OpenAI has a Studio Ghibli problem

In this episode, we do a Studio Ghibli-like rendition of The Vergecast. First, Nilay and David discuss some big news in the gadget world, from the mysteriously viral midrange Canon camera to the upgrades we're expecting out of Apple in the next few months. Plus, is it over for Amazon's Echo brand? After all that, The Verge's Kylie Robison joins the show to discuss everything happening at OpenAI: the company launched a new image generator inside of ChatGPT, and it immediately became both a huge hit and a big mess. (Par for the course with OpenAI, really.) Kylie also explains why Perplexity is probably not buying TikTok, no matter how much it might want to. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for everyone's favorite segment, Brendan Carr Is a Dummy, followed by the latest on the Signal attack-planning chaos in the government, some news about Elon Musk pressuring Reddit CEO Steve Huffmann, and what's next for the car industry with huge tariffs looming. Oh, and a little bit of exciting e-bike news Further reading: From Meta: Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook Apple’s AirPods Max with USB-C will soon support lossless audio The Apple Watch may get cameras and Apple Intelligence Apple’s WWDC 2025 event starts June 9th Don’t expect an overhauled Messages app in iOS 19. Amazon tests renaming Echo smart speakers and smart displays to just ‘Alexa’ OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus OpenAI upgrades image generation and rolls it out in ChatGPT and Sora ChatGPT’s new image generator is delayed for free users ChatGPT is turning everything into Studio Ghibli art OpenAI says ‘our GPUs are melting’ as it limits ChatGPT image generation requests OpenAI expects to earn $12.7 billion in revenue this year. Nvidia Infinite Creative Microsoft adds ‘deep reasoning’ Copilot AI for research and data analysis Google says its new ‘reasoning’ Gemini AI models are the best ones yet Google is rolling out Gemini’s real-time AI video features Perplexity’s bid for TikTok continues Trump's FCC says it will start investigating Disney, too From Status: Sounding the Carr Alarm Trump officials leaked a military strike in a Signal group chat The Atlantic releases strike group chat messages And the Most Tortured Signal-Gate Backronym Award goes to… | The Verge Elon Musk pressured Reddit’s CEO on content moderation | The Verge Trump’s plans to save TikTok may fail to keep it online, Democrats warn Rivian spins out secret e-bike lab into a new company called Also BYD beats Tesla. Trump says he will impose a 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles 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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• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast with viral cameras from five years ago.

• 1:37David Pierce?

  This has all made me feel really good because the only camera I have is from like 2012. It's a Sony A6000, and it sucks. And I'm like, give it 18 more months and this is going to be the camera everybody wants.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. First of all, I want to point out that everyone thought I was going to make a joke about Signal. Right? You all thought it. I said the flagship podcast of, and you all thought of something, right? Adding somebody to a group chat. You all thought it, and I went another way. And I just want to take the credit for that. We're going to talk about Signal later in the show.

• 2:08David Pierce?

  Do you have any good I've been added to a group chat stories?

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  I have a good, I didn't know how deleting a message worked. So like I, this is a long time ago. Actually, this is a really good story.

• 2:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  A long time ago, the night before Uber fired Travis Kalanick from this, from being the CEO. Do you remember this? It was like a big deal. Everyone heard about it. I can't, I got a message from, let's just say a dancer.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  And the dancer said, there's a VC crying in my lap right now because they're going to fire Travis Kalanick.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  And I had, what am I going to do with this? Like, right? I'm like, this is weird. Like, can you take a picture? Like, this is a true story, 100% true story. And so I went to Slack, our transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, being like, I think dudes, I think it's going to happen. Like, here's, we, all this noise is happening and I just got this insane message.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  And in the middle of that, I accidentally texted her what I meant to text Andy. And I went to delete it and it doesn't, it didn't delete, right? Because it deletes like locally, so you can hide your cheating from like your wife. But the person who got the message to last.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  I thought I was being so smart. I was like, oh, I deleted it. And later, like, the, the person was like, did you? Please don't, please don't mention my name in this one. I was like, I don't have the story. That's, we don't know. It's, this is all years later. We, we did not have the story. I had a single source. The next morning, it turned out to be true. But, you know, we have standards here. We need multiple sources to run a story of that nature. And so we could, I, so I knew it. And the next morning I was like, god damn it.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  Does our ethics policy cover how many dancers have to corroborate the VC crying in their lap before it's reportable journalism?

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  This was also, this was happening, like, it's 7:00 PM East Coast time.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  Right? So it was like, I had to, I had to call, like, everyone was home. So like, I need you to walk away from your children. I need to tell you a story about a text. It was like, what are you talking? So we chased it for a while. And then the next morning it happened. And I was like, I should have done something that I couldn't for it was to do. That's my, that's my texting fail story.

• 4:26David Pierce?

  Good stuff. I like that. I don't really have a good one, to be honest. I have, I've had a lot of very near misses. Uh, most of mine are actually more dangerous in Slack than in messages. Where, uh, in Slack, everything looks the same. And I have sent, I have almost sent like truly alarming things to the person I was talking shit about.

• 4:48David Pierce?

  And I don't think I have ever actually done it. And it's a real like there, but for the grace of God, kind of situation, watching all of this unfold. Like, is it, is it out of the realm of possibility that I have accidentally invited the editor in chief of the Atlantic to a group chat? It's not, but luckily I never have.

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  The thing that gets me the most often is, um, clipboard fails. Where I hit, I paste and I hit return, like before I verify that I pasted the thing I want to paste. And that happens to me all the time, like just random sentences from old documents just show up.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  For me, it's always, it's always a really, it's always a link I didn't mean to post. Like I, I copied the, the wrong tab out of Chrome instead of the right one. Uh, and so I'm like, hey, here's a cool thing we should do. And then it's just like a, a weird like cheat code for a video game that I should not be thinking about at work. Uh, it's good times.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  This happens to me all the time with TikTok, which is my segue.

• 5:42David Pierce?

  Ooh, okay.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? Cause I'm always like, I want to share TikTok, but I always have to double check. It's not a totally bananas TikTok.

• 5:49David Pierce?

  Right. There's a real, like, you have to watch the whole thing through just in case.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is this creator secretly like a milkshake duck situation? It's like a real thing. So here's the mystery I want to start with, which explains the joke at the top of the show. My TikTok feed for the past three days has just been people talking about the Canon G7X Mark III. And this, to me, this is a gadget mystery. So Canon G7X Mark III is a camera from 2019.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  It's just old. It is an old camera.

• 6:20David Pierce?

  Oh, I remember this camera.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just, it's a G7. Like, you know, there's the RX 100, which I talk about on the show all the time because I have one and its competitor is sort of the G7X, but like they're different. Whatever.

• 6:32David Pierce?

  It's got a pop-up flash. It's fun. Yeah.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this thing is apparently mega popular with influencers and people want to take better pictures. They are all taking flash photos with it, which is bonkers, but that's what they're doing. And it is selling out every day. Like, I have gotten TikTok videos from people who are like, here's how to get a G7X Mark III, or even a Mark II, which is even older. And the answer is like, wait up until 5:00 AM until Target restocks its online, like a PS5 drop.

• 7:04David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  So we've assigned this story, the virtue, I think it's Alison Johnson's like, working on what, what's happening here? Like, why, why is the G7X Mark III a camera, again, from 2019? Why is it going viral and why isn't Canon making enough of them?

• 7:19David Pierce?

  The second question I think is super fascinating. Uh, the macro mystery of this is, is pretty straightforward, right? This, this like resurgence in digital cameras and point and shoots in particular, uh, is a thing, right? We're in this very like, turn of the century nostalgia moment in so much of culture and like crappy pre-Instagram photos are like, the thing everybody wants, which is very funny because they're bad. But that is like, there's something in that look that a lot of people are after. And so we've talked about this before with like, there was a run on like the Nikon Coolpix from 2004 for a long time. But it's very weird that it's this particular camera.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Nikon Coolpix is like very cheap. This is an $800 camera normally. And right now, the secondary market or the demand for it is so high that on Amazon, it's like over $1,000.

• 8:14David Pierce?

  Well, that's the thing. It's weird that it's like, this would actually make more sense to me if this camera was from 2009 than from 2019. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's, it doesn't satisfy the, this is a sort of pre-internet digital camera and that's fun to play with, with my high school friends. It's also too expensive to in like for $1,500 you can buy a way better camera than the G7X. Like do not let TikTok lie to you. You can do much, much better than a G7X Mark III. So it is, it's very strange to me that it is this camera in particular that people are obsessed with.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  It is a phenomenon.

• 8:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh, it really is.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  We looked at an unboxing TikTok that has almost a million likes.

• 8:53David Pierce?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  Of a five-year-old camera and this unboxing was just recently posted. So I don't know what's going on. If you know what's going on, this is a gadget mystery, like I said, we're reporting on it. We're going to, you know, talk to people who are using it and figure out if Target is actually restocking like six G7X Mark III's at 5:00 AM every morning, which is just deeply hilarious. So we're poking at it. If you know anything or you have one, or you're, you know, just like foaming at the mouth trying to get a five-year-old camera, like let us know. Hit up the, hit up the hotline, send us an email. Like I'm sort of very curious about it. Cause you're right. Sometimes old gadgets come back and certainly cameras go through these waves.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like X100s, this is a thing. Like it's hard to get them, but those are kind of bleeding edge. They're hard to manufacture. This is a five-year-old camera that Canon should just be able to fart out at will.

• 9:45David Pierce?

  And if memory serves, this was not like a set the world on fire kind of camera. Like the X100 makes sense to me, right? That is like an unusual camera with a particular style that people really gravitate to. Like that, I fully understand. Even like the RX100 was like the first of this kind of thing. And so it got a lot of shine for it and they've had, God, what, seven or eight revs of that thing since like.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  I honestly think, I think one of the answers why the Canon is succeeding right now is it's impossible to understand which RX100 to buy. They sell all of them at once and then the ZV1s also exist right next to them, which are the same camera in a shittier case for cheaper with better video features. And none of that makes sense to anyone. And the only differences between like the four and the five and the six and the seven is like focal lengths of lenses. And so like any normal person just like looks at the available set of RX 100s and is like, nope. And then someone's like, have you thought about the G7 X? And it's like, right there.

• 10:41David Pierce?

  Like, thank God I'll have it.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  This is way simpler than whatever Sony's doing. Anyway, it's a mystery. It I will. I drove our team crazy with this mystery this week because I was like, why is this camera going viral? And then I've already had all these reactions, but we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it. We're gonna figure out the story. Let us know. It's like a culture story. It's not a tech story.

• 10:59David Pierce?

  So there is, I should just say before we move on that like, there's a, there's a sort of truism in journalism that like news is whatever your editor cares about that day. There's a real thing that happens in our Slack in particular, where Neel I will just parachute in after hanging out on TikTok for an hour and be like, the kids are into this. What's that about? And it brings up some of my very favorite stories that we do.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  As you can imagine, my TikTok for you algorithm is ludicrous. It's like trucks jumping over stuff. We're doing a story on like AI image enhancers. So now it's just weird AI porn that makes me feel bad about myself. Like, literally, like, we've done searches for some of these tools that are available. And I'm just sending some of the worst shit in the world to these songs. So that's really bad. And then it's like, like five year old cameras that have gone viral. I need to reset my algorithm. Maybe they're gonna ban it in time for me to regain some semblance of identity.

• 11:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, what you need is for it to go dark. New algorithm, new Neel I. Just start it all over.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  I want to be a different person. I just, I'd like to get back to trucks jumping over stuff, please.

• 12:04David Pierce?

  That feels good.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  It's gone. All right. There's actual gadget news this week, not just five year old mysteries. What's on with Facebook, which is also in an identity crisis? Have I told you my, my deepest theory of Meta as a company right now?

• 12:19David Pierce?

  No.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Which is Mark Zuckerberg just desperately wants to be Elon Musk.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like Elon has everything Mark wants. Like, he's got the president. He gets to say stuff whenever he wants. And people are scared of him. He's got fans, like actual fans. He's the rockets and cars guy, whether you like the rockets and cars or not. Like, some people perceive him to be deeply evil, and some people perceive him to be ruling the world. And Mark Zuckerberg just has like. A gold chain and mostly people yelling at him and I don't think he has the other set of things.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  That's interesting and he is, I mean, it's a funny segue into Facebook because like going all the way back to the beginning of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has always been like big and powerful, but never cool. Like even when Facebook ruled the world, Twitter was cooler. It was like culturally central in a way that Facebook never was.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Twitter was cooler, Instagram was cