How DeepSeek crashed the AI party

Nilay and David dig into the week's biggest story: the new Intel-powered Surface Pro. Kidding! They talk about DeepSeek, the out-of-nowhere AI company that sent both Silicon Valley and the stock market into uproar this week. Then, after the hosts debate what the real killer app for AI is — and whether we've even found one yet — we follow up on our question from last week about how people are actually using AI. We got so many good answers, and we talk through what to make of them all. Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about Brendan Carr being a dummy, the return of the Pebble, the continued rise of Bluesky and Threads, and Meta's $25 million check to Trump. Further reading: Why everyone is freaking out about DeepSeek DeepSeek says its newest AI model, Janus-Pro can outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3. Microsoft makes DeepSeek’s R1 model available on Azure AI and GitHub OpenAI has evidence that its models helped train China’s DeepSeek China’s DeepSeek AI is hitting Nvidia where it hurts DeepSeek’s AI app is restricting sign-ups due to ‘malicious attacks’ US Navy jumps the DeepSeek ship. DeepSeek wakes up Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on DeepSeek R1: “an impressive model.” Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta investors to not worry about DeepSeek The Pebble smartwatch is making a comeback, with some help from Google Oracle and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to take over TikTok FCC chair says landlords can force bulk internet service on residents From NYT: F. C. C. Chair Orders Investigation Into NPR and PBS Sponsorships Meta agrees to pay $25 million to settle Trump account suspension suit Zuckerberg wants to Make Facebook Great Again Zuck wants to bring the “OG Facebook” back. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Richast, the flagship podcast of stealing stuff Sam Altman has already stolen.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  You're on notice, Sam. You steal a car. I'm coming to steal that car. Look, I haven't been a lawyer in a long time. Isn't that double jeopardy? Like, if somebody else has done a crime and then you do the crime to them, you're good.

• 1:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, if it's additive crime, I think it is fine.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't... Look, I passed the bar exam a long time ago. I've drank a lot since then, just in the past five days of the Trump administration. I drank away one full bar exam, but I do believe, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that if someone does a crime and then you do that same crime to them, the court's like, you're good.

• 2:16David Pierce?

  Listen, if we've learned anything in the last two weeks, it's that you can in fact just say things.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  Whenever you want.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, and sometimes those things turn out to have huge weight over how America works.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:28David Pierce?

  So here we are.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  We're fully in the I declare bankruptcy stage of the American experiment. As, as I believe George Washington prophesied in his first inaugural, he was like, one day, people are just gonna start saying stuff and you should row a boat away from here as fast as you can. Those are all the things I know about George Washington. All right. Uh, there's a lot going on this week. I'm actually very excited about our second segment this week. Uh, last week, we asked a bunch of you to tell us what you were using AI for, because there's a big gap, right? In how people feel about it, what the companies say about it, the amount of money we're spending on it, and then how people are actually using it.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out a lot of you are using AI.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  We got so much feed, like so much feedback, including from a bunch of people who like were outraged at the idea that not everyone uses AI for everything all the time. And I really actually appreciate that. It was, it was very cool to go through and be like, oh, these are like real people who use it in their real lives and not just like somebody trying to convince me to give them billions of dollars.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Are you sure that Sam Altman wasn't outraged that not everybody's using AI?

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Do I think Sam Altman has a lot of burners and is in our inbox on occasion? I do think that.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  He does have access to ChatGPT, I will say that. Uh, so we're gonna go through all those. I think that's gonna be really fun. We got a lightning round, but we gotta start, I think, with the, the tech news. It's the tech news and it's obviously that Microsoft is continuing to launch Intel-powered Surface devices.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  For $500 more, you can have a Surface that has more words in the name and a chip you don't really want.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  And worse battery life.

• 4:04David Pierce?

  Congratulations. You did it.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  There's something there. They did announce they're gonna do this. They also announced that Microsoft is running DeepSeek now on Copilot PCs that run Qualcomm chips. We're gonna talk about DeepSeek in a second, but it's just interesting that they're still, Microsoft has to still carry Intel in this specific way. Because that partnership is so long and so important to everyone. But it's like, everything about Microsoft releasing new Surface devices has changed in the past 18 months.

• 4:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  To where, two years ago, they were like, here's some Surface devices with ARM chips. I think the reaction would be, eh. And now it's, here's some Surface devices with Intel chips. And it's like, oh man, you're still doing this? And that's a big change.

• 4:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it really did happen. A, really fast, and B, almost without anybody noticing. Like, I feel like every step along the way was also kind of meh, right? Like, when that first round of Copilot, Copilot Plus PCs, still the worst name in laptops, uh, came out. They were fine, right? Like, the overwhelming response was like, Qualcomm did pretty good work here, but the emulation stuff is still pretty bad. The performances and what we, it's like, it's just not, it's, it's fine. And then, somehow between there and here, we flipped all the way to, like you said, I see Intel Surface Pros and go, that's not what anybody wants. Like, it's crazy.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  But I don't, and I, to be clear, I don't think the ARM-powered chips are doing everything yet. There's a reason to sell Intel-powered laptops. Lots of people are still buying Intel-powered Windows PCs, obviously. But it's just interesting to see where the bleeding edge has gone to. Like, it's obvious that that thing has runway and Intel, and you know, along the way, they did fire their CEO.

• 5:48David Pierce?

  They did do that.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  So, maybe it's just vibes all the way down. That's not actually the biggest news. That was a joke and we ended up talking about it because it's for a chest. The big news is DeepSeek.

• 5:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  It has turned the tech world upside down in just a very, the only way to describe it is a very bubbly way.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  Like everyone was over invested in overhyping AI and then everyone overreacted to another AI tool. What do you think, David?

• 6:12David Pierce?

  So I actually think that's the right frame for it because the more I've learned about this and the more I've talked to people about it, the more I've come to believe there are sort of three simultaneous things going on. On the one hand, there's the stock market freakout, which is just a stock market freakout. A bunch of people, I would say like, half correctly understood what DeepSeek is and made a bunch of weird, semi thoughtful bets against Nvidia as a result. And there's been some really interesting reporting over the last few days that a big part of the sell off was triggered by this one super deep, super thoughtful blog post about somebody who was shorting Nvidia. And he writes this

• 6:56David Pierce?

  big thing and lands on short Nvidia. It has no moat. This thing is not, this thing is massively overvalued. Got shared by a bunch of people in tech and you can kind of argue that that's what caused a lot of that. So on the one hand, there is just a lot of money was lost very quickly. So a lot of people got in a CNBC tizzy about that. So that's like one thing happening over here. The other thing is very much a story about technology and the actual questions of like, okay, how do we think about what DeepSeek did here that is interesting and unique? And how do we think about open source AI being really at the bleeding edge of a lot of this stuff? And what did DeepSeek do that is interesting

• 7:41David Pierce?

  that's going to roll back to some of these companies? And what does it mean for OpenAI? That's all interesting. And I think we should spend most of our time talking about that. And then there's a third thing, which is just China. It's just the China of it all. And I think everybody sort of twists themselves in knots about everything to do with China, in part for good reasons and in part for bad reasons. But like, coming off of all this stuff with TikTok and Red Note and the ideas about what these companies are collecting about us and what it means that there is like technical leadership happening in those countries and like,

• 8:13David Pierce?

  Everybody is just really spun up to have feelings about China. And so there was a lot of feelings about China in there altogether. So it just became this like perfect storm of, I think, under a couple of really small changes. This would have been like an interesting story and not like the only thing anyone in my group chats cared about all week. But because it was those three things together, it became everything. Like my high school friends are talking about DeepSeek. This has just been happening this week.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, once you turn the entire economy into gambling, which is what we're doing.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Everyone cares a lot about the gambling. And to take whatever you mentioned, the CNBC of it all, like most people's retirement savings are like in big index funds, which are all just big tech stocks.

• 8:58David Pierce?

  Right. And so. It's like eight companies now.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. So when Nvidia goes down or Apple goes down or Meta goes down, like actually the whole economy kind of goes with them, which is not great. There's a, there's a lot of reading and reporting you can do about that. That's not what we care about here at The Verge, but it's just notable that that's why it breaks through so often now.

• 9:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, oh, I agree. And I think in, in Nvidia's case, I mean, the, like, what people have been saying about Nvidia for months is that it has essentially propped up the stock market on its own for a very long time now, and it has gone through the roof. Like it's, it's grown like crazy. And so, yeah, everybody has been saying there is a bubble and just pointing at Nvidia. By the way, total side note, one of the funniest things about every time Nvidia is in the news is the number of different ways people pronounce the name of that company. There's a lot of Nuhvidia happening, like N U Hvidia, which I like. There's a lot of.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  If Verge has, if you're paying attention to Verge, there's some of that floating around the Verge lately.

• 9:51David Pierce?

  Listen.

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna fix it.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  The thing is, I'm not sure anybody's wrong. You know, who knows? It's, it's nuclear and nuclear, like, you know?

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  No, I know. There's, wait, hold on. There's a, we can't slide this far. There's an answer. We're gonna, we're gonna clean it up. That's all I'm saying.

• 10:05David Pierce?

  Okay. So it's like, we agree that you, you would pronounce it like Nvidia, like there's a sort of sign, there's an I at the beginning, right? Like a gentle.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Nvidia has, their name is so stupid that they have pronunciation guidelines online.

• 10:19David Pierce?

  Do they really?

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they have for years, years and years and years. It doesn't matter because like the CNBC people will just say.

• 10:26David Pierce?

  But also Nvidia might be the company that most violates my theory that you can't overcome a stupid company name. And it's a stupid company name. It's hard to pronounce. It doesn't mean anything. It has nothing. It's just, it's, it's just like an Amazon brand of letters that they happen to turn into.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's, that's rough, but it's good. That's a rough chuckle. That's really good. I bought this Nvidia battery bank.

• 10:49David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Thirty nine dollars with a 10% coupon code.

• 10:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, like in a parallel universe, Ugreen makes all of the GPUs that people buy in the world.

• 10:59David Pierce?

  And this is where we are. But yeah, so the, the, the money of it is, is real. And I think to the extent that it's also tied up in all of this other stuff, it's, that's important. But to me, that is actually like, that is the thing people got most sort of bent out of shape about and took it to mean that there is all this other equally important stuff happening in these other ways, like with the tech itself. And the more I learn about it, the less I feel like that's actually the case.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  So I keep making the comparison to Bluetooth with AI. It's just, it's just my go to.

• 11:28David Pierce?

  You've been doing that a lot recently. Every, you compare a lot of things to Bluetooth.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  Everything is Bluetooth.

• 11:34Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like we had to, you don't remember this.

• 11:37David Pierce?

  When we do a first cast coffee table book, by the way, that's the title. Just throwing that out there. Everything is Bluetooth.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  When, when Bluetooth first hit the scene, they were so proud of themselves. And they're like, we're, everything is going to be Bluetooth. Bluetooth is going to change the economy. They were, they were out here talking about personal area networks or pans.

• 11:55David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  I, I wrote a lot of blog posts to Engadget about personal area networks.

• 11:59David Pierce?

  How's your pan doing?

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  Awesome, dude. It's my Apple Watch and my AirPods.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, my pants are cracking.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  This was a real thing that was going to happen, right? Like the, we were going to blow up the world with Bluetooth. And then the actual products didn't match, match the investment for years. And so like, it's a, just a good comparison. Five, 5G actually is another great comparison. We were in a race for that, you will recall. Just to what, to what finish line? No one knew the answer. Robot surgery?

