind that hallucinates or not. It's like the next tier up in pricing. They had another demo in Google Sheets, which I thought was really interesting, where they, they were talking about colleges and like, if you find me a college, it's like, good if I want to be involved in video games and I'm interested in animation. And I made a list and then the person demoing it was like, tell me if they're public or private at a table. And so it added another column to the list and it said whether colleges were public or private. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is super cool. Also, all that stuff we talked about with search where it like, has the button where it tells you all the sources? None of that's here. It could, this, this is like, the most dangerous place where you're now having it draft documents and do stuff for you and you have no way of checking.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  And when you're like, make a list that I will depend on in my college search. And you're gonna, like, if it gets it wrong that a university is public or private, like, I'm not sure the stakes are there yet. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But there's a lot of trust that's downstream of that.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  I mean, the average tuition, you ask it for the average tuition, then you get accepted and then you're like, oh, this is actually a hundred thousand dollars more than I thought.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if you get all the way to applying and you don't double check that, like, I think that's.

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  Look, 18 year olds are a different, different class of folks than us.

• 27:26David Pierce?

  One of the conspiracy theories that I've heard about Bard in particular is that it exists to make people do more Google searches because you have to fact check every single thing that Bard tells you. So it pops up this thing over and over, right? That's like, Bard is an experiment, it's gonna get lots of stuff wrong. And then there's that button at the bottom that says, Google it. And so it's like, every time I, you know, fill out this table and then I have to go Google every one of these just to check to make sure it's a public or private university. And Google's like, sick, we just got 12 Google searches out of this.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  They announced these upgrades to Bard. Like, do you know, like, sometimes you have a friend who sucks and then like, they get a little bit better? Like, I don't know how else to describe this. Like, what's a meaner way of saying, like, my friend got a glow up? Like, oh shit, you're hot now. Like, you know, it's like that thing that's like, very insulting. Bard used to be bad at math and now it's good at math. Like, they said this over and over again. Seriously, they're like, Bard is now better at math and better at coding. And it's like, because it used to suck before. So they've improved this and the big change here, they upgraded the model to something called Palm 2. So the model they have been very proud of is called Palm. They've upgraded the model Palm 2. They're very proud of how big it is.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  There are different sizes of model inside of Palm and they have like adorable names. There's like Gecko and Bison and Unicorn. Unicorn's the biggest and Gecko's the littlest and Gecko can run locally on a phone. So they're very proud of this model and that's the thing that's now powering Bard. And that has led to a pretty fantastic like capability increase for Bard. So maybe it won't be as confused and boring as before. And then it can now do really interesting things, like it can definitely write code. But then they showed, hey, write code, improve your own code and then leave comments on it in Korean. And it just did it, which is pretty cool. Like, I don't know if the Korean comments were any good. Again, Bard, a little shaky, but it was just cool that they could do that.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  And then they talked about a lot about multimodal interfaces so that you could, you can talk to Bard with pictures. Or you can have Bard generate pictures for you, which is really cool. And then they're doing plugins. So in addition to generating pictures for you, it can go talk to Adobe Firefly and have Adobe Firefly do generative AI images for you. Like the flex for Google is like, oh, we're Google and we can just call all of these companies and say, do you want to plug into our thing that's going to show up with a billion users on day one? And they all say yes.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  The plugins thing I think is, is like the most interesting story in chatbots for the next couple of years, because this is now what everybody has decided is the next turn of this is that the chatbot is the interface, whether it's ChatGPT or Bing or Bard, the chatbot is the interface and you're going to use these plugins to pull in all kinds of other data. And that's either going to turn out like the App Store, which is like a huge, incredibly successful business that has birthed entire new industries, or it's going to turn out like browser extensions, which are like neat and cool, but don't make anybody any money or solve any real problems for anybody. And it's going to be totally fascinating to see which of those it turns out to be. But I think you're right that the, the other advantage that Google has is it has most of those.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Services already that it can plug in like Google doesn't have to go out and talk to kayak to do a travel plugin for Bard. It just has Google travel. It can just do that. And it has it has maps that it can plug in. It has Google Lens that it can plug in. And it's like, all of this stuff, like AI is coming into search at the same time that Google is coming into Bard in a really interesting way. And all of this stuff is first party right now, but it could get bigger very quickly.

• 31:04Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't that kind of set Google up for regulation troubles, though? Because like, that's essentially showing off just how big and huge and far reaching Google is, which is the thing that has the FTC really concerned right now, like thinking, you know, rumbling about like, well, we want to break Google up because it's too big. And they're primarily focused on the advertising section of this. But like, if you can go do what all of these other apps and all of these other plugins and all these other companies can do in one place, that seems like a really powerful argument for, yeah, break that up.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, they got to actually do it. I think like, yes, I think there's a reason that there are a lot of government affairs staffers walking around like, I don't want to, I don't think it's possible to overstate, like where we were, there was the press. And then there was like, large groups of people under signs that said government affairs. And then somewhere else, there were developers presumably, but it was, it was a very obvious Google was like courting this group of people. And you're right, like, they have to walk this line. And when they did Google travel, they got into some trouble, right? Like, they had to, they bought a company, they bought a travel agency, basically. Like, all this stuff happened in the past, but it happened. And now Google owns it. And it's like, pretty hard for them to get into trouble doing things that they already can do against deals that were already approved and went through, especially when all they

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  have to say is like, well, there's OpenAI and Microsoft on the other side of the table. Like, we're competing against the fastest growing consumer software product ever. And like, no one thinks we're winning.

• 32:30Alex Cranz?

  Is there a Bing travel?

• 32:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, Microsoft operates all these services and like, they're Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to stand up a competitor to Google trap, like, it definitely can. And there's all these other startups. So I think that moment for Google is, they're about to say, we're adding AI to all these products, and they need to keep their regulators happy. But they haven't, like, I keep saying, they haven't actually done it. Like, they're just showing us these demos that are really, really cool. But they haven't actually shipped it yet. They're being very, very careful and they're saying out loud, here's all these bold ideas we have. We're going to roll them out responsibly. We know we've got these problems. To that end, one of their biggest announcements was every time you make an AI-generated image with a Google tool, it's going to take, it's going to get a watermark and it's going to have metadata

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  embedded into it that says it's AI-generated and it's been synthesized media. And they want broadly the industry to adopt that. Is that going to happen? I don't know how to answer a question, but like that's where Google's head is at, is like, we're not going to give you these tools until we've, we've done what we can to make them safe and convince governments around the world that they should trust us that we can do these things. There, I think there's power to that approach for them.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  How much for you guys being there in the room with them? Did this feel like kind of a response to a lot of those regulatory concerns?

