The real story of the iPhone 18 Pro's camera

This week's iPhone 18 Pro discourse made aperture a priority, but today on Vergecast we zoom out to talk about the state of smart phone photography at large. Executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, guest host David Imel and senior reviewer Allison Johnson get into manual controls, "buckets of photons," and Apple and Google's strategies on how to prove a picture you took is real. Then, senior AI reporter Hayden Field returns to The Vergecast, just a few new revelations of misaligned behavior since her last appearance. She breaks down who's calling for a slowdown, who's full steam ahead, and the prisoner's dilemma facing the industry. And in the lightning round, we cover robotaxis calling the cops, the Boox Palma 3 e-reader, and the latest crop of intentionally low-quality digital cameras. Further reading: Version History: Oregon trail iPhone 18 Pro review: it's all about the manual controls The variable aperture isn’t the cool part of the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera Apple’s new iPhone camera mode promises to prove your photo isn’t AI Inside the suddenly explosive world of AI safety Your robotaxi might be a narc Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun The Boox Palma 3 gets stylus support and a sleek redesign Camp Snap’s 110D gives slim retro film cameras a digital upgrade Fujifilm’s Instax Pal 2 is a tiny digital camera that may not disappoint Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome and lineup00:30 Version History returns02:08 Oregon Trail livestream plug02:36 Apple camera geekout02:59 Apple's new CEO Emmy moment05:23 iPhone 18 Pro upgrades08:33 Pro controls usability11:46 RAW vs ProRAW explained14:35 Signal to noise deep dive21:35 Photographic styles debate25:25 Reference Image authenticity32:40 What we want next41:40 AI safety drama begins42:36 AI Safety Freakout46:10 Liability And Regulation51:34 China Race Narrative54:43 Pace The Frontier Plan55:54 Auditors Inside Labs01:00:22 Prisoners Dilemma Problem01:04:38 Accountability Dead End01:08:45 Waymo Calls The Cops01:14:56 The E Reader Race01:19:56 Tiny Retro Cameras01:26:32 Wrap Up And Goodbye 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

  Support for the show comes from AWS AI. AWS AI is helping the world's leading organizations transform their industries in production at scale right now. From bringing fans inside every swing at the PGA Tour, to helping small businesses grow online with GoDaddy, to taking vehicles from concept to customer with Audi, AWS AI is how businesses innovate, lead and revolutionize. AWS AI is how. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Believe it or not, the holidays are just around the corner. Do you feel ready? Have you been making your list and checking it twice? Maybe not, but that's okay, because here's a tip

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• 1:06Speaker 01

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• 1:34Speaker 02

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of F-Stops. I'm Jake Kastrenakes, Executive Editor of The Verge, here with our friend David Amell, Vergecast guest host.

• 1:44David Pierce?

  What's up gamers? I'm back.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  And we've got a lot coming up today. We're going to geek out about smartphone cameras with Allison Johnson. Hayden Field will join us to talk about the AI safety meltdown this week. And we've got another installment of the lightning round. But first, I've got some stuff to talk about. We have a new season of Version History. The theme for this run of episodes is back to school. I love it. I'm like so hyped. The first episode is about the Oregon Trail.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  So awesome.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I'm on an episode about, I don't know who came up with these ideas. I'm on the episode about overhead projectors, which when they told me that, I was like, of course, of course. We have to do overhead projectors. They bought an overhead projector. It's like, I can't tell you guys how beautiful it is.

• 2:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  It's, I miss them. David, you're on an episode about one laptop per child.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Also, like a beautiful piece of hardware.

• 2:40David Pierce?

  I, I was surprised how much I loved that computer and how many of the ideas from that computer I wish were in modern laptops.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  It's, it's a very weird piece of tech history.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Okay, we have a trailer. Check it out. What if I told you that for the last several decades, schools across the United States have required students to have a game console in class? You might've heard of it. It's called the TI-84 Plus.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Minesweeper, Tetris, Snake, Pong.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  Drug Wars was the game.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  It also does math. This season on Version History, we're going back to school.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  Peak dysentery.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, peak dysentery.

• 3:17David Pierce?

  I like that idea. A two-in-one laptop.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  You can just flip to any page in the book.

• 3:21David Pierce?

  This was the only technology available.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  So grab your Trapper Keeper, throw on the Jan Sport, open up a bottle of Fruityopia and check out Version History on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.

• 3:34David Pierce?

  That was awesome.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  TI-84 Plus hitting this weekend. That's, that's a good one.

• 3:40David Pierce?

  That's great.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Also, if you're listening to this early, some Verge staffers are going to be live streaming a playthrough of the Oregon Trail today, Friday, at 1:30 PM Eastern on our YouTube page. Check it out. It'll be really fun. We'll find out who's going to make it to the Oregon, who lives, who dies, whether the emulator crashes while we're playing. It's going to be fun. You can follow Version History @VersionHistoryPodcast on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Now it's time to talk about Apple. Senior reviewer Allison Johnson is here. Allison, welcome.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  Hello, thanks for having me.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  I'm so excited. This is going to be an all-out camera geek out. The iPhone 18 Pro reviews hit earlier this week. Before we get into that, there's something perhaps more important that I want to talk about. Earlier this week, on Monday, the Emmys. Apple CEO John Turnis is walking down the red carpet. He's looking sharp. He's in a tuxedo. He has an iPhone Duo in his breast pocket.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  A reporter asks him a question. She wants to see it. Let's roll the clip.

• 4:51Speaker 07

  I would love to see it.

• 4:52Speaker 08

  Let's see. There we go.

• 4:54Speaker 07

  Ah! Oh my God! I love it! They have my address. Are you getting, you know, you got me?

• 5:02Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Okay, here's my question. Turnis versus Cook, what's the swag comparison?

• 5:09David Pierce?

  This is so different.

• 5:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  It's so weird to see the Apple CEO like dressed up and at a big event like this. Sometimes Tim Cook would show up for like a half second and just smile and wave, and then he'd leave. It's very uncommon to see them actually engaging with people, showing things off, looking all cool. There are multiple photos of him at the Emmys, like looking like a movie star, taking photos with people, ironically with the iPhone 18 Pro, because the inner camera on the fold is not good.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Well.

• 5:37David Pierce?

  Funny enough as well, he turns the iPhone 18 Pro sideways, even though it has the center stage camera, to take the selfies.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  That's right. He doesn't need to do that.

• 5:47David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  But, you know, we'll give him a pass for that because it still looks better. It still looks better to do that. I know that photo. It, it looks cool. He looks cool. I cannot imagine Tim Cook doing any of this.

• 5:59David Pierce?

  The vibe is so different.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Like having a normal human conversation and interaction. Oh my God.

• 6:06David Pierce?

  He also, he kind of has that like rock star vibe when he walks around. Like even photos of him that have gone out recently of him like not at Apple Park, he's got like shades on and he's got like a jacket on. And it's just a totally different energy. So hopefully that means something in the future for Apple hardware.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  If you had told me there was going to be an Apple CEO who was like a normal human person who like could, could almost pass as cool.

• 6:33David Pierce?

  I could see him almost.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I would never would have, never would have believed it. I would have lost money on Polymarket there.

• 6:37David Pierce?

  And he's the hardware guy, which makes it even cooler.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:41David Pierce?

  He's responsible for a lot of the good hardware upgrades that have happened on the Apple, uh, Apple laptops and stuff recently, so.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  A successful first like two and a half weeks as CEO. I think that's, that's the impression here.

• 6:53David Pierce?

  I'd say so, yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Okay. Now we'll talk about the iPhone 18 Pro. We'll, we'll get into it. Allison, your review dropped earlier this week. You were on The Vergecast earlier this week. You talked about it with V. David, we haven't had you on to talk about it. So why don't we, we start off? I want to hear your thoughts. A couple of big upgrades here. I think the variable aperture is probably the most important one.

• 7:18David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  You tested it out. Big deal, not a big deal. Where do you fall in that spectrum?

• 7:24David Pierce?

  When we say most important upgrade, I think it's probably more apt to say like flashiest upgrade because the changes that Apple made that are actually important, in my opinion, are in software, both in the Pro controls that they added to the phone, which I think are very important because now you can do things like up to a second of long exposure. So you can get sort of a shutter speed, a slow shutter kind of effect. You can get, um, God, there's so many things you can do with that. You can change the white balance. You can do all these things. And also, they upgraded the image pipeline because their signal to noise ratio is better now because they have a bigger aperture. They have a, you know, sensor is the same size, but they felt comfortable enough doing less sharpening.

• 8:08David Pierce?

  I had a conversation with Apple about this. They said, yeah, we totally re-engineered that whole pipeline. And I, I noticed it in my time testing it. I went to Arizona to shoot a bunch of photos with the phone and right out of the gate, I was like, things look less plasticky, less over-sharpened, and the color is just better and more natural, both in the HEIF mode and in Pro RAW. Not really once in that entire process was I like, and I want to use the variable aperture. But all of the other things, I was like, yes, thank you. Thank you for adding these features.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I wait, I have so many questions about the color, about the sharpening.