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Seems unlikely. Autonomous cars, there's some of them driving around.

• 12:36David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  Sure. But like, that was the big impetus. And you will also with 5G, you will recall, we had to beat China. Because if China got 5G networks first, America was done.

• 12:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  You can't, can't have it.

• 12:51David Pierce?

  Which is very much what people are saying about AI right now.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  It all just tracks. Like, these things rhyme, right? The difference is when AT&T and Verizon spent billions of dollars to build 5G networks against whatever hype and whatever graft, they at least knew they were going to sell people cell phones and cell service.

• 13:11David Pierce?

  True.

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  At numbers that people were willing to pay. Right? And the people who put Bluetooth everywhere, they didn't know that there would be AirPods, but they could imagine AirPods. And they were like, one day there will be AirPods. And then eventually, Apple invented AirPods.

• 13:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, you could look at all the things with wires and be like, what if no wires? And like, that, that worked. You could, you could see how you'd get there.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  But with AI, we just keep, we're like, what if it bangs you? Is that worth $500 billion? For some people, the answer is decidedly yes. We're like, what if it's agents and it does some clicking around the web for you? What if the Rabbit R1 is great? What if the Humane Pin is great? To quote David Pierce, is this a thing? And there's not the, there's not the finish line.

• 13:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? Where everyone's going to pay all of the money for the products that justifies all of the investment. And I think my version of the deep sea story is like, it just showed that all of this big upfront investment maybe isn't necessary. And so Meta doing dick measuring by how many Nvidia GPUs it was buying, kind of is like, are we, are you just wasting money? Like, is there, is there an end result to this? Or can, or can you just do it much more cheaply now? And I don't, I don't know the answer to that, to these questions. Because I don't think anybody has really delivered a product that is gonna pay it all back.

• 14:40David Pierce?

  In the context of DeepSeek, that conversation has been super interesting this week. Uh, because like the, the case for all of this being good news for the, the Mark Zuckerberg, you know, talking about the size of his data center of the world is, okay, let me see if I can explain how the theory goes. The theory goes like this, if you make AI cheaper to make, two things will happen. One, you'll be able to make better AI for the same price. So you get the, the performance scale goes up, right? I can now make something 50% better for the same price as I was planning to do it before. So thus, good AI. Then all the stuff that I've already been doing gets cheaper.

• 15:25David Pierce?

  So it becomes more accessible to more people who use it for more things, thus also better. So it's like this flywheel of, of scaling is what everybody is very excited. Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, made essentially that argument, right? That now, because all this stuff is getting cheaper, and this has been happening for a while. Like DeepSeek didn't invent making AI cheaper to run. Like, this has been happening for a while.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  But one of the very first Google IOs in this whole AI tumult, like two years ago, literally Sundar Pichai was saying, the thing that we're best at is making things cheaper.

• 15:56David Pierce?

  Right. And so, so now what you're thinking is like, okay, if you're Sam Altman, instead of spending $10 billion to do this thing, I can spend $10 billion to do the next thing, right? I can, I can make the thing that I'm working on with all this money 50% better.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  But what is he making?

• 16:12David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying. So all, I, I actually buy that theory, right? Like, it, it all makes sense, but the question continues to be, what are we laddering all of this up to? What is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? And the, my favorite thing that happened this week was, did you read, read Hoffman's, uh, New York Times opinion essay that everybody was dunking on all week?

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 16:31David Pierce?

  Can I just read out loud two? From it. Please. He says, imagine AI models that are trained on comprehensive collections of your own digital activities and behaviors. This kind of AI could possess total recall of your Venmo transactions and Instagram likes and Google Calendar appointments. The more you choose to share, the more this AI would be able to identify patterns in your life and surface insights that you may find useful. Decades from now, as you try to remember exactly what sequence of events and life circumstances made you finally decide to go all in on Bitcoin. Your AI could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we're often barely aware of as we create them, much less days, months, or years after the fact. This is Reid Hoffman writing about how AI is going to make humanity better and the best use case he can dream about

• 17:15David Pierce?

  is it's going to tell you which DM made you want to buy into Bitcoin. Like, what, what's the plan here? And, and now, and I, I've been thinking about this a lot with the questions of like, okay, well then, if all these companies don't need this much money, why are they raising all this much money? And it's like, well, because money is good to have and you should, if you can raise it, you might as well. And so Sam Altman is out there raising unheard of amounts of money and there are reports that they're about to raise anywhere from 15 to 25 billion more dollars now. Like, Sam Altman is as good a fundraiser as we have ever had in this industry. And so he's going to go out and raise money, but it turns out, I'm not sure anyone knows what we're building towards anymore.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  And I am less and less sure every day that people know what the answer is to what problem they are solving with AI. So we're in this place where like, DeepSeek is very interesting in that it is going to make, it is going to help make a lot of this stuff easier and cheaper to make. The fact that it's open source, I actually think is on balance, very cool.

• 18:15David Pierce?

  There are scary things about open source AI, but whatever, I think by and large, this stuff should be in the open and not in the hands of three companies.

• 18:23David Pierce?

  It's going to change the way that this stuff gets developed. People are going to like, take the things that DeepSeek did, bring it in, make it better. The whole industry will get better. And to what end has not become any clearer at all. Yeah, it's funny, the Reid Hoffman thing, I read that too.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  You know, like you do in Trump administrations, I spend, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the inner lives of rich, rich men.

• 18:46David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, very rich men. What do they, what do they want from me? Because they seem to be in charge of everything. Um, and it's just like, dude wants a friend. Like, I don't, I think a lot of these guys don't have, all their relationships are just people who want things from them.

• 19:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  And so when they're like, what, what could this robot be for me? They just imagine just a friend who's known them since kindergarten.

• 19:07David Pierce?

  But then do you think there's also a little part of them that's like, wants their AI friend to know how rich they are?

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, oh, absolutely.

• 19:13David Pierce?

  They're like, why don't you think my ideas are good? I don't, I don't want your ideas, AI, I want you to like my ideas.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  I just think, if I have a piece of life advice for everybody listening, it's like, you should have some non-transactional relationships in your life with people who just like, like you and you like them and that's it. You're not trying to buy and sell.

• 19:30David Pierce?

  That's all right.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  Everything, all the time. That might be good for humanity. I always think about Steve Jobs, you know, he would end all the keynotes with like apples at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. And like, these dudes are like, fuck the liberal arts. It's like, no, that's the important thing. Like, that's why that, that's why that company is important. Because they like care about culture. They're like, the, the computers are to make art with.

• 19:53David Pierce?

  That's why they can't make AI for shit, though.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  But that's, that's so funny. Like, I, I don't know what Steve Jobs would have thought about AI, but it's like, you look at the output and it's like, it's pretty bad. And it's like, is this good? Like, is this, do you want to make more stuff with this?

• 20:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Um, I will say, DeepSeek, uh, there's some copy going around that it had written about like the nature of tools, which is a very vergy thing to write about. Dieter made an entire video about whether or not computers are tools or instruments most of the time.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  It was like, pretty good. Uh, you know, it's like, not great, but it has, it had some bangers in there, you know?

• 20:26David Pierce?

  It, it didn't sound like ChatGPT, which I mean is a compliment, right? There is this like, I think we're all kind of learning how to sense when something is written by AI. And it didn't sound like that. It was. Weird and kind of overdone and overwrought and it was very much like a overly pretentious college sophomore writing a paper for their English class, but like, that's a lot better than ChatGPT, so I'll take it.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not like a receptionist who's kind of annoyed that you're there, which is ChatGPT's default tone. Like, I'll be so corporate that you will go away, is kind of how ChatGPT writes. But I just think that's like, very fascinating. Like, what are these, what is this tool for? And the first answer with the image generators was art, right? And then the second answer was the chatbots will write me 10 more episodes of Seinfeld. And then it was like, they'll kill Hollywood. And then we just kind of like, brought it all the way down to like, uh, it'll be a friend that'll, that'll book an Uber for you and maybe buy a sandwich. And it's like, this is a really small vision. At the end of the day, just as we're talking, I think you just kind of mentioned it, David. OpenAI is like, in talks to raise more money at a $340 billion valuation.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  This is right on top of them announcing $500 billion to do Stargate, which is not real, right? That's the most, like, talk about Trump administration, staying in the White House, announcing a project that you're not going to build as like, the heart of the Trump administration experience.

• 21:49David Pierce?

  It's a giant novelty check. Like, it really is. That, that whole thing was a giant novelty check for $500 billion, make sure.

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  But the reality check on this whole industry right now is you're spending all this money because no one was stopping you. Everyone wanted crypto to be it and crypto wasn't it, so then maybe I'll be it. And because it can do something, as opposed to crypto, like, all the big companies are like, look at this new thing our, our phones can do. That's Apple Intelligence, like, great. But it hasn't done enough yet. And then DeepSeek comes along and they're doing it for way cheaper. And I still don't think it's good enough, but it's so much cheaper that it's like wiping out this like, Investment thesis that you need all of the money to make a friend.

• 22:35David Pierce?

  Right. And again, it goes back to the thing of you have to start to explain to people what you're making. And I think like the this, this, this, we are making God thing isn't gonna work forever. It's already starting to come unwound. Like a thing I've really noticed is as Sam Altman and others have started to pull back on what they claim AGI is. This idea that we are like marching towards a singularity where these things are going to be as good as humans at everything is like getting more nebulous and weird. And so like, if anything, the goalposts are getting fuzzier for these companies, not more clear.

• 23:16David Pierce?

  And so it's, it's wild that it continues to be this frothy when it feels less and less like anybody has any idea what they're going towards here. Except it will reinvent the economy. And that's what you have to say, because that's the only way to raise 25 billion more dollars is to claim you are going to change the way that people live their lives. And like, that's how Adam Newman convinced Masasun to give him a lot of money, and that went super great for WeWork. And we're just, we're just doing it again at even more scale now.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  It is notable that SoftBank is investing into AI at large valuations. It is also notable that, you know, Sam Altman is, you know, making videos where he's saying AI will require us to renegotiate the social contract. And Mark Andreessen is like, absolutely not. And then in the next breath, Mark Andreessen is tweeting like, imagine a world in which wages go to zero and everything is free. And it's like, well, that's renegotiating the social contract, Mark. I don't, what are you talking like that?

• 24:13David Pierce?

  Also, none of that is going to, I cannot say clearly enough, none of that is going to happen. It's just not like some, if, if that does happen, play this clip for me and I will be suitably embarrassed as I sit on the yacht that I got for free because of AI. This is not going to happen. And so, and until then, it's like, okay. Sure, let's work backwards from reshape the way humans live our lives. What's the, what's the first killer app that you're gonna, like, what are you gonna make for me that is great, that I like and use all the time?

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  It's Apple Intelligence. You can summarize any email you want at the click of a button.

• 24:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  I saw an unnamed big tech executive. And I just said the words Apple Intelligence and they just started laughing.

• 25:03David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 25:04Nilay Patel?

  That was basically where they were at with it. There are two other funny parts of the DeepSeek story. Interesting, but funny. One is that DeepSeek is a result of, you know, Biden administration policies to restrict chips in China. And so it really feels like a bunch of US AI researchers got lazy. And they were not optimizing their code enough. And the Chinese researchers with H800 chips, which are nerfed H100s. Over optimized those chips to get better results in the H100s. Which is just like a classic of computers story, right?