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  I'll give you one example, like the, uh, straight on. They showed a really cool demo where someone was speaking English and then they ran it through an AI. And I think it was, it was in Spanish, right, David?

• 33:55David Pierce?

  I think that's right, yeah.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  And it came out and the person's voice had been remapped with perfect intonation into Spanish. And in the video of that person speaking, their lips had been remapped from English into Spanish, too.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Super cool. And they are staring at a group of government affairs people and they're like, we know that there's a downside to this. Like, we know that this is like a very dangerous tool to unleash on the world. They actually said the words "deep fake" on stage.

• 34:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can now deep fake in every language.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, and our solution to this is we're only going to give this tool to our trusted partners. Which is, on the one hand, great, right? Google's being responsible. On the other hand, comes with a huge set of questions about how they will decide which partners to trust. And what, whether or not they will cave to bad faith criticisms, right? Like, all these big tech companies have caved to bad faith criticisms about who they trust and why they trust. Okay. And then it also is like, kind of funny, because it sort of implies that Google is the only company in the world. And it's like, Y'all, people are doing this on their laptops today.

• 35:00Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  Deep fake revenge porn is a problem today. So you promising that you won't give this language translation tool to people you don't trust, like solves this problem 2%. Because the real problem is like arbitrary code execution on laptops, which no one can stop. And no, and maybe no one should stop. And there's, there's a tension in there that, you know, we could talk about for like the rest of our lives, probably.

• 35:26Alex Cranz?

  So like in the room, while you guys were in the room, did it feel like Google was doing a good job of, of saying that they were trustworthy? Like, did you feel, did everybody seem to sense like, yeah, these are the trustworthy ones? See, this is one that trusts with AI versus OpenAI, Microsoft and everybody else that's kind of in this space right now.

• 35:41David Pierce?

  I have spent a lot of time trying to decide how I feel about this because my, all of my instincts say that no, everybody is moving too fast and nobody is being trustworthy. But also, like in talking to these folks and even in watching the keynote, I kind of believe Google that it's trying to do this. I mean, I, one of the things that I think seems to be true is that these kinds of products have existed inside of Google for a long time and it has been slow and careful in how it released them to the world. Right. And then I think when ChatGPT and then Bing happened, Google's hand was forced, right? And so it started having to play its cards much more quickly and much more aggressively. And I think whether that was the right call

• 36:25David Pierce?

  remains to be seen on a variety of different levels. But I do think Google is trying to do this the right way. And I think that's partly self-serving, right? Google has a gigantic search business to protect. Google has a huge number of regulatory issues that it's fighting against. So Google has a lot of really self-serving reasons to try and be the good guy here. But at the same time, I think Google is trying to be the good guy here. So like incentives aside, I do think the company is trying to be responsible. And it's possible that I'm just like being taken in by the narrative they're trying to spin, because that's clearly the narrative they're trying to spin. But that is what it has felt like to me so far.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of people at Google who really truly believe that they're five years away or 10 years away from AGI, artificial general intelligence. And like that they should be the only ones to do it because they'll get it right and it won't kill everybody. And like, that's something, you know?

• 37:20Alex Cranz?

  That's a that's a certain amount of confidence.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  It's a take. Yeah. I would say more more cynically, if you're Google and Microsoft, what you want to be is like the regulated monopoly. And I think if they can convince a bunch of lawmakers to effectively like, we only trust AI to these three companies that we will regulate directly. Like, Google's like, yeah, we'll be one of those three companies. I just, it's like the kids still have laptops, man. They're gonna figure out how to do it. Whether or not the government says like, and like, there's, there's just something in there that's like, I'll give you the example of AI Drake. Yeah, my favorite, my favorite character in the entire game. You want to stop AI Drake, right? Okay, what, what are you gonna do? You can go to Apple and say, don't let AI Drake into logic. You can get a pro tool. None of that makes sense. That's not gonna stop it.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  You can go to Google and Microsoft and say, don't make tools that are like, okay, but that's not gonna stop it because the open source tools just let you do it. You're gonna go to Dell and Intel and say, don't let this code run on your laptops? There's just, at some point, like, the kids are just gonna run software and they're gonna make AI Drake. And like, Google is in that, is in that kind of position with all of this stuff. There's a really interesting leaked memo or allegedly leaked memo from inside of Google that is, I think the headline is, we have no mote. And it basically argues that it's not actually competing with OpenAI, that they're competing with open source models, like the meta model got leaked. And they're saying, we're competing with open source.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, that community is gonna go faster than we ever will because we're, you know, we're like wringing our hands about safety and worrying about OpenAI. And that, that's just running at the speed of like, community on the internet. And like, there's just something there that like, what's Google, what are, what are a bunch of Google lawyers, a bunch of government lawyers gonna do in a room to stop a bunch of teenagers making AI Drake? Like, that is just an unfair from the jump. And like, I, I think that's gonna be one of the most interesting dynamics that we see play out. Because at the end of that all, like, a big decision is, will we let people run whatever software they want on their laptops? And I, I think the answer is almost always gonna be yes.

• 39:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, it just makes me think of like, that's one of the reasons Google is nervous, right? Because it's it's going to be a lot easier for the government to regulate Google than it is for the government to regulate AI. And I think it may see it as a proxy for regulating AI to tell a couple of these companies what to do. But it's like, shutting down Napster didn't end piracy, but it is it is one button you can press that does some of the work. And I think if I'm Google, I'm worried that I am the biggest, most pressable button in that space right now.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. One thing I definitely want to talk about, and like, the tweets came in instantly. Google demoed a new magic editor function for Google Photos, AI-based, generative AI-based, where they were like, you know, you can just edit a photo. And the demo was it was a child holding balloons on a park bench, and they just circled the child and they scooted him over on the bench.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  And then the generative AI just figured, and like, my Twitter's pretty quiet. I haven't tweeted in a long time, but you know, during events, I keep it open just to see. And the immediate, instant, "What is a photo?" replies, like, this, I think I put it in LiveBlog, "This is a singularity-level event for what is a photo." Like, it is right there with "Produce an image of my child" as a text prompt, right? We're looking at a photo, and we don't like its composition. We don't like the way the sky looks. We don't like this. And with a tap with a circle, we can just instantly change it. Yes, there's some Photoshop conversation there, but this is different, like, meaningfully different than that stuff.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, the demo that really got me is there's there's this picture of a of a woman standing in front of a waterfall and doing the thing where you sort of stick your hand out as if you're like, you know, catching the waterfall, or like, the thing they do where you're holding up the leaning tower of Pisa or whatever. And she got the angle slightly wrong, but with Magic Editor, you literally just drag her over to the side of the photo so that she gets the angle right. And it's it's literally, it's just that simple, that just like, tap on the thing and just slide the woman over in the photo, and then put it back, and it looks just as normal, and you can change the sky. Sky, you can change the background. It's the kind of thing that it's like, this is like the natural finish of Instagram filters. If you just like take Instagram filters and play it all the way out to the end,