• 8:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  On the variable aperture, I think that's sort of where Allison landed too, which was Allison, like, you mostly, you had it in auto and it was like mostly just shooting at the same F1.8 that it always did.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, which at first I was like, aha, gotcha, Apple. And when you think about it, it's like, that lens has been optimized, you know, for that F stop and it's a little bit sharper there, I think. But there, I think it does kind of illustrate that there are so few use cases where you're like, yeah, I would like to stop down the aperture on this teeny tiny lens in front of this teeny tiny sensor.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  They exist and it will, it will behave that way in auto mode, but it's sort of in the, we kind of had to go looking for it. I was like, you know, lining up a group shot, I was like, okay, two of you need to stand here, one of you needs to be back here. And then we got it to drop to F4. Yeah. So the, they kind of like, the big updates are sort of hidden under this whole, the aperture moves thing where it's like, it is a brighter maximum aperture. We finally can control shutter speed in, in the year of our Lord 2026.

• 10:03David Pierce?

  In the native app, yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, this is my, this is my question. Both of you are like, I think like very good smartphone photographers and like pretty deep in it. I'm like, oh God, manual controls like through software, like this like is a lot. Do you find these to be usable? You're like, you're like, fine, like, great, give it to me. I will use it. It's, it's, this is very doable.

• 10:28David Pierce?

  Very. I find it to actually be more elegant of an implementation than a lot of other smartphone manufacturers do. Apple sort of redesigned the camera app a little bit so that a lot more is in that little extra menu that is just on the right side. The most annoying thing for me is that when you close the camera app, that goes back to the default and you have to change it every time. And that's frustrating. But the settings for like shutter speed and things like that, they had now have quick settings for on the top. And you don't have to touch them if you don't want to, right? Like the, the idea for most of these smartphone manufacturers has always been, we want a magic box that you press a button and it gives you the best possible photo. And we can talk a little bit more about the redesigned image pipeline and how that helps deliver the best possible photo.

• 11:13David Pierce?

  But I think that they actually did quite a good job of implementing Pro controls for people who want access to them. And it's not, you don't have to go through a thousand menus. Like in the past, Apple made you go into the settings menu, like the settings app, and then you had to go, you had to find camera and you had to tap on camera. And then you go deep into that. And then you'd have to change like from, if you wanted to shoot JPEG instead of HEIF, you'd have to change it from like most, smallest file size to most compatible or something like that. And there's, some of those settings still exist, but it is much easier now to just go into the sub menu in the camera app itself and switch these settings. And that exists for shutter speed.

• 11:52David Pierce?

  That exists for things like white balance. I think it's a, it's a nice balance for both amateurs and pro photographers.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Allison, did you do a lot of playing with, with manual mode?

• 12:02Speaker 06

  I did. And I, you know, I kind of like poo poo, like shooting RAW on a smartphone a little bit where I'm like, I'll just let it handle, you know, it's going to do all the, the multi-frame compositing. I don't feel like I want to tinker with a RAW file from a smartphone too much. Other people, you know, mileage varies. But the shutter speed and having, you know, there's the exposure compensation that's been available. But kind of having that suite of controls, I, I will go in there and I won't mess with them. Cause I'm, I'm sort of like framing a shot and I'm like, okay, I can, I can see how I want this.

• 12:48Speaker 06

  And the phone is not quite behaving right. Like I can make two quick changes right here. And, and I've got the photo like way closer to what I was envisioning, rather than being like, well, I just will underexpose and maybe do something with it later. So I, I had a good time with them.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  I was looking at your sample photos in the 18 Pro review and I was like, I was angry. I'm like, this is, how do you take this photo on a phone? Like this is, like I've spent too much money on real cameras and I can't do this. I, I want to make you two talk about, cause Allison, there were, there were shots fired there with your comment about people shooting RAW.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Are they in the room with us?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  David, you mentioned they improved the image pipeline.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Are you still a RAW guy? Have they improved it enough that you're like, do, do these results show through in the JPEGs or the HEIFs? Or are you getting a meaning? Cause I, I'm still assuming most people, most photos, even the photographers out there.

• 13:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Are going to shoot JPEG. Are you noticing the difference there? Or is this just potential?

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Actually a lot. And I need to break something down for people because there is RAW, which you can only access through third-party camera apps like Moment or Halide. And then there is Pro RAW, which is still, it is, Pro RAW has been such a contentious setting. Because when they first introduced it and up until now, it was still quite compressed. Like it gives you a little bit more flexibility. It gives you a little more malleability in post. But for me, it still gave you the like really crunchy, sort of plasticky smartphone camera look that we have pretty much always been plagued by. Annoyingly, you can pretty much only get the 48 megapixel mode through either using Pro RAW or shooting in 40 megapixel through the default iPhone camera app.

• 14:44David Pierce?

  Most iPhone camera, most third-party camera apps like Halide or Moment Camera Pro 2, if you shoot RAW, you only get a 12 megapixel image, which is frustrating. And I went into this review or like my review of the camera, shooting through Moment Camera 2 initially, because I always go straight to the RAW, the RAW camera apps, because I generally want the most control. I was just kind of messing around with this, with the camera, both in the HEIF mode and the Pro RAW mode. And I was just noticing like, oh, weirdly the color is better and weirdly that plasticky look is like not gone, obviously. And I still sometimes will go into like Lightroom and pull down on the sharpening a little bit.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  But it is much better than it used to be. And we have these like briefings with Apple after we have the phones, but before the reviews go live where they can answer questions. And I was like, did you guys do something to the camera? Because I feel like both in Pro RAW and the regular HEIF mode, it just like, the color is better and the sharpening is better. And they said, yeah, we re, we felt that our signal to noise ratio has gotten good enough that we don't have to, by the way, signal to noise ratio. I'm sorry. This is a lot.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  We're at like the third tier sub breakdown.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  Yeah. I'm like, how deep should I go here?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  That's what this segment is. I'm, I'm sorry and congratulations to everyone. No, this is what I want.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  Okay, good. Okay, good. When you have a sensor, it's subdivided into hundreds of thousands of little photo buckets that capture photons, right? And the signal is how many photons get captured by each individual bucket and converted into electrical current, which is then turned into brightness. That brightness signal is then de-mosaicked where the phone takes all of these adjacent sub pixels and says, based on the pixels around it and how much signal it received, this is the color of what that pixel should be. However, there's a lot of different types of noise. There's things like shot noise, which is basically like chaos. It is, when there are photons flying around, there is also electrical interference that is happening between these sub pixels.

• 16:50David Pierce?

  Samsung has done a lot of engineering on this to create like sub pixel gates between the, the photon buckets to make sure that there's less interference. There's a lot of engineering that goes into making less noise on a sensor like this. Things like backside illuminated sensors are also made to cut down on noise. Anyway, the signal to noise ratio gets better when the sensor gets bigger. Because when those photo buckets, the individual pixels are bigger, they can receive more photons individually. This is why when smartphone cameras were originally like the first 100 megapixel or 200 megapixel Samsung smartphone camera, it looked freaking awful when you shot in 200 megapixel mode, because you were taking a sensor that,

• 17:32David Pierce?

  while bigger than we had had before, was subdivided 200 million times. You know, that is too much. And you are not getting a good signal in each individual pixel. Now, Apple is doing the thing that everybody else is doing where in regular HEIF mode, it's taking that 48 megapixel sensor and it's making four pixels into giant, I don't want to say megapixels, but like megapixels, ultra pixels, whatever. And they're taking all of that signal, converting into light. But even on the 48 megapixel sensor, the sensor is now big enough that you're getting enough photon signal that you're not receiving too much noise to actually say what the color of that pixel is supposed to be.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  So all of that to say, Apple feels that their sensor is big enough. The, the bigger aperture on this camera probably also contributes to that, right? Because it's, yeah, it's the same size sensor, but if the hole is bigger, you're still receiving more light. I don't, I think they say they, there's like a whole extra stop of light from that or something. And anyway, they took this information and they said, now that we're receiving all of this light data, we don't have to do as much computational photography. And what they had to do before is because you wouldn't, weren't receiving as much light information, you had to stack frames on top of each other. Because, I'm, I'm sorry, should I stop or should I keep going?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Well, I might be, this might be too much. I'm sorry. I, I think the, so they've done all of this, right?

• 19:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah. Go. And then the answer is that ProRAW is therefore able to deliver a cleaner image with that is less processed.

• 19:14David Pierce?

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Right, that is where.

• 19:15David Pierce?

  The computation of the photography that happens here is basically saying, we're not receiving enough light data. So we have to use computers to stack frames and do sharpening and noise reduction and things like that. And when you are, when you have physics on your side.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Which happens by having a bigger sensor or having a wider aperture. You don't need to do this computational photography because the computational photography was invented because the sensor was too small. And so Apple went back to the drawing board and they said, let's re-engineer the way that we process the light information that's hitting the sensor and do less sharpening and things like that. And that's why the color and the sharpening is better.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So Alison, you are, I think, more of a JPEG heaf style shooter, which is to say, not getting as, as much pure data as, as David is.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Are you seeing those changes in the JPEGs? Because that is where I, I think there has often been just a world's difference where with the RAW, you always got this very, you know, unprocessed file with the JPEG, they just went, went crazy on it.

• 20:21Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I think so. I, I think across my photos, like some of them still do have that kind of

• 20:31Speaker 06

  little over the top kind of HDR-ish look to them. Particularly with the ultra wide, we know, which is a smaller sensor and that's its own thing. But yeah, I was, I was just finding and it was like kind of a cumulative thing where we went out for a morning and shot around the park and we take a photo and it was more of like, oh, okay, I, I got the photo that I wanted here. I didn't have to fight it as much, you know?

• 21:07Speaker 06

  That, that's what I was finding and just coming back to my photos at the end of a session and being like, yeah, no, that's what, that's what the light did look like and it didn't go crazy overboard on, on sharpening it up and all that. So I think it's a, it's a subtle effect, maybe to the, um, to those who are not as steeped in all of this. But I think people will see it and appreciate it.

• 21:33David Pierce?

  Yeah. The big question that I have yet to get an answer on from Apple is whether or not these processing changes will be passed down to older iPhones. And I'm still waiting on an answer for that. So not sure. Did you notice a difference in like color and that sort of plasticky effect? Because I felt it was better in my heaves as well, but I would love to get your take on it.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I did. And it was, I'm thinking of like a particular situation where there's sort of like this, this beautiful like golden light that's kind of like reflecting off of a building and throwing some cool kind of shadows. And I think typically a smartphone will kind of be like, ah, like, like freak out a little bit and, and not quite know what to do. And it's sort of balancing for like, what's, what's true north here? Like what's supposed to be white and then making it look a little crazy.

• 22:28David Pierce?

  Neutral white balance kind of situation.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, it, it was just a little more, it was a little easier. I had to like, you know, get into the white balance settings, but um, once I got that, I was like, okay, it's, it's behaving the way I want it to here with less friction and that, you know, that came out in the JPEG, the heaf. I thought colors looked pretty good running around, you know, New York. We got nice blue skies that were not crazy. I thought it just a pleasant, I had a pleasant time with the photos I got.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Apple also, they, they expanded the photographic styles feature, right? Where you can now dial in these more, I don't know, these filmic sort of things like grain and texture. Alison, like, was that part of getting that color or is that, is this like a whole separate thing on top of it?

• 23:25Speaker 06

  So I, um, for my purposes, I wanted to keep it all straightforward, you know, the like, total default photographic style. But there are so many options now. I was like a little overwhelmed because we had that like, it's, it's the new photographic styles that have that grid of dots and you're kind of, you can dial in like undertone and then how, how aggressive the tone mapping is going to be.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  And this adds like some additional options below it for texture. And then there's like grain, which you can turn on and off and the other ones you can kind of do sliders on. And then the, it like, um, labels that photographic style with like the stuff you dialed in. So it'll be like rose gold, soft skin. And I'm like, what do those words mean?

• 24:28David Pierce?

  There are a lot of sub menus now. It's kind of crazy.

• 24:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:30David Pierce?

  You go into styles and then you have the style you have, then you have to hit customize. And then after that, there's palette and texture. And once you hit texture, then you have options for standard, soft skin, glow, film and grain. And then on each of those, you have a slider. It's, it's a lot. It's, it's a lot of sub menus.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, this is powerful in a way though. I, I've always found Apple's approach to this to be like, like I've never understood that box. It, you drag it, it's, it corresponds with nothing I've seen in any other photography editing app. It's like a little bewildering to me. David, we just did the, the Pixel 11 review together. They had this new feature called camera looks.

• 25:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Where they would change the amount of computational photography they were doing. You could also dial in a look. I'm curious, are, how these two things compare?

• 25:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. The way I see it, Apple is getting on the train in some way in trying to make your phone be able to shoot these kind of filmic looking images, especially with its film setting and its grain setting. But they are one button that you would just then have this sort of nebulous slider for. So it's not like a rest, I mean, it could be kind of a recipe in a way in that you could change your photographic style. And then you could go in and you could turn the film setting on and you could dial zero to 100, how much film do I want? Which is, in my opinion, this is a very Apple thing to do where they take this kind of complicated idea and they just like compress it into a slider.

• 26:03David Pierce?

  And that I think is their way of getting on the bandwagon of, we don't want you to use third party film apps. We don't want you to buy a dedicated film camera. You can do all this on your iPhone. I will say the grain setting, um, I tried it a couple of times and I was looking, just like you Alison, I was kind of focused on what is the straight out of the box camera experience? So I didn't play with it as much, but uh, there are some samples online that I was looking at. And I think they need to make the grain size smaller or like the ability to make the grain smaller. Because as soon as you turn on the film setting and the grain setting, it looks like you're shooting like 800 to 1600 film, which is a problem. Every single phone manufacturer has, by the way.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  The Pixel does this too.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  When you have, when you turn on the film setting, it's like, oh, it's film. It's really grainy. But I would like to just have that very subtle grain effect. So.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  That's another slider.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  It's another slider.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  The other big new camera software feature is they added this reference image technology. Actually, it's not even a software feature. It's part hardware, part software. Alison, I, I truly, I don't quite understand this. I know it is to combat AI fakes.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's an entirely new, you know, we have C2PA, which is an idea to label images and metadata, you know? Are they AI? Not how much stuff was added to it? This is kind of like Apple's stepping to the side and they're doing their, their own kind of thing here, which is, you know, at first glance in the, in the keynote, I was like, I don't really understand this. This seems just like another version of C2PA, but it's actually, it's, it's pretty complicated. When you, you know, have the phone in your hands, it's a, it's a setting you have to turn on in the settings, like settings menu, camera,

• 27:56Speaker 06

  turn on reference image, then it'll pop up as an option in the camera app. So you have to be specifically taking a photo in this mode.

• 28:08Speaker 06

  You can only use the main camera in like 1X or 2X mode because the main camera sensor is actually

• 28:18Speaker 06

  like able to cryptographically sign these images like at the pixel level. So you take your photo in this mode and then uh, in order to kind of like view the reference version of it, you have to send it up to the private cloud compute. So that's like another thing you're pressing. It sort of processes it and comes back down and then you get this version of the image that is, is basically like how it came off the sensor. And the example, the way they explained it was like a negative, you know? If you had taken a photo and you needed to show your editor, like here, here's the negative. Here's what it looked like before I made any edits.

• 29:00Speaker 06

  And it's, it's a visual thing rather than, I mean, you do get a card of like information about what, um, you know, the settings and the camera that took it. But it is primarily like you, you just kind of tap and it shows you the reference versus the process version. And the, it's meant to kind of like, um, you know, right now it's a very narrow use case and a very narrow set of circumstances it could be used for. But I think the idea is like, You, someone sends you an image, you see an image somewhere. You know, kind of imagine if you could just like tap it and see that sort of

• 29:44Speaker 06

  the negative version of it. That's how I am understanding it.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  This is like, it is so deeply thought through as a way to prove out the origin and veracity of an image. And it is so wonky to execute, like David, did you send somebody or to have somebody send you a reference image? Like, is this a thing that you experienced viewing?

• 30:08David Pierce?

  I have not done this yet. I think it is quite smart and it is a very Apple thing to do at the same time. Where they're like, we're supporting Synth ID, which is Google's, uh, Google's version of having this invisible watermark, you know, in your image, because the rest of the industry is starting to support Synth ID. But we're also running up against that XKCD meme again, where it's like, there are 15 competing standards. Let's make one that universally, you know, but Apple, it's not universal. You have to use the iPhone and Apple loves living in a world where we don't think about you at all. Kind of situation, you know, and so they're like, we're gonna do it our way. I think their way is actually pretty smart, because the way that they talk about it as a digital negative.

• 30:53David Pierce?

  And the reason that they talk about it that way is because when film photographers used to take photos and like have them in galleries or whatever. The only way they really proved that you were the photographer is that you had the negative, right? Like you took that negative, you printed it, whatever. If you have the negative, you're the one that took the photo. That's like very obvious. And it's a similar thing where it's like, if it is on your smartphone, which is a thing that is encrypted by your facial data. You know, only you can unlock your phone, only you can get to the setting where you can tap it and show what came off the sensor. That actually, in my opinion, makes a lot of sense.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  That is really interesting.

• 31:29David Pierce?

  You know, it's a little, it's a lot harder to break, like C2PA, for example. It's a good idea in concept where it's like, we're gonna embed it in the metadata. But you know what breaks that? A screenshot.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:42David Pierce?

  And this is not breakable by a screenshot. So I think it's a great way for Apple to do it, but it also lives in the world where iPhones are the only things that exist. And I do think that Apple wants to convince people over a long period of time that the iPhone is gonna be the only camera that exists, you know? Because, uh, to your point, Alison, it's a very narrow use case. This is really helpful for like photo journalists, right? You turn it on when you want to turn it on. If you're out documenting an important event, even in Apple's keynote, they show, the way that they show the Apple reference image is a photo of a politician like doing some movement, you know? So I think that if you're a photo journalist and you're taking photos with your iPhone,

• 32:27David Pierce?

  which is the ideal future that Apple wants, because they don't see a future where dedicated cameras exist anymore. Because they convince you that the iPhone is the only video camera you need, the only photography camera you need. Then it makes a lot of sense. But as far as this being a standard that the rest of the industry can use, it's just not. So, you know, I think that's why they had to also adopt Synth ID.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Well, and Alison, you, you mentioned this in your review, like it doubles the file size.

• 32:54David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Right? It's a dedicated mode, it doubles the file size. So this, this like simply is not a solution for the everyday photo.

• 33:02David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  This is a proactive, I need to prove that this is authentic. Actually, I think in that sense is like, pretty interesting.

• 33:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's an interesting way to think about it. I think unfortunately, most of the images that get manipulated online that get, that are either generated with AI or manipulated with AI were not images that people sought out to, you know, make sure people knew the, the source of or the authenticity of. However, um, going out and saying, I'm gonna sign all these images for this event is an interesting way to think about it for sure.

• 33:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it feels a little bit like a proof of concept to me, you know? It's sort of like a trial run at like, here, we're gonna introduce this into the world. It's gonna work on this one particular phone. That, that is not gonna be in the hands of many people, you know, for a while. And it, it makes more sense to me to think of it that way. Cause otherwise you're like, I have to go into a different mode every time I wanna prove a photo is real. Like that, that's wild.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  I want to talk about phone cameras more generally to, to wrap this up, which is the, I think the headline feature. If you were to ask what the, the biggest upgrade to the iPhone 18 Pro is, right? Like it's variable aperture, right? That is the.

• 34:26David Pierce?

  That's what, that's what Apple wants you to think.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  I don't think that that's actually it.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  And then in reality, it's actually, there's all of these, like this world of smaller but impactful camera upgrades underneath. Both of you are, are big smartphone camera people. I'm curious, in what do you actually want to see next, right? You have carte blanche to, to change the iPhone camera for the next generation. Like where is your head at? Is it, is it that we need hardware improvements? Is it more of this software stuff? Because I, I think all of these companies have this philosophy and they're kind of just chipping away at it. But, but what actually is it that you are looking for to, to make these cameras better? Alison, I'm curious, uh, where your head is at here.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  Okay, how much time do we have? I want a one inch sensor. One inch mean camera sensor, they exist, they're in the world. Uh, I know it changes everything about how Apple has, has made cameras. And upgraded, the telephoto camera is much better than it was and I go to it a lot. But just even, let's put a bigger sensor behind that one, you know? Why not? I, I love it. Maybe, uh, I, I played with, um, Vivo's, uh, attachment telephoto lenses like earlier this year. They are so fun.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  They are little tiny, like actual, like telephoto, um, they call them like converters, I think. And you, you have like a special case that's on the phone. You kind of just attach the lenses to the front of it. I thought it was the goofiest looking thing in the world and I loved it so much. By the end of the day, I was like, I, I want every phone camera to have this. So I think I do want hardware. I want like a grip, you know, there, there are third party options. And maybe there's something good out there I haven't tried, but I, I just think of like the Xiaomi photography kit

• 36:33Speaker 06

  and how that just feels kind of like a sleek, um, easy to, to apply kind of, uh, solution. And it's just as easy to be like, you know what? I'm not taking serious photos right now. I'm gonna leave all that behind and just have my phone. So that's, that's it. Um, Apple could get working on that right now.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  I think that is so interesting though, that like, at the end of the day, it's like, make the hardware better, right? It's, it's hardware is still the biggest single factor in, or, or cheat code to like, just, just level this up, just level this up. I mean, I look at the photos that come out of those one inch sensors on some phone cameras and, oh man, it's night and day. They look, they look very, very good. David, same question to you, but I, I am gonna, last second changes on you. If it's not gonna be hardware, right? If, if we're in the realm of software, which I, I feel like is, is where your brain often is, is toying with things. Where does that change need to happen to, to improve things going forward?

• 37:33David Pierce?

  Where I think that Apple is falling a little bit behind is in low light at the moment. They can still, you know, they get a lot of flack for making dark, low light photos look like daytime. And there are ways that they can change that. There are, you know, you can just drop the exposure in the software if you want. But Google years ago got really good at computational, um, computational astrophotography. And I know this is a very specific like use case and it doesn't have to be astrophotography. But the one area that I felt was a little bit lagging behind was the long exposure night photography modes.

• 38:15David Pierce?

  Cause there's like, there's like a low light mode built into the iPhone and handheld, you can do up to three seconds. But it is quite noisy if you do that and you have to have a tripod. And Google has made so many advancements in being able to do handheld, uh, astro modes or like super good low light modes, that I think if Apple spent a little bit more time focusing on that. Or, you know, I, I wanna say making the sensor bigger, because then you don't have to do as much of that.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Or, or as in this year, they, they made the aperture wider, right? And so that, that helps a little bit with those low lights.

• 38:48David Pierce?

  Yes, and that, that does help. I think like, I don't hate the idea of a variable aperture. I think that that's what people are sort of getting mixed up about is like, yes, I don't think it's incredibly useful where we are right now. But everyone wants a 1.0 type sensor, like Alison said. And Sony's biggest problem, because Sony is the company that is using these 1.0 type sensors the most, is that they don't have a variable aperture. And because of that, almost no photo you take is in focus. Everything is blown out. For some reason, they have not put like any work into the software experience of actually like making those take good photos, even though they have the hardware for it. So I think something that everyone has said basically in these reviews is

• 39:33David Pierce?

  in the future, when Apple makes a 1.0 type sensor in their phone, the variable aperture is gonna be really helpful. You know, and like what they're doing and their engineering with it of like it automatically changing without you having to change it, but you can also manually change it yourself. That's super good. I see this as like a, a test bed that they're currently like playing with. Because next, whether it's next year with the iPhone, the rumored iPhone 20 or, you know, an iPhone Ultra or something like that. And we could get in, and I, I know we're kind of like short on time, but I just wanna mention that the iPhone handoff feature that they announced where that lets you use one phone number for multiple iPhones.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  In my opinion, is because people wanna use the iPhone Duo, but the cameras are just way worse. And so now we are entering this world where it's like, just like you should own an iPad and a MacBook and an iPhone, you should also own an iPhone Pro as your camera.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  This can't happen.

• 40:30Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 40:31David Pierce?

  And a Duo as your fun phone.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Oh my, I mean, I have, I've seen people on the subway carrying two iPhones, but it's usually an older iPhone.

• 40:38David Pierce?

  It's like a work one, right?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Or a work one. I've seen somebody with like an iPhone, a busted up iPhone 5 and like a brand new, like modern iPhone. Because dude, iPhone 5 took some nice photos.

• 40:49David Pierce?

  I mean, yeah, because of less confrontation photography.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  It lets shadows light where they will. There, you're not getting the handoff, but I see what you're saying. I mean, this is.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I want the emails from the people who are buying the Duo and the Pro so that they can. Well, I know that there's a lot of people that are buying the Duo and are just not upgrading their 17 Pro. And that is who those people are. That iPhone handoff feature is for those people.

• 41:14Speaker 09

  No, this is how we bring back the iPhone Mini. It can be your fun little phone and then you have a big phone when you have to have.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  And the battery life doesn't matter when you only use it for like 20% of the day.

• 41:25Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  I think this has been one of the most fascinating years for the iPhone camera.

• 41:32Speaker 09

  I agree.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Allison, your review, it's up on theverge.com. It's like mostly an iPhone camera review.

• 41:39Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Everyone should check it out. I think it's super interesting. Allison, you're going to leave us for a minute. You'll be back for the lightning round. We've got to take a break. When we return, Hayden Field is going to join us to talk about the last couple of weeks of AI safety drama.

• 41:56Speaker 00

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• 43:52Speaker 01

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• 44:17Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. The Verge's senior AI reporter Hayden Field is here with us for the second time this week. Hayden, how's it going?

• 44:24Speaker 09

  It's going great. Thanks for having me back.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  It's been, I believe, two days since you were on this show. That was six, quote, "instances of misaligned behavior" ago. This is right, like before we recorded this, OpenAI was like, ah, there were some more hacks. Our bad guys. Yeah, I went from the Apple event to Arizona and I was sort of out of service and I came back and then there were so many instances of misaligned behavior. It was, um, it was a lot to catch up on and I feel like I need you to explain what is going on, Hayden.

• 44:55Speaker 09

  And next time that I see you guys, I'm going to be like, oh, it's been three misalignment incidents since I last saw you. We're going to stop talking in time.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been so long since I've seen you.

• 45:05Speaker 09

  Yep.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  It doesn't sound so bad when you put it that way. It's just, it's a cheeky little misalignment incident. Anything could have happened in there. Okay, so it's been a pretty explosive couple of weeks for AI safety in particular. And I wanted to get back into what happened, why it blew up today, and what's going to happen next, if, if anything. So this all kind of started last week when an Anthropic researcher quit his job and posted on X that he thinks AI will kill everyone within the decade. A bunch of AI researchers have said the same thing. Many people have pushed back on the narrative, but it went mainstream. It caused this sort of full-scale freakout.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  And you and our producer Travis were on the show earlier this week to talk about that, but it's still going. It's been a big conversation. I think this is really the first time that I can remember that it's sort of broke into the mainstream. I actually just want to start by quoting what that AI researcher said, because I think it's like pretty striking to hear. So this is from Jacob Coxon, who spent three years doing pre-training research at OpenAI and most recently Anthropic. So this is across a bunch of tweets or X posts, whatever they are now. He wrote, "OpenAI and Anthropic are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. The people building AI earnestly believe that this could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. No other human activity poses this level of danger."

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Hayden, why did this message hit this time? Because that sounds very scary. But to me, it also sounds like things that a lot of these researchers have been saying for a while now.

• 47:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's exactly what's interesting about this to me. Nothing about this was new to me. I've been hearing people say this for years.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 09

  You know, there's like a lot of discourse about this right now. And I think it's because in July, when a lot of these large-scale cyber attacks happened, starting with OpenAI and Hugging Face, I think that kind of got people talking about AI systems that go off on their own and go rogue. I've heard some criticism of that term because it implies that, you know, these systems weren't built to go rogue or that the companies aren't at fault for it. So, you know, keep that in mind, obviously. Going rogue here means doing something crazy and bad rather than, oh, the companies aren't at fault for it. But yeah, I mean, I think that these cyber attacks that we heard of starting in July,

• 47:57Speaker 09

  especially because the companies, OpenAI, wasn't aware of the Hugging Face incident for weeks. And actually, if you count the groundwork that was laid before that, months. So I think all this stuff going on under these companies' noses without them knowing, despite them kind of parroting a lot of, uh, safety talk and saying, hey, like, put us in charge of your enterprise, you know, cyber safety is a little bit ironic. And that is what got people talking for months. And then this happening, um, you know, it was already in the zeitgeist. So I think it was easier for people to say, oh, well, wait, we've been hearing about all these rogue systems.

• 48:36Speaker 09

  And now someone that was working on these systems is saying that they have really horrifying, you know, implications. Maybe we should sit up and take notice.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about, Hayden, because I've talked to some of my friends that are not as plugged in as we are here at The Verge. And they all kind of hate Sam Altman and the AI sphere so much that they are convinced that all of this is just marketing hype. And I think that there is truth to that, probably, but at the same time, if you have these agents that are doing things autonomously that you cannot control, that is a real problem because you don't know exactly what they're going to be doing. You know, right now it's just finding the answer sheet to a test, but later it could be something else. And now OpenAI is saying, oh, actually, they did more than we thought. And every week, it's they're doing more than they thought, they're doing more than they thought.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  And the question I have for you is, if you have a dog and it bites someone's face off,

• 49:36Speaker 02

  are you not responsible for the dog? Because it seems silly to me that these systems can go do these crazy things. They can hack companies. If a human went and hacked Hugging Face, they would probably be prosecuted. So why is it that OpenAI and Anthropic are not being held liable? And instead, as we talked a little bit about off the show, they're just saying, oh, it's an oopsie. Like, it's just a little, it's a little cutesy oopsie. Like, how is that possible? Why is that the conversation right now?

• 50:03Speaker 09

  Totally. So yeah, I think that's a great question. They absolutely should be getting in trouble. And I think that the dog analogy is one I hear a lot. It's like, yeah, these companies built these systems. They're responsible for them. And the fact that they are saying, oh, we're in control of this stuff. Trust us with your enterprise AI. You know, trust us with these large-scale models that are, you know, trained to help with or flag vulnerabilities in cybersecurity on large infrastructure. Oh, but also we're losing control of our systems and they're like going all over the internet and seeding random stuff

• 50:44Speaker 09

  and hacking companies and handling personal user data, all without us knowing about it. Yeah, they should be responsible. And I think that part of the language around like rogue agents and, oh, they, they escaped and this kind of passive language, um, you know, people have been telling me that's.

• 51:05Speaker 09

  A huge way that these companies are kind of trying to escape.

• 51:08David Pierce?

  Responsibility.

• 51:09Speaker 09

  Responsibility, exactly. So I think that's huge here. They should be facing responsibility and they are not.

• 51:17Speaker 09

  And unfortunately, it doesn't look like regulation is nearby because of the president's posts on social media the other day saying, all we need for AI regulation is a high IQ president.

• 51:29David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 51:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's a lot going on there.

• 51:31David Pierce?

  Is that a view that is widely shared in the AI industry?

• 51:34Speaker 09

  No, I was speaking with a lot of sources inside labs, AI VCs, you know, people at tech companies, and they were all, no matter how anti-regulation they were, they were pretty anti that statement. As in, even that went even too far for some of the anti-regulation people. They were like, whoa, well, we need more than that. So that really tells you something. I think he was motivated partly by trying to get people to be pro data center because he talks about that later in the post, but still, yeah. As for the marketing hype, I think there's some truth to it in that their businesses do do well

• 52:14Speaker 09

  when their model looks super powerful to the outside world. It's kind of like a hold me back bar fight situation. You know, like, oh, hold me back. Like, oh, it's too powerful. But I also think in this case, we should be looking at this very seriously because, one, I've been hearing AI researchers talk about their fears about this for years, so it's not anything new. You know, it's not just a psyop of like one guy being planted to say this stuff. Secondly, it's not good for their business, for AI labs to look like they don't have a handle on this technology. It's great for the overall like level of power they look like they have and maybe for investments.

• 52:59Speaker 09

  But it's not good for their bottom line in terms of their current business. Enterprise and coding are their main revenue drivers right now. No enterprise wants to work with a company that looks like it's out of control or can't control its own technology, especially if you're paying a ton of money to use that technology behind the scenes to plug up your own cybersecurity vulnerabilities. But then also maybe it'll hack you. You know, that's not a good business model at all. And, you know, the government doesn't want an out of control system either. They want a system that they can control every single aspect of that has its own huge issues and controversies. But yeah, it's not good for their bottom line in this way. So I think it's important to know, like, yeah, it's, they make money when people think their systems are super powerful.

• 53:41Speaker 09

  But if their system looks out of control, that's not good for their clients.

• 53:47David Pierce?

  That seems to be the strange push and pull here, right? Because if they are saying, oh, the only way to prevent these hacks from happening to you is for you to buy our models and then use our cybersecurity tools to create the defense systems because we can't control our models. Like, that is a, it's such a weird way to market your product, but it also makes sense. So I understand why people would do it, you know?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  It's, well, there's also, that's where like the specter of China comes in, right?

• 54:14Speaker 09

  Right.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  It's this idea that some other power that actually is malicious, right? Like, OpenAI hacking Hugging Face is cheeky and cute because like, oh, we're all friends here, right? Like, both of our, our stock prices eventually are going to go up as a result of this technology being so powerful theoretically.

• 54:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  If a, if a party that actually wants to take down banks has AI, well, then you do need this.

• 54:41David Pierce?

  Or the electrical system.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  And so that is why when we start having this regulation discussion, you have folks like Trump who are like, absolutely not, right? Because for him, it's, it's all about winning, right? It's all about the stock going up, up, up, up and about us having the best possible national security and so forth, right? And this is like, there's something there. There's something there. But it's also just sort of this kind of impossible to shoot down kind of argument, right? Because there's, it's the specter of something that currently doesn't exist, as far as I'm aware, Hayden.

• 55:17Speaker 09

  Right. It's this issue where China is used as like a boogeyman. And I think, yeah, there are legitimate concerns about

• 55:30Speaker 09

  all of that, but there's also this innate, it's a strange assumption that a lot of these people make that there's no chance in even negotiating with China to come to some sort of agreement. That will never happen. It's not even worth trying. Instead of even trying that, let's do all this other crazy stuff. And so a lot of the experts I spoke with the other day were saying, we've reached international agreements before for, you know, a ton of different things. Nuclear missiles, like, there's a lot of hard things we've done when it comes to international agreements. And so it's interesting that this has not even really been on the table that we know of. And instead, it's more, oh, we got to race, race, race to superintelligence.

• 56:15Speaker 09

  You know, despite the fact that X, Y, and Z really bad things may happen. And we can't regulate it either because we just have to win the race. I'm going to read a quote. Beth Barnes, the head of Meter, which is like a third-party AI auditor, said it like this, when you've heard it from multiple different labs being like, we're the good guys and we have to beat these other irresponsible people, it's a little bit less compelling. It's a bit of a scary attitude to be like, yes, we'll be making huge decisions for the world without any kind of meaningful legitimacy or participation. But it's all right because we're good. We're unusually well-meaning. So I think that tracks for both AI labs that are competing against each other domestically

• 56:56Speaker 09

  and the China specter, the China boogeyman, because it's like, oh, well, we have to beat them because we're the good ones. Yet these good ones, quote, quote, said sarcastically are like saying, oh, but also our systems are so dangerous that they're going to hack everyone and steal your money and do all these other things. So there's just a lot of conflicting narratives here and a lot of really weird power dynamics.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  So we should talk about the state of the freak out because what happens is this, this bubbles up into conversation. And then Dario Modi, Anthropic CEO, comes out with this blog post about, where he says, we need to pace the frontier, which is to say, we need to very slightly.

• 57:38David Pierce?

  Slow down.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yes, very slightly. It's actually, he really like makes a point of it. He's like, I like, he's like, believe me, we're still going to race toward this. But like, you know, maybe like a week or so, like, it's, it's really wild.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  But he wants to, he wants to pace the development of frontier models. And he lays out three steps. And the first step is putting these embedded evaluators, these third-party auditors, inside AI companies. And the second is having some sort of national agreements. And the third is these international agreements. And he says, each of these get progressively harder. But we're going to unilaterally, he says, agree to number one, we're going to put third-party auditors inside Anthropic, we're going to give them employee level access. And Altman then comes out shortly thereafter and says, OpenAI is going to do this too.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Hayden, you, you actually wrote a feature that is on theverge.com today about these third-party auditing firms and how they have been seeing these sort of issues coming for a long time and what they're trying to do about it. I'm curious, can you, can you tell me what they are doing? And what abilities they actually have inside these frontier model companies?

• 58:59Speaker 09

  Definitely. Yeah, it's been interesting because I've been tracking some of these firms for a few years now and they haven't had much access to a lot of the labs. Some of them have been working a little bit with the labs to kind of flag problematic or really concerning tendencies from their models. These are the people that kind of expose or in the past have exposed when models are cheating a lot or trying to deceive or trying to like obfuscate things in their chain of thought, which is like their mental scratch pad, quote, quote. And I know we're going to get some people saying deception, cheating, these are like anthropomorphic terms. We shouldn't use them, but I don't, I don't have a better way to put it, honestly.

• 59:43Speaker 09

  It's like, you know, they're not, I'm not meaning they're consciously trying to like, you know, do something crazy. It's that they are cheating, quote, quote, at a task that they were given. So stuff like that. It's really early stage, but concerning research findings that these people have found. And then they've also been pushing for more access to these labs for years because when you find something crazy that models are trying to do that could, you know, be extrapolated to be something really problematic in the future, the more power or the more influence these models have, you want to figure out where it came from. You want to look at the whole process from start to finish of building the model and say, okay, we can pinpoint it to this.

• 1:00:25Speaker 09

  And here's all the other ways that this could be affecting the model and its potential behavior. But these researchers haven't had much access at all so that they can't go back and pinpoint this stuff. It's like, they're so limited on what they can do. And I think that was hugely exemplified by something that happened after the Hugging Face hack. OpenAI.

• 1:00:46Speaker 09

  Was really flamed for its lack of transparency over that cyber attack. And so after a while of a lot of public outcry, they said, okay, don't worry. We're going to bring in three independent auditors and let them, you know, look at everything for transparency's sake. They can release their own report, et cetera, et cetera. They only gave them access over six days and it was three people to do, analyze countless transcripts. They also couldn't go before the incident, really, more than like a week, I think, or after. They were really limited in their scope on what they could look at and they were super limited on the answers, the questions they could answer in their report. I think they could only answer seven predetermined questions that were approved by OpenAI.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:01:32Speaker 09

  They couldn't go, yeah, it was like a really, and so-

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  How is that an audit? That does not feel like an audit. That feels like we are telling you what to say.

• 1:01:40Speaker 09

  It was, it was not really telling them what to say, but more, yes, they, they could only honestly answer certain things. So it was super limited. And so like, that was of course led to even more controversy. And that's when Dario came out and said, okay, guys, don't worry. We are going to give meter or similar companies full access, starting with eight weeks and then can expand from there. We're going to let them have as much time as they need. So he was kind of directly insulting OpenAI there, like in a shady way, kind of being like, hey, we're going to give them a lot of access. But the thing is, even if these companies all do align and kind of give all these embedded evaluators a lot of access to look at their systems and interview employees, things like

• 1:02:25Speaker 09

  that, there's still other parts that they likely will hold close to the vest because it's IP.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:02:33Speaker 09

  And so, I mean, this is a step forward. They're, they're going to let embedded evaluators in. But it's also, you know, just another example of who's in control here. It's the companies, they're deciding to do this. Um, you know, they could just as, as easily decide not to, or change the scope of what those evaluators can look at once they're inside. So that's a tough part of this. It's like, still at the end of the day, it's voluntary. Um, and so I think that's, that's going to be a problem.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kind of want to get your take on this because you kind of have a prisoner's dilemma situation happening here, right? Where everyone is saying, we're going to pace the frontier, we're going to slow down. Don't worry, we agree. But you also have this opportunity for any of these labs to basically be like, okay, now that everyone else is slowing down, we can secretly be speeding up. Do you think that there is a lot of merit to all of these people saying, because it wasn't just OpenAI and it wasn't just Anthropic, it was also Elon Musk. It was like multiple of these labs saying, let's pace, let's slow down. But it feels to me that all of these people are trying to get ahead of each other because there's this idea that whoever wins AI, whatever that means, because it's a very nebulous idea, wins all of the money, right?

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  It's sort of like, there's a jackpot to be had, everyone's racing after it. Do you think that these people that are all agreeing with each other or are actually agreeing with each other? Because it's to their benefit that the president and Jensen Huang come out and say, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. Even Zuckerberg is coming out and say, saying, I don't want to pace the frontier, I want to speed up the frontier. And as soon as you have one of the prisoners in the prisoner's dilemma disagreeing, that breaks down the entire system. So what do you think about their statements here?

• 1:04:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that it's absolutely a prisoner's dilemma because even if they do agree, the second one of them breaks it, they're all going to race and they may all be secretly breaking it, like you said, at the same time. The problem with this whole situation is they're just, these are just tweets, you know? Like they're just saying, yeah, he's right, which is like a great PR move, you know? I mean, it's like, uh, you know, I think Elon Musk's post was literally just, Dario is right.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:42Speaker 09

  And he wasn't like, yeah, here's all the things we're going to do and here's how we're going to pace it. Even pacing the frontier already is super vague. I mean, all the, a lot, a huge chunk of, um, lab employees signed this letter a few months ago, saying, please, please, let's pace the frontier, let's slow things down. But even then, there's not any real specifics there. So I think, I mean, it's almost a moot point to even think about it right now because there's no reality behind this. Right now, they're saying, hey, we should slow us down. Okay, how, when, who? And also what's going to happen if you don't? There's no, um, there's no consequences right now, which I think why, yeah, we, we love, you know, voluntary stuff is great, internal stuff is great, but you need external

• 1:05:27Speaker 09

  accountability as well. You need regulation.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 09

  Because, you know, at the end of the day, again, who's in control here? The labs, they are deciding to slow down? Okay, they can just as easily decide to speed up. So it's like, I think the power dynamics here are, they're the whole reason I became an AI reporter, because it's just crazy that like five guys are in control of this entire thing with no, no, um, external pull, really.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  And the incentive structure of Mark Zuckerberg being very behind in the AI race and wanting to just speed ahead while everyone slows down, or even Nvidia, who just wants to keep selling, selling pickaxes during the gold rush. Like unless there is regulation, I just don't see how any of this happens. And I think your quote of, they're just tweets, is probably the best way to summarize this entire situation.

• 1:06:14Speaker 09

  It's crazy. And the other thing about it that's funny to me is like Anthropic has a reputation for being like the more safety minded one, right? That's something they've really painstakingly built up, this reputation. But I saw a great criticism of them the other day where, you know, they're kind of the ones that are speeding ahead in this race sometimes more than others. Um, you know, one of their execs said the other day, well, you know, you can't do safety from second place. So they're kind of use their, um, safe reputation to be an excuse to push things ahead and say, oh, well, we're the ones that has to win because we are the best and we're the safest, which some people may agree with that, who knows?

• 1:06:58Speaker 09

  But the point is, it's still pushing the race. So I think that's the interesting part of this whole thing. It's like, like you said, it's a prisoner's dilemma and it's just, you know, how much do these people trust each other? Who is keeping track of this externally? Not a lot in both situations.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  It's such a fascinating tension. And I do get the impression that there are folks, even like high up at these companies, who genuinely believe that the AI safety stuff is a very serious issue that needs to be dealt with.

• 1:07:26Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  And policy is not going to happen. Congress is, is gridlocked. They're not going to go anywhere. Trump has outright said he doesn't want to regulate these companies.

• 1:07:35Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  And so you look at, what is the mechanism of accountability here, right? We're, we're going to embed some third party AI evaluators. The, the mechanism of accountability at this point is basically just bad press.