• 25:44David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  Like you start out with 64 kilobytes of RAM and you just like worked your way up from there. And then the old head programmers are like, these kids today are wasting cycles on animations. Like it's all, it's just there. It's the same story.

• 25:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's laziness. I think, I mean, there's, there's certainly some laziness.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  They were counting on an infinite supply of processing power.

• 26:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 26:04David Pierce?

  But that's like, it's, it's, you know, what is it constraints breed creativity like?

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:08David Pierce?

  There is something to that, but I also think, I don't know that they were. Sitting around being like, well, we don't have to try hard because the chips will do it for us. Actually, now that I say that I do, I know for sure they were kind of doing that.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  See what I'm saying?

• 26:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, you're right.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Once you work it all the way out, you're like, oh, they didn't. They were just like, we'll just buy more chips, like Sam, get more money and buy more chips.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  Right. There was, there was a brute forcing to this. Problem that everyone just assumed was going to be how we get better was that like. And they've been making changes to the foundational technology and like transformers are better than they were in 2017. When people started talking about this stuff like. They're doing that, but nobody.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  At these companies spent a lot of time thinking about how do I do this on worse chips? Because they just had the good chips.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. And you know, the, you know, a month ago, we were talking about scaling laws. I'm like, can you just throw more horsepower and more data at this problem to make the models more efficient? And the answer was like, kind of no.

• 27:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  And that might have been when the bottom should have fallen out of all these stock prices. Cause that answer was no, then this moment was coming inevitably.

• 27:09David Pierce?

  Well, but then what they all did in response was say, okay, well, we're, we're running into walls with our, you know, frontier models at these unbelievably huge things. GPT five is reportedly not what OpenAI wanted it to be like, nobody can find kind of the next huge turn. And then they were like, but if we do even bigger data centers. And it's, it's the same thing to your point. It wasn't like, let's go back down to the metal here and figure out like from first principles, how to do this. It was what if we throw even more chips at it?

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:41David Pierce?

  Which is how you get Nvidia.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is, and, and, and very much again, you know, and Liz and I have been talking about parts of the Nvidia story for a while now. I think she's even written it up. Like there are startups that are financing their purchase of Nvidia chips with the Nvidia chips as a collateral on the loan.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Because their assumption is that there will be so much demand for usage, they will be able to just like make it work. And it's like, that's a little, that's got some NFT vibes to it. You know what I'm saying?

• 28:06David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  And you just see, okay, well, they didn't, the Biden administration put restrictions on the chips we could sell in China. And the Chinese researchers at DeepSeek were able to ultra optimize those chips in a way that US engineers and researchers had no incentive to do. And then this is, so that's funny, right? That's like a unintended consequence of a restriction.

• 28:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  That like, fine. Like it's funny in the sense that like trying to nerf the Chinese AI market ended up tanking the US stock market. Weird.

• 28:43David Pierce?

  It's pretty good.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  That's not what you want there. And then the second extremely funny part is this idea of distillation, where part of DeepSeek was trained by just like ripping off OpenAI's models in various ways.

• 28:56David Pierce?

  It's pretty.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  Um, and like, you know, Sam Altman is like a little bit outraged by it. And it's like, Sam, you stole the entire internet. Everyone's so mad at you.

• 29:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, DeepSeek is apparently was built on top of Llama, Meta's model, and used vast quantities of output from ChatGPT to train itself, which is just, it's just perfect. Like, it's just, if every single stereotype you want to believe about the AI industry, every single stereotype you want to believe about China, like, it's all right there. It's great.

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and at least Meta, to its credit, is like, yeah, we made the model open source. That's what it's here for, like, you know, OpenAI making noises that, like, they have evidence that this was, and it's like, yeah, who cares?

• 29:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people have a lot of evidence about you, my friends. You know what else could take the bottom out of the AI industry? Losing the number of copyright lawsuits that you are currently engaged in. I feel like I need to disclose at this time that Vox Media has signed some kind of licensing deal with OpenAI to make our stuff show up in SearchGPT, and honestly, no one uses it, so it's fine.

• 30:01David Pierce?

  Seems right.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  That's way above our heads, but there it is, there's your disclosure.

• 30:05David Pierce?

  They just turned Gemini on for our Google Workspace. That's a thing that happened this week.

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure. We had to have a meeting, trying to turn it off, keeping our data inside our own house. Even that, right? We're going to take a big bite out of the search market and knock Google off it. Like, it hasn't played out, and that's the biggest identifiable market so far, right? You will ask the robot questions and it will deliver you answers. Right, we're going to make Google dance. All of that, it doesn't seem to have played out.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  No, and I think that's, it's why everybody's betting so big on agents, right? It's like, okay, somewhere between we're going to take a cut of your DoorDash order and we are going to be the payments processor is like, that's the idea everybody has had. Like, I think it was you that said to me at one point on the show that everybody's business model ultimately is just payments processing. Like, it's really, it's really extremely true. Everybody is just desperately trying to do payments processing, including now X this week, which we can talk about. But, uh... These ideas just aren't working. Like, it is true, and we're gonna talk about a lot of the stuff that people are doing with these tools. It is true that people like using these tools,

• 31:13David Pierce?

  and that is a meaningful thing. But the question of what are they for? And maybe even more importantly, what is the business here? Super duper unknown. Like, it's important to keep reminding you that the bigger OpenAI gets, the more money it loses. And that continues to be true. And like, there was like the Uber thing that was like, you know, when we win, we'll take over and we'll raise our prices. And like, they did win, they did raise their prices, they had to retrench in like a huge way, and now they're making this much money.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:50David Pierce?

  That's not coming for any of these AI companies anytime soon, no matter how many billions of dollars you raise. It's just not coming.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Right, because their product isn't as useful as when you push a button, a Toyota Highlander shows up.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  Right. And it's being commoditized even faster than that. Like, the thing everybody was worried about about Uber 12 years ago was, robotaxis are gonna come and just throw all this into chaos. That's happening in the AI world. Like, all this stuff, whatever you build as an AI model company is going to be copied and bested like immediately by six other companies. And this is just what we're seeing.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  So let me ask you this. Microsoft had earnings this week, they're doing fine. But, you know, it seems like the Microsoft OpenAI relationship has been rocky for a minute.

• 32:37David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  You know, they were like, part of the Stargate announcement, not really part of the Stargate announcement, that was mostly funded by Oracle and SoftBank. Nadella was asked about $500 billion, and he's like, we've already committed $80 billion to Azure build outs, and I'm good for my 80 billion, and just like, wouldn't talk about Stargate.

• 32:52David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  And then this week, Altman and Nadella, Altman posted a selfie of the two of them, said the next chapter of this relationship is gonna be great. But then the companies had also announced that like, Microsoft's deal basically goes until 2030. I can't tell what's going on with these two companies right now. And especially, he posted that after DeepSeek. And after Nadella was trying to calm down the market by talking about Jevon's paradox, which is what you're describing, where you make the thing cheaper so people use it more. What is going on with these two companies?

• 33:22David Pierce?

  I think it's as simple as they are. They're sort of in a mutually assured destruction thing where like, Microsoft benefits so much from OpenAI being a huge success because it has these agreements for the all the cloud stuff that's happening because it's such a huge investor in the company. Like, as OpenAI gets bigger, it uses more Azure, which is more money for Microsoft. Like, Microsoft literally wins coming and going when it comes to OpenAI. So if I'm Satya Nadella, it makes sense to be doing both of these things. You both want to shore this stuff up in-house in case this company implodes in some meaningful way, which A, it has already done once, and B, could just happen again.

• 34:07David Pierce?

  Like, the people a lot this week have been talking about the fact that most of OpenAI's co-founders aren't there anymore. There are many litigious people circling around this company. There are lawsuits circling. Like, OpenAI is both absolutely chock full of money and like, pretty fragile in a lot of ways. So I think if you're Satya Nadella, you're like, okay, I need to not be fully reliant on it, but I also am going to make so much money from OpenAI if it hits, that it's worth a selfie and like, a nice tweet a couple of times a year. Like, that's a pretty low-risk way to at least keep the piece enough that Open, nobody gets super nervous about OpenAI.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, one selfie. Like, he's got a chart in his office. It's like, options. One selfie. Invest $200 billion.

• 34:57David Pierce?

  Leak phone call to Sam. Like, yeah. Be caught having lunch with Sam at Sweetgreen is like $200 billion. Like it's, I, I really, I think, I think these companies hate each other and I think they know it's better to be stuck together for a while.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:14David Pierce?

  And to root for each other because it will be successful for everybody. But I think they will be, uh, in, in, they, I think Sam and Satya both go home at the end of day and like throw darts at a, at a, the other person's face.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  The really interesting thing is, you know, Microsoft's core business is Azure, like in the realist way. Uh, Azure's doing great, you know, their earnings are out. Um, there are parts of the Azure business that are like different than the others. Like their new customers are not signing up for AI. They're just signing up to be cloud customers. And they kind of announced during the earning call, like, yeah, we, we stopped trying to do that. Like we're, we're back to just trying to get cloud customers.

• 35:52David Pierce?

  Yeah. Um, I mean, that's what, that, that has happened in a real way. Like that, that's actually been a big moment that both Microsoft and Google were like, okay, we're going to charge $20 a month extra on top of the normal, like workspace or office subscription. And you're going to get all the AI stuff, uh, and people didn't. Like $20 per month per person for nebulous AI features turned out to be an awful lot to ask. And, uh, these companies, like you said, they need more cloud customers and they need people to use the AI in order for the AI to get any good. And so they have just walked it all the way back. And what they want is they want you to use their tools that make the money. And then they want to shove AI at you so that you use it and maybe someday we'll pay for it.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see how that goes. Um, but that's like a really interesting piece that Microsoft is at least reselling whatever capability it has. Google's reselling it, Amazon's reselling it, Nvidia sells the chips and they, you know, like Jensen flies around the world on his jet made of money. Meta is really interesting in here because they're the only ones who don't resell the capacity. They are buying all the GPUs. They're building a huge data center the size of Manhattan, like crazy, but they sell none of it. It's all for Meta. And either that's a lot of risk, right? They have to get the value out of it or they figured it out. And in their earnings.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  This isn't great. I don't love it, but they're like, we are increased ad targeting yield by sorting through all of the ads we can show people faster. And that's what the GPUs are for. And it's like, oh, they actually figured it out. They know why they're spending the money. They're not just trying to resell capacity to somebody who's going to make a killer app. Or assuming that they can make digital cod.

• 37:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  They're like, oh, there's a thing we do with this that actually goes faster because we're doing it.

• 37:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, the killer app for AI might be ad targeting.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is terrifying. I want to be clear. That sucks.

• 37:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Meta would love for you to not think about that and instead think about smart glasses. But like Meta is building those data centers to serve you better ads, not to like let you wear glasses on your face. If they can do all that stuff, terrific. But the business case for that Manhattan sized data center is advertising. And I think that's, that's what is happening across the world. It's true for Google. It's true for a lot of these companies like. Ads are going to be how a lot of these things support themselves in a way that I think people are not yet ready for.

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  And in the case of Meta and Google specifically, they have already started down this road. Where the end result is you're some advertiser. And you just type in who you want to reach and you put in the first version of your ad. And then it makes infinite variations of that ad targeted at specific people. So everyone is seeing their own ad.