• 41:48David Pierce?

  you have this where you can just change every part of your photo, however you feel like. And this is another one of those, like on the one hand, like as a person who tends to take just slightly wrong photos all the time, this kicks ass. I'm going to use this all the time and it's coming to Google Photos. So it's not just pixel specific. This is going to be applicable to like many photos that I take from now on. And yet I'm going to look at every one of these and be like, am I lying to the universe about this photo that I took every time?

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. No, it's like Photoshop exists, right? And like, if you just think about Instagram is a really good example here. Because if you think about the Instagram norms that have changed over time. Do you remember when using DSLR photos on Instagram was like kind of a faux pas?

• 42:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Nilay Patel?

  Like that was a norm on that platform that you were only supposed to use your phone camera. It was like weird and that's gone, like obliterated by the Kardashian machine. Like DSLR photos on Instagram are there all the time. Mirrorless photos on Instagram are there all the time. And then it was, you shouldn't Photoshop so much Instagram. Like they have the filters, but like a straight photoshopped, it still needs to be a little bit raw. And that is fully obliterated too. And now it's like, oh, now everybody has this like completely like hot shit version of Photoshop. It's AI powered, it requires no technical skill. And you're like, the example they showed was, I think it was a gray sky. And like, do you want the sky to be as blue as you remember it? Which is an incredibly philosophically loaded question.

• 43:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  How blue do you remember the sky being on this day? Like, I don't remember how blue the sky was on the day I proposed to my wife. But if you ask me, it was the bluest it has ever been in world history.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  Should it be that blue? Like, I don't know. And so like, you just get to this place where it's like, you really could be like, as an influencer, like, you know, where's that place in Italy with it, like the, everyone stands on like the hand and the cliff? Do you know what I'm talking about? You just like put, make a photo of me standing on this thing. Yeah. Like, does it matter if I was actually there to take this photo? If I'm gonna have the AI totally correct it?

• 43:41Alex Cranz?

  It does, cuz you're still a liar. Like, when you lie and do a Photoshop, you're still like, a liar.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but I'm saying the norms on Instagram, right? And then they had another AI thing where like Bard was generating captions of cute puppies. And you could just see this thing being like, alright, I'm gonna like AI generate the photo, then AI generate the caption and like automate an Instagram account. I'm telling you, singularity event for what is a photo.

• 44:07Alex Cranz?

  I, I wanna be more angsty about it, but I just can't cuz I keep thinking about every time, every time we've seen these turns on Instagram. At some point, everybody's like, hey, you know, this is all just lies, right? And then there's like a whole thing like Jezebel and all these other sites are like, these are full of lies. This is destructive to, to, to body images and stuff like that.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying Instagram is more important than it is. I'm saying it's a useful thing to examine how like norms in a photography community change over time.

• 44:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  So you start with, you shouldn't even use a mirrorless camera on this platform. Like, that was a thing, like, and you're like all the way up to Photoshop is fine. You're all the way up to like, there's a lot of professional photography on Instagram. And now you're all the way up to, yep, maybe there'll be some blogs talking about lies, but everyone's just gonna use it and it's gonna be fine. And like, there's just something about the norms of photography in there that is interesting to pull out of Instagram. But I think it's broadly true of all the platforms. And I, it's not gonna be a huge leap until you push the shutter button and the cameras start doing this stuff preemptively for you. It is already happening, right? That is already happening with Samsung and the moon.

• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  And like, hey, we see that you're trying to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower with, you know, your partner in it. We're just gonna, when you hit the shutter button, we're just gonna get to, to what you think you wanted. It's like, it's, it's just like, obviously, the next thing that's gonna happen.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  I have deeply mixed feelings about this, but it was wild to watch the demo where they, they scooted the kid over on the bench. The utility of that is a thousand percent obvious, right?

• 45:41Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  I wish my kid was in the center of this photo. The magic eraser where they're constantly circling people and deleting them from photos, like, bye bye, like. A generation from now, some Gen Z boss is gonna like fire someone by deleting them from a Zoom call. Like, that's absolutely gonna happen.

• 46:00Alex Cranz?

  Just circling them on the call.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, Tony, it's been good. Just circle that.

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  You're out.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  See you later. This is, uh, Steve Jobs let Tony Fadell know that he was gonna get fired by deleting him from the contacts in the first iPhone demo. This is a real thing that happened. But like, that's all just wild. And like, we're just, we're very close to accepting magic erasers being a normal thing that happens in photos. Take this person on the background, take this distraction on the background. It's like this close to being normal. The phone's gonna do it for you before you decide to do it. Very close to be normal. What is a photo? Singularity event for what is a photo? Okay, we have to stop because otherwise it will be the entire show. We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Okay, so I want to talk about the most, I cannot believe we forgot to talk about this. So Google organized I/O into sections like you do. It's two hour keynote. So first, like, here's all the stuff we're doing. Here's all the AI we're adding to our products. And we just talked about that. Then they're like, and then there's Google Cloud. And here's all the ways you, as a business, can add AI to your products using our tools. And they talked about their partners and like, some of them are terrifying. Like, what do you think Deloitte's gonna do with AI?

• 48:16David Pierce?

  I don't want it.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  Is it gonna fire a lot of people, companies around the country and world? Yeah, it certainly is.

• 48:22David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  With the power of Google Cloud, like, what's Accenture gonna do with AI? Yeah, dude, they're gonna downsize your shit. Like, it's just like, very obvious what's gonna happen there. But then there is this moment, and I cannot stop thinking about it because it came up twice. First, the company said it, and then later, they referred back to it. Google was like, and here's an action. I just want you to listen to this, and then we can all just figure it out together.

