Humane Pins and your own ChatGPT

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss the debut of Humane's AI Pin, OpenAI's DevDay, GPT-4 updates, and more. Further reading: Exclusive leak: all the details about Humane's AI Pin, which costs $699 and has OpenAI integration Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable All the news from OpenAI’s DevDay conference OpenAI is letting anyone create their own version of ChatGPT OpenAI wants to be the App Store of AI ChatGPT subscribers may get a ‘GPT builder’ option soon OpenAI turbocharges GPT-4 and makes it cheaper OpenAI’s GPT builder interface is dead simple to use. Valve reveals the Steam Deck OLED: $549 buys better screen, battery, and more Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster This smart garage door controller is no longer very smart YouTube pages are getting a TikTok-like For You feed Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, flagship podcast of Vox Media. They're just taking it back, baby.

• 1:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  That's 2024. Just open mutiny. Bring it on. Sports website. I'm your friend, Neil. Alex Kranz is here.

• 1:27Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend, too. I just got to say it. My brother won a Michelin star.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:31Alex Cranz?

  And I didn't even want to try to, to put that in neatly. I just want to brag.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Alex Cranz?

  So that was me bragging. And that's, that's it. It's, it's here. It happened.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  The flagship podcast of being related to Michelin stars.

• 1:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there we go.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  He's my brother, too.

• 1:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he's all our brothers.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  He's everyone's family.

• 1:45Alex Cranz?

  Everyone, everyone earned this.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening to this show, you can tell people you know a Michelin star.

• 1:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you can.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  The star, not the person.

• 1:51Alex Cranz?

  Just the star, just the star.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is in San Francisco.

• 1:55David Pierce?

  We're like 85 seconds in and I'm like, this is going to be a three and a half hour long Vergecast. It's not going to make any sense to anyone. And this might be the end of The Vergecast.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  Like this, for a lot of reasons, today might be the last Vergecast ever, I think. It's going to be, it's going to be a day.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  If you're going to go, go with a bang. Alex Heath is here from Los Angeles.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm really just an AI agent, but I'm here.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  I will say that some people in the YouTube comments openly wondered if I was interviewing an AI Barack Obama. They're like, "That didn't happen."

• 2:27Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  "You got trolled by AI Barack Obama." And maybe I did. Alright, so David, you're in San Francisco.

• 2:33David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  Because you were supposed to attend the launch of the humane AI pen.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  That's correct.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  Which, when David says "the energy of this podcast," is a little... I would say that that is the thing that we are gonna talk about. It is... It's a lot. There's a lot to unpack with the fact that David is in San Francisco and did not go to that event. And then earlier this week, Alex, you did attend the OpenAI Dev Day. That's right. Which is probably like a pivotal moment in the history of that company, because they're headed towards app stores. So there's like quite a lot of news. And then we got a lightning round. But we should start with the fact that I'm using Samsung Dex.

• 3:14David Pierce?

  Well, first, I should say, we should actually start with an apology, which is that I made certain promises on this show two weeks ago to hold you to a standard of using Dex on the podcast. And I did not do that. I abdicated my responsibility in bullying you into using this insane setup that you have going on. And on YouTube, there were several people who were very upset with us. And so, I just want to preface whatever Neelai's about to say, as the 30 minutes before we started recording this podcast were spent with Neelai and Liam, our producer, attempting to make this thing that is happening now work.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  So if you're listening, if you're in your car, just close your eyes. Pull over, close your eyes. Now just imagine my setup. Dell monitor, pretty nice Dell monitor, actually. We just stole it from a desk. Liam just wandered the office and took the nicest one he could find. It's connected to a USB-C hub, which is connected to a dead Bluetooth keyboard that is now charging by being plugged into the hub. And a wired mouse, and the tracking speed of this mouse is out of control. This computer is almost unusable because the tracking speed of this mouse is set at warp 20. It's out of control. And then that's all plugged into a Galaxy Fold 5, with a Dbrand skin on it. It's our custom Dbrand skin. You can go to storethetheverge.com. Put that plug in there. And I'm, I'm in it, man. I'm just running multi-windows. Yeah.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my dream, Alex doesn't know any of this, my dream, Alex, is that I would commute with nothing. No bag, no laptop, I would just have the fold, I would do phone stuff on the train, I would tell David that his Humane leak was clunky. Just from my, my folding tablet, then I would get to the office and I would use Dex. And this would be my computer at work.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  And Alex, I just want you to tell the people what you said immediately upon seeing this setup.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Just that looks stupid? I, I actually don't, I don't remember exactly what I said.

• 5:10Alex Cranz?

  That was it, yeah.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. The only thing that could possibly be stupider is like a screenless thing on your lapel, uh, I think. That you're using, but you're not using it, so.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  I wish I had one, but we never will.

• 5:25Alex Cranz?

  Nope.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  That seems clear. Alright, so I'm using Dex, we're gonna get through the show notes with Dex. It's not unusable, I would say.

• 5:34Alex Cranz?

  Well, the monitor's gorgeous.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  The Dell display that we, again, just boosted from the working space in this office with, without asking anyone. Uh, that's great. And it's basically just a Chromebook that sucks.

• 5:47David Pierce?

  Neelai has the exact energy of the person who brings an iMac to Starbucks and plugs it in, like, that's, that's the vibe that I'm getting from you in the studio right now.

• 5:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you gotta bring this whole setup to Starbucks. That's when we'll really appreciate it.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're gonna try to get through the rundown of this. So let's start with Humane. There's, we're gonna take the first ad break on the show, my laptop is 100% coming back.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  I just want you all to know this. Also, just to remind everyone, I truly dislike using this phone because of the jolly scrolling. Nothing about this plan was a good idea.

• 6:19Alex Cranz?

  I like that I don't need my laptop open because the screen is so large, I see the whole rundown.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is a good case for having a big screen.

• 6:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Not a folding phone that runs Dex. Alright, let's start with Humane. There's a lot of drama with Humane right now. We do a lot of big splashy launch features. David has written a billion of them, I have written half a billion of them. They're fun to do, I appreciate that people do them. It's great, they're, they're great. This company... Just from the jump, has communicated about itself in the weirdest ways possible. And then they, I'm just gonna say it, David, they invited you to California and then ghosted you.

• 7:03David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  And you are not at the, they disinvited you from the event, which is crazy. And I, we know a lot of other reporters and reviewers who are not there either.

• 7:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is a weird situation that I still am trying to wrap my head around. Because on the one hand, like, I think a majority of people who work at Humane used to work at Apple. So there's a real Apple, like, aesthetic and ethos and way of thinking about the world. And Apple is a famously secretive company that has weird ideas about how to sort of bring people in on what it wants to do. And that's all fine and good, right? Like, Apple, Apple does things its own way and that works fine. But then also, Humane has been doing this thing where I think for eight months now, it has been sort of slowly trickling out information about the device. And one of the things, we're gonna get into this, but one of the most fascinating things

• 7:52David Pierce?

  about this launch to me was that it's functionally the same thing that Imran Choudhury, the co-founder, did on the TED stage, like, six months ago. Like, the, the features are the same, the device is the same, like, my guy just launched it then, and it has really not changed all that much since then, which is really fascinating. But, yeah, so there was supposed to be a, a kind of launch thing ahead of the event, and then that got changed to being after the event, and then a bunch of people got disinvited from that. And what seems very clear is that Humane is not interested in product reviewers getting their hands on this thing at this time. Even the people they gave these sort of big splashy stories to, like Wired had a good

• 8:33David Pierce?

  story, The Times had a big, giant, profile-y thing, The Wall Street Journal got a story ahead of time. They weren't allowed to photograph the thing, they weren't allowed to, like, talk that much about how to use it, no one is really trying this thing. It's a strange thing that is happening right now, where it is both a launched product that they've been talking about for many months, and also seems to be not close to being finished or ready for public consumption. It's very strange.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of the features were just, they'd be like, "They're coming soon. They're coming soon."

• 9:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, recording video is coming in a software update. It's like, that, that's a pretty basic thing to get right, on your camera.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  So, we have obviously talked a lot about Humane. David was invited to the event, got disinvited. And then last night, totally separate from all of that, and the other reviewers we know, who didn't get to cover the thing, it was all leaked to us. Which is what happens. It's, that's life. And I'll take the leak every time. So we know a lot about this thing, and there are no surprises. I think most of the leaks we got, all of the leaks we got were dead on accurate today. So the basics are pretty, they're understandable, and then what's not understandable is this device at all. So the basics are, it's a smartphone. Right? It's a Qualcomm eight core Qualcomm processor. They didn't say which one, but whatever. It's got a camera. It has

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  a prasonic speaker that creates a bubble of sound, which no one has experienced. It has the laser projector, which we've seen. It needs wireless service, obviously. They've partnered with T-Mobile, which is really interesting. And it's not just T-Mobile. It's like they have their own wireless network, like an MVNO. So you know how like Visible is Verizon? They've got that, but it's humane. And so you get a phone number, you can get texts, you're a green bubble, we should talk about that. You get data, and you get cloud storage, and you get access to OpenAI and Microsoft models. And then their slides, they had Google and Slack, importantly, title.

• 10:33Alex Cranz?

  And it's weighs about the same as a tennis ball. That's the part that's really, I'm hanging up on, because like, my mom gave me this beautiful pen earlier this year, that also weighs about the same as a tennis ball. And I'm like, oh, I want to wear this really pretty pen. It's this big gold pen. It's cool. I'm like, I want to wear it. I can't wear it with anything, because fabrics, like, just crumple under it. And you can see, what's wild is, you can see it in the video, you can see it in the New York Times piece, too, where it's just like, the fabric around the pen is just crumpling around the weight of the pen. And I'm like, okay, so this won't work with a t-shirt, because it's going to drag the whole side down. Like, you can watch him, and he's wearing a shirt, his whole side, it's like, one side of the collar is dragging down from this thing. I'm like, why would you?

• 11:17Alex Cranz?

  No. Like, who wants that? I don't want that.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, you haven't gotten to the battery boosters.

• 11:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh, sorry, sorry.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  I think it's, it's a tennis ball without the batteries. And so, I would say a huge part of the humane story. Is what you might call self seriousness. There are other words you could use. But self seriousness, I think, really captures it. Because I think they're sincere.

• 11:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  And I think that means they're blinded by some of the inherent absurdities of the product. And I'll just give you this example, which has made me giggle all day.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  And this is very clever. Again, I think they're sincere. I think they came up with a solution that's very clever. The thing obviously chews through battery.

• 12:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  Because it's small. And it has an always on wireless connection and it's running GPT and it's got around the mics. And it has a laser projector in it. So instead of making it big, they're doing an inductive battery that is the clip.

• 12:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  So the back of the magnetized clip contains the battery. Or more battery. And you can swap them. So that the computer part has a battery in it. And then the back of the thing is called a battery booster. And you can hot swap them because the computer part has a battery.

• 12:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  This is very clever. I don't want to take one ounce. If you were to solve this problem, this is very clever. They're doing this cool inductive thing. Many questions. If the fabric is really thick, does that lower the transfer power? Like all this stuff, but whatever, it's very clever. Humane, I just watched this video. They're like, this is a perpetual power system. And it's like, my guys, it's a battery.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Is my anchor USB C battery pack a perpetual power system?

• 13:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  And I think the answer is yes. The Apple MagSafe battery attachment is a perpetual battery. Like, what are we doing? Like, the overtalking of the product is out of control.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Well, didn't David say that most of the people at Humane used to work at Apple? So doesn't that explain the branding?

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Alex Cranz?

  It kind of reminded me of, a lot of times you'll get a really good writer out there in the world, like writing like a TV show. And they go and they write this really cool TV show and you're like, oh, man, I wish they ran that show. That would be so cool. Instead of just being like a writer, I want them to run it. And then they go and they run it. And no one's there to say, hey, that's a bad idea. And so you just get unfiltered writer and it's that's the same. It felt the same way.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  In fact, Alex, I would suggest that the exact opposite happened.

• 13:46Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 13:46Nilay Patel?

  With Humane.

• 13:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay. You think these are the bad writers?