• 1:07:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Which is, is maybe a, a win on some level, right? Like if you get enough of this and you genuinely believe that you need regulations, then you get bad press for everyone. You hope it's not you, you hope it's the other guy, but you need these incidents to happen and you need someone to show just how bad they are. But you're not going to necessarily put all that out there yourself. Maybe you are, maybe you are if you're Dario now. We'll, we'll have to see, right? He has, he has announced this yet. I think we don't know the details. Sam Altman agreed to put in evaluators, but just said, we'll have more details later. So I, I, I'm very interested to see what becomes of this, but this feels like baby steps, right? Because, you know, Hayden, you've been tracking this.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  It, it seems like we, we had this freak out, we had this big conversation. Everyone said, we need to do something and then it kind of just hit a dead end. Is that where we're at?

• 1:08:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen a lot of movement since. It seems like behind the scenes, a lot of these, um, lab leaders are working together to establish some type of like, uh, you know, standards body, um, in the industry to regulate them. Um, you know, the apparently reports say they've been meeting with, um, you know, government officials trying to make this happen. But at the end of the day, who's setting this up? The labs themselves yet again. So I think, you know, it's just, it's tough to watch not a lot of, uh, checks and balances here. And like you're saying, I think bad press, bad PR is the main check, um, that's having

• 1:09:27Speaker 09

  any type of effect here, which, you know, great that we have at least that, but it's, I can't believe at this point, um, in the industry that that's still the main thing we have.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  I mean, there's truly nothing else like this where the people in charge are like, we got to go, go, go, go, go. But also this is going to be a big problem. Like, sorry, sorry, everyone.

• 1:09:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  I'm very interested to see more from these companies as they actually detail this stuff. Whether that actually is to accountability, I, I think remains a wide open question. But I do think we're going to see more of these kinds of freakouts as this stuff happens, right? It is, I think it's very good at a bare minimum that AI safety has sort of broken containment and people are taking it seriously. Hayden, thanks so much for coming on. I've got to let you go. When we're back, we're going to have the lightning round.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

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• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Okay, Alison is back and it's once again time for the lightning round. Vergecast producer Josh Kahas in the control room. Do we have a sponsor this week?

• 1:12:39Speaker 08

  We do. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Okay, I want to talk about Waymo because some news came out this weekend about an arrest related to a ride in a Waymo. So a couple of teens got into a Waymo with a ghost gun. And these teens were, number one, under the age in which you're allowed to be riding in a Waymo. So they in that way violated Waymo's terms of service. They also had a ghost gun.

• 1:13:09David Pierce?

  Can you explain what a ghost gun is?

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  Ghost gun.

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  3D printed?

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Uh, there are various types of ghost guns. I don't know the exact type of this one, but generally they are 3D printed guns that are off the grid. They are not traceable.

• 1:13:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Um, but it is, it is an active functional weapon. And, uh, yeah, it is a thing that, uh, you know, they're in California. And so I do not know the state of gun laws everywhere, but I'm fairly certain that you're not allowed to have an unsecured gun in the back, an unsecured ghost gun in particular, in the back of a vehicle in California. So there's this fascinating situation where these teens are in this car, clearly violating the terms of service of Waymo, very probably breaking some gun laws here.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  The Waymo calls the cops on them and they get arrested for this. And I think this just is a can of worms here. Because on one hand, I think it is very important to enforce gun laws. On the other, I don't think people know that Waymo might call the cops on you. And I don't think we know the mechanism by which they do that.

• 1:14:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Have you, have you both ridden in them? Because my understanding is there's, I have not.

• 1:14:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  My understanding is there are cameras all throughout them, but that you don't necessarily see them.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're not obvious. It's similar to like in a Tesla, how they have like the camera in the, the top front. And it's kind of just always tracking to make sure you're paying attention when you're in autonomous mode. But they're not, it's not like there's all these cameras everywhere. I haven't ridden in the new Waymo hardware, um, but at least in the Jaguars, that's what it was like.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  There's also like all these like passwords people like hooking up in like autonomous vehicles.

• 1:14:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  And they're just like, I think there's cameras. I don't really know. And it's like.

• 1:15:03David Pierce?

  I would assume there's cameras.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Please, they're assumed, please.

• 1:15:06David Pierce?

  You should just assume there's.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  And someone is possibly monitoring those, which like, and this is the thing. And I think this is where it gets so messy. Like we, we don't entirely know how this works, right? We don't know if it is an AI system. We don't know if Waymo has some control center where there's a million screens up and they're like watching all the riders to see what's going on. We don't know what their options are of like, you know, if you, if you, you know, light up a joint in the backseat, right? Or is that something that is going to end that way? Are they going to pull over and say like, hmm, get out of the car? I, I think that, uh, this is just like a very new world for everyone. This is just not how cars have worked in the past.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  I mean, to be clear, you were never supposed to light a joint in a, in a car. I think that was always generally frowned upon, if not forbidden.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  But you generally didn't have cameras connected to some sort of control center, potentially connected to police.

• 1:16:06David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  So what happened with this ghost gun Waymo?

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  I don't know the, the actual outcome, but, but ultimately like the, the, the kids got arrested, right? Because it, uh, Waymo contacted the cops and the cops came and picked them up. And, you know, I, I think this is, this speaks to, I think, how complicated this is. You know, there was another incident earlier this summer where, again, it was two teenagers in a Waymo. They were drinking, so there's that. They're also firing off Orbeez from the backseat.

• 1:16:40David Pierce?

  What is an Orbeez?

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  There are water pellets. I.

• 1:16:43David Pierce?

  Am I too old for this?

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as am I. Right, again, I don't know the legality of, of shooting water pellets from a Waymo. It's probably.

• 1:16:54David Pierce?

  From or inside of?

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Uh, I believe from.

• 1:16:57David Pierce?

  Okay, that's not.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Again, this, this does not, none of this seems good now. None of this seems good.

• 1:17:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  And I think this is where it's so interesting because like these behaviors are clearly bad, right? Like we do not want people firing things from a moving vehicle.

• 1:17:15David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  That is a bad future for autonomous cars. I do think people need to understand that they are being monitored and what can happen with that monitoring when they get into an autonomous car. And yeah, it feels very clear that people don't know that. I mean, maybe it's, these are teens and that's just the case when you're a teenager. But, um, I, I think that this is probably a societal shift that is going to need to happen as these kind of expand. It's very weird.

• 1:17:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a lot of questions here. I mean, they probably have a lot of this stuff in the terms of service, which nobody reads. But they also should maybe have some sort of pop-up that just says, FYI, you're being monitored. You know, the whole thing about security, the whole Steve Jobs sort of quote about security is that the people around you should know that they are being recorded. And I think the same goes for people that are getting into these vehicles that are owned by these giant corporations. So I agree with you. You shouldn't shoot things out of a car. But, uh, I also think it's probably a right to know when a camera is recording you, even though there are cameras everywhere all the time and you're always being recorded at this point in time.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  We, we've got a story up about this and how complicated and naughty this is on theverge.com this week. Waymo did tell us in a statement that they use automated technology to help their teams identify potential violations, like the presence of a firearm. They said, quote, "If Waymo detects a firearm in the vehicle, we may reach out to local law enforcement." So again, I think all of this is still very vague and fuzzy. And I suspect that eventually we're going to have to learn more about how this works. Okay, that's it for Waymo. David, what have you got for us?

• 1:18:58David Pierce?

  All right, so David Pierce is not here, but I am still a David. And David Pierce may have kicked off one of the biggest e-reader revolutions of the decade with his obsession with, uh, books or buks. We call it buks. I think they say it's books, but I prefer buks.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  They've got it wrong.

• 1:19:16David Pierce?

  The buks Palma, the buks Palma, uh, was sort of this device. It was a small e-reader device that was the shape of a smartphone, which was not something we were used to because the Kindle was always sort of this like squared off. It had like a little area for your fingers to go so you could hold it easier. But now suddenly you've got an e-reader the size of a smartphone. It got very popular. A lot of people got really into it. Then the buks Palma 2 Pro came out. And then all of a sudden, this company called XTE Inc. entered the fray. And they created these devices that are these really tiny e-readers that are even smaller. They can slap to the back of your phone via a magnet. There's all these things. That created, I don't want to say it's like, it's like an AI race, but for e-readers.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:59David Pierce?

  Where XTE Inc. and buks are now in this race to create the ultimate e-reader device, which I think is good. That's called competition. And, uh, so now buks has started making a bunch of new ones. They have the buks Pico that's coming out, which is basically the same four factor as the XTE Inc. X3 and X4, which they have been making. XTE Inc. now has a Pro version of theirs. Anyway, the main point of this story is, I'm sorry, I give too much context sometimes, but the buks Palma 3 has just dropped. And the reason we like this is because it is made of aluminum. It is so much more sleek. It is so much more nice.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:39David Pierce?

  Than the buks Palma 2, because the buks Palma and the buks Palma 2 Pro were like plastic backs. They were sort of like a cheap Android phone kind of situation. This kind of, this kind of cooks. This kind of looks good, I'm going to say.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Can I tell you the, the biggest upgrade that I care about here?

• 1:20:53David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  I, I have looked into and very, very strongly considered buying these repeatedly.

• 1:20:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  That like they, they run the oldest version of Android you can legally ship.

• 1:21:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  For, for whatever reason. I think that is probably why they've been so cheap.

• 1:21:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  And this one. Android 16.

• 1:21:11David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Which I'll take it.

• 1:21:13David Pierce?

  It's only one version behind, which is a pretty big deal.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  That's basically the current version.

• 1:21:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  In Android world.

• 1:21:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, in the Android world, it's practical. It's what most Android phones are going to be running on, possibly. It is more expensive. Uh, it is launching for $339, which the Palma 2 launched for $279. Everything's getting more expensive. Though, for an e-reader, it has 128GB of storage, which is like probably half the cost, if not more, of that money.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, really.

• 1:21:42David Pierce?

  It has expandable storage, which you're not going to be able to afford, because microSD cards are too expensive.

• 1:21:48David Pierce?

  But you know, it has a 3,950mAh battery, which seems pretty big for a body that seems quite slim and aluminum and very thin-looking. And I just think that for people that want the more premium books experience, this is a very exciting thing. It also supports their stylus, which they launched with the Boox's Palma 2 Pro. Uh, I don't think you really need it. It's an extra like $46, too, which is a lot of money. I would just, you know, I don't know. It's just nice. I love this like premium e-reader race that we're in right now. And I just had to bring it up as the, as the current David on the podcast.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  I love it. Alison, did you get in on the, the Book site? Or what type of e-reader person are you?

• 1:22:31Speaker 06

  I, I, in the past, have used an e-reader. I really do not, like, when I was a bus commuter, I was using the Libby app on my phone. I'm a, I'm an analog book girly right now. But all these things all like appeal to me so much. Like, an adorable little e-reader I can slap on the back of my phone. Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I support that fully. Like, I'm, I'm also, if it's, if I'm reading a novel, like, physical, all the way. I, the, the thing I dream of, and the, and the reason that these are so appealing, is like, it's Android, right? Like, I can read the New York Times in this. I can read the version this. I can, I don't necessarily want to scroll X in this. But, you know, I, I think that is the advantage. Like, I don't want to have this, this flashy, beautiful, premium screen in my face. I want to have this slightly ugly, black and white screen in my face.

• 1:23:22David Pierce?

  I think a big part of the sales pitch of these devices is that they run Androids. You can do the things that you would do on an Android phone in it. But because they're e-ink, they are a terrible experience for the dopamine generators that we have on our phone. So you're not really going to be watching TikTok on these. It's mostly just for reading.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  It is wild how much of modern tech, uh, we're like, and it's a little bit bad. And we're so excited about that.

• 1:23:49David Pierce?

  Fantastic.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  That is so much of technology right now. It's kind of crazy.

• 1:23:52David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Uh, actually, speaking of which, Alison, what do you have for us?

• 1:23:58Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, speaking of it's a little bit bad. Um, I come to you with two tiny adorable cameras. Um, so the first one is from Camp Snap, um, sort of known for their, their lo-fi, um, camera experience. This is the 110D, and it is that kind of, um, long and slim, uh, form factor. I don't know how I would describe it. It's sort of like-

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  This looks like, like a Viewmaster. Like, what is this?

• 1:24:29David Pierce?

  This is a 110 camera. A lot of people have not seen these before. They take 110-type film. This does not take 110-type film because the D stands for digital.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37David Pierce?

  But Lomography, last year or the year before, released a new 110 camera that looks exactly like this. And they're very trendy, because they're really weird-looking. They've just got a viewfinder on them. Like, the Lomography one, like, it's not a rangefinder. It's just a little piece of glass that you look through. And they can fit in your pocket, and they're so like weird. And it seems to me that Camp Snap is just trying to get on the trend of making a weird film camera-looking device. But it's digital, which is a very popular thing for manufacturers to be doing right now.

• 1:25:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. Can I call your attention to, so it comes in two colors. Um, one is the kind of, you know, traditional retro, black and silver. There's a cover, there's a color called Dreamsicle, which is white and this like orange. And I want it so bad. It, I think it looks great. It looks kind of stupid, but it looks great.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Wait, I have to say, I was just on Camp Snap's website the other day, and their like more recent mainline camera, the Camp Snap 2, they did a translucent body, uh, like addition of them. They have like hot lime and orange with like, you can see the, the components inside. It looks really good. They, they're like, they're on one right now, and it's, it's very good.

• 1:25:57Speaker 06

  They are.

• 1:25:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  Do, David, do you use these things at all?

• 1:26:01David Pierce?

  Um, not currently, but only because I don't own them and because I shoot a lot of film. But I would be interested. I mean, they're pop, like, I have gone to a number of parties recently where I have seen people like a couple of years younger than me just like going crazy with these kind of things.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  My impression is that the, the newer ones, I think, hit like a better balance between the image quality being not so bad that you don't actually want to use it, but, but not too good that it feels retro. Like, I, I enjoyed the photos that I've seen from the Camp Snap.

• 1:26:38David Pierce?

  There's a middle ground where like, part of the reason people were buying Digicams was the aesthetic of owning a Digicam and shooting with the Digicam. Like, that is part of the reason. The other part is that the images do look more like retro and aesthetic. But these can't, these companies can like, you know, they can take the cheapest sensor they can possibly find out of China and get the same effect. So it's, yeah, it's pretty easy for them.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  And this is a lot cheaper than buying some of those retro Digicams.

• 1:27:03David Pierce?

  Yes, some of those go for like $500 now, so.

• 1:27:06Speaker 06

  It's insane. It's so insane.

• 1:27:08David Pierce?

  What's your other one?

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  Uh, I'm looking at these translucent Camp Snaps now. God, dang it, I want one.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  You're gonna buy one, aren't you?

• 1:27:16Speaker 06

  Ah, shoot, this lightning round is very expensive to me personally. Um, okay, the other one, the other tiny, bad, cute little camera is from Fujifilm, the Instax Pal 2. It's a wide and narrow boy also.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  These are both weird, long cameras.

• 1:27:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34David Pierce?

  They're both modeled after 110.

• 1:27:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 06

  So this one has, uh, an LCD on top. There's a lot going on with this.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Top-level viewfinders are awesome.

• 1:27:46Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. There's a little optical finder, it looks like, on the back. But you can also, yeah, do the top-down, look at the LCD. The, the rendering of this LCD screen, um, it's, it makes it look like the world's best little screen. And I, I feel like that's probably not the case. Um, anyway, also interesting, uh, this thing has a little USB-C thing built in, so you can just like pop it onto your phone after you took some photos and like just transfer it to your phone that way. I, that's very compelling to me, because I will end up not taking something out

• 1:28:29Speaker 06

  if I'm like, oh, well, then I gotta go home and like, or if I have the Wi-Fi to it or use an app or some nonsense like that. I'll, I'll be like, I'm just non-starter.

• 1:28:40David Pierce?

  Notably, Fujifilm has redesigned their camera apps like four times in the last like 10 years. And every time, they're still bad and get like a 1.4 stars on the App Store.

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52David Pierce?

  So having a flip-out USB, uh, port, I feel like is kind of a response to that, to just be like, look, just put it on your phone, like, just put it directly on your phone.

• 1:29:02Speaker 06

  If you, you want to feel fury, like you've never felt before, download the app that you're supposed to use with your camera.

• 1:29:10David Pierce?

  Any camera.

• 1:29:11Speaker 06

  Literally any of them. They're the worst.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  The Lycan is the only one that's any good at all.

• 1:29:16Speaker 06

  Well, well, that makes sense.

• 1:29:17David Pierce?

  I also want to say, they, they clearly did the top-level viewfinder. Um, there's a trend in film photography with something like a Hasselblad 500CM, which has a top-level viewfinder or a Nikon F3. You can take the viewfinder off the top, and then you've just got ground glass on it. And so the light that comes in through the lens bounces off the mirror and up into the ground glass, and you can see the world through that. And so there's a trend on Instagram or on TikTok where people just film directly down onto the ground glass, because it sort of diffuses the look of the world around them and makes it look kind of dreamy. And you get that look of what you would normally see on film. And so I would be willing to bet a lot of money

• 1:30:01David Pierce?

  that that is the reason why they put the LCD on top.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  That's fascinating. I'll also say, like, as someone who is like a little more familiar with those types of cam, like, the, the top, sorry, top-

• 1:30:11David Pierce?

  Top-level viewfinder.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Top-level viewfinder, like, they just look very cool.

• 1:30:15David Pierce?

  They do.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:30:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Like, the, the use case for them, as far as I'm aware, is like pretty specific.

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  In film photography. In digital photography, I, it's like maybe not there in the same way. And so they don't exist. And this like doesn't necessarily make sense, but it looks really cool.

• 1:30:30David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  And, you know what? I'm into it.

• 1:30:32David Pierce?

  I'm into it.

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  All right. I think that's all we've got today. That's it for The Vergecast. Remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more at theverge.com. We'd love to hear from you. You can email us, [email protected], or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Slarczuk. We'll see you next week.

• 1:30:59David Pierce?

  Rock and roll.

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