• 48:49Speaker 06

  Folks come to Wendy's, and a lot of times they use some of our acronyms. The Junior Bacon Cheeseburger, they'll come in and give me a JBC. You know, we need to understand what that really means, and voice AI can help make sure that order is accurate every single time.

• 49:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 49:05Nilay Patel?

  Now, I can be charitable here.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  We should, we should listen to it again, shouldn't we?

• 49:10Speaker 06

  It's the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger, they'll come in and give me a JBC. You know, we need to understand what that really means, and voice AI can help make sure that order is accurate every single time.

• 49:20David Pierce?

  I'm just imagining just hordes of teens running into Wendy's screaming, give me a JBC.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  So charitable, what this means is they're gonna build some sort of voice recognition, order-taking system. Again, downsizing their workforce. And apparently, the teens have started calling Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers JBCs, and they need the voice AI to recognize this. Right, that, that's more or less what he's trying to say, if I understand it. He said that without any of this context. He just, he just said it and Google ran it. Is that we would all understand that the problem of the robot order-taking system not understanding what a JBC is, is so challenging that they need to use Google Cloud. I'm just gonna say, paying a human being like, $15 an hour to understand what a JBC is, is a better solution than building a voice AI.

• 50:10Alex Cranz?

  I feel like they, maybe it's just because I'm about to move. And so I've been having to make a lot of calls to like utility companies in the last couple of days. And today I called, I've called a gas company to like get my gas turned on at my new place. And they were, they wanted to know what my phone number was. So I said my phone number and my phone number starts with an eight. And they went, okay, your phone number starts with a one. And I was like, no, eight and one sound nothing alike. Like,

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  We need to understand what a JBC is.

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  Like, yeah, like y'all can't even understand what a one and an eight are. And you're going to tell me that you can understand what JBC is.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It was just, it was like a pin drop silence in the keynote today. In particular, the idea that Wendy's was going to invest massively in AI to take cheeseburger orders is, it's very good. It's like, it's a perfect sign of where we are, that Google's like, who, what's our, what's the best compelling customer case for Google Cloud?

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  They couldn't get like Waffle House? You know, like, I don't know what smothered means. Tell me what my smothered hash browns be.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  Also, I just want to point out that understanding that JBC means junior bacon cheeseburger, you don't need AI to, you can just tell the computer.

• 51:15David Pierce?

  That's like a, a super easy computer science problem. That was the thing they kept jumping at, like, nothing that you just described requires Google Cloud. Like, you're good. But no, I, I agree. I mean, I think, so I was reading Wendy's is obviously very proud of the fact that it's doing this. Like, this reminds me of all the stuff that Domino's always does, right? Where like anytime somebody launches a new technology, Domino's is like, we're going to use it to deliver your pizza. There's like that thing where you can order a pizza from CarPlay and they're really excited about that. And it's like Domino's, that's nothing. Like you've, you've, you've done nothing. But anyway, so Wendy's is very proudly announcing this thing. And their CEO, Todd Penninger, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, it will be very conversational.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  You won't know you're talking to any but an employee. One, don't buy that. Two, is that what we're going for? Like, this, this is back to the like, everybody's just going to use AI to fire a bunch of people. Like, I, I feel like I'm pretty happy talking to like a stoned 17 year old about my JBC behind the counter at Wendy's. Like, I don't need a robot to solve this problem for me.

• 52:17Alex Cranz?

  Also, which side of the counter are you, is it drive through or is it just walking in? Cause walking in, don't they all have the screens now?

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  What if you are stoned? I just like, let's just walk through the, the situation in which you're yelling, give me a JBC.

• 52:30Alex Cranz?

  This is very realistic. Let's go.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, laser bog. Walk me through the situations in which you are screaming, give me a JBC to a robot at Wendy's.

• 52:37Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that that happens a lot of the times and usually like I want that and some chicken nuggets, the spicy kind that shouldn't be hard. Like, that's a very easy conversation to have because usually if you're stoned, you're saying it very slowly anyway. So you're enunciating.

• 52:51Nilay Patel?

  A voice that can help us understand when people want JBCs. All right, let's talk about Android. There was a lot of Android news in I O as well.

• 52:58David Pierce?

  Sort of.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  There's a really fun demo of like new lock screens.

• 53:02Alex Cranz?

  They like talked about Android, but they didn't talk about Android, right?

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  They, okay, yeah, they like, it was Android 14, but like there was a pixel fold. There's a pixel 7A. There are new lock screens.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  They did a wallpaper demo that was like 96% of the Android demo. It was just like Dave Burke, who runs all the Android stuff and is lovely and did a terrific job in his demo. Just goofed around with his wallpapers. He's like, what up? We have a new Android. Let me change my wallpaper.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  I I really liked the wallpapers.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed that.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  But yes, but like Apple, like half the time is like, look at my wallpaper thing. There was one part during the demo where he was showing off how they could make cinematic photos. And he was like, I did this thing where like, here's a photo of a kid in front of a lake and like, I pushed the button. And I now I cut out the kid and generative AIs filled out the background and look at this parallax. And he's like, it's beautiful. And I was like, this looks insane.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't want my wallpapers to move that much.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, it was wild. Okay, so but there was Android news, like as a whole, right? There are new pixel devices, a pixel tablet, the pixel fold, they a new home app. At one point, they were like RCS now has 800 billion users and Android messages. And then very pointedly were like, we hope every phone maker adopts RCS. And there was a cheer from the crowd.

• 54:24Alex Cranz?

  And no Dieter. I kept expecting him.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  And yeah, and all the spotlights shot shown on Dieter. And he was like, yeah. But no, it's like the yearly ritual of of Google asking Apple politely to support RCS continued.

• 54:37David Pierce?

  And it's just never gonna happen.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  If you recall, at the code conference last year, someone asked Tim Cook a question like, my grandmother hates the green bubbles or I can't send photos. And he was like, buy your mom an iPhone. Like, he doesn't care. The man doesn't care. They're not gonna do it. There was a cheer for Matter, which is like, like, Google is just like a very different audience. Like, when Apple's like, and this will support Matter. Like, first of all, you're like, I'm in a parallel universe. Apple said the name of an open standard. It's not gonna happen. And but there's not rarely cheers. This was like, and it supports Matter. And there was like a cheer from the crowd. And they're like RCS. And there's like a cheer from the crowd. Uh, so that was cool. They added a new Find My Devices update. Alex, you're in on this, right?