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  No, I think that, I mean, Imran and Bethany, the two leaders of the company, worked at Apple. They have a long history. They've built some amazing things. Their names are on some very important technologies. I'm going to just read you this section from the Times profile, which I encourage everyone to read. And again, I began.

• 14:07Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I can already see it.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  By saying, we have written a lot of access based launch features. I love them. I love doing them. I love reading them. They're, they're some of the most fun things you can do. I have no qualms against it, but you add the self seriousness of humane to the institutional self seriousness of the times. And it's, it's gold. Like every line of this is gold. So when you're like the writer, no one told them to stop. In fact, the exact opposite happened. A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to humane. Mr. Chadry and Ms. Bon Giorno had developed concepts for two AI products, a women's health device in the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they had met through their acupuncturist,

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  recommended that they share these ideas with his friend, Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce. Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff's Hawaiian home, they explained both devices. This one, Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the pin as dolphins breached the surf below is huge. It's going to be a massive company, he said.

• 15:21Alex Cranz?

  He was right about one thing. It is huge.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  I just want to know if the dolphins thing passed the Times fact check. Do they have three sources on the dolphins? Uh, incredible. Uh, the best part about that whole thing, by the way, is that Benioff owns Time Magazine. And then Time Magazine just like immediately named the AI pin best invention of 2023, like before it ever.

• 15:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Uh, all that's great. That's what I mean by self seriousness. Like, maybe this thing is really cool. Maybe having a voice assistant that talks to chat GPT is a really good idea.

• 15:54Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  It's $700, it costs $24 a month.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  I don't know about that.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  I think the, the like, very basic thing, like if you describe it the way you just described it, which is a, a voice assistant for talking to ChatGPT, I think that is like a real thing that a lot of people are going to have at some point in the very near future. That makes perfect sense to me. Like, I have talked to a lot of people who think that there is a really interesting set of hardware to be made around some of these AI things, right? We heard about Sam Altman and Johnny Ive working on some of this stuff together. Like, how do you access these language models from an interface is super interesting. What this feels like to me is like, do you remember that period of Samsung where they never said no to anything? That it was like any engineer and product manager who was like, I have an idea about how something should work and where a button should go.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  They just said yes. So there were 40,000 ways to do everything and none of it actually made any sort of coherent sense. That's what this seems like to me, is they like built a bunch of tech demos and then were just like, yes, this is it.

• 17:00Speaker 05

  Well, no, it's yes to anything but a screen, right?

• 17:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Because there's one really easy way to interact with AI chatbots. And it's the ChatGPT app on the iPhone. You can just get it.

• 17:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. Which is, it works pretty well. Also has really good voice assistance.

• 17:18Alex Cranz?

  And I was gonna say, Alex, you and I have both used the Ray-Bans.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:21Alex Cranz?

  From, from, from Meta. I, I like them. I was wearing them on the way to work today. They were great. I infinitely prefer that to this. What about you?

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Um.

• 17:30Alex Cranz?

  As a way for accessing voice?

• 17:32Speaker 05

  For accessing voice, it helps to have something that can sit on your body that isn't dependent on the clothes you wear, I would say.

• 17:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  And, you know, speaking of Sam Altman, Neelai, what did Sam Altman say about humane in that Times piece?

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  That's how she's just so good.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  So Sam Altman is a is a large investor in Humane.

• 17:54David Pierce?

  And in seemingly every other AI thing happening right now, like anybody who's making hardware, it's like, yep, Sam's there.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  Right, but yeah, so I was talking to our friend Joanna Stern at the Journal. She also did not get to interact with the AI pin. But when I say like, they didn't want reviewers there, people who are going to ask technical questions about how things work, they got reporters there, in very good reporters went to this. I don't mean that it's just a different skill set, a different mindset, whatever. No reviewers have seen this thing. Tech reporters have seen it and they wrote, that's great. And many newsrooms have a split between news and reviews. We kind of don't. It's where a tech publication is different. But Joanna didn't get to go and see it. And so she and I were just talking about all of this. And she pointed out that Sam Altman, an investor in Humane, was on stage with her at her conference last month. And she asked him if he was going to make a phone. And he said, no, phones are great.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  There's no point in competing with phone. And then there's these rumors, these working Johnny Ive. And he said, I like demurred. And he said, I think there's something great to do in AI hardware, but I don't know what it is yet. Which is like.

• 18:59Alex Cranz?

  A month ago.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  A month. Do you think it's the company you invested in? Maybe, maybe he's just taking shots. And then today in the Times, he's an investor, so the Times talked to him. Sam, I would say, waffled. No guarantee of success. That will be up to customers to decide. Maybe it's a bridge too far, or maybe people are like, this is better than my phone. And then he says to the Times, plenty of technology, it looks like a sure bet, ends up selling for 90% off at Best Buy.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Which is brutal.

• 19:28Alex Cranz?

  The Zune.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  So the Zune looked like a sure bet.

• 19:32Speaker 05

  Well, we'll talk more about this later, but I was with Sam on Monday at OpenAI. He talked about consumer hardware. He didn't mention Humane. And this was days ahead of the public. Everyone knew Humane was about to launch. He didn't acknowledge it, but he got asked about this. We can talk more about this later. But yeah, there is this very interesting pressure happening where people are talking about how can OpenAI intersect with a consumer device? And Sam does not seem to think Humane is that device.

• 20:02Alex Cranz?

  Because he's invested in this and also like, there was a necklace too, like an AI powered necklace.

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Alex Cranz?

  And.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  It's like the rewinder.

• 20:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the rewind something.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, the rewind pendant.

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, this is great. And what they're all trying to run away from is the phone. Yeah. Because the second you put a screen on it, you've made a little phone. And then, once you made a little phone, and we've seen this with every other little phone, you've got to have Instagram. You, right, bank apps have to be there. All the stuff that people expect from phones just come for the package. You have to deal with whatever Epic and Google are doing in their trial this week.

• 20:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  You can't. Like, it's too hard. The mountain is too high to climb. So you take the screen off it, and you're like, and again, in the Times piece, and in all the marketing for the PIN, they're like, this is to solve your relationship with your phone. And they are very clear that you should not need a phone. Right, that you're $700, that's the cost of a phone. $24 a month, that's the cost of a data plan. If you've got this and your phone in your pocket, you're doing something wrong.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  They sent mixed messages there, because in the New York Times piece, they end it with saying, "Oh, we're still using our phones." "We just, we use them differently, yeah, but we're still using them." I mean, I guess you, you were also still using a phone just.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  So they did answer some questions in the presentation today that I've had for a long time. How does it know your contacts if you want to make a call? Where do your photos go? All this stuff. But when you set up, when you go to order one, you import all your contacts. And then it arrives with your contacts preloaded. This is, this is what they want you to do. Then, then there's a website called Humane Center, where your photos are and your videos are. Well, your videos when video recording is released, they haven't.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  What happens if I meet someone and I add their contact? How do I do that? How does that then get on the PIN?

• 21:55Alex Cranz?

  Chest bump.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. These are all, these are all questions that like phones have solved really well. And I think this is why, when people ask Altman about it, he knows that whatever AI device arrives is going to sit right next to your phone.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. And also, what is a phone? This thing comes with a phone number. It makes calls. It is a phone.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  What is a phone?

• 22:18Speaker 05

  It is a phone. It's a screenless phone. They made a screenless phone. So let's stop calling it anything else but that.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  I don't think the idea that you have to have this and your phone is like a huge strike against humane. I think we're, we're in this. Phase now where I think every gadget maker is out there trying to sort of disintermediate the phone with the recognition that like you're going to keep having your phone in your pocket. What can we give you that is better and faster? And like, it's certainly true that if you want to ask ChatGPT a question, the PIN is going to be a faster way to do it than your phone. And that's meaningful. That's real. You don't have to fish a thing out of your pocket. You don't have to unlock a thing. You don't have to open an app. Like, that's a better system.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  Right, right until that thing is built into your AirPods.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  It already is. You can already, with shortcuts on iOS, you can already ask ChatGPT things through your AirPods.

• 23:08David Pierce?

  No. Alex, the minute a sentence starts with shortcuts on iOS, like, I'm out.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Sure. Like, oh, so, so that's harder for you than buying an $800 PIN that you have to sync on the web and pay a monthly?

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  No, Alex, you can listen to title on it.

• 23:23Alex Cranz?

  Forgot about title.

• 23:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. The Personix speakers. But no, but I think the, the problem with a thing like this, and a problem with a lot of these LLMs, is they don't do anything. They're really good, like, information retrieval systems, and they're useful for generating text and images. But like, I, I want to, I want to add to my contacts. That is not a thing ChatGPT is capable of. And Humane is gonna try to be the platform for all of that, in the same way that OpenAI is trying to be the platform for that. But like, the real race underlying all of this is to be the AI App Store. Like, that is, that is the fight here. And everybody wants to do it. And until someone wins that battle, the list of things you can actually do by interacting with an LLM is pretty small.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get that because that's the OpenAI story, right?

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Yes, but David, what David is hitting on is very important here, which is that, you know, you're saying ChatGPT is a good information retrieval system. I would argue that it's not. And the problem with this Humane product is that its core tech, which is like, talk to OpenAI, guess what? ChatGPT makes shit up all the time. Like, and they know this. And Sam talked about this with me and other reporters on Monday, and he doesn't think this problem will be solved for like, three years. So... So this is a device you're buying where the primary interface information retrieval system, the people who designed it know that it has still a huge accuracy problem. I was using chat GPT to try to do some earnings coverage. It just made the financials up for the company.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  So so imagine walking around and this is your only device on you and you ask it something and it's like, yeah, take a left to go here and you end up like walking into oncoming traffic, right?

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  So this raises another important point, which is we still don't know how it works. Like even in all the coverage you can read and in their demos, we don't know, like, is it OpenAI underneath it? In the press release, it just says Microsoft and OpenAI models, doesn't say which ones.

• 25:26David Pierce?

  They said in a couple of the stories that it's it's chat GPT primarily. So I think I think we can fairly safely assume it's a chat GPT interface.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  They're using OpenAI's API.

• 25:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, but then the there's the Google logo sitting right in their press release and I don't know why, then they claim they have their own platform called MyAI. And maybe it is all just chat GPT.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  And it's all cloud based, right?

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which I think is also why it burns through batteries.

• 25:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, well, it burns through batteries and it also that just cuts off a huge user base. There's a ton of people who can't have ready access to the cloud all the time, right? Like internet is inconsistent. They weren't gonna buy it anyway.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  You think the people in rural America are?

• 26:04Alex Cranz?

  Are you saying they were not watching the Caperny show to see it? Like, oh, my God.

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  It's it's running on the T-Mobile network. Those people are already left out.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  It's just like even that stuff, right? Primarily the chat GPT API. That's what we think it is. We don't know. No one's actually used it to figure out its limits. No one's actually used it to figure out if when you ask it for directions, it falls back to Google Maps or something like or Bing Maps or whatever acquisition like Microsoft made through the Nokia deal 500 years ago that they forgot about that still runs and somehow makes $5 million, which is the true story of many Microsoft acquisitions.

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  And because it doesn't have a screen, you, the user, will never know. Like you will ask it a question and it can never tell you how it arrived at the answer, which has been a problem with voice assistants in general for a very long time.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  It could list sources, but still, like, I don't, we'll talk more about this later. I don't trust ChatGPT for like information because it hallucinates. And so if you're thinking day like tactically, this is my new phone. This is how I'm going to interact with the internet. The main way that you're doing that, you cannot inherently trust what is being said back to you. How is that a replacement for the devices we already have? It doesn't make sense.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's this interesting moment in the, the demo video that they put out, which everyone should watch. It's, it's wild. Neil has suggested to me was to watch it at 2X speed, at which it seems like normal speed, which is good advice. But there's this one moment in it where he holds up, I think, a book to the pin and says, how much does this cost online? He's, he's like demonstrating the shopping features and he's like, how much does this cost online? And it responds, it costs $28 online. And he says, buy it. And that's the end of the demo. And it's like, I have a million questions between here and there. Like, there's only one price on the whole internet for this thing? Where did that price come from? Where am I buying it from? How fast is it going to ship? Where's it going to ship? Which credit card did it use? Like, Amazon has gone through this problem where if you just say to your echo speaker,

• 28:07David Pierce?

  buy toilet paper, it turns out that actually takes you through a flow that you don't understand and can go wrong in a thousand ways and people don't do it as a result. And the idea that Humane is going for is to abstract even more of that away and to just say, all you have to do is just describe to this thing what you want to accomplish in the world and it will do it for you. And I think that's a super interesting and completely impossible thesis.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  The, the price online is $28. It's like, is it Amazon? Do you think Amazon is the, the only store?