• 38:47David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  And that's what the generative AI is for. And this is either good or bad, you know, like it's bad, but.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  But like, you know, from those companies perspective, they're, they might spend less money in advertising, but Meta might. Make more because they're showing more ads that convert more clicks and purchases. And you can just see how you get to, this is all good. And then you can also see how the user experience of the platforms will go to hell. Because they're going to be just choked to death with AI slop and extremely weird AI ads. And it's already happening. Like, I don't want to protect, I don't want to be like, this is some like vaporware idea. Like TikTok has some of this capability in their ad sack today. Meta and Google are already saying to creators, let people chat with AI avatars of yourself. Like they are training the user base.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  To see AI content and think of it as the regular part of the user experience. And then it's just, it's just one turn to, hey, Ford, give us a bunch of money. And we'll have infinite ad for explorers that like, we know everything about this person. And we'll be like, hey, we saw that you bought a lot of stuff at the store today. That would fit better in a Ford Explorer, like down to that level of targeting.

• 40:06David Pierce?

  Or it'll show me the color of Ford Explorer that I'm most likely to like in the setting that is most likely to make me want to buy it because that is data that these companies have like.

• 40:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:16David Pierce?

  It's, it's gonna get really weird. And I think the, the like uncanny valley of targeted advertising is about to be explored in a really fascinating way. I will say, one of the funniest things about this is that it is going to make Amazon look even stupider because Amazon still does the ad where you're like, I buy a hat on Amazon. And then for six months, Amazon's ads are just like, do you want to buy that exact hat that you already bought?

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:39David Pierce?

  How about a hat? Do you like hats? Here's a hat. And I'm like, and it's just like, Amazon, if, if AI can fix that, I'm in. Give me AI.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  Boil the oceans. Take this hat away from me. Ah, it's weird. Look, okay, we've done enough negativity around AI. I do think that this thing is a bubble and it has popped to some extent and it might bubble again. But there's just, I don't, it's not just deep seek, it's the products. It's, I'm going to compare it to, to cell networks again, because it, this is just, this is just the world I was raised in. The money we spent on LTE was good. Like if you, if you, we have a lot of newer listeners, but if you are with, here with us from the beginning, you will remember that the iPhone getting LTE was a big deal.

• 41:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? And the iPhone launching without 3G was like a legitimate criticism of the product at that time. It had edge, it had 2G networking was too slow and putting wifi in it was the big, like the big innovation. This is all impossible to think about right now.

• 41:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  But the, when the iPhone got 3G, that was a big, big deal. Because it meant that it could access the internet faster and was usable on the go as an internet device. When it got LTE, that meant it could do video. And that's when a bunch of mobile video like took off and like became a thing.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  When I got 5G, everyone was like, that's gonna happen again.

• 42:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  It just didn't.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  It didn't.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  It super didn't.

• 42:11David Pierce?

  What is this for is a question people should ask much more often about

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:15David Pierce?

  technology. I will say, I just want to say one nice thing about DeepSeek, and then we should take a break and talk about cool things people do with AI.

• 42:25David Pierce?

  Learning about DeepSeek sent me down a deep rabbit hole on chain of thought reasoning.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:31David Pierce?

  Which is one of the technologies that that DeepSeek did a really good job with. Basically, like, these reasoning models, all these companies are coming out with, that kind of show you the way that they think. Truthfully, I thought of that as kind of a gimmick that was like, less doing something different and more just like,

• 42:48David Pierce?

  pretending to be human so that you trust it more. But what it actually is, is DeepSeek and other companies have found ways to, basically, instead of generating one token that is like the answer to your question, it's able to generate a bunch at a time and actually go step by step and try to think through a problem. And what DeepSeek figured out how to do is how to use a technique called reinforcement learning, which basically rewards and punishes a model when it does things right and wrong, and teach it how to do that kind of step by step reasoning inside of the model. And so there's a, there's a great moment in one of the technical papers, where the model starts to answer a question, goes step by step, gets it wrong, realizes that it is going down the wrong road, and is going to make a mistake, backtracks and starts over.

• 43:34David Pierce?

  And that is like, a powerful moment

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  in the history of AI. Because the, all this stuff is like, if you just think about it as like, it's generating the next word every time. It doesn't actually have the capability to go back and be like, wait, where did I go off track? It just keeps going off track. And with something like this, like, this is the kind of thing you will start to see in every other model very quickly, I think. Because the, the reasoning model is, A, they have, there are pretty strong studies to suggest that it's vastly more accurate when you ask these things to go step by step, because instead of trying to answer the question all at once, it answers it step by step, which is like, the correct way to do things. But that also, the more you let the model do that, like, the, the longer you let it take, and the more steps you let it take, and the more you let it think and try and poke around and do stuff, the more accurate it actually is.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  So there, there is a path toward, we can do this better. And it looks like these reasoning models and there are huge compute challenges there. There are huge latency problems there like that stuff is going to be hard to do in a way that is like good user experience, but the idea of you can teach a model to be wrong less seems to actually be plausible. And I think that's very cool. And DeepSeek is way out in front of that idea.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Fine, you've convinced me. Let's give Sam $500 billion.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  Fine, sold. Did you download the DeepSeek app?

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 44:53David Pierce?

  I didn't either. I got so freaked out by like just their terms of service are just like, we'll give the data to anyone in the government who asks.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  And they've already leaked some.

• 45:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, there was a whole database that got leaked. Like, don't download the app, people. And definitely don't log in with like your Google account and your email address. Like, be, be careful. Please.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Please, I beg you. Also, when I tried to download it, because none of that was my actual concern, they had shut down registrations because they were overloaded.

• 45:21David Pierce?

  I see. So you tried and were foiled.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I tried to get in that club.

• 45:24David Pierce?

  You said, listen, China, and said, no, no, no.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  I should have had that club drunk and they would not let me in. They were like, no shoes, no shirt, no service, sir.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take a break. That's been enough. Enough Negative Nancy. Let's see what the people are doing and whether that justifies $500 billion. Sam Altman, we'll be right back.

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• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  All right. So last week, we pointed out a gap that I think we see in all of our AI coverage. You might have even felt in the last segment that there's how people feel about AI, which in our comments is bad. Just straightforwardly.

• 47:35David Pierce?

  There is a real like principled stance against it as a whole that a lot of people

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not plagiarism, and maybe it is. Like I said, the other, the other leg of the stool that could get kicked out is the New York Times when it's copyright case against OpenAI or Sarah Silverman or any of these.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  Wasn't it Marc Andreessen, who was like, if you don't let us steal from the whole internet, this all falls apart?

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he wrote it in a letter to the copyright office.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  Where he was like, I need you to, I need you to do me a favor. Then he bought the government, so we'll see what happens. But a copyright office this week announced a clarification of its rules, saying if you make art with AI, that is copyrightable, but art made entirely by AI is not. No gray area there, that won't be confusing to anyone.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  No, super, super straightforward.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, there's a gap. The gap that I'm saying is people are mad about it, especially in our comments across the internet and various social media platforms. It's movie studio puts up a poster with AI, they get bullied right off the internet. Then there's what the companies tell us, which is people are using this stuff like crazy. DeepSeek is at the top of the App Store, ChatGPT, most popular app by growth in the history of all applications. I think it's a little bit less than that, but you get what I'm saying. And then there's just the stats that we hear from the companies themselves that are sort of like less invested in the hype. Like the one I always call out, I called out last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Rai told me on Decoder that people use generative fill at the same rate as layers in Photoshop, which means they just have opened Photoshop.

• 48:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's just an identity.

• 48:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  There's this big gap in how people are saying they feel about AI, the hype, we're gonna make digital god, and then the sort of like mundane reality of a lot of people are just using the stuff and a lot of people like it, but they don't perceive themselves as like using AI. So we asked, listeners, send us what you're doing. And David, it sounds like everybody responded.

• 49:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, we got a lot. We heard from a bunch of folks on social. We got like dozens of calls to the Vergecast hotline. We got a whole bunch of emails. Everybody, it turns out, uses AI. There are at least, and a lot of people out there who had a use case that they wanted to share. So I figured we should just go through a bunch of them. And I think I tried to pull ones that are reflective of trends that we saw in the responses. So if you're down, I'm gonna read you some emails and I'm gonna play you some hotlines and we're just gonna talk about it. Because they all made me feel a lot of feelings and we need to sort through them together.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  What is this show but sorting through feelings? That's what we're here for.

• 50:03David Pierce?

  So I'm gonna not say the emailers' names because some of this stuff is very personal and also most people in their emails don't explicitly give us instructions whether to say their names. I think a few of the folks on the hotline say their names, but I feel like if you say it into the voicemail, knowing we're gonna play it on the show, that's fair game. So I'm so sorry if I'm outing you here on the Vergecast.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  This first email is from Sam A.

• 50:30David Pierce?

  All right, let's start with.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  Ilya S. has a note for us about how good AI is.

• 50:36David Pierce?

  So here's one email we got. It says, "I was recently diagnosed with a stomach issue, so it's been difficult for me to find and know things that trigger and don't trigger a flare up. So when it's really acting up, it's super easy for me to just take a picture of a menu at a restaurant or bar and just ask, what can I have? And from what I've told ChatGPT from the doctors, it can just tell me what's safest to eat and drink, even telling me the exact ingredients that are safe in those dishes." That's awesome. Like, unambiguously cool use case in my humble.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  That's a great use case. It's just like, I, again, maybe just being negative.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how the restaurant actually made the food. I don't know if the things hallucinate like that. It's just, this is what I mean. Like, I'm just prone to see the risk. And I think that's an email where people see the benefit.

• 51:19David Pierce?

  So this is, you just brought up the exact thing that is going to come up an awful lot in these, which is, uh, you are going to see a trend in which there is a question of how much should I trust this? And, uh, one of the things that consistently surprised me is a lot of people saying it doesn't really matter. That like, I understand it has flaws, it might not be perfect. It's something, uh, like here, let me, let me read you one.

• 51:45David Pierce?

  I've often felt intimidated by the professional and technical demands of public service. However, ChatGPT has given me the ability to communicate more effectively, present my ideas professionally, and quickly understand complex topics. From rebuilding water treatment facilities and developing billing systems to ensuring compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency regulations, I've been able to handle responsibilities I never imagined I could take on. Again, very cool. To me, I immediately read that and go, how many of the EPA regulations do you think ChatGPT just flatly gets wrong? Like, yeah, just, just fully hallucinates some made up thing. And I feel with a lot of these things, I keep coming back to like, it, it's gonna work for you until it blows up spectacularly in your face, right? And it's like, it's the same with the eating in the restaurant.

• 52:29David Pierce?

  Like, as long as it's right, and let's say it's right 80% of the time, which is probably kind to most of these systems. But let's say this, you take a picture of your food or you, you upload a PDF of a regulatory document, ask it questions. It's often going to be right, but when it's wrong, if you trust it, really bad things can happen. And so I, I feel like where I fall on the like, but what if it doesn't work? Scale might just be different than some other people. But that just is the thing I keep thinking about with all of these.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I don't trust computers. I have a weird job in that regard. But like, as David knows, when I record this podcast at home, I insist on recording locally to another recorder and not letting my Mac do the recording because I just don't trust the Mac, which is weird because I should.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  But I will say on the, on the flip side.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  That's the, but I just like, that's the frame that I'm in.

• 53:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  Whereas it's like, what I hear in that email is not about trust, it's about.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  I worked out this idea so that I would have the confidence to go have like have the idea. And that's really different and interesting.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  How how so? Say more about that.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that person sounds like they have a very complicated job. They know they have to know how to do everything and they're like designing a water plant, right?

• 53:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  I hear that and I think, well, you already you already did know how, right? Like you had the capability of doing it and what you needed was a conversation or a more easily digested reference material or whatever to get you over the hump. Like you just solved your imposter syndrome. You the the AI didn't do it for you, right? You just it just helped you get to where you were inevitably going to be.

• 54:23David Pierce?

  I I think there's something to that, and I think there's also a recurring theme in a lot of these that is basically like I just needed something. I didn't have a tool to do this thing and now I have a tool to do this thing. And even if it doesn't necessarily do it well, the fact that it does it at all is something, right? And it's like, I I think that I started with the food one because that is one that there isn't a clean other answer to, right? Like I see on Reddit all the time, the people who go to a restaurant with like those huge placards of like, here's all the food I can't eat, may hand them to the chef. And then the chef posted on Reddit being like, this asshole came to my restaurant. And to have something that is like, I can take a picture of this and it is going to give me

• 55:04David Pierce?

  even even reasonably reliable information about what this is and whether I can safely eat it. Reasonably reliable and easy is probably a huge step up from the alternative in this case. And I think that's that's something really meaningful. And so there is this sense that like something is better than nothing is is so pervasive through a lot of this and I think is really interesting in a way that I didn't give it credit for. All right, let me let me play you a couple of voicemails we got.

• 55:28Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Alex and I wanted to call in to talk about how I use LLMs in my daily life. I use ChatGPT as an on-demand advisor of sorts. You know, how can I improve this recipe? How much cat litter should my cats be using per month? What are some good ways to save time at the gym? If these are my priorities?

• 55:52Speaker 07

  A lot of these things are things I could use Google for, but it's just quicker to ask ChatGPT. Another thing I use it for is as a way to organize my thoughts. So if I'm ruminating about something, I'll just talk to ChatGPT. It's no replacement for my therapist, but it helps reorient my thinking when I need it to. I know I could also get this from my friends and sometimes I do, but ChatGPT is nearly always available instantly.

• 56:26David Pierce?

  I find that very compelling, I have to say.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, again, it's hard to tell anyone they're like doing it wrong. Like, that's great. I'm like very happy that that's working in that way. The thing that grabs me at that one in particular is it is the thing that Google is afraid of. Right? But it's also the thing that these products have shown themselves to be the worst at. Like, how much cat litter should my cat use every month is, well, first of all, it depends on the cat. But second of all, it's like, that's the one where it's like, you should, you should feed your cat rocks. Like, it's like, that's what will happen.

• 57:04David Pierce?

  Put glue in the cat litter. It's like, it's just sitting there. Yeah.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  And I think this is just really eye opening for me in that, to your point, it's just good enough. It's just something. And as we have covered exhaustively, typing that sort of thing into Google right now is like getting mugged in an alley.

• 57:21David Pierce?

  Seriously. Yeah, no, there is a real thing that I keep hearing in a bunch of these that is just how aggressively Google fumbled the bag of search. That like, what people want is better Google, not ChatGPT. And Google just threw all of that away. But I think one of the things that you say all the time is that the internet is about to be flooded with C++ stuff. And I think what we might be underrating is how valuable a C++ can be sometimes. Like, maybe a C++ delivered to me easily and quickly at all times is actually something.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Hmm. Is that bleak as hell? Probably, but it's something. All right. Let me keep, let me keep going. Uh.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  That's like the, that's like how they, why they invented legacy admissions at Harvard. Like that's what you're describing. Like, what if we can just accept a flood of C plus applicants?

• 58:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. And that goes fine. What is that? All right. Here's the next one.

• 58:14Speaker 08

  Hey, this is Jake. I was listening to your recent podcast where you've mentioned, and you want to be my colleague and say what to use chat GPT for in the real world. I use it weekly to make my shopping list. I ask it to make the recipes based off of what I have in my house and what I'm going to buy. Um, try to make it where I can get as macro friendly as possible. One of the features that I've started using more recently is whenever I make a shopping list, I ask it to make an optimized shopping pattern for a standard uh, location of where I'm going. So if you go into Costco or Aldi, I can make sure that I'm uh, shopping in those sufficient. Uh, and then I ask it to find substitutes to make for recipes.

• 58:52Speaker 08

  It has values for pretty much anything that it comes to for like vacations, trips, use of a planning. That's the, this is some of the main use cases that I use it for outside of all my work.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. So first of all, I just, I, that's all great. I, man, Google blew it. You just described everything Google has ever demoed at Google I O.

• 59:15David Pierce?

  I know.

• 59:15Nilay Patel?

  But you're doing it in chat GPT.

• 59:16David Pierce?

  I know. Yeah. Yeah. Like there, there's a, there are a hundred Google Keep features that you just described that no one uses.

• 59:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I, this to me was the one that I was like, the most sort of down the middle, simple use case is like, I'm gonna write a list of stuff that I have in my fridge. You're gonna spit back some recipes and then I'm gonna say, can you optimize this list to go to Costco? Like, chat GPT is great at that. Do it. Love it.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then the next turn is go on Instacart with operator and order it for me, right? Like, you can see how you connect all those thoughts.

• 59:50David Pierce?

  Next time I go to Costco, I'm gonna tell chat GPT to give me directions around Costco and I'm only going to follow chat GPT. We're gonna see how it goes.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  This is actually the part where he said that I'm dying to know more here. It really implies that chat GPT knows how Costco's organized and just based on my Costco in, it's a war zone.

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  Costco knows how Costco is organized.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  That's what I mean. It's like, I've asked Costco employees where things are and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Good luck to you, sir.

• 1:00:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a secret. You're not allowed to know. But yeah, that kind of thing, like I, I am always talking to people about like, what I, what do I think are good use cases for ChatGPT. And the one I always come up with is movie recommendations. Cause it's like super low stakes, but actually a thing AI is unusually able to be good at. Where I'm like, I like these three movies. What else should I watch? And it's like, that's a thing LLMs do very well. And this kind of like recipe remixing is another good example of that. So I just thought that was great. All right. Let me read you another email. Real tone shift here. You ready for this?

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52David Pierce?

  We got an email from somebody who's going through a divorce. And said, ChatGPT has been a surprising source of support. Let me be clear. I don't use it as a talk therapist, parentheses, gross, but rather as a tool to help me communicate effectively and with kindness. My wife is very sensitive to perceived criticism, so I draft emails to her and then use ChatGPT to help me soften the tone, make them warmer and remove anything that could be interpreted as critical while still ensuring my requests and boundaries are not diluted. Filtering emails this way has made a difficult process a little less hard. It's also helped me curb any instincts to be petty, sarcastic or passive aggressive. It helps me keep my side of the street clean.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:01:27David Pierce?

  Right?

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  So I'm, I'm married to a divorce lawyer. I have heard about an infinite variety of passive aggressive emails between partners for the past several years. Uh, I feel like I should just go tell her about this.

• 1:01:40David Pierce?

  It's really interesting, right?

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42David Pierce?

  This one, I was like, I don't know how to feel. On the one hand, the, it, it, there's like a piece of this that kind of makes me sad that it's like, it's a bummer that there is a web app that has to be your tool for this. But on the other hand, like, again, what's your alternative? Where else would someone go to do something like this?

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  If you took this out of the bigger context of AI and all of the noise and all of the hype, and you were like, there's a new feature in Grammarly, right?

• 1:02:08David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or you're like, Google Docs has a new feature that just helps you like de-passive aggressive in email. I don't know that anyone would have any reaction to this other than that's actually pretty good.

• 1:02:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  And it's only in the context of all the AI hype and you know, that horrible Apple commercial where it's just like, bad employee sends professional email.

• 1:02:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  And like, this is what Apple Intelligence is for.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  There, there, this is maybe the most human of the notes that we've gotten.

• 1:02:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that, I mean, not to say everyone else isn't human, but like, this is a very emotional task that is being performed.

• 1:02:45David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  And I, I really do think if you took this one out of the AI bubble and all of the baggage that comes with it, you put this in any other product five years ago and everyone's like, oh, this rules.

• 1:02:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it, it goes to show that A, our, our vocabulary about AI is still so primitive. Like, we call everything AI and actually AI has lots of wildly different things and we need to get to the point where we're better at talking about them as different things. Uh, but it also, to some extent, goes to show how versatile something like ChatGPT is. Like, all this stuff is happening in the same text box, right? Like, it's a pretty remarkable thing.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Also, very notable, everyone has said ChatGPT.

• 1:03:25David Pierce?

  Every single person.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  We haven't gotten one Dolly. We haven't got one Gemini.

• 1:03:29David Pierce?

  Nope.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  No, no Apple intelligence.

• 1:03:31David Pierce?

  Little bit of Claude love in a, in a few of these.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's coming. Okay.

• 1:03:33David Pierce?

  Little bit of Claude love. Um, I don't think I pulled any of the ones that people use Claude, but, uh,

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  Just calling it out.

• 1:03:40David Pierce?

  Sorry, Claude users. Claude was mentioned. I don't think Gemini came up one time in the emails that we got.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  Brutal.

• 1:03:47David Pierce?

  But Claude, there's, people were like, oh, I mostly use ChatGPT and like, some Claude. There was a lot of some Claude.

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  Uh, all right. Let me play you another voicemail. Here's a, again, we're just gonna tone shift all over the place here, because that's what AI does. Here we go.

• 1:04:00Speaker 09

  Hey, this is Leo from Atlanta, Georgia. Um, Neil, I asked what everyone's using their AI assistants for, and I use mine almost exclusively to solve hard questions in the word puzzle game, Word Salad. Um, also to note, I recently discovered that something about David's voice makes me super tired, um, and helps lull me to sleep. So I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to Mr. David Pierce for, uh, improving my sleep quality and helping fight my insomnia. Thanks, guys. Love the show.

• 1:04:31Nilay Patel?

  Something on David's voice makes me super tired.

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  First question, was that a compliment or an insult?

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's really, that's a tough one. You make me sleepy. It's like a really.

• 1:04:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, he said, thanks. I don't think he meant it. But that one, like another in the line of like movie recommendations, right? Like pretty low stakes, pretty straightforward. This thing has a lot of information and it can, it can spit some information back at me.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54David Pierce?

  It works.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  You're cheating, but it works.

• 1:04:56David Pierce?

  You are cheating. To be so clear, you are cheating. It's okay. I've Googled what's the word or answer before like it's.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  It's bedtime for you, sir.

• 1:05:04David Pierce?

  We all have bad days. Yeah. Okay, let me, let me find the next one. I've been fascinated by my mom's usage of AI. She's 49 and while she uses it a lot for her small business, writing posts, et cetera. I've noticed that over the past year, she's also started to use it as a general Google replacement in her personal life as well. She wants to know a fact, she asks ChatGPT. She has to write a WhatsApp message that requires minimum thinking, she asks ChatGPT. Last week, she found out one of her close friends is struggling with her mental health and having suicidal ideations. And I shit you not, she asked ChatGPT, what are the best ways to support someone who's depressed? Again, just Google fumbled the bag. Like people want better Google.

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but this is the one, again, these are real people. Everyone use a computer, however you want. I'm happy it's working. But this is the one that's the blinking red danger sign. Right? It's like, oh, everyone just needs a friend.

• 1:06:00David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's, there's just an element here where this is, to me, like, this is where the robots hallucinate all day long. And what you're getting is better Google with worse results presumably. But in a better interface or more reactive or just someone to talk to you in a way that's natural. And it's like, this is the one where it's like, if you tell me this is the use case, I will confidently tell you this is not support $500 billion data center.

• 1:06:28David Pierce?

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Cause it, it, it doesn't scale. Like the thing will happen that happened to Alexa in Siri, which is you'll do this until it fails you and then you will stop thinking and do anything more than this. Right? Like you're like Siri, tell me a joke. And it's like, I don't, I give up. Right? Like fine timers and music it is. And I'm not saying the ceiling is, the ceiling for ChatGPT is so much higher, obviously. But there's still a ceiling and the ceiling is when it lies to you. Right? When I make something up, when you ask it for movies and it gives you three real movies and one fake one, and then people are literally showing up at public libraries asking for books that don't exist.

• 1:07:06David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  And that, that's what I mean. It's like when lawyers show up in court citing cases that aren't real and they get disciplined by the bar association. That's the, like, they can't overcome, they don't know how to overcome that. And so like this one to me is like, yeah, I, every experience is valid. Like, great. And it's really interesting to see how different people are approaching it. But this is the one that hits the wall the fastest.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree, but I also think there is a, a more charitable way to look at that that says, uh, the human is still kind of in charge here, right? Like, I think it's, it's one thing to, uh, have these things do things on your behalf, right? And this is where I think things like operator get really messy. Like, would you let ChatGPT text your wife for you? Like, even something relatively innocuous.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  Again, David, I don't, I, I don't think I've made this clear enough. I'm married to a divorce lawyer.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  No, but even something very simple where you're like.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  That woman can have ChatGPT divorce me. It's just a macro on our computer. It's a work issued windowed laptop with a button that says D and then my life is over.

• 1:08:12David Pierce?

  Fair. Yeah. But like, it's, okay, fine. Uh, Helen Havlak, our boss. Would you, would you like voice mode ChatGPT and be like, hey, will you text Helen and tell her I'm running late, but I'll be like 10 minutes late to the meeting?

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  Why wouldn't I just text her that?

• 1:08:26David Pierce?

  No, no, but, but just go with thought experiment with me here for a second.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:08:29David Pierce?

  Would you let it take that act, like, do that on your behalf? Not say, here's a message you might send, but be like, send this message for me, ChatGPT. Would you have it do that?

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, abstractly, yes.

• 1:08:42David Pierce?

  Really? See, I wouldn't. I like, just the, there, there is a certain thing where I'm like, okay, if you want to write the text and then I'll look at it and send it.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I guess that's what I'm imagining because that's how I use Siri in the car.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  No, I even get freaked out in the car because you say it and it reads it back to you. And I'm like, what if it like put weird punctuation and a period at the end? And my wife is gonna think I'm mad.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  There's middle finger emojis between every word and you just don't know. Yeah, okay.

• 1:09:05David Pierce?

  And I still like, I truly get nervous about doing a text that I can't look at the words before I send them. And I think that's where all of this agentic stuff gets really messy for me because I'm I'm expecting you to do things. But again, just to finish this off, in this case, the idea that like, I'm asking ChatGPT to give me ideas about how to support a friend, I think is less terrifying than the idea of like, send my friend a supportive text message, which would be horrifying.

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  I scrolled down and I'm reading the rest of the same email, about the mom.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  And the second part of the email is the most important part of the email.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  Here's a quote, "Most people I'm friends with or that listen to this show are probably concerned with accuracy, environmental impact, development of critical thinking, et cetera. She, the mom, could frankly not give less of a shit.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  And I suspect people like her are likely to be the majority, not because she's dumb, she's brilliant other ways, because she's just not wired that way. And this is your point about good enough.

• 1:10:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's just the computer's talking to you and it sounds fine and that's good enough. And I,

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm just very convinced that we live in an age where just being confident is like all you need. Like just blustering through it is very effective in a variety of domains. And maybe that collapses on itself, we'll find out. But that's like, the whole population is primed to just be like, confident talking? That must be right.

• 1:10:37David Pierce?

  Totally. Wired ran a headline the other day, something to the effect of the less people know about AI, the more they like it. And I'm there, based on a study that I think it was like a marketing firm did, basically to find that. If you don't understand what's happening, AI seems great. And that makes perfect sense to me. That feels exactly right. And I think most people don't understand what's happening. And maybe that's terrifying, but I think that's what's coming.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  Based on this and that second piece, which is super interesting to me. I understand why a bunch of companies are so excited about this. Because it's the first time using a computer has felt different for people. Right? The the jump from the command line to the graphical user interface felt different. And you built an entire paradigm of computing around it. And then the jump from desktop computers to touchscreen mobile phones was an entire paradigm shift. And obviously phones could go with you and all the other stuff. But that created an entire economy. And they've been searching for something else that makes computers feel different to people. Are they going to fold? You know, like, well, it's something, it's got to be something. And this feels different to people because they're just talking to them.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  But there's not an application layer behind that that builds the whole economy or supports all this like. And also, I just come back to this here example, like. Eventually, mom's going to hit a wall, right? It's going to lie to her. She's going to make a mistake. It will embarrass her in some way. And then and then we'll stop because she can't trust it. And that trust, once it's gone, is gone.

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think the question of A, when that happens and B, what the stakes are, is the stuff that makes me really nervous about all of this.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15David Pierce?

  And either I'm just a chicken or everyone else should be more afraid or both. I don't know. All right, let's do one more and then then we'll we'll get out of here.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  Here's one more.

• 1:12:24Speaker 10

  Hey, The Verge and/or the Slack channel. My name's Florian. I'm calling from New Jersey, taking up your request on what I use ChatGPT for. I would say primarily, I use it as a a more reliable resource than Google searches for informed decisions. So whether that's in-depth settings menus, I can find Bluetooth. But, you know, the other ones, I'm a recent college grad, so I've used a lot to help friends with their career growth or updating resumes, kind of like the bad code, good code argument. I come back for practical advice, namely curious topics or other things like that to gain some information on very quickly.

• 1:13:05Speaker 10

  But I would say primarily it's for things like when I can't find the answer on AV forums for how to set up the Blu-ray player through ARC with the soundbar and making sure that Dolby True HD plays from my disk. Neel, I don't know what's for you, but

• 1:13:22Nilay Patel?

  I love you.

• 1:13:22Speaker 10

  Thanks for the great pod and hopefully someone in the Slack sees us. Have a great day.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  I love you. I love this man. First of all, just call me. You're gonna, you're gonna talk to a robot? I'm around.

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is why the Vercaast exists. We will solve these problems for you.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  That's great. The, the in-depth technical problem, the issue that I've always run into with that is the answer is buried in some forum posts from six years ago. And it's just been muddled. And I actually want to find the old forum posts where the person actually has the answer, not the, do you know what I mean?

• 1:13:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Like not the, not the synthesis over time.

• 1:13:55David Pierce?

  This is where I think like Reddit answers, the Reddit AI search is, is actually super exciting because it is geared toward that exact thing.

• 1:14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03David Pierce?

  That is like, what if we just did a smarter job of searching this stuff, but we're still interested in finding actual people's actual answers. It's like, that's a, that's a cool mix. If we can figure out how to do it right. I lied. I have one more to play for you and then we should go to break. But let's just.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  I just want to say to, to my guy, you're my best friend. We don't know each other, but we're in it now.

• 1:14:24David Pierce?

  You are one of us now.

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  We're family.

• 1:14:26David Pierce?

  Welcome to the verge. All right. I got one more.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  True HD for life.

• 1:14:30Speaker 11

  This is Matt from Springfield, Missouri. I was just answering your question about using AI daily. All these tools came out when I started dating and I used it to help write my profile and also compose my messages because I'm a machinist. I'm have good ideas, but I'm not good at words and AI helped me fill that gap. It must've worked because now I'm in a relationship. I'm gonna have a son this year and I still use AI today to compose thoughtful messages to send to her throughout the week.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is great.

• 1:15:01David Pierce?

  AI is good, Neel.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, I mean, that's, we just got it there. We should shut down the verge. Negative Nancy is good out of here. Uh, that's fast.

• 1:15:08David Pierce?

  That one made me really happy.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  Chat, we only hit two years ago. We went from zero to sun.

• 1:15:14David Pierce?

  Killing it.

• 1:15:14Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good.

• 1:15:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good. Pretty good. You know, most people move in together for, I'm just saying, anyway.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  Not anymore. This is an AI world we live in. No time for that.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'll give you, I'll give mine and it's very different than that, but it's in the same zone. I recently sold something on eBay and I let eBay's AI just write the description for me.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  Really?

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  Just gave it. It was so dumb. It was like, uh, we, we bought a new stove. Uh, and we bought different color handles for the stove. So I sold the old ones. And I just took a picture and I figured out what it was and I was like, do you want to write a description? And it's like, this is the lowest stakes shit in the world. Like, anybody who's searching for replacement stove handles and sees a picture of this, like, they know. Like, you don't have to describe them very much. I was like, fine, here's some copy. And it did it. Uh, Poshmark today actually, uh, announced that they're letting people do AI descriptions. I think there's this world in which like weird, low stakes fields get filled in. Obviously, dating is a higher stakes field, but I can, I can see why it's very tempting to people.

• 1:16:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  And by the way, that's a great story.

• 1:16:15David Pierce?

  Yeah. Matt, congrats. We're very happy for you.

• 1:16:17Nilay Patel?

  I hope you name your son Al. Think about it.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take a break and we got a lightning round. That was great. Send us more of those.

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, thank you to everybody who, who wrote in. Uh, it was super fun. I learned a ton. It, it, this has been really enlightening and interesting.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  And I do want to, I want to make sure our coverage is rounded out, so.

• 1:16:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 1:17:11Speaker 03

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• 1:17:41Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Unsponsored lightning round. That's how you know it's wild.

• 1:18:19David Pierce?

  It's crazy times out there.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Unfiltered, uncensored. The First Amendment's back, people. And by back, we mean Trump will arrest you if you criticize. All right, there's actually a lot in this lightning round. Let's start with something very exciting, very niche Vergecast news. Google is open sourcing the Pebble source code, the original smartwatch. And Eric Minjakovski, the founder of Pebble, is gonna make another watch. David, you like, talk to him. What's going on here?

• 1:18:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, so I saw Eric at CES. We had lunch and he had a Pebble on his wrist. And I said, we were just talking about, you know, life and the future and gadgets. And I was like, I was like, so you've left Automatic. He sold his company Beeper, the messaging app that we talked about a bunch, to Automatic last year. He left the company looking for something to do. I was like, so are you gonna, are you gonna just like do Pebble again? Are you gonna re-Pebble? And little did I know, he asked me again, we talked this past week, and he was like, did you know? And I was like, what are you talking about? And he was like, we're calling it re-Pebble. How like, why did you say? So I, I'm feeling very proud of myself, except that I completely let him off the hook and just moved on to something else.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  But anyway, so Eric, I guess over the last year, has been working with Google to open source all of Pebble OS. So Pebble sold to Fitbit, which sold to Google. And a lot of the like Pebble ideas sort of percolated around those two companies. And you can see some DNA in like the Pixel Watch. But the Pebble software itself. Was just not being used. And so Google, to its credit, I cannot report that Dieter Bone was involved, but I also believe in my heart that Dieter Bone was involved. Dieter, famous Pebble fan, was, is, works for Google now. You know, there, there's just, sometimes there are pieces there. But anyway.

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  Look, we don't do conspiracy theories here, except for that one.

• 1:20:06David Pierce?

  Except for that one. And Google agreed to do it. So Google open sourced all of Pebble OS, which is not everything. There are like third-party drivers and stuff that are occasionally complicated to open source. The name Pebble still belongs to Google, but functionally, all of the software is now available. And so Eric is starting a company that will not be called Pebble, but the goal is just to make Pebbles again. He's like, we got it, right. His Pebbles now still work. He said he had to replace the battery on all of them, but they still work and they still do the things he wanted. And so he's like, I'm going to keep making these like, long-lasting e-ink gadgety gadgets to put on people's wrists. And the plan is hopefully to start making stuff quickly, like even this year. And there

• 1:20:51David Pierce?

  are a lot of Pebble nerds out there who are very excited about this.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  So the Pebble story, as I recall it, is that they just ran into API problems with the iPhone. Because the original Pebble could get notifications.

• 1:21:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, Apple supported sending notifications out that way. But you couldn't reply to a message. Like, they were just limited, in very real ways. You could just like, look at a text message, and be able to get your phone. Apple's never going to open that up.

• 1:21:16David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  So probably Android phones, the Pebble app on Android phones, they could do some of that stuff.

• 1:21:22David Pierce?

  It was always much better, yeah. There's more to do on Android. But also, I think, for Eric in particular, I think the idea of it being like a messaging machine is, seems to be less compelling. He's like, he's very into it as like, it's an easy way to get kind of glanceable information, but it's also like, simple and the battery lasts a long time and it has buttons for music controls. Like Buttons for Music Controls is one of the specific things he named as like, a core competency of Pebble. And it's like, it does not have to be a messaging system, which I actually kind of agree with. Like, I would like lots of features to exist, but I find that I only use a very small number of them on my wrist. And I would trade a lot of them for like five day battery life. And I think it's going to be interesting to see what they do this time.

• 1:22:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. I love a good open source hardware hacky project.

• 1:22:11David Pierce?

  It's gonna be cool because there's like, there's been a pretty big community of people keeping this stuff alive for a long time. And the fact that now they have honest to God software to play with instead of like hacking around the edges of existing Pebbles. Uh, I think we're going to see some pretty interesting stuff here, like that that community is really engaged and I think is going to get up to some stuff.

• 1:22:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's Pebble. Uh, next one. Oracle and Microsoft reportedly in talks to take over TikTok.

• 1:22:38David Pierce?

  This story makes me so tired.

• 1:22:39Nilay Patel?

  Although Trump denied Oracle, right? In some press conference, but he doesn't know. I mean, like, when I say he doesn't know, I don't, I just mean be dismissive. I mean, literally, he gave them a 75 day illegal extension, which Apple and Google do not trust enough to put TikTok back in the store. And then at a press conference, he said, Congress has given me 90 days, which is 15 more days than he gave himself.

• 1:23:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Nilay Patel?

  Congress has not given him that.

• 1:23:04David Pierce?

  Congress didn't give anybody anything.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  The time's up. Like, what he gave TikTok was a 75 day pause on enforcement of breaking the law. Which again, Apple and Google do not trust, because that's billions of dollars. Anyway, so I'm just saying like, the facts are confusing on the ground. Like, what does Trump even believe is going on here? Because he's just saying different numbers. And then, but he did say, I don't think Oracle's involved, which is weird. But Microsoft was a bidder the first time. Nadella famously said it was like the weirdest deal he's ever been a part of.

• 1:23:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, a bidder might give, uh, Microsoft too much agency in that. It seems a lot like Microsoft was like dragged into a room and yelled at about buying TikTok for a while.

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  No one knows what's gonna happen. Like, truly, no one knows what's gonna happen. And then this other plan, uh, that Trump keeps floating, where someone does a joint venture and they give 50% of it to the United States. Our own big tech companies are extremely nervous about that plan.

• 1:24:05David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:24:08Nilay Patel?

  Because if you just think about it, that means India could shut down YouTube and demand it gets sold. And 50% of YouTube be given to India. Like, that's a precedent you do not want to play with. Interesting.

• 1:24:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  Because all their governments are way less skittish about nationalizing companies or doing speech regulations. Everyone's like, don't play this game.

• 1:24:32David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:24:33Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 1:24:33David Pierce?

  India is actually a particularly interesting one in that it is a government that I think would be excited to do that kind of thing and is such a crucial market as a growth engine for so many of these companies.

• 1:24:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, I picked it. India has banned TikTok.

• 1:24:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Nilay Patel?

  Straight up and it is very reliant on YouTube, but it has very draconian speech policies and Modi government does not enjoy dissent in very specific ways. You could see Brazil and other countries like Russia exist. Like, there's a million countries that would play these games. And so like our own big tech companies, like do not, you do not want to open this door. You're already in 50 different trade wars. Like, don't do this.

• 1:25:10David Pierce?

  Is it possible that the door is opened now that just someone has said it out loud? Like, do you wonder if there are a bunch of people sitting around in like government boardrooms being like, how did we never think of this?

• 1:25:22Nilay Patel?

  They do, but like, if you want to roll up on the United States that way, the United States would be like, no.

• 1:25:27David Pierce?

  Fair, yeah.

• 1:25:28Nilay Patel?

  But then the United States starts doing it like, okay, tit for tat. Like, here we go. Like, we're off to the races. Like, we, the norm has been shattered. And like, because we're doing trade wars, you can already see it. You can see people be like, we don't know what's going to happen, but don't, don't do that one. We'll see if any of that goes through. We'll see if there's a buyer. We'll see what happens at 75 days. Like, 75 days is not a long time to close a deal of this magnitude.

• 1:25:50David Pierce?

  No. Even if you had agreed on it already, it would be a short amount of time.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. And as far, so far as you know, there's no lead buyer. And then there's the big question of, are you selling TikTok US? Or are you selling ByteDance? And there's a lot of chatter that the answer is they're going to sell ByteDance.

• 1:26:07David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  And so that's a much bigger deal.

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:26:11Nilay Patel?

  With a much different set of investors, one of whom is Jeff Yass, Trump donor, you know, like, a lot of his money is set up in ByteDance, not TikTok US. And then there's the question of like, what does control mean? Because the law specifies it can't be under the control of a foreign adversary power. And then Trump is supposed to run an interagency process to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:26:34David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:26:35Nilay Patel?

  Is he gonna do that? So there's just, I don't know, man, I think we're, I think we're gonna run to the end of that 75 days. And then we're all just gonna look at each other and it's, who knows?

• 1:26:45David Pierce?

  It really does seem like at the end of day 74, we're still gonna look around and everybody's gonna be like, what happens now? And no one is going to know like that. It feels like that's where we're headed.

• 1:26:56Nilay Patel?

  And that is gonna, you know, not that Trump isn't running into the separation of powers problem every single day. But you get to day 74 and he's like, I'm extending it again. A bunch of Republican senators are gonna say, no, no, no, no, no. Tom Cotton is gonna be like, no, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna shoot TikTok in the street. That's where he's already at.

• 1:27:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Nilay Patel?

  And so I, yeah, we're just barreling towards a full sale of ByteDance, which is nuts to contemplate with the permission of the Chinese government.

• 1:27:28David Pierce?

  ByteDance probably either the first, second or third most valuable startup on earth right now.

• 1:27:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35David Pierce?

  Way up there.

• 1:27:35Nilay Patel?

  By April and by the time you're listening to this, it will be very close to February. Like this is just not gonna happen.

• 1:27:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy to me.

• 1:27:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I really like, we were, we were on the show for a couple of weeks trying to like handicap possibilities. And I have given up even trying to guess like, I, I couldn't possibly begin to make an educated guess about what's gonna happen here. Which is so interesting and also so insane.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  I do think there's some reasonable likelihood that Microsoft actually goes through with this and tries to do it. They have the money to do it.

• 1:28:08Nilay Patel?

  They have the ability to run the infrastructure. They have Azure. They have a consumer market with Xbox users, like they have a thesis for why they would run it. They have an advertising business. It's fine, not great. Like, sure. Meta can't do it for sure. Can't do it for other reasons we can talk about, but like, you know, the FTC is still pursuing a breakup. Like they're not gonna do it.

• 1:28:31David Pierce?

  Would buying ByteDance be the biggest acquisition in history? Company is worth like upwards of $300 billion is the number that keeps being fluttered around.

• 1:28:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if the number is.

• 1:28:39David Pierce?

  But then I, I've heard numbers for TikTok that are higher than $300 billion. So like, ByteDance, by the way, also kind of in the deep seek race of putting out much cheaper AI models that can be like, there's a lot happening in that company.

• 1:28:53Nilay Patel?

  There's not happening in that company. Also, just the. The chatter that I've heard is the number changes based on who buys it.

• 1:29:00David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like if Meta or Google buys it, for example, they have gigantic monetization engines that are really, really good. So they don't have to spend any money, like getting their money back out.

• 1:29:17David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:29:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? They just have to deliver ads inside of TikTok and they already have the clients and they already have the tech and they already have the yeah, like whatever it is that you think they need. They've already, they already have it.

• 1:29:25David Pierce?

  It's just really expensive scale, essentially.

• 1:29:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they just bought more scale. If you are Amazon even, you gotta go build an entire monetization system. So you're gonna pay a lower price because you gotta allocate some money to that stuff. So like, how much you're willing to pay, how much it's worth is all based on what you can do with it. And there's only so many companies like, and the two companies that could do the most of it, would pay the most are not gonna do it. Because the government's trying to break up.

• 1:29:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Nilay Patel?

  So like literally, they're trying to break up Google.

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  Google has to sell Chrome, but can have TikTok. It's like a very funny outcome.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  It's nuts. All right. On to the next one. This is a new segment that you're gonna have to get used to in the Vergecast for the next four years. I'm just calling it Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:30:06David Pierce?

  Ooh, it's a podcast within a podcast.

• 1:30:09Nilay Patel?

  He's a moron. He is, he is a total political hack job with no conviction and no morals. That's my belief. Brendan, if you're listening, you can come on Decoder and you can try to prove me wrong, but good luck, buddy.

• 1:30:22David Pierce?

  He doesn't even have a cool mug. Like, if you're gonna be terrible at this job, at least like have a funny mug.

• 1:30:27Nilay Patel?

  You know, Ajit Pai, he was a guy. He was also a character in the first Trump administration. He had a governor, like he, there was a line of depravity that he would not cross.

• 1:30:40David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:30:41Nilay Patel?

  Like you could be like, I disagree with this irritatingly Verizon captured conservative Republican commissioner. Brendan is just a political animal.

• 1:30:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Nilay Patel?

  Here are two examples this week, and they're just gonna happen every week because the man loves attention.

• 1:30:59Nilay Patel?