• 55:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's gonna use like, it's gonna be better at triangulating, right? Because right now, Apple does this too, where it uses all the Apple phones to try to better triangulate so you can find your thing. And now they're gonna do that with Google and Android. But the difference is Android has way more users than than Apple does. No, no offense to all of the Apple fans listening. I'm sorry, it's just the fact, Android has way more users. But I'm curious how, like, there's some stuff we don't quite know, I think. Like, what version of Android do you need, right? Because there's a lot of Android users out there, but not most of, most of them aren't on the newest version. So if you need the newest version, this becomes a lot less useful than the the Apple one.

• 56:00David Pierce?

  I feel like this is like a perfect microcosm of the like, potential and peril of Android.

• 56:06Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 56:07David Pierce?

  Because a lot of the stuff, especially in that demo, was stuff you can do with Apple devices for your other Apple devices. And what Google is saying is, we're actually gonna make this a standard that anyone can tap into. And, you know, Tile devices are gonna use it, and other companies' devices are gonna be able to be part of this. And actually, they're working with Apple to do some of the work on the unwanted tracking notifications. If there's a tracker that it doesn't recognize, it's following you around, it'll alert you and try to help. And that's really great. Matter is the same kind of thing. Google's doing the same kind of stuff with Fast Pair. It's like, the best version of Android basically takes all of Apple's good ideas and makes it available to everybody. And that is amazing. And in theory, is like, That that actually assumes that Apple goes first on a lot of things, which it doesn't. But that's the idea, right?

• 56:49David Pierce?

  Is it is it is an open, successful version of this that plays nicely with everybody? Except that it cannot get its shit together enough to put everybody on the same version of Android, such that if you use a phone from 15 minutes ago, you're on the wrong version of Android and none of this works anymore. And so Google has tried to solve this by selling a lot of pixels, but it can't figure out how to sell a lot of pixels. And so it's like, what Google is trying to do is right and powerful and good and would be massively successful. And it just, it just can't do it. And I don't know, it's possible that that approach, those two approaches are actually like mutually exclusive, that if you're gonna be the open one, you actually can't force everybody to like play along and update their software. But it just, it just breaks my heart every time.

• 57:33Nilay Patel?

  So they gave, they gave some stats here that were really interesting, though, that kind of support your point, right? That it's like a long tail play. And it was like, there are 300 plus pairs of headphones that support Android Fast Pair. And it's like, I didn't, I didn't know that number was that big. I didn't, I didn't know that there are literally 300 different kinds of headphones that support Android Fast Pair now.

• 57:52David Pierce?

  And that rules. That's awesome.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  That, that's awesome, right? And it's like, oh, that just happened over time. They announced this like several years ago. And then, you know, all the new phones came out with last year's version of Android. And over time, they all just inherited Android Fast Pair and the headphone makers did it. And that's like, pretty cool. But you can't announce it, right? You can announce it at the beginning when no one can get it. And then you can announce it now when like, it just sort of happened. And in the middle, there's like, there's a vacuum of news. Whereas Apple's like, I don't know, spatial audio, everything has it now. And that, that's a tension for Google.

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  I think this goes back to the, to why Android wasn't a huge feature of I O this year, or at least the big keynote, right? Like, they're gonna do a whole Android keynote, too. Most years, Google I O is like, Android 14, Android 13, Android Oreo, whatever. And this time, it was like, Android, yeah, that's here, too. And they didn't really focus on, on the timeliness of it. I think it's because they can't, right? They, they just are too diversified. There are too many phones, too many devices out there.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  There are, but they did the thing that they did, which is they announced the Pixel 7A, the Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet. And so to some extent, like they solved their own problem.

• 58:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but they're just like, they're no longer focused on what's new right now. What is the thing that you're going to go be able to download on your device tomorrow to have a lot of fun? Instead, it's like, this is, this is stuff that's going to come down the pipe eventually. You're going to be really excited about it, but.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, you get emoji home screens. What they're focused on is you're going to spend $1,800 on a phone that turns into a tablet. And here's a bunch of tablet optimizations. Do you know how many times they mentioned that Google has updated 50 plus of its apps to run better in tablet mode? Oh, and they, and they did the thing where they like nagged themselves again, where they introduced the tablets. Like, they were like, so tablets kind of suck. They're in a weird middle place. And sometimes you buy them and you shove them in a drawer and you don't use them anymore. You should buy our tablet.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  Ah, that's, that's a weird sell. So the Pixel Tablet is cool. We saw it. I would not say it looks remarkable, except for the stand built into the case, which is really cool. It's like a metal ring. It's like, it's very clicky. It's cool. And it's got a charging dock that comes with it. It's $4.99. The charging dock by itself, I think is $1.29, $1.49, but you get it for free if you buy the tablet. It's cool. It's an Android tablet. There's nothing about it that's not an Android tablet, except when you put it in the dock, it does the cool photo frame thing that Nest, Nest Hubs do. And it has a new smart home, Google Home app. Other than that, it's an Android tablet.

• 1:00:17David Pierce?

  This is why we talked a little bit about this on, on the Wednesday show with Dan, who got an early look at some of the stuff. But I think the thing about these large screen Android devices is that apps are bad and they have always been bad. And Google has begged and pleaded many times to make them not bad. And all the developers say, we don't care. Nobody sells good Android tablets. We're over it. And there was even a great moment in the keynote where Rick Osterloh was like, we have a better lineup of Android tablets than ever. And he showed like three tablets no one's ever heard of. And that was, and that was it. He's like, would you like this Lenovo Android tablet? And everyone's like, no, this is nothing. But the Google optimizations are all well and good. And I'm very excited about that. There was a suspicious lack of really great big screen third-party Android apps.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:01:01David Pierce?

  Still, because Google has such a massive hill to climb to make anyone care enough to build these big screen devices. But I think the genius thing that Google did with the tablet was essentially treat it like a TV screen, right? Like, the demo that we saw, Neelai, has a big Google TV widget. It has Chromecast on it.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  So you can cast to it, which is really cool. So it's the first, right, it's the first Android tablet that you can cast to.

• 1:01:23David Pierce?

  Right, which is a big deal. And, and it is like, very clearly, this is a thing that like, it'll run the Google apps that you want. But mostly, this is for you to watch things on a screen. And most apps that you can watch things on have a button that you can press to make them fullscreen, and that does the job. So they've like, so aggressively constrained what this tablet can do, that you almost don't have to worry about the app problem. I think the foldable phone is a very different thing that is gonna have a much higher hill to climb. But the Pixel tablet, I'm like, I don't know that I'm gonna care all that much, because like, Netflix is gonna look fine. And Peacock is gonna look fine, and it'll all move on with my life.