• 28:38Speaker 05

  Who knows?

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  Ebay?

• 28:39David Pierce?

  Right.

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  Who knows?

• 28:41David Pierce?

  Maybe it's an artisan. And it's like, by doing this, am I signing up for whoever Humane has decided to like rev share a partner with in order to be able to do this? Should I be able to choose? And at that point, if I'm choosing, what are we accomplishing by abstracting all of this away? There's just no version of this that feels good in the way that you kind of want it.

• 29:00Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, the book is a easy example in the sort of medium scheme of things because the book has a barcode and maybe it's scanning the barcode. Maybe you can see the title and right, there's structured data on and around the book. There's another part of that demo where he just holds up a handful of almonds. And he says, how many, how much protein is in these almonds? And it just tells him it's 15 grams. Hmm. And it's like, did it count? The almonds? And I pointed out, it must be counting the almonds. And Liam said, well, technically you'd want to weigh the almonds.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because you're inside of that. Chat GPT is just making up grams per almond.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Average. And then spitting out a number, amount of protein.

• 29:47Speaker 05

  Using a dubiously data-collected source that could be accurate or could not be accurate.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Who knows?

• 29:53Speaker 05

  And you would not know. Yeah.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, all you've made is like a very complicated lose it? And you don't know if it's counting the almonds accurately? That's weird.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean.

• 30:04Nilay Patel?

  It's not good. There's no structured data about the almonds.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  There are, I mean, there are a million holes you can poke in this thing. And I think we're doing that appropriately. I think the direction Humane is trying to go here is really interesting. And I want to have competing visions for where computing is going in the world because everyone else, Meta, et cetera, Apple, they think the future of computing is more visuals in your eyes, right? Like literally augmenting over the world. And Humane is saying, no, we think actually computing should be recessed more into the background and you should interact through voice. And it's more of that Spike Jones, her future. And I think those different directions need to exist. People need to be building those different directions. It just feels very early. This feels like General Magic or Magic Leap.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  You know, there's a ton of examples of companies that were just too early to the tech. And I think this is the case here.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  No, I'll make a, I'll make a big distinction between those things because we, now we're old and we know a bunch of ex General Magic people. They were very sincere. Tony Fadell is a friend of the show. He's part of the General Magic story. He financed the documentary. A self-serving documentary, but you will, because they all come out as heroes, like in the end. But it's, it's a fun watch and I encourage you to go watch the General Magic documentary. They were nerds, like huge nerds, and they did not think they were cool. And they thought they were inventing the future. Fine, but at the end of the day, they were like silly nerds.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  They didn't put their pin on like fashion models and Paris Fashion Week.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  They weren't, none of that stuff was happening. No Capri Show. Uh, Magic Leap, huge nerds, obviously, took themselves so seriously. Well, they blew Beyonce away. Right. They had other people down there for demos. Uh, I think David got a demo once. Didn't you go down there at some point, David?

• 31:49David Pierce?

  I got a demo. It wasn't, I didn't get the full treatment, but I did get to try it at one point.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, they said things like, we're hacking the GPU of the mind, which is, it's just an incredible phrase. They promised to reinvent, uh, all of entertainment, all of technology. That, like, this thing was, and they got so far ahead of the technology with the hype and the seriousness, that there was no way the product could have lived up to their own ideas. General Magic was early, but they weren't, they knew that there was a thing that they were trying to get to that was far away from where they were, and they were honest about it. I think, and if that's the spectrum of companies that are too early, like sincere nerds trying to build the future and they're aware of their limitations and kind of silly and honest about it.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  And we've hyped ourselves so much that nothing we invent can meet the standard. Like Humane is beyond that.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  You think it's beyond Magic Leap?

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  I think it's beyond Magic Leap.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  But it actually is. Because they, they're out there. They have their employees, ex-Apple people, in the press today, saying they, they had retired from Apple and they joined Humane because they were disgusted with having invented the iPhone and destroyed society. And Humane is their chance to like reset. It's like, you guys, I don't even know if it's counting the almonds. You know, it's like, what bookstore? You know, it's like, that's crazy. If your, if your positioning is that this will rescue us from the phone, but you've made a phone, no, nothing, there's, there's no product that can fill the hole that they are drawing, right?

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  And that is the issue, I think, with the, the product itself in many big ways, but also.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Like how they're putting it out into market.

• 33:41David Pierce?

  But this is also, this is just the world we live in now. I mean, I think about like Carl Pei and nothing like he's running around being like, there are no interesting consumer electronics companies left. And it's like, well, that just isn't true. But you have to like, you have to tell this big grand story about yourself and how you're changing the world. And it's like, we still live in the, we're making the world a better place thing, which you would think Silicon Valley would have killed like by just being on that TV show. But it didn't. And so I think honestly, like the, the single worst thing that Apple has done to tech culture is convince everybody that this is the right way to talk about your products, that everything has to be finished, everything has to appear as if it was inevitable and just sort of rose out of the ground, this perfect finished product, that we have solved every problem

• 34:25David Pierce?

  that has ever existed in the world. And there are no companies anymore who are making things being like, we made this, we don't know if it's any good, do you want it? Ironically, OpenAI is probably the closest thing to that right now.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:37David Pierce?

  But it's, it's just not, it's just not how this works anymore. And the playbook worked so well for Apple that if you're a company who raised a lot of money and would like to make a lot of money, you just follow the Apple playbook. And I think the thing we've learned over and over is that it doesn't work for anybody other than Apple.

• 34:52Alex Cranz?

  I don't think this is fair because there are a lot of interesting consumer tech companies that aren't doing this. They're not based in Silicon Valley. They're not, they're not in this like weird investor ecosystem, right? Where, where there, there, there's almost this demand from their investors to ship something and to change the world at the same time, right? Like, there's plenty of weird tablets in China. China's doing a lot of cool consumer tech gadgets and not promising to change the world with their steam deck.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  It would be amazing if Apple was like, we made these gamer lights.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  They're awesome.

• 35:25Alex Cranz?

  They're just cool.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  They're never gonna do that.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  But if you go back to like the launch of the original iPhone, Steve Jobs, he didn't say it's gonna change the world. He was like, here are three things it can do at once.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  He did start with today, Apple reinvents the phone.

• 35:39Speaker 05

  But that's not, but, but that's different.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  With his arms outstretched.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  I would argue that's different than what Humane's doing, than what Magic Leap did, which is like, it's the hubris. Right? And Apple has hubris on, you know, they have tons of it. And Steve Jobs was the king of hubris. But like, if you go back to that original iPhone, there was like an almost weird humility with the hubris, right? Where it was like, we actually are just focusing on what it does. And what it did was such an aha moment where everybody in the room was like, oh, my God, these three things together in a mobile form factor. Yes, you didn't have to over explain it. Whereas like humane, they can't explain it like because it's it's incomprehensible. There's it's a it's an idea in search of a product, right? And and I think that was that's the key difference here between like the early Apple, where Apple is now and humane, I think.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  So here's a question I have for you, Alex. I'm just thinking about the the cycle OpenAI is in.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  Brother Spirit, the Buddhist monk, introduced them to Marc Benioff in 2018. The connection, by the way, made through their acupuncturists. Very, this is all very important detail. 2018 is a long time ago to start working on this pen. OpenAI was nowhere in 2018, right? The the first glimmers of the thing were happening.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  They were a research project. Yeah, they were. They were. They were maybe 60 people at that point. Yeah.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  And they were still kind of focused on not being a commercial company. So if you're making this product in 2018 and you have this vision,

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  what is the technology that you're basing this on? What have they been working on?

• 37:14Alex Cranz?

  Oh, oh, I know what what happened.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's there's a pivot that's that's contained in the story of this product. Where they were like, you're going to talk to ChatGPT, and that's the thing that's going to sell it, right? Because that's what we're talking about today. In 2018, you could not begin work on that product.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Well, ChatGPT didn't exist. ChatGPT didn't. It barely existed a year ago.

• 37:33Alex Cranz?

  This was totally going to be like an Android product until OpenAI popped off, right? Like, that that had been what happened. They were. They're building their own little Android dumb, like dumb phone, because it's effectively a dumb phone, right? And and then OpenAI popped out and they were like, oh, finally, we have something cool to attach this to, to ship it. So we're not just like, we did a phone, but it's a pen and not really a good phone.

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. There's just I'm like thinking about this chronology and it's like. In 2018, when you set out to make this product, you cannot assume that there will be an LLM explosion in mid 2023.

• 38:09Alex Cranz?

  No, but you could assume-

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  That recontextualizes this whole product.

• 38:12Alex Cranz?

  But you could assume Google was doing, Google was doing a lot at that point, right? They were doing a lot about visual identity, like being able to visually ID things with a camera. They were doing a lot about being able to just talk and have those natural conversations with Google Assistant. Like, all of that was happening in 2018. So I, that's why I'm fully convinced that at some point, we're going to find out that this was originally an Android product.

• 38:35David Pierce?

  I mean, it's an Android product now. Like, the thing, the thing runs Android. I, I think you're exactly right. I think if you, if you rewind five years, they're looking at voice assistants and Google Lens and some of these other, like, what can we do without putting a screen and a bunch of apps on your smartphone? Which, in the abstract, like Heath has been saying, is a really interesting and valuable question. Like, this is stuff we should be talking about. Because the idea that the, like, platonic ideal of how we interact with technology is like a grid of icons on a screen is just not true. And we, we should be exploring all these things. But I do think it's very clear that at some point along the way, they went from, we're

• 39:17David Pierce?

  going to have to cobble together a bunch of different things and probably invent a bunch of technology ourselves, to just, this is now, we are an interface company on top of ChatGPT, which is functionally what this is. This is a, this is a, it's a revolutionary input device on par with the, with the keyboard and mouse, uh, for ChatGPT. Like, that's what they're trying to build. They, they make a big song and dance about all their stuff they can do, but this is functionally a way to input things to ChatGPT. That is what this device exists to do.

• 39:46Alex Cranz?

  It's a real digital crown moment.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  You know, any minute, Apple's gonna do a partnership with one of these companies because they can't build it by themselves because of all the privacy reasons. And they will say, if you want to use ChatGPT-

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Your Apple Watch can do it, and that will be the end of the AI pen.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  Oh, I will take the opposite side of that bet. I'll bet money that they will not. Yeah. Because, because of, because of the privacy reasons you cited, they will not do this as an external partnership.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  No, but we're watching this in the trial right now, where Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are in meetings discussing their search deal, and Apple's like, your services can begin where our limitations end. So you can, they could say.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  Well, there's an important fact there, which is that Google is paying Apple on the order of $20 billion a year. So yes, if someone is paying you, you know, 20% of your profit margin, yeah, sure, you can have deep partnerships.

• 40:41Nilay Patel?

  You don't think OpenAI and Microsoft are gonna, they're gonna throw that money down? Like, that's what I mean. The second Apple gets over it, and there's a few ways for them to get over it. They can invent a privacy-focused LLM, very hard, inside your values. You could take the money. It's true. Or you can do shortcuts, David's favorite.

• 41:04David Pierce?

  Love shortcuts.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  But like, all I'm saying is there's a big action button on the side of my watch, and there's a lot of different ways for that thing to trigger Talk to ChatGPT.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's, there's many methods by which that button can, can do the thing. And at that moment, the value of $700 plus another $24 of service fees a month begins to slide.

• 41:26Alex Cranz?