  He is rolling back a rule that allowed people who live in apartment buildings to go get their own internet service. So like a lot of apartment buildings, your landlord would be like, I'm just going to sign everybody up for whatever ISP, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, whatever. And all of you have to use it and you can't go get your own. And because I have collected this all up together, I'm going to get a deal. Right? We have, we have some scale. And the ISPs, if you've experienced this, you're like, I don't, what? It's just the same number as everything else, right? You're not getting a deal. You're just being lazy, or you're getting a kickback from the ISP and you're not passing any of that on, like, this was my experience in an apartment in Chicago, it was my experience in an apartment

• 1:31:44Nilay Patel?

  in New York, like, a lot of people have had this experience. Biden FCC passes a rule says you cannot do bulk billing, you have to increase competition and let people sign up for their own ISPs in apartments. Brendan Carr has revoked this rule and his argument is this will lower prices.

• 1:32:01David Pierce?

  Which just on its face doesn't make any sense. It's one of those things that like, I, I can't even make the bad faith argument that that makes sense. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Here's a quote, "I have ended the FCC's consideration of a Biden-era proposal that could have increased costs by 50% the price that some Americans live in apartments pay for internet service. This is regulatory overreach and it would have artificially raised the cost of internet service. There is not a world in which letting people choose their service provider raises the price."

• 1:32:29David Pierce?

  There's a, I mean, you could choose the more expensive one.

• 1:32:31Nilay Patel?

  In which you live in an apartment that, building that's so big, you have a landlord that's so good, that maybe they were negotiating a terrific rate. I don't know anybody who lives in an apartment.

• 1:32:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, no. There's, there's one of those in America, and that's the one that Nekkar is talking about.

• 1:32:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just, I'm like, what this doing by a political animal? Like, he's straight up saying reducing your experience of broadband competition will lower prices.

• 1:32:58David Pierce?

  It's ridiculous. All right, what was the other one? You said there were two.

• 1:33:01Nilay Patel?

  Pure double speak. All right. Uh, well, there's two, actually. There's two other ones. Uh, the, uh, the second one is he's reopened investigations into NBC, ABC and CBS's broadcast licenses. Very complicated because the stations have them, not the networks, but so goes. Um, and in particular, he opened up the NBC one because he says they violated the equal time rule by having Kamala Harris on, and Tim Kaine on Saturday Night Live.

• 1:33:26David Pierce?

  Oh, right.

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember this?

• 1:33:28David Pierce?

  This was like last fall that he got all fussy about it.

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:33:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  So on her way out the door, uh, Biden's FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, just like wipes out these investigations. She's like, these are stupid. I know they're politically motivated. We're not doing this. Uh, he's reopened them.

• 1:33:43Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. You can say whatever about two of them. They're, they're dumb, but in particular, the NBC one, he knows that NBC complied with the rule because he has emailed people and said that they have. This is such a brazen lie. Right? He's like, they had her on, they complied with the rule. Here's their notice and then immediately had Trump on a NASCAR race the next day because they gave the proper notice and the campaign took advantage of it. He know, I know he knows it because I've seen the email. And he's reopened it to be like, I'm investigating, like this is just total political theater.

• 1:34:21David Pierce?

  It's just yelling.

• 1:34:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And this is dangerous First Amendment territory. I don't like this speech, so I will cost you money is not what you want. Any government, it doesn't matter if you like Kamala Harris, you love Donald Trump, you hate one, you love, it doesn't matter. Unelected bureaucrat saying, I will cost this money. I will make this painful because I don't like your political speech is red flashing warning light of free speech problems.

• 1:34:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Nilay Patel?

  And then on top of that, just as we sat down to record, Carr announced investigations into NPR and PBS.

• 1:34:55David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:34:55Nilay Patel?

  Because he says they are illegally advertising and what he specifically means is that they do fundraisers. And so his line is taxpayer should not pay for commercial activity. And then, you know, the usual garbage about woke Sesame Street.

• 1:35:11David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:35:11Nilay Patel?

  Or woke NPR. He's attacking NPR in particular because the CEO of NPR is Catherine Marr, who used to run Wikipedia and the conservatives hate Wikipedia right now. And so this is just Brendan Carr trying to chill speech. Right? He's like, I will defund PBS and NPR because they, because I've constructed a legal reality in which them doing fundraising drives or saying we're supported by viewers like you call us to give us money is advertising for an agenda.

• 1:35:40David Pierce?

  Right. And all of that is transparently nonsense. But it maybe doesn't matter because he's in charge of the

• 1:35:45Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't matter in, in like the alternate reality of X where this man is trying to build a profile. And I'm like, if he Brendan, I know you pay attention to us. You have for years. You want to come on Decoder and explain this like craven political bullshit when you are playing with the absolute fire of the First Amendment and claiming you're doing it. Come on, I'll talk to you. But it's not gonna, it's not gonna be easy because I think this stuff is incredibly transparent.

• 1:36:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. I also, this is not important in the scheme of things, but like, if you find yourself against Sesame Street, like in any way, business, politics, like if you're canceling Sesame Street or you're mad at it, like you've done something wrong. Like just, it's not good. You shouldn't be against Sesame Street. That's, that's it. That's all I have to say. Sesame Street is great.

• 1:36:33Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty straightforward.

• 1:36:34David Pierce?

  Leave Sesame Street alone.

• 1:36:36Nilay Patel?

  I will stop. It's lightning round. We gotta move on.

• 1:36:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh, but I have another super fun, deeply craven political speech thing. Do you want to talk about it real fast?

• 1:36:43Nilay Patel?

  Love it. My favorite.

• 1:36:44David Pierce?

  Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle the, the Trump suit over suspending his account after January 6th, uh, which is just like in a sea of Mark Zuckerberg nakedly sucking up to Trump for business reasons. This is the simplest one yet. Like, here's a bunch of money. Please be nice. And then there was some reporting that, uh, Trump was basically like, I think what he said is like, we have to settle This lawsuit before I can like bring you into the into the fold. I think he called it the nest into the nest. And it's just like this. This was the price of admission, right? Like this is what happened at the inauguration. They all spent a bunch of money to hang out with him and go to parties and he would say nice things.

• 1:37:27David Pierce?

  And and now Meta is just spending another $25 million to make Donald Trump like them because that is worth it.

• 1:37:34Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say why this one is like particularly galling to me? Meta would have definitely won. Right? The theory of this case is that Meta, when it banned Donald Trump, was somehow the government and that violated Trump's First Amendment rights.

• 1:37:52David Pierce?

  Right. Which is nonsense.

• 1:37:54Nilay Patel?

  Which is nonsense for the very simple reason that the president at the time Meta banned Trump from its platform was Trump.

• 1:38:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06David Pierce?

  He was the government. It turns out, yeah.

• 1:38:08Nilay Patel?

  He was super the government. Like you don't even have to get to the like pedantic forum stuff of like the First Amendment is about the government, not slash. Like I can do that all day. I was I was raised in that fire. I'm just saying this one is particularly stupid because like Meta acting on orders from the government who was me illegally banned.

• 1:38:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Nilay Patel?

  It's so stupid. He's lost other versions of this case. But this, this is everyone is doing. There's other cases that he would have. ABC settled one, Disney, ABC settled one. They're just trying to get out of the line of fire because he controls the regulatory agencies.

• 1:38:46David Pierce?

  All these companies have decided it's worth the money. And the thing is, they're they're right, right? Like I would say pretty transparently, you can make the case that this is just a good use of $25 million for Meta, which is

• 1:38:59Nilay Patel?

  This is a sneeze.

• 1:39:00David Pierce?

  Has a lot of complicated cases going on. There are anti-trust questions about Meta. Trump has threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail a bunch of times. Like, I can see why you write this check. It just sucks. Like, it just sucks so much that this is the state of things right now.

• 1:39:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, yeah, the FTC is going to try that their antitrust case to break up Meta is coming. The various teen health cases about Instagram causing mental health crises across the country. They're all coming up. You can, if you have an angry Trump who's like, break him up. And you can get out of that for $25 billion? Yeah, yes, there's a ruthless cynicism here.

• 1:39:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Nilay Patel?

  But man, we are, I'm, we are just playing with fire with the First Amendment right now. Like, left and right.

• 1:39:43David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:39:44Nilay Patel?

  We are doing weird speech regulations and claiming to do them in the name of free speech. Weird, super weird.

• 1:39:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta end with a happy one.

• 1:39:53David Pierce?

  Blue Sky.

• 1:39:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56David Pierce?

  I'm happy Blue Sky's working. I have, I'm all in on Blue Sky. I was-

• 1:40:00Nilay Patel?

  Wait, just the concept of Blue Sky?

• 1:40:01David Pierce?

  Blue Sky now has 30 million users.

• 1:40:03Nilay Patel?

  There you go. It's like, there's news, right? Not just, not just like, I logged into Blue Sky.

• 1:40:07David Pierce?

  It's growing. Threads is much bigger. Threads continues to add a million people a day. It has, uh, 320 million is the number Mark Zuckerberg gave on the earnings call this week. That's a gigantic number.

• 1:40:22David Pierce?

  But Blue Sky, Blue Sky's the fun one now. I think we can say pretty-

• 1:40:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26David Pierce?

  Certainly that like, Blue Sky has replaced Twitter as the place that is fun to hang out. And it is true, it's a bunch of like liberals being annoying to each other.

• 1:40:35Nilay Patel?

  Super annoying.

• 1:40:36David Pierce?

  But in addition to that-

• 1:40:37Nilay Patel?

  This is a group of people that does not love jokes.

• 1:40:39David Pierce?

  No. Yes.

• 1:40:41Nilay Patel?

  At least that's why.

• 1:40:42David Pierce?

  Yes, but like, A, I'm psyched that there are multiple versions of this thing that are succeeding. Uh, I think it would have been a bummer if we had just replaced Twitter with one thing. The fact that there are a few different cuts at this that are gonna work is really exciting. Mark Zuckerberg also made noise about wanting to make the OG Facebook experience come back, which, that's not gonna happen. Like, sorry, Mark, you ruined that 15 years ago. But like, Blue Sky, man, Blue Sky, I think, has hit like, escape velocity in that this thing is gonna work. And it's here. People are building stuff on the protocol. People like using the app. It's coming. Yeah.

• 1:41:19David Pierce?

  I don't remember what, but they're doing it.

• 1:41:22Nilay Patel?

  I would say, I, I'm a Blue Sky person. My harshest criticism of Blue Sky is, for all the promises of that protocol and how open it is, uh, there's not one other server.

• 1:41:32David Pierce?

  No, there's not. But there are people building, somebody built a cool, Blue Sky-y app that just looks like Instagram, and it just takes photo posts. Like, that's cool. That's the Fediverse, baby. Give me weird ideas about how to look at Blue Sky. I'm in.

• 1:41:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's all just like API, front-end views.

• 1:41:48David Pierce?

  Listen-

• 1:41:48Nilay Patel?

  I want one other place to log in.

• 1:41:50David Pierce?

  One thing at a time, man.

• 1:41:51Nilay Patel?

  I wanna post, maybe that's gonna be the first-

• 1:41:53David Pierce?

  You said good news. Let's end on good news.

• 1:41:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, good news.

• 1:41:55David Pierce?

  We're happy.

• 1:41:56Nilay Patel?

  The Fediverse is, uh, around.

• 1:42:02Nilay Patel?

  I like it. I do like it. I do love an open source weird pebble hack. And I do love a weird band of misfit decentralized social media hackers. That's the good stuff. Hell, yeah. That's the rebel stuff. Well, you know, the bad thing happens. That's what we want. Send us more. This is your, send us more weird rebel technology. Right? That stuff. That's your, that's your homework for this week and we'll play the voice most nights. Love it. All right. That's it. We got, we're way over time. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:42:38Nilay Patel?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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