• 1:01:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. How many apps are people using on tablets?

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're using consumption. Like, what is a modern TV? Like, go look at the TV in your living room right now. It's a ARM processor, it's a Linux-based OS, and it's a bunch of video-playing apps. Like, it's a, it's a giant Android tablet. That's all it is. And like, now they made a little one, and they made a dock for it. And that's cool. Like, I can definitely see myself buying it. I wish that the camera could be electrically disconnected. I do not like having a camera on those kinds of, on smart displays in the house. It's just like, that's the line for me. It's like, I'll put, I'll put microphones anywhere.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  I wish there was a button or a shutter or something on that camera. By the way, they showed a video where a celebrity, I think she's the narrator of The Circle, that's what he was telling me. Michelle Buteau was taking meetings. She's like, I take three to five Zoom meetings a day. And she was just sitting in front of a tablet on the dock with like, no keyboard. And I was like, you just. Didn't happen. This is not the way to do it. No, but I'm definitely gonna buy one. I'm gonna suck for this. I'm also thinking about buying the fold because we played with it and it is exactly the right form factor. Like they got the size and shape and hinge of this thing right. The hinge is right off the Surface Duo. Like this is what the Surface Duo should have been, but it folds perfectly flat. The hinge is really tight. It's not tall like the Galaxy Fold. It's just the right size and shape.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  I have some concerns about the screen though.

• 1:03:25Alex Cranz?

  And also that it's $1800.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's like.

• 1:03:27David Pierce?

  Those two things are related for me, right? Because I think like to just hold it as an object. It's very impressive. Like it's really well made. It's really solid. It feels really good. It's basically an iPhone 10 that opens into an iPad mini, which is like the dream. That is literally, that is what I want size wise. But it has that crease down the middle of the screen that is very much there. It's a little better than the Galaxy Fold, but oh boy, do you still notice it. But the big thing that threw me was, and we were using it outdoors in a relatively sunny place in Mountain View, but like the glare on that thing was awful. Like really, really, really bad.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  There was a cheapness to it. I don't know how else to describe it. Like, and there's a screen protector that you can see. So like there's the edge of the screen protector and then the display itself and then like the little lip of the bezel.

• 1:04:15Alex Cranz?

  Just learning nothing from Samsung on that one.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was just there. Like I want it. It's cool. And like the tricks they gave it where you're like watching a video on the thing and you open it. It pops up in the video there and then like you're taking a selfie with the back camera. All of that was neat. We all tried to open it with one hand, which was just a terrifying experience. Like you're, we're outside holding $1800 phones. I'm like, like, whoa, trying to open it with one hand.

• 1:04:41David Pierce?

  Alex, I wish you could have seen the face that Neelai made. So it was, it was Neelai, the song Allison Johnson and me, and we're all standing around this wooden table. And we all decide we're gonna try to open this phone with one hand and I go first and sort of like push my thumb in and try to pop it open and just fully almost dropped the thing like it, it, I had to like bobble it to catch it. And Neelai literally goes, whoa. It's like reflexively makes a noise.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  It was terrifying.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  It was so good.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  And then we all did it. All of us in turn were like, what if I made my other friend have that experience that I just had? The phone cannot be opened with one hand. We did see Dieter. He did insist that he could do it. He was like, you just do tit to that. Like he's Dieter. That's a very Dieter move. None of us have mastered it yet. V thinks she's mastered it. I will say that.

• 1:05:31David Pierce?

  She had a thumb thing that it was, she was, she was better at it than the rest of us for sure.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  It was like she was pushing it straight up into the air. Like it was getting higher, like from the ground, from disaster. Like I don't, no, no, no, no, no, no. This thing is not made to be opened with one hand.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but there's like just a little bit of, like right in the middle where the crease is in the hinge, like the bezel stops and there's like a little flat plastic piece. And it's just like, ah.

• 1:05:59Alex Cranz?

  Is it smushy?

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not squishy. It's just, I don't know. There's something about it that just didn't give me $1800. And that's weird because every, like the, it's nicer than the fold, right, David? Like.

• 1:06:10David Pierce?

  Oh, much.

• 1:06:11Alex Cranz?

  Like all Pixel products are that way. They always are like the same price as Samsung, the same price as Apple, maybe a hundred dollars cheaper. Just not quite as nice. Like just, there's something about it where it's just a little cheaper, just a little more affordable feeling.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  I know. They, I will say this is the right size and thinness and an aspect ratio. They got all that right.

• 1:06:33Alex Cranz?

  It looks gorgeous.

• 1:06:35Nilay Patel?

  And I do love the idea of just like opening it and like doing a thing, you know?

• 1:06:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, like we, we've talked on this show about how 6.1 inches is the correct size for a smartphone screen. And this is not an invitation for debate. Like that's just a true fact. It is, this is the official position of the Vergecast. Don't worry about it.

• 1:06:51Alex Cranz?

  Keep going, Eli. Keep going, keep going.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Bold.

• 1:06:53David Pierce?

  But it is, it is, I would be curious to see, you know, slight variations on it, but this size immediately felt right to me. And like Alison and V were able to close it and slip it into their pockets. You're, you're able to hold and use the thing in one hand. You can open it and hold it in two hands and type on that split keyboard fairly comfortably. Like I agree. I think this is really right, just sort of blueprint wise for what one of these is supposed to feel like. Like you can use it closed and it's just a regular phone. It looks and feels like a regular phone.

• 1:07:22Alex Cranz?

  But that protector on the display, I'm just looking at the photos of it. Is it that, like in Dan's photos, it's really big. Is it that big in, in real life?

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, there's, like I said, there's just like a little. A little touch of jank in there, like, you know, spice it up a little bit. Uh, I think, I think David had the, like, the best take on it. At one point, David, you were like, "I can't wait for the next generation of this."

• 1:07:43David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, yeah, that's, that feels about right.

• 1:07:45David Pierce?

  Change nothing about it, except make everything a tiny bit better, is like,

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49David Pierce?

  Luckily, that's kind of the whole Pixels move, so I, I'm, I'm optimistic. Or they'll shut it down in 12 months.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Or they're gonna shut all that. On that note, we also saw the Pixel 7A, which is a very nice $500 fun. No, there's a review of it on the website now, if you care to read it. Nothing much to say. We also saw a very impressive demo of Google's Project Starline, which is their video conferencing thing with stereo cameras that look like you're looking at somebody in 3D. It was awesome.

• 1:08:20Alex Cranz?

  BJ loved it. He saw it a couple, like, a year ago, I think, and adored it.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  No, so we saw the new version.

• 1:08:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is the new, this, like, uses regular cameras, right?

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's just a 65-inch display, uh, in cameras on three sides of it.

• 1:08:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, cuz, because the original version, you had to, like, have a whole setup. You're like, "I have to go down to the Starline office."

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this, this still had a whole setup. Like, we were in, like, a special booth and, like, whatever. It was very controlled. It's a tech demo.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  But it still felt closer to, like, "Oh, this might be achievable for normal people."

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Alex Cranz?

  One day.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, this, "Here's a piece of hardware you can put in a conference room and it will make sense." And it was very cool, and it's nowhere near shipping. But, you know, Google, Google made a cool thing and we saw it.

• 1:09:00David Pierce?

  It is really cool, though. And the idea is basically, it's just designed to be, uh, it does a lot of work on, like, gaze correction, so you can make something that feels like you're approximating eye contact. Uh, they've done a lot of work on latency. They've done a lot of work on the depth, so that, like, Neil and I both had the experience of, like, the guy we were talking to, Andrew Nucker, from Google, uh, would hold out an Apple, and you, you can actually see the Apple in, like, real, true, high fidelity, because, like, he's large and you're on this big screen. And then, and he was like, "You, you can look at it and you sort of instinctively lean towards it." And then he's like, "You know, um, reach out and take it from me. It feels just like you're taking it from me." And like, "No, it didn't. It, like, super, super didn't, Andrew." It, like, it felt like I was reaching through a ghost. Like, that's what this was.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45David Pierce?

  But, uh, but still, the demo, as, as far as, like, virtual conversations I have had with people, that was leaps and bounds better than anything I've ever tried.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  And the display tech is really cool, right? Cause it's, it's just a flat 65 inch screen. But then it's got a lens array mounted in front of it that sends different images to your right and left eyes.

• 1:10:06Alex Cranz?

  That's so cool.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  And it's doing head tracking and it's just like that is cool. And like, they're like, basically they're interrupting like, they're gonna make like the stereo sequence of images that you see. And so they're just sending a different picture to your left and right eye and doing with head tracking. So it's basically just a TV with like a lens array in front of it.

• 1:10:22Alex Cranz?

  That's nuts.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  And they're trying it with like a handful of customers. I think Salesforce has one and T-Mobile has one, uh, but it's still very much tech to know. But it's cool. We, it was fun to play with.

• 1:10:31Alex Cranz?

  When does like James Cameron get one?

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the next Avatar movie in order to save on costs is you alone will go into a small booth and talk to a Navi. Just like straight eye contact with a Navi. And he's like, you're really, really messing us up, dude.

• 1:10:46Alex Cranz?

  Disney's thinking about, Disney's like working on this right now.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine making like dead on eye contact with a Navi person? And they're like, I'm going to be honest with you. The way we have sex is by putting our hair into each other.

• 1:11:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, now I can. Also it works with our animals, but that's different.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  I feel strongly that we should take a break.

• 1:11:11Alex Cranz?

  Probably.

• 1:11:12Nilay Patel?

  We'll be back. The JBC is for all.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

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• 1:12:05Speaker 07

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• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  We're back. We've talked about Google enough. Let's do a lightning round. Alex, you want to start?

• 1:12:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm going to fight David in a little bit, but we each chose ours before the podcast started and David got here first. So we're going to fight later.

• 1:12:57David Pierce?

  I chose mine first.

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  But so I went ahead and went with Apple is launching Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on the iPad with the new subscription pricing. And mainly because I didn't know people were still using Final Cut Pro and this like blew my mind this week. Like, there was like an hour of Dan Seifer trying to explain to me in Slack that, no, everybody does this, this is very normal. But I didn't know. Yeah, like MKBHD, a lot of creators use it. I'm very used to Premiere. Premiere, like Final Cut Pro was huge. Then 2011 happened. There was a really bad version of Final Cut Pro called Final Cut Pro 10 and everybody stopped using it. And then apparently everybody started using it again. And now it's going to be available on the iPad. It sounds like it's pretty like the feature parity is good.

• 1:13:41Alex Cranz?

  It's going to have a lot of the same features that you've already find in the Mac version, which makes sense because they're using the same processors. So this is exciting if all you have is an iPad and you just really want to edit. There's still a lot of questions we're waiting to hear. And if you're one of those people that uses FCP now, like just message me. I just want to know like, what's your life like? I know, I know there's a lot of you in this, but this is still like blowing my mind. And I want to know more. I want to understand you.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  They're like straight up open letters to Apple being like, make FCP great by doing these things so we can switch from Premiere. And like from the Hollywood community. So like there's, it's been around. It's, it's, it has a very loyal user base, especially amongst solo creators. Cause it's cheap. It's really, really fast on Macs. I remember Jonathan Morrison used to edit 4K footage on a MacBook Air with Final Cut Pro. Cause it's so fast on, on M series chips.

• 1:14:31Alex Cranz?

  That's wild. Yeah. I just want to know like when that turn happened. Cause I remember being like, I had my copy and I was like, ugh, 10 sucks. And I threw it out.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that was 2011.

• 1:14:41Alex Cranz?

  I think I actually physically threw it out and that was 10 years, like 12 years ago. And I'm like, when, when did things change?

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  The relentless passage of time, Alex comes Russell.

• 1:14:49Alex Cranz?

  I know, but when was the moment? Call me. Let me know.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm, I'm fascinated by the subscription pricing with this. If they bring that to their Mac, I think it's going to get real weird. And I think like the LumaFusions of the world will have a big opportunity.

• 1:15:01Alex Cranz?

  Cause that's, that's one of the big reasons people hate Premiere. And, and as I understand it, that's one of the reasons Final Cut Pro became so popular is you could just buy it and be done. Whereas with Premiere, you're paying, spending I think $50 a month minimum, maybe $20 if you do certain kind of gross versions of it.

• 1:15:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that, especially for an iPad app.

• 1:15:19Nilay Patel?

  This is a big deal, right? Apple's bringing Pro apps to its supposedly Pro iPad, which has the same chip in it as some of its Macs.

• 1:15:28Alex Cranz?

  Especially after Adobe spent years being like, we're doing it too. And it's always just not quite good enough.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:15:34Alex Cranz?