  If I hold my phone just right, I can do the shortcuts method with ChatGPT and the Ray-Bans.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and, and they're adding, so Cranes, they're adding, early next year, Zuckerberg was talking to me about this when I interviewed him ahead of Connect. They're gonna do a software update for the Ray-Bans where it's visual recognition. So in the interview, he was like, you'll just look at the camera and say, what is that camera? Where can I buy it? And he didn't say buy it, he said, where can I buy it? And because, so that's, that's a much more, I think, compelling because it's on you, right?

• 41:58Alex Cranz?

  And cheaper.

• 41:59Speaker 05

  And cheaper, no subscription.

• 42:00Alex Cranz?

  And like, if you go, if you go to the beach, you don't have to worry about where you're gonna pin it.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  It turns out, your head is on you all the time. And you can have stuff on your head all the time, no matter what you're wearing. It's actually a really cool human feature.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay, this brings me to the last thing I want to talk about in this sequence, which is a graph that's in my head at all times. Is there a Y axis? There's a Y, and I'm gonna label the graph for you. So pull over in your car and I want you to imagine X and Y axis.

• 42:28Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  And I've worked this out, cuz I was on threads last night and people really helped me figure this out. This is the formula of wearable product success.

• 42:37Alex Cranz?

  Hmm, hmm, yeah, I, I saw this on threads.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so it's X and Y axis. It doesn't matter which side's which. The Y axis, let's call it.

• 42:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  Is amount I have to care about this shit.

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  Times

• 42:53Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  face multiple. Which is

• 42:57Alex Cranz?

  What's a, what's a face multiple?

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  Is it on my face?

• 42:59Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  And is it a VR headset? So like, is it on my face and it's like a cool pair of sunglasses, low face multiple?

• 43:05Alex Cranz?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  Is it on my face and it's the Meta Quest Pro?

• 43:08Alex Cranz?

  High.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Enormous face multiple.

• 43:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  If it's not on your face, on your wrist, no face multiple.

• 43:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  You got me?

• 43:15Alex Cranz?

  Got it. See it?

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  So that's like, that's just one variable.

• 43:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  It's either, it's, and you gotta decide for yourself and the glasses. How much I have to care about it is, is this a tiny little computer? Do I gotta software update, plug it into battery, charge it, does it beep? Computer stuff.

• 43:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  And you gotta decide. Is it weird to get the photos off it?

• 43:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  All in the first factor.

• 43:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  So fiddliness times is it face? That's one axis.

• 43:43Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  And then the X axis is how useful is it?

• 43:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so if X is greater than or equal to Y, so there's a line at 45 degrees. Oh god. Then it's, it's good. And if it's lower, you're tooped. So like, regular glasses, right? Alex, you're wearing some glasses? Yeah. You gotta think about them never. Right. Low number, times on your face, low number cuz you have cool glasses. Value, very high, so you're like historic success.

• 44:14Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. See, I didn't do well at math in school, but I think I'm tracking with you.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 44:20David Pierce?

  No, Nilay also is describing a graph that has like six or seven different axes.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  It's just one. It's just two numbers.

• 44:25Alex Cranz?

  There's algebra.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  Is fiddly bullshit greater than or less than how useful is this?

• 44:33Speaker 05

  I'm gonna make a GPT for this, where you can just...

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just saying the only real variable here is face.

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  It's really just face. Is it on your face? And then it's gotta be super valuable.

• 44:42Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 44:43Nilay Patel?

  Right? Apple Watch, a lot of fiddly bits at the beginning, low value.

• 44:47Alex Cranz?

  Not on your face.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Not on your face, but it still didn't do a lot at the beginning. You could like send flirty heartbeats to people who maybe didn't want them, right? And they figured it out and they brought it up above the curve. And now it's actually kind of less fiddly, too.

• 45:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Success.

• 45:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Meta Quest Pro, fiddliest product in the world. Gigantic face multiple. No value.

• 45:08Alex Cranz?

  No value.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  Not a success. They won't even talk about it anymore. You see what I'm saying? So humane AI pin. Very fiddly. No face multiple.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  Unclear value. Big question mark.

• 45:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Vision Pro. Enormous face multiple on the order of they put another face on your face.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  Huge problem there. Very fiddly, we think. Or perhaps not, because it's kind of standalone. Unclear fiddliness. Unclear value.

• 45:39Alex Cranz?

  X. It's an X. The value is X.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  Who knows? I'm just telling you this works every time.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  Someone's gonna animate this graph and it's gonna be amazing, but I promise you, if you just work this out for any product, you get there. So the Meta Glasses. People like them, right?

• 45:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  So you do it. They look cool, low face multiple. Eh, fiddly.

• 45:59Alex Cranz?

  Liam complimented mine today before he saw the lenses.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Before he knew. So medium face multiple because people are like, oh, you've been watching me, you creep. That's a problem. But they look cool.

• 46:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  And then they're fun.

• 46:12Alex Cranz?

  Right?

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  Because they have good music. They've got great call mics. You should watch that video with Becca.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  They're useful.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  They're useful. Right on the line of success.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Okay, I, my challenge to any Vergecast listener right now who's playing with ChatGPT's GPT Builder is to make a GPT based on what Nilay just said, send it to us, and it's gonna be amazing.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  Fiddliness times face multiple has to be less than or equal to how useful is it?

• 46:39Speaker 05

  What is this bot called? Nilay's, Nilay's gadget, or Nilay's wearable?

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  It needs a good name.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  Indicator? This is a horrible name.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  The Theory of Wearable Bullshit.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  That's the episode title.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it needs a name. I'm just telling you, I've been working this out on the show forever, and last night it finally clicked when I looked at the humane pin, where I was like, oh, it's not on your face. So that changes the whole equation. But then it is all the other things that it is.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  I was disgusted by my work on the iPhone. So instead, I made a little laser projector that you have to look at your hand.

• 47:15Alex Cranz?

  There's no Instagram. Can't do Instagram with lasers. Just doesn't work.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this thing is real silly. They should have let us, they should have let us and other reviewers actually into it, and they should have been less all serious about it, is what I'll say. I'm excited to play with one. I think we're all excited about new gadgets all the time.

• 47:30Alex Cranz?

  I want to see how the speakers work. I want to.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  The Personix speaker.

• 47:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I want to see, I want you and I both to have one and see if we can hear each other's.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  That's gonna be the worst episode of the show.

• 47:37Alex Cranz?

  The worst episode. I'm so sorry.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  Listening to a title four feet apart.

• 47:42David Pierce?

  I mean, I will say, again, to go back to the meta things on that one, like, I've seen a bunch of people be like, oh, the Personix speaker. That's, this is the thing that the smart glasses have been doing for a while. This like, personal directed audio that you can hear and other people don't is like relatively proven technology.

• 48:00Speaker 05

  The Ray-Bans do that.

• 48:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I do this, and I hear so well with the Ray-Bans.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  It's the projector.

• 48:06Alex Cranz?

  I sit on the train like this.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, the projector is what I want to try. I want to, I'm going to a concert Friday. I wish I had this so that during the concert, I could just hold my hand out, and it just like Matrix displays.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Are you going to a concert that sucks? Is anyone else gonna be there?

• 48:19Speaker 05

  No, I'm just, I just want to do it to get the reaction around me, you know?

• 48:22David Pierce?

  It's just like, you're, Alex is in the pit, just like.

• 48:28Alex Cranz?

  I just assume it's very bright.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  I brought my own laser show.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, there you go.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  That would actually be sick. Okay, here's the killer app for the humane AI pen. Personal laser show.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Imagine Coldplay and instead of the bracelets they give you, it's just the pins. They all, they all.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is a good time to note.

• 48:47Alex Cranz?

  Synced to your title account.

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  Ugo Labs had a Bored Ape NFT party and they bought the wrong UV lights and they burned everyone's eyes. Maybe don't do the laser show thing. Just an idea. All right, we got to take a break. That's a true story, by the way. It's heartbreaking. Check your UV lights. We got to take a break. We'll be right back to talk about OpenAI.

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• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Less hardware this time, more software. But the future of software in a very exciting way. Alex, you went to OpenAI Dev Day this week. They announced a bunch of stuff. Take us through it.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this was in downtown San Francisco Monday, and this was OpenAI's first big conference. And when I was going to it, like realizing that ChatGPT is not even a year old at this point, like blew my mind. And then you get there and they have about a thousand developers there. And it just had this energy of, I'll get into the announcements, but I think it's important to like contextualize the energy. It felt like the early Apple events. It felt like this buzz that, you know, we had that a little bit. I think, you know, David and Eli, you were there too for the Vision Pro unveiling. That had a special kind of feel because, you know, people had high hopes for Apple finally doing a big new thing.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  But like, this just felt like something I haven't experienced since like early Mac Worlds. And you get in and, I mean, they did a really nice keynote. It was about an hour and a half's worth of content packed into like a tight forty-five minutes with like real live demos. Like there was a moment where they were showing off like a Zapier integration where you could like have a bot you make, you know, text someone or send them a Slack based on what you tell it and like they're doing it on stage live. They're building the thing in like a minute. And then like it sends the ping to Sam and he's on the other side of the stage and he just holds his phone up and it's like, yep, got it. Like, like, I really don't like the direction the industry is going, thanks to Apple, where it's these highly produced

• 51:47Speaker 05

  pre-recorded keynotes that are really just like becoming marketing videos. I think we saw that with the last Mac event especially. So OpenAI, it felt like this return to form. It was like, wow, this feels good. In terms of what they announced, it was a lot. I mean, I think like the most immediate thing that the developers were like freaking out about and like Sam had to tell everyone to like stop clapping because they kept clapping over and over was just like making GPT cheaper to use as a developer. So it's like three times cheaper. They've got GTP four turbo, which apparently people really want larger context windows, which is the ability to upload more text tokens to these models and do more with them.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  So I think the limit was around like twenty-ish K max before and now it's like a hundred and twenty-eight plus K context window. So you could put a book in this thing and have it do all kinds of things. People got really excited about that. And then a bunch of like kind of more developer focused stuff, right? It's a developer conference. The biggest thing, though, was this new AI platform. I mean, really what OpenAI wants to become, and I wrote about this in Command Line this week, is the App Store of AI. And so they've got this new GPT platform where with no coding required, you can build your own GPT, upload custom knowledge, and do a bunch of what is essentially like abstracting away prompt engineering, right?

• 53:11Speaker 05

  And making it very like tailored to a specific use case. And do all that in like honestly, a matter of minutes. I got a live demo of one of these things being made and you can do it in under five minutes and then just publish it to the web. Eventually, and when I say eventually, I think just in like a few weeks, OpenAI is going to have this store, the GPT store. And that's where things get really interesting, I think, because you're seeing OpenAI, not only is it becoming a huge developer platform, an external platform that powers other things, they have over 2 million developers in under a year, which is just like wild. But they've got this massive growing consumer business. They have 100 million weekly users of ChatGPT, which is like for a product that is less than a year old is just absolutely insane.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  That means their monthlies are probably on the order of half a billion. And so what they're trying to do is like aggregate that audience and also become a consumer internet platform and have people making GPTs, no coding required, that they then surface to people through ChatGPT and through the store. And so the store is coming very soon, but they showed a preview of it. And I think that's where things get really interesting.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  Is that 100 million, is that GPT plus the paid thing or just?

• 54:25Speaker 05

  That was just ChatGPT users. They didn't give a plus number. Very important for the the custom GPTs, you have to be a plus subscriber to access and build the custom GPTs. So this is all feeding that loop of like OpenAI. I think the information reported they're already on like a 1 billion a year revenue run rate with the consumer subscription business. They really want to have more reasons to pay for ChatGPT and an app store and custom GPTs. And again, abstracting away all that prompt engineering, they think is going to be. Key unlock there. So like some of the examples were like, and it's multimodal. So you can use Dolly. So it's like an interior design GPT. That's like specifically for helping you figure out how to design your home or a cooking one.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  Or, you know, theoretically here at The Verge, we could upload all Verge content ever made into a GPT. And it could replace search on our website. That's an idea, right? And OpenAI, which we should get into this, uh, next, OpenAI will be compensating creators of these GPTs based on their usage, which I think is a very interesting, uh, distinction from other platforms.

• 55:31Alex Cranz?

  I think two things that kind of, I, I read your piece and it was great. The two things that stuck out to me were, were one, the compensation and how they're planning to do that, because that seems like a whole mess.

• 55:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:40Alex Cranz?

  And also just how quickly he seemed to gloss over the hallucination problem.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just like any normal store.

• 55:47Alex Cranz?

  You're releasing an enormous app store.

• 55:48Nilay Patel?

  You go into a Walmart or a Target, you're like, most of these products will lie.

• 55:50Alex Cranz?

  That lies. Like an enormous lying, enormous lie store, basically. Yeah.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Well, yes, but the, the difference with the custom GPTs is you can upload custom knowledge. So like onstage, Sam made a bot and he used to be the head of Y Combinator, the startup incubator. And he was like, I have wanted to have a bot that just tells people what I would tell startup founders, the advice I would give them for like a decade. And he just built it onstage in like three minutes and he uploaded transcripts of every talk he's given on these topics, right? So yes, the hallucin, it's still a problem, like hallucination, obviously still a problem. He talked about this more after the keynote and a press thing I went to. But, um, the fact that you can augment it with custom knowledge, uh, makes it more domain specific. And so it's hopefully going to alleviate a lot of that.

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't that kind of just make it like, I think the no code part is probably the coolest part of this. But doesn't this just make it like no code chatbots like you had on AIM 20 years ago? Like if you can upload it like for, the, the Sam Altman one in particular, okay, that's really, really cool. Somebody could have done that 20 years ago. It just would have taken them quite a bit of time and now it.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  Right, but you, you have the sort of like a lies a problem.

• 57:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  Right, where it's like, there's some canned responses. This one is like gonna talk to you. Like I think the fidelity of the conversation is higher. The thing that's really interesting to me is what you're saying, Alex, the compensation model.

• 57:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  So OpenAI has what, 20 bucks a month?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, ish, yeah.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  And then they're they're probably gonna, what, just share out some of that?

• 57:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  To the bot builders. That's the Spotify model, which is historically doesn't make anyone rich, except Spotify.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Well, Spotify, important distinction, there's this whole thing called the labels, right? That OpenAI doesn't have to deal with because they don't pay for a lot of their content, which is something that Sam did not really want to talk about. Um, but yes, I actually think it's closer to YouTube because the way they're gonna do it initially is they're gonna share some percentage, we don't know, we don't know if it's fixed, we don't know if it fluctuates based on the category, but they're gonna share a percentage of the companies, so OpenAI's ChatGPT's subscription revenue with GPT creators, and it's based on usage. So, and and Altman was very kind of high level about this on stage. I think they're gonna share more in the next few weeks. But at this press Q and A I went to with after, and I wrote about this in Command Line,

• 58:17Speaker 05

  he elaborated and said there's going to be category specific bonuses. Um, and that down the road, they're open to actually letting you subscribe directly to custom GPTs, letting GPT creators charge one off fees for them. Um, but it sounds like a lot of it is gonna get figured out in like the first few months of the store. They're rolling out with this initial kind of mushy rev share thing, but it is YouTube-esque, it's not Apple-esque because there isn't going to be like a transactional piece to this.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  Have they asked ChatGPT itself how it thinks it should handle?

• 58:52Speaker 05

  I'm sure they have, I mean.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this analogies are difficult because it's weird and it's mushy.

• 58:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  YouTube, my, most YouTubers are getting a cut of the ads, right? There's a

• 59:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  sort of like infinite amount of money coming into YouTube, or at least an uncapped amount of advertising money coming into YouTube, and that goes out.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Spotify is like you pay Spotify Premium, and I know my ever increasing amount of money I pay for Spotify Premium, I listen to a song, there's some formula and that goes to the label and the artist, and it's pennies. And this feels more like that, right? I pay ChatGPT 20 bucks a month, I go use a bunch of GPTs, my usage gets divvied up into fractions and goes to those creators. And that they got it. The reason I'm harping on this is because of what David said earlier, which is the entire game is the App Store for AI. And you cannot distribute this anywhere because the second you start doing a better revenue model, which is just pay for the apps or pay for a subscription or have transactions, Apple's going to sit there and take 30% away from you.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  Well.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  And Google is going to take 30% away from you.

• 59:59Speaker 05

  Apple already, the Apple already is taking 30% of ChatGPT plus revenue on iOS, right? And I, because it's a subscription.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you sign up on a phone.

• 1:00:07Speaker 05

  Right. If you sign up on the phone. So, yeah, and this is where I kind of like ended with command line this week is like, I would love to know what Apple thinks about all this because Apple, they don't like stores within apps. They, you know, like, you can ask Mark Zuckerberg about that one. You can ask a lot of people about that one, actually. A lot of people have tried versions of this. The only one that's gotten it through for reasons that are too complex to get into is WeChat in China. But I think they're going to run into a massive wall there eventually, which is Apple's take rate and their historical hatred of an app trying to recreate any kind of a digital store experience.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  And potentially having their own AI, right?

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  And wanting their own AI to be the primary AI in the device. Because once the AI is looking at books and just buying them for you, that's a whole nother world of transactions that Apple can take money out of. And they're going to want to be the primary AI there. So it's, just to bring this together, you can see why people want to build a not phone. Why Sam Altman is investing in 45 different attempts at this and might be working with Johnny Ive at some attempt at this. There's a massive blocker to mobile innovation here, which is that 30% cut. And I just don't have any sense of how anyone will actually get around it because building the humane AI pin or the rewind pendant or whatever Johnny

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  Ive comes up with on the side, the phone is still going to be the primary device.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  Well, the, the other part of it is like, this is not all that different from what Amazon and Google were trying to do with skills for their voice assistant. Like, we've been down this road where Amazon was like, okay, you're going to interact with Alexa, but we're also going to offer you lots of ways to interact with other data and other services. Skills is going to be a huge business. That got passed Apple. It was fine. It just turns out nobody wanted that because it has this heinous discovery problem. The interface is actually not that good for it in most ways because like the thing where you have to essentially say a wake word to get to the thing and then another wake word to get to the app that you want and then talk to it in a very specific way, all to route right back to you. Like that flow sucks. And so I think what ChatGPT is gonna

• 1:02:20David Pierce?

  have to figure out is how to, like, again, we're talking about abstracting all of this away. And by virtue of making you choose things, you lose that abstraction in a really helpful way. Like ChatGPT already has these plugins. The plugin system sucks. It's a perfectly useful thing. Right? But I think that is one way to go down that road. That doesn't work because it, you can't find the stuff. You have to like turn it on every time you want to use it. It just doesn't work. And I think figuring out how to do this thing they're trying to do in a way that doesn't cause those exact same problems is gonna be really hard, especially because OpenAI is trying to have its cake and eat it too, because it also wants to be the interface to all of it. It wants to be the

• 1:03:05David Pierce?

  underlying infrastructure and the most powerful, important product. And at some point, doing both of those becomes really, really, really hard to do.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  This is what Altman said in the Q and A I was at after his keynote. I thought it was really interesting because it gets at that tension, David, that you talk about where OpenAI is building a platform very clearly. They're continuing to add things into ChatGPT, add different modalities, different data sets. At the same time, they're saying, come build on our platform, we'll share revenue with you, come make your own GPTs, et cetera. And he got asked about this and he said very clearly, he was like, don't build a thin wrapper on top of OpenAI. We are planning to build the obvious features that you would expect for a robust platform over time, and there's enormous value to build. So that's him just being straight up like, we will

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  probably Sherlock you. And, and I'm gonna see, I see a lot of parallels here to the early App Store.

• 1:04:01David Pierce?

  We're gonna build the app.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  And I think that's okay. Like, you know, the early App Store had a bunch of flashlight apps, right? Eventually, that just became a feature on the phone. And that's, it was, it's a better feature as a result.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  You can go in the App Store right now and download a home interior app that is a thin wrapper on Dolly. Like we're we're painting our house and I wanted an app that would just like put paint colors on a wall and like half of them are now just doll wrappers and they're bananas. Like it's like, don't do this. Like, I don't recommend them. Like, your house starts to look real wild after a minute. But it's, there's obviously a market for that thing to occur right now. And maybe one day OpenAI will build that exact thing because that's a useful case for Dolly. But in the meantime, like, they're just watching a bunch of these companies try and fail. And that's useful to them. And in the short term, useful to companies are making some money.

• 1:04:55Alex Cranz?

  I just keep thinking about all the scummy apps that are going to come to this thing, right? Like, there's the obvious ones where I, as an adult, call it scummy. A lot of our younger listeners would probably love it. It's like one that'll just write your papers for you, right? That's the thing ChatGPT can already do. Somebody will probably make a really, really good version of it using this. And a lot of people will probably be very upset about that and demand for it to be pulled down because it's helping a bunch of kids cheat. There's ones where like, okay, you can have, you know, input some actress that you really want to talk to. And then everybody's like, oh, yeah, I can go talk to that hot actress. And it's like, ooh, no.

• 1:05:32Speaker 05

  You can already do that, Alex. I mean, there's like replica, character AI.

• 1:05:35Alex Cranz?

  But that's gonna happen now on OpenAI's forum, right? Like, they're gonna have to deal with that.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, someone's gonna build that GPT. If you build a GPT of me, it's over.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  So that is like-

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  The law will come down.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  So, Neelai, like, we are, there's a lot of stuff on the internet that could like be used to inform a chatbot about us because we write on the internet. Like, that is a perfect example. Someone could just make a Neelai bot and it's everything Neelai's written on The Verge and you ask Neelai questions about copyright, you know, forever, right?

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then Neelai bot is like, this is copyright infringement. You should be clear what's happening.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  Well, we should, I want to, this is a bit of a tangent, but like, they, another thing OpenAI announced this week is a copyright shield, which is a program where they will pay for any legal fees incurred by their developers for copyright claims of use of the technology. So theoretically, someone builds a Neelai bot, they scrape The Verge for all Neelai's stories, they put it in the bot. Box media goes, hey, you stole our IP and you're making money off of this because OpenAI is paying you. We're going to sue you and OpenAI is saying now we will fight all those legal.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 05

  Legal things that happen. So like, what do you think about that, Neil?

• 1:06:42David Pierce?

  That's a bad answer to this problem. We should all just like, I just want to acknowledge that is a bad answer. That's how OpenAI goes bankrupt. Real fast. Well, that's, well, no, there are also, there are so many interesting ways of thinking about this content. Like Alex, your paper example is a really interesting one because like you put together all the announcements that came out this week. And what's going to happen now is you're going to be able to upload your history textbook to a GPT and you're going to be able to write papers from it. That is that it now has the big enough context window and it like they're using this thing. It's it's like the AI term for it is RAG, which is basically like by doing this custom knowledge, you're able to reduce it all the way down.

• 1:07:23David Pierce?

  Just to the stuff that you know that it knows, which means it hallucinates less, which is actually a really important part of this. It's going to write you a good paper based on your history textbook and that is just, it's all sitting there. And that's a mess in so many ways. And for OpenAI to just be like, don't worry about it. We have lawyers is not a good answer to the problem.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  So Sam was Sam's exact wording on this issue was we don't like to do things that are illegal.

• 1:07:49David Pierce?

  Congrats, Sam.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  Cool, Sam.

• 1:07:51Speaker 05

  Same Sam, same. But like, I mean, they clearly think all this is under fair use. And there's a lot, you know, you all have talked about on the show, a lot of, you know, there's a lot of lawsuits right now that is trying, that are trying to, you know, they are going to figure this out, whether this is fair use. This is happening while all this is going on. It's a very.

• 1:08:07Nilay Patel?

  Can I call her that in for you? So the Copyright Office took comments about whether it's fair use and all the big companies filed the comments.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  We have some of them on site and the one that just stuck out was Andreessen Horowitz, big Silicon Valley firm. Their comment was, look, companies have invested billions and billions of dollars into this technology, assuming it's fair use. So it's fair use.

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  No, I mean, they were clear. They were like, if this is not fair use, like these investments go to zero, basically. It was like, it was like the whole, the whole structure of all this is predicated on the idea that we can have this for free.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I know a lot of media executives. They don't agree with that view.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  Not a little bit. We had Barack Obama on Decoder this week. I asked him this question like, you're an author. Do you think this is for you? Because he really wants to talk about AI. And he was like, he's a politician. He's very good at this. He's like, leave me out of it. I've sold enough books. But you watch him do it. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. I refuse to engage this question. And then he said, this is a speed bump. The revenue will get figured out. And so I think there's a real tension in the industry. There's an expectation from the people who make the IP that this is, yep, a speed bump, that the money will sort itself out, the creators will get paid. And there's the expectation from the tech industry that they're going to get to do a Google

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  and just take it. And like, Google's history is built on taking it. And they were the scrappy upstart when they did that. When Google scraped all the books on the internet and made Google Books, they got sued. But they showed up with their like, big colorful logo and their propeller hats. Literally, that image of Google protected it from these lawsuits. When Viacom sued Google over YouTube for just ingesting huge amounts of Viacom television shows onto YouTube, YouTube was like, but it's so cool. Like, everyone loves it. You could just watch South Park for free. And Viacom was like, yeah, that's the problem. They won. And they won running away because Viacom was perceived as evil.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  And Google, again, stupid logo, slides in the office, beanie hat, and it was really useful.

• 1:10:17David Pierce?

  That's part of the story. The rest of the story is that Google had a reasonable defense, which was to say, we're not the ones uploading it. And it turns out there's like a large part of tech policy that is based on that specific idea.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  No, they, they, I mean, their other defense was, and we built you content ID. We built you a private copyright enforcement system that is unaccountable to everyone and pisses everybody off every day. Right, that's the actual, that's the thing that they did to get out of that jam.

• 1:10:48David Pierce?

  Google got so much out of this in a lot of ways by returning value to people. Like, Google made the case to Viacom that more people are watching Viacom stuff because they're finding it on YouTube. And whether that's true or not, it's a case to make. And it's done the same thing with websites, right? Like, there have been all these issues for years about, like, media organizations being like, how are we supposed to feel about the fact that there is a constantly updated version of our entire website sitting on Google's servers? And that's what they're crawling and serving, not our website. And what Google says is, we send you traffic. And there's like, there is some set of trades that you're willing to make there. And ChatGPT so far has not returned any value to the people whose stuff that it is taking, it's not directing traffic, they're not getting money.

• 1:11:31David Pierce?

  It's just like a nifty thing that other people get to do. And I think without, if it can't figure out how to make that turn back to like, here is what it's worth for you, I think it's much bigger than a speed bump.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it will bring the whole thing down. Like, it is the end of the industry if this isn't fair use. And the thing for all of these companies is you cannot rely in the court system to be reliable when it comes to fair use.

• 1:11:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, it is not a stable decision-making framework. It is a coin flip. Like, every time. It is a coin flip even in just like recent memory. Like, I bring up this example all the time, but I'll do it again because it's useful. The estate of Marvin Gaye was not happy. No, it just comes up.

• 1:12:16David Pierce?

  Drink. Somebody owes me $10.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm just telling you, the Blurred Lines case is gonna go down as like the thing that upends maybe all of technology. It did bring us Emily Radakowski. Many things happened because of the song. They, Robin Thicke and Frall sued Marvin Gaye's estate preemptively because they thought it was so clear cut. They hadn't stolen a note. It was just a vibe. And they lost. That is a totally unpredictable result. And then the estate of Marvin Gaye emboldened, goes and sues Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran shows up in court, all floppy hair, and says, oh, just the music, and he wins. And he actually took the court.

• 1:12:54David Pierce?

  He played guitar in court, that was the difference.

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  Incredible Ed Sheeran impression, by the way.

• 1:12:58Speaker 05

  You could use some accent work, but yeah, it was alright.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  He's just a floppy guy.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  He's just a floppy guy.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  But that is a straight coin flip. If I gave you the facts of that outside of the actual characters and said these two didn't take any of the chords or the music, they took a vibe, and this guy took the actual chords, who should win, who should lose, right? And it's the exact opposite of what you expect. And if you are OpenAI or Google or any one of these other folks, you're staring at a problem where it is so unpredictable that you should go and make some deals, just to bring some semblance of order to this marketplace. But to what David's point is, no one knows what that deal is worth. The second you make one deal, everyone else is gonna want a deal. The second you make a deal, you have communicated

• 1:13:46Nilay Patel?

  to the world, you think deals might be necessary, and everyone shows up with their hands out. Like, this is classic, like rocked in a hard place situation for all these companies. And if they end up going to court and fighting this out, no one knows if they're gonna get to the right answer on either side. A couple of weeks ago, on Decoder, we had a record label executive, and she said, "Look, the music industry is like this. You sue each other in the morning and you go to dinner at night. And that's how it works. And like, you're just gonna have to deal with it. And they're gonna have to get good at that, too, because that's how we do this." And I don't think Sam is ready for that.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  They are not thinking about it at all. It didn't come up on, like, the stage. It didn't really come up afterwards in the conversations I was hearing. They're very focused on, what is the value we can give to developers and users? And the data that is powering all of this is like something they do not want to talk about because of what we've all been saying. But I mean, I do want to just like, to take devil's advocate here, like, yes, like, there's a huge copyright question here. Generally, I feel like with these new things, the Viacom YouTube example is a great example, where... Better product experiences tend to win in the long run, right? So, and if I'm thinking about a GPT for The Verge, unless I'm in kind of like discovery mode where I just want to literally,

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  you know, surf our beautiful site and look at things and I have no idea what I'm wanting. I actually would love the idea of just going, what should I know about the new iPhone? Is it good or not? And a bot just, it surfaces our article, it tells me, it says this is, this is the score. This is the history of our coverage. Here's a link to the video or just watch the video there. Like, that's a pretty good experience. There's, there's a lot of like finding things on the internet that like that time collapses immediately when you're using an interface like this. And that's going to, I think, provide value.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 05

  And so if you believe that that's valuable, and I think a lot of people will, and I think we're going to start seeing a lot of really interesting GPTs that are doing very dubious, you know, fair use things, but are showing like, hey, this interface is actually better for just finding information. I do think that idea may win out in the long run, regardless of what happens in the short term with the legal system.

• 1:15:55Alex Cranz?

  It just feels like they're moving way too fast.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  They are, yeah.

• 1:15:58Alex Cranz?

  Between the lying thing and the fact that they haven't figured out whether or not they're wholesale ripping off a whole bunch of creators. Like, what are you doing?

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  What do you mean ripping off? What do you mean?

• 1:16:11Alex Cranz?

  What we just talked about, like,

• 1:16:12Speaker 05

  Like the payout structure?

• 1:16:12Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people, yeah, a lot of people straight up accuse them of, if they're, if they're ingesting their stuff without paying them, they're, that's ripping them off.

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, I'll just give you, let me give you just another example of this. Outside of ChatGPT. I think about this with TikTok all the time. I keep a list of TikToks that I think should be media PhDs. It's great. One day I'll publish the whole list. And there's one I keep coming back to. Hagerty Media, which is a great car YouTube channel, I love it. They did a stop motion video of an engine being disassembled.

• 1:16:42Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 1:16:43Nilay Patel?

  This, this took forever. Like just this is making a video of an engine being disassembled, such that anyone can understand what's happening. Takes a long time with people. To do it in stop motion is like a map, just obviously massive investment.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  And so it instantly got cut up into 10,000 different TikTok channels that reposted into 10,000 different clips because it's it looks cool as hell. And if you're running one of these TikTok channels or just trying to get views, so you can like send people their TikTok shop, this is great. Should that should any of that exist? Media PhD. Okay, here's the real thing that I think about all the time. The comments on all of the TikToks that have freebooted this video are this took so long. This must have been so hard to do. This is so cool. I'm so glad you spent all this time doing this. And it's like, not like, everyone can see the value and the difficulty of the work. And no one, not not a cent of that value is going back to the person that made the video.

• 1:17:40Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  And no, like, no one's confused that this was like a hard thing to do. TikTok is making the most money in that. The freebooting channel is making some money in that. The users are getting a ton of value, right? Because they're seeing a video they wouldn't have ever seen. And the poor person who like, had to move the bolt, like a sixteenth of an inch, and then take another frame, gets nothing.

• 1:18:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, I keep thinking, like, I came up as a guy who, when I was my short stint as a lawyer, I defended the kids who used Kazaa. And I'm sitting here being like, am I the bad guy now?

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  What is going on here? Like, that's like, one step too far. And that's just with video, and everybody can understand, everyone can see it. If you make a GPT and you ingest all of some YouTube creators' videos, and you're like, now you can talk to Doug Demiro, and he doesn't get a cent? Like, at some point, you have to say, this is not like, fair.

• 1:18:35Speaker 05

  Oh, it's not even

• 1:18:36Nilay Patel?

  Not fair use, or whatever, just like, this is just like outrageous.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  It's not even that the creator doesn't get a cent. It's that in that case, YouTube doesn't get a cent. And guess who has a lot of lawyers who is comfortable suing is Google, right? So, like, I think OpenAI is entering a world of hurt here. Like, I saw, again, I got a demo of the builder. And you would think that the ability to upload custom knowledge, they would have some pretty stringent guidelines on what you can upload, and maybe they scan it before they let you put it in the GPT to make sure it's, you know, not something that is like, very blatantly, like, paid copyrighted material that is like, behind a paywall, or something like that. It's literally just an upload field. It's just an upload field. You can upload anything. Like there, there was no, nothing said about like how they're going to look for this stuff.

• 1:19:19Speaker 05

  So I, I, I don't think they're ready for what's about to happen, which is that like someone is going to be, I, I, it's just obvious. Like you, like you take a paid product online, you pay for it, you scrape it, you put it into, into a GPT and you make money from it. And it's like in that flow of events, like the value is just being stolen, right? And like, and OpenAI is saying at the same time, guess what? We're going to pay all your legal defenses. Yeah, it's just wild.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  We should just get OpenAI sued. That's the new Verchess challenge.

• 1:19:53Speaker 05

  Well, they're being sued. They're being, I mean, they're being.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm throwing out my wearable graph. The next episode is us, just us doing dubious things to get OpenAI sued. Um, no, they are getting sued by artists like Sarah Silverman, all these people.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  But this next turn where they're offering revenue to people to build things and then protecting them from the claims.

• 1:20:13Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to make a bot that adjusts all of the Game of Thrones books and writes the final two.

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  I think George R R Martin would at this point would just pay you for that.

• 1:20:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I like that. That's, that's, that's my loophole.

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  He's gonna, he should just do that.

• 1:20:25Alex Cranz?

  That's my loophole.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  George, if you're listening, and I know you are.

• 1:20:27Alex Cranz?

  I got you, George.

• 1:20:28Speaker 05

  You can, you can do it. It's, they've, they've expanded the field.

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  I, I, the context window is bigger, George.

• 1:20:35Speaker 05

  I, I, I do think this is like a huge problem, but I do want to acknowledge like these GPTs are, they're, they're cool. They're going to be cool.

• 1:20:41Nilay Patel?

  They're cool as hell.

• 1:20:42Speaker 05

  People are going to like using them. The, the Dolly stuff is wild. Like just having like something that can like generate. And like, I have this problem. I don't know about you guys with these, these chatbots, these like all in one chatbots is like, it's just a, it's just a text bar. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know all the things it can do. There's this context problem with these bots, like Bard and all these where they can do so much that like, it's overwhelming frankly for me. So having like a cooking bot that has like all the cooking information I would want to like make recipes. I would pay separately for that because like I actually just want that. I don't want the all of it. Right. And so I do think it's a really powerful idea and Meta is doing it. They're going to have a bot creation platform next year. There's already character AI replica.

• 1:21:25Speaker 05

  The industry seems this year to have realized that we are moving on from these like one bot to rule them all concept to like millions of bots everywhere. Right?

• 1:21:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Speaker 05

  And that's a that's a cool idea. It's just, um, yeah, there's all this like copyright problem, but I think as an idea, it's

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  it's it's there's just existential risk.

• 1:21:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  Actually, the model thing is really interesting. Um, uh, they had touching a Della on stage. Microsoft, they're obviously huge open A investor. And part of the argument that they're making is they're all just using one big model, but they're learning to segment it into these use cases.

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  So the big model is getting better overall.

• 1:22:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:22:02Nilay Patel?

  While people are doing these specialized things with it. And then on the side, Microsoft Research is trying to figure out if you can take small models that can run locally or on these other places and make them fully useful in like very narrow contexts. So you see this like kind of parallel innovation pathway where like the big model, maybe you can put guardrails around it and make these GPTs. Or you could have like the little model that's just good at what it does. And there's something and the funniest thing about the, I think the little model training that Microsoft is doing is one of the prompts they give it is pretend you're the big model.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is incredible.

• 1:22:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, don't, uh, it it's not impossible. It's like that thing, you know, uh, it's pretty good. Um, it's funny. We've had this whole conversation about voice assistants and AI and all this stuff. And it's like, we've brought up Amazon and Google many times, which have voice assistants, millions of them deployed in homes today and seem not ready for this next turn at all.

• 1:23:00Speaker 05

  Open AI is moving so fast and that was just the takeaway from being there and like talking to developers there and just, I mean, when you think about the fact that ChatGPT is almost a year old and everything they've done in a year and everything they just announced on stage. And like the demand for it, like there was a massive chat GPT outage this week, right? After they announced all this stuff, like their servers are melting. So they have clearly like captured lightning in a bottle. It's their game to lose. I really feel that. It's just a matter of the legal ramifications potentially catching up with them and the diciness of this store concept. And like, if you're doing a usage based system, what's to keep me from buying a bunch of bots to use my bot so that I have the most used bot? Like, how do they know that it's actually real?

• 1:23:45Speaker 05

  I guess because it's through the subscription business, but so I guess that is a good limiting factor on that. But there's just a lot of like dicey, like who decide like, I'm already imagining like chat GPT is used to like, uh, influence the next election and they decide to demonetize news, right? It's like everything old is new again.

• 1:24:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, that's like, what is, what's going to be the cocoa melon of chat GPT? That's on the good side, right? That's like the biggest YouTube success story ever.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Nilay Patel?

  Um, enough so that Disney has listed it not owning Coca-Cola and is like a risk.

• 1:24:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  Because it, and that's just a YouTube success story. And it's like, on the other side is like, what is the horrible white noise playlist on Spotify?

• 1:24:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Nilay Patel?

  App, right? That is just like zero value delivered and just sucking money out of the ecosystem and until Spotify has to shut it down.

• 1:24:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:24:37Speaker 05

  Yes. And, and the next turn here really, and this is what Sam was telling us after the keynote is he imagines that we will all have our own GPT, which I'm really excited about. So a GPT that is trained on all of your stuff, like the rewind idea, the pendant, but like all of your software, all of your, you know, notes and your GPT engages with other GPTs on your behalf. So it's like bots on bots all the way down, talking to each other. So it's like, you tell your GPT, I want to go to see a concert and have dinner with these friends on this date, line up my ride, my reservation, the tickets, and it all talks to different bots to do that. Sam thinks that's inevitable. And what really, so OpenAI's stated mission is to build AGI, right?

• 1:25:21Speaker 05

  Artificial general intelligence, which is this like super, it's like godlike AI that can think better than all of us combined. People in the AI field that I've talked to over the last year think that this next step where it's GPTs representing us engaging on our behalf unsupervised is the environment that is needed to train the models to become a step function even more intelligent because you need to have this concept called self-supervised learning where these agents are all interacting and training on their own. That's pretty freaky, right? That's like Matrix stuff. Yeah. That's coming in like the next couple of years. I think the world could look a lot different. It's just we're, I think, and that was the vibe there was like we are

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  kind of witnessing a very, very exciting, but also like very scary next few years. Yeah. And inside of it is a copyright lawsuit. Is a giant ticking time bomb. It's just Ed Sheeran looking mad at you. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll come back. We got a lightning round. We gotta get out of here. We'll be right back.

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• 1:27:31Nilay Patel?

  We're back. There's quite a lot in this lightning round, but we gotta go fast. Kranz, why don't you start? Because I think you have the best one.

• 1:27:36Alex Cranz?

  I do have the best one. There's a new Steam Deck. Sean Hollister has reviewed it. He naturally loves it. I think I called him like the day after he got it and I was like, "Tell me everything." And he sure did. He really likes it. The big things that have changed with this one is there's a new processor. They went from the 7-nanometer Aerith processor, named after the character from Final Fantasy VII, to the 6-nanometer Sephiroth processor. Sames. They've switched to an OLED display. They've switched...

• 1:28:16Alex Cranz?

  The battery life has supposedly increased, which led to an incredible quote from Sean, where he said, "For example, in 2022, I was able to play the graphically intensive control for just under two hours on my original Steam Deck review unit at 60 frames per second. This week, I played the same game at up to 80 frames per second for two hours and 11 minutes."

• 1:28:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, more frames.

• 1:28:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  You saw more frames.

• 1:28:47Alex Cranz?

  He does add more stuff to it. It is a pretty measurably different, big difference in battery life, especially on games that don't use as much of the CPU and the GPU. So like those lower-impact games are gonna last a lot, lot longer. The high-impact games, those of us who are making our way through Baldur's Gate 3 on the thing, we're not gonna see as much success. The big shock for me was that there are no Hall effect joysticks. I just assumed that was gonna happen because there's been so much frustration with the drift on the current joysticks. They didn't do that. That's a big bummer. But they got rid of the 32-gigabyte EEMC version, which was the one that I bought because you could replace the drive really cheap

• 1:29:29Alex Cranz?

  and easy. They got rid of that one. Now starts at 550 or 549. I'm resisting buying one, but Sean loves it. Oh, and the power button's now orange.

• 1:29:40Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that's pretty good.

• 1:29:41Alex Cranz?

  I love it. Yeah, I'm excited.

• 1:29:42Nilay Patel?

  I would put this out as evidence, as we've been saying, there's more action in gadgets than people ever give any credit to. And the love that our audience, and in particular Sean, has for the Steam Deck is like off the charts.

• 1:29:55Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's an awesome device and they don't have to do a bunch of really long infomercials for, for us to get hyped about it.

• 1:30:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, look, you can play Control at 80 frames per second for 11 minutes more. That's all you gotta say.

• 1:30:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:07David Pierce?

  I just love this thing. They just, they were just like, what are all the things we can do to make this device better? And then they just did all those things and now here we are. Like, God forbid more companies don't just like make their things better all the time. Like, it's, it's just, it just makes me happy. And it was the same thing with the Switch OLED where they're like, we got this thing pretty right the first time. But what if we just did a couple of things better? Wouldn't that be cool? And everybody's like, yes. But it's like, most companies are like, okay, this is called the Steam Deck 2. And this time it comes in six pieces and you have to like do backflips while you use it. It's going to be so dope. And Valve instead is just like, no, we like pretty much got this right. We just made it better now.

• 1:30:48Alex Cranz?

  It's cool.

• 1:30:49David Pierce?

  It's like, yeah, that's the way. Just make your things better.

• 1:30:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm, that's all you need to do.

• 1:30:53David Pierce?

  I just really appreciate that one of the headline features of this one is that the fan is both larger and quieter. Which is like crushed it, guys.

• 1:31:02Alex Cranz?

  No more fan one.

• 1:31:03David Pierce?

  This is some video game stuff here. We did it.

• 1:31:05Nilay Patel?

  I would know that, but I've been trying to scroll this article using Samsung Dex, which is not possible.

• 1:31:12Alex Cranz?

  I didn't realize you were actively scrolling. I thought you were doing, I always do the thing where I like fidget and scroll up and down. No, you're just trying to read it.

• 1:31:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just trying to land on a sentence that I can read because this mouse is set so fast.

• 1:31:22David Pierce?

  Are you just flying top to bottom of the page?

• 1:31:23Nilay Patel?

  Out of control.

• 1:31:24David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 1:31:25Nilay Patel?

  And, look, Android is many things as an operating system and Samsung's one UI is many things as a skin on Android.

• 1:31:34Nilay Patel?

  A combination of things that is designed to let you change your mouse tracking speed is not on the list of priorities for either of those companies. All right, David, what is your lightning round?

• 1:31:44David Pierce?

  Uh, mine's very simple. It's just that YouTube in its relentless quest to be TikTok is now adding a for you page to, or a for you carousel to people's channels, which is basically like personalized recommended videos on people's channels that you land on. A, very smart. B, forever interesting to me that the phrase for you has just completely taken over the internet. Like, we've just decided that that is the term for every personalized everything, for you, just one. And also, YouTube really ought to stop trying to be TikTok. Like, just stop.

• 1:32:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god. I think everything is inevitably gonna be TikTok.

• 1:32:21Speaker 05

  But I, I opened my YouTube mobile app to the shorts thing, and it was just, it was a, it was little tiles of shorts filling my entire screen when I opened my YouTube app on my phone. Like, no, no.

• 1:32:34Alex Cranz?

  I still sometimes accidentally scroll it, forgetting I'm not in TikTok.

• 1:32:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that's, it's incredible.

• 1:32:41Alex Cranz?

  That and Instagram. I'm like, oh, that's why it's kind of crummy and weird.

• 1:32:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's like watching the algorithms grow up. Like, there are different stages of being toddlers, and like TikTok is like running away with the election, you know? But like, YouTube is just like, is this anything? Will this make you mad? Will it make you sad? Horny? You know? Instagram is like, here's a Kardashian, you know, like, back to basics.

• 1:33:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Nilay Patel?

  At least in my feed. They figured out that I like truck jumps. A lot of truck jumps on my Instagram. Like, you know, it's like getting better.

• 1:33:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:13Nilay Patel?

  Because I engage with it more. And then TikTok is just like full crazy.

• 1:33:16Alex Cranz?

  I, I screwed up on TikTok the other day, and I thought I had broken my algorithm because it just kept showing me bagpipe videos.

• 1:33:22Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what I mean. TikTok is now at the point where it's in the deepest, darkest recesses of your personality.

• 1:33:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  If you've been scrolling it for years and years.

• 1:33:30Speaker 05

  It's horrible.

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like beyond truck jumps. It's like deep fried truck memes that like, I can't explain to anyone else. There's a video I keep seeing of like, a motorized pizza peel that just picks up a pizza and puts it back down.

• 1:33:44Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  It's...

• 1:33:46Alex Cranz?

  It was bagpipes.

• 1:33:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, it's telling you more about yourself than you need to know.

• 1:33:51Alex Cranz?

  I'd never...

• 1:33:52Nilay Patel?

  It's in there. It's in there.

• 1:33:55Alex Cranz?

  Five-year-old Alex thought they were cool.

• 1:33:58Alex Cranz?

  I left it at five. Leave me alone back.

• 1:34:00Nilay Patel?

  TikTok has that reset algorithm button and I think about hitting it all the time.

• 1:34:05Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god, I should hit it. I think I have to at this point. We should all hit it.

• 1:34:09Nilay Patel?

  Here's my pitch for this whole thing. I've now watched more, again, we've had a lot of copyright on the show, but I've watched more movies on TikTok recently than anything. And all of these video streaming platforms are trying to get you to engage again. And it's like Netflix, just make, make the TikTok.

• 1:34:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just show me.

• 1:34:27Nilay Patel?

  Just like, let me scroll through it. And I'm like, oh, man. Yeah, I'll start Couples Retreat in the middle of it for some reason. And then that'll play on my TV and we'll be done.

• 1:34:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Nilay Patel?

  And like.

• 1:34:37David Pierce?

  AI absolutely 100% guarantee you that's coming. Like, there is not one shadow of a doubt in my mind that at some point in the very near future, the Netflix mobile app will have that thing for you. But I also think, part of the reason I picked this one as my lightning round thing is because it's just like, I've gotten totally obsessed with the idea that scrolling is just like the, the behavior. And it doesn't matter what you're scrolling. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's just like, people want to scroll. You just like have a moment where you're like, I'm gonna get on my phone and just do some scrolling. It's just like a thing people talk about. And the activity is so much more important than what you're doing it with. But it's just like, I, I now think about that all the time. It's just like, that is a mode of engaging with technology is I'm just gonna scroll.

• 1:35:19David Pierce?

  And I think the more that becomes the thing, especially as young people are trained on that as like, I have five minutes, I'm gonna do some scrolling. I just like, I hear more people say that. And you're gonna see it absolutely everywhere. And it is gonna like completely change the internet because it's like, instead of, I'm gonna go like, look at Reddit or whatever. It's just like, I'm just gonna do some scrolling.

• 1:35:39Nilay Patel?

  And it's just the for you feed of scrolls everywhere?

• 1:35:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's nuts.

• 1:35:43Nilay Patel?

  And it's just a bunch of algorithms, starting at the very beginning of like personalities, like angry, sad, hungry, horny. And then all the way to bagpipes.

• 1:35:54Nilay Patel?

  Whatever complex, I would love to see the database field of like bagpipe emotional reactions that TikTok thinks it's getting when it gets a bagpipe engagement. You know, like Netflix has those like deeply over constructed movie categories.

• 1:36:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It was all because I liked a Friends video and for some reason it was like, I know which part of that we need to pull out for you. Bagpipes. I'm telling you.

• 1:36:19David Pierce?

  One of the things I love about these conversations is it's always just people telling on themselves about the stuff that they watch on social media. It's so fun. You're like, aren't you also on bagpipe TikTok? And it's like, no, no one else.

• 1:36:29Alex Cranz?

  There are a lot of people on bagpipe TikTok, including me now.

• 1:36:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's mine. A great piece by Jen Tuohy this week. If you're a smart home nerd, this really hits you. There's a company called Chamberlain makes all the garage door openers. Like if you buy a house, the chance that you have a Liftmaster garage door opener made by Chamberlain, very, very high. They, like many bad companies, have smart devices. You can make the garage door opener smart. They have a proprietary platform called MyQ, which is long since a disaster. MyQ is monetized through partnerships with car companies. So you've got a car with like a wifi connection in it. You can like push the button, cloud service happens, your garage door opens, whatever, man. Many, many, many people have hacked into

• 1:37:18Nilay Patel?

  MyQ with Homebridge and Home Assistant, which are really cool things. It's very nerdy, but you can have a little Tamagotchi of a raspberry pie in your house. You have to reset every couple of months and it bridges all the things together into HomeKit. That's my Homebridge. Like my Ring cameras show up in HomeKit because of Homebridge. MyQ showed up in HomeKit for a lot of people because of Homebridge. MyQ shut off this integration.

• 1:37:41Alex Cranz?

  Not cool.

• 1:37:42Nilay Patel?

  They claim that they're getting DDoS through it, which is like you could have a real integration with HomeKit and everyone shut up. You wouldn't get DDoS. So they, and this is a part that just rankles. They explain their decision by saying, we've made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of the MyQ ecosystem through third-party apps. It's so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million plus users. We understand this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of MyQ benefiting all of our users.

• 1:38:12Alex Cranz?

  That is the cleanest garage I've ever seen.

• 1:38:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the picture here. So they said this is 2% of people. So Jen just did the math. You've got 10 million users. You've you've broken 200,000 garage doors.

• 1:38:31Nilay Patel?

  Which is just incredible. So now they're freaking out. I will tell you, MyQ has always been a disaster. They've always been pretty user hostile. This is not a secret. It's just what people have. And no one thinks about placing the garage door opener. So everyone's been hacking around it. You can buy little adapters. I have one called Miros. I think the refurbished ones are called Refos. It's very confusing. They're like, anywhere between 30 and 50 bucks depending on sale. You can just wire them into your garage door opener and put them in HomeKit. They work. There's other ones. Jen has a whole list of other alternatives. If you are the sort of person who wants to open your garage door from your phone, and I am that sort of person.

• 1:39:07Alex Cranz?

  You are.

• 1:39:07Nilay Patel?

  There are many ways to do this that do not involve the MyQ platform. And our article has irritated them so much that they're issuing corrections. And they are trying to explain their decision even more, when all they need to do is just either build the HomeKit integration or let the people do the hacks.

• 1:39:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just like say, okay, home assistance is fine.

• 1:39:25Nilay Patel?

  I love it when companies are like, it's a tiny percentage of users. You just broke 200,000 garage doors.

• 1:39:33Alex Cranz?

  Only 200, only 200K.

• 1:39:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. Alex, you got a lightning round?

• 1:39:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's actually a thing I've been trying. I've been test driving a Rivian R1S for the last week. So RJ, the CEO, is at Code. And this is not an ad by any means, but I have had fun in it a lot. We took it off-roading in Joshua Tree. And an electric, it's my first time in an electric SUV. And the thing can go zero to 60 in three seconds and has like 840 horsepower. And it's just like driving a big ass go-kart through the desert.

• 1:40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 05

  Like, it was just, and I like the, I mean, just a lot of the small decisions they've made in terms of the, you know, the OS and the interior of the car. The moment they do a mid-sized one of these, I think it's going to be a really compelling Tesla alternative. But right now, it's very like outdoorsy, you know, big, big hulking vehicles. But yeah, had a lot of-

• 1:40:29David Pierce?

  Next up, Cybertruck for you?

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah. I've heard, uh, yeah, I've heard the Rivian described as the, I should, I can't say it on our air, but the, a version of the Cybertruck that, uh, for people who, yeah. Uh, I, I, um, I, I, yeah, anyway.

• 1:40:45Nilay Patel?

  Okay, can I say my Cybertruck thing? So I asked for pictures of the wiper and they've been lots of Cybertrucks everywhere and people keep sending me not close-ups. They're just like, here's another video of the wiper and it's like, you're six miles away. So I'm going to be more specific. I need a close-up of the middle of the wiper.

• 1:41:03Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:41:03Nilay Patel?

  The middle, not the, not the arm, not the part at the bottom of the windshield that turns, the middle of the wiper blade. Or even better, close-ups all the way up the wiper.

• 1:41:14Alex Cranz?

  Like connecting to the glass?

• 1:41:15Nilay Patel?

  And I'll be more specific. I have heard rumors of how the actual blade is constructed that I would like to verify. I will not tell you what they are.

• 1:41:25David Pierce?

  Please.

• 1:41:25Nilay Patel?

  Cause I don't want to put disinformation in the world and I know the Tesla people are crazy. And I don't want, I don't want clips of me saying a thing that's wrong. I'm just saying, I've heard some information that I cannot verify about the wiper blade itself. So if you encounter one, just go look at the blade, take some pictures. Start at the bottom, click, click, click, click, click all the way at the top. See if you notice anything.

• 1:41:48Speaker 05

  A thing about the Rivian wipers, they work and there's two of them.

• 1:41:52Alex Cranz?

  I was about to say, I heard a plural there.

• 1:41:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's two of them. They cover the entire windshield and they work. The only thing I don't like is there's not the cleaner fluid.

• 1:42:00David Pierce?

  Boring.

• 1:42:01Speaker 05

  Right? Like you can't like, why are we making new cars that cost a lot of money that don't have-

• 1:42:05Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have windshield washers?

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  It doesn't have the washer fluid. I'm like, I'm driving this thing through the desert.

• 1:42:11Nilay Patel?

  Wait, it's empty or it just doesn't have it?

• 1:42:12Speaker 05

  It doesn't exist.

• 1:42:14Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:42:14David Pierce?

  You guys, we cannot pick the windshield wiper fight again. We can't. We've been, we've been down this road before. Neil is about to say, just put water in it, it'll be fine. And we're going to get emails again.

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  I'm saying it doesn't exist.

• 1:42:24Nilay Patel?

  There's no tank.

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  There's no tank.

• 1:42:25Nilay Patel?

  He's saying they've obviated the entire problem.

• 1:42:28Speaker 05

  It's bizarre.

• 1:42:29Nilay Patel?

  Someone asked me if I was going to ask Obama what windshield washer fluid is.

• 1:42:34Nilay Patel?

  We have picked a lot of dumb battles on the show and this is easily the dumbest. And do not just put water in your special food. Anyway.

• 1:42:40Speaker 05

  Eli, the one thing I did want to ask you about Obama was how was the Secret Service?

• 1:42:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so this was our second round with him and we were in his offices. So they were chill.

• 1:42:49Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:42:50Nilay Patel?

  Um, the first round.

• 1:42:51Speaker 05

  Did you get a pat down?

• 1:42:52Nilay Patel?

  I did not. We already, we were already all cleared from before. Um, so when we were at Harvard, there was like intense security in the other protests that day. Cause he was speaking, we're on a college campus. Uh, there are dogs, like the whole thing happened. Uh, we hung out with the dogs and we found out he wasn't going to be there. So then we, it was cool. The dogs are cool. Um, they're very friendly. The, at his offices, we had already been pre-screened and we were on his home turf. So there was, there was a, there was a presence. He doesn't not have a presence. Uh, and there was some discussion about whether the blinds can be open or closed and, and whatever. But it was, it was very chill because we were in his space as opposed to when you're not in his, just moving him around is a complicated affair.

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  I would imagine.

• 1:43:35Nilay Patel?

  What we have discovered.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Alex Cranz?

  Can't go to Cinnabon.

• 1:43:38Nilay Patel?

  Can I, actually can I tell you my one Obama behind the scenes story and we can, we can end this episode? Um, to, in that episode, we talk a lot about free speech on the internet and regulating free speech. And one of the things that's really hard to do is like, you need some constitutional authority to go ahead and regulate speech. So the one that came up in the episode is the FCC has some authority over broadcast stations. Right? So you swear on ABC or CBS or NBC, people can file complaints to the FCC. The FCC can find them because you're using the public airwaves. This is like a real thing. So like radio stations and broadcast TV, there's some basis for the FCC to regulate the content in there.

• 1:44:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Nilay Patel?

  That is wax and weight. This doesn't exist for cable TV, which is why HBO can exist. Why cable news is like off the rails, why I can just swear at will on the internet on the show. Right? The government has basically no authority because there's no public airwaves. So I asked Obama this question in, in the episode. He's like, hey, you've seen some hook. So then we get up and we take a group photo because he's an excellent politician and he knows they should take a group photo. So everyone's like happy. And. I did the least journalistic thing in my life, which I took a video of him saying hi to Max, which, again, I'm just admitting to you disclosure, the least journalistic thing I've ever done in my life, but my daughter has a video of Obama saying hi to her, which.

• 1:44:55Alex Cranz?

  That's awesome.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  You can't get that on Cameo, yeah.

• 1:44:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like hard. And then he's leaving, and I was like, that, this like thing, like, this feels like the problem to me. Like, everyone wants to do this. Everyone wants to issue some speech regulation, but you gotta get over this problem. And he looked at me and goes, "Yeah, you just need a hook. You just gotta figure it out. We'll figure it out." And he like walked out of the room. And I was like, "Oh, you used to be the most powerful person in the world." "Your brain is just like, this problem should be solved. Like, figure it out."

• 1:45:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Nilay Patel?

  And it was like Kate Cox, the Decoder producer and I, both, our minds were just blown. Because that's just like not, I don't have the ability to just like order someone to solve a constitutional law problem. And he was like, "Yeah, just, I don't know. Shut up."

• 1:45:40Alex Cranz?

  Just delegate.

• 1:45:43Nilay Patel?

  It was, and it was just like, you don't have that experience for it.

• 1:45:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, the charisma, too, yeah.

• 1:45:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a lot. Anyhow, that's it. That's Vergecast. Please, if you see a Cybertruck, just all the way up the wiper stock, I'm telling you, there's something there. I don't know what it is, but people tell me there's something there I should look at.

• 1:46:00Speaker 05

  And make the Neelai wearable index GPT.

• 1:46:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the graph. We need the graph.

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, the Vision Pro, the whole Vision Pro review is just gonna be me doing math.

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  But, but I want it to be an input. I want it to be a GPT where you can say, is this thing, how does this fit into Neelai's graph of wearable awesomeness?

• 1:46:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. Fiddliness times face has to be less than or equal to usefulness. That's the whole equation. You just figure that out for me. Alright, that's it. Thanks, everybody. That's Vergecast. Back on.

• 1:46:35David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcasts Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:47:07Speaker 07

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