  And, and Apple just went and did it.

• 1:15:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, and there are a lot of, there are a lot of things about editing on an iPad that are better than editing on a Mac. That like direct input, being able to move things around with a pencil and your fingers. And it's like, it's actually a really great, powerful editing machine. Once you figure it out. And I like, I know a lot of people for image editing in particular, who will like, use their Mac all day until they have to do sort of really detailed, fine image editing. And then they will actually like punt over to their iPad and do that work there. And. I think the video interface for that is hard work. Like iMovie is not a great piece of software on the iPad.

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  iMovie has been totally replaced by CapCut. We could do, if anybody wants to write the story of how CapCut, which is basically the TikTok editor broken out, has just replaced iMovie and Apple missed it. I'll take that pitch 10 days out of 10. Like, it is a wild thing that has happened in the industry and it's like kind of unremarked upon.

• 1:16:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think there's the thing that Final Cut has had going for it is that it is most of the power of Premiere without most of the overhead of Premiere, both like financial and like performance. And so if they can figure out how to actually map that to the iPad in a way that really works, I think it's gonna mean a lot to a lot of people.

• 1:16:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  To have the subscription money. All right, Dave, what's your lightning round thing?

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  I just want to say, just last thing on that, it is super funny that Apple announced that the same week that Google announced a Pixel tablet that basically doesn't do anything but play movies. It's just like, his two companies have very different ideas about what tablets are supposed to be, and I think that's delightful. My lightning round thing is Disney just had its earnings and one of the things it announced is that it's putting all of Hulu content into the Disney Plus app. It's also raising the price of its ad subscription and not killing Hulu or running away from Hulu.

• 1:17:25Alex Cranz?

  Cause it can't.

• 1:17:25David Pierce?

  It can't and also doesn't seem to want to, but it definitely doesn't seem to want to buy the rest of Hulu from Comcast for what would cost at least $9 billion. So it's, it's just doing this weird move where it's gonna sort of quietly try to like obviate Hulu and just like let it die to make Disney Plus more successful. Cause Disney Plus, they're now going into ads and one of the things that we've seen is that actually if you can build a subscription slash ad hybrid business, that can be super successful. It's working really well for Netflix. Disney, like everybody else, is losing an insane amount of money on streaming and needs to find ways to make more money. As a longtime Hulu fan who has debated cancelling Disney Plus because I don't watch anything on it anymore, this makes me sad, but this was always kind of inevitable, right?

• 1:18:10David Pierce?

  Alex, I feel like this is, this was always where this was gonna go.

• 1:18:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this was always because right now they have to, they have to decide whether is Comcast gonna buy Hulu, is Disney gonna buy Hulu? And Disney's been putting a lot of money into stuff to go on Hulu, but it still owns the rights. So it can just pull all of that stuff and put it on its own service and like, be like, all right, Comcast, enjoy your three shows that are still on the service. Suffer. And I mean Hulu Live, I think is still like an important product that that bears some thinking about, right? That's, that's their live TV function. It's basically the biggest competitor, I think, to YouTube TV. So, so there's still something there, but it's very clear that like Apple or it's very clear right now that Disney is cutting costs. They're, they're also saying they're gonna drop stuff

• 1:18:58Alex Cranz?

  from Disney Plus, some of the shows and stuff. We don't know what, but they're gonna be dropping content because they don't want to pay the licensing fees for it. This kind of idea that, oh, wow, you have a utopia, you, you go and you pay for a streaming service and you get all of the content ever is just rapidly disappearing. So everybody go bust out your, your Blu-ray players. Start collecting your media again. This is the moment.

• 1:19:20Nilay Patel?

  We'll put a pin in that. All right. Here's my lightning round one. Google announced it's bringing YouTube, Waze and Zoom to cars with native Android, which is very funny. As David pointed out to me, everyone seems to be very interested in making your cars more functional when they're in park. So now you can watch YouTube in park. I think this is because of charging, right? They just think people with EVs are gonna be sitting in their cars charging for 20, 30 minutes.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, you go and you buy your JBC and then you don't want to go home and eat it. You gotta eat it fast.

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  You're like, it's a JBC and the robot's like, what do you mean? There's a data center on fire, trying to figure it out.

• 1:19:50Alex Cranz?

  You're just getting salad after salad. You didn't want that.

• 1:19:54Nilay Patel?

  This is not actually my lightning round item. My lightning round item is that David came to pick me up from the hotel to go to dinner last night.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:01Nilay Patel?

  In his Kia Soul. And he looked at me with absolute swagger in his eyes and said, wireless carplay. And then the wireless carplay immediately didn't work, like immediately didn't work.

• 1:20:15David Pierce?

  We didn't even make it out of the driveway before it broke. We literally didn't even get out of the driveway. I have never been so disappointed in Apple than I was at that moment.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  This rental Kia Soul is like, it's a hot whip. It was just like wireless carplay is great. You know, like Google map the restaurant. And I was like, this, this thing is, this arrow is not moving. The app kept quitting.

• 1:20:38David Pierce?

  And then Neelai got out of the car and it worked fine for the rest of the night. And then again, has worked fine today. There's just like, there is like a Neelai Patel force field that just destroys CarPlay. I don't understand.

• 1:20:50Alex Cranz?

  CarPlay is like, I don't want it.

• 1:20:52Nilay Patel?

  I was just like 100%. He was like, why I was.

• 1:20:55David Pierce?

  And then just I, I hit go on the directions and just nothing happened.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  No, he had to pick up his phone and use Google Maps on his phone.

• 1:21:03David Pierce?

  It sucked so much, Alex. I can't even tell you the shame that I felt in that moment.

• 1:21:07Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna pick you up one day, Eli, in my car with wired CarPlay. It'll work.

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We gotta wrap this thing up. That's the Vergecast. I'm sorry that we're completely loopy. It has been a long day, but a fun day. It was fun to see everybody. We saw listeners at I O. It was great to see all of you. Really cool being in person. We've got lots more from I O on the site. We have hands ons with all the gadgets, all the stuff. We have lots more coverage of Google coming this year as we've already previewed. So look on the site for that. I'm really interested in your thoughts about Google. Search changing is a big deal. So let me know what you think, because I wanted to shape our coverage a little bit. And if you want more on the hardware, the Wednesday show this week was Alison and Dan talking about all those hands on. So there's lots more about the hardware if you want it on the Vergecast Wednesday show this week. All right, that's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:22:00David Pierce?

  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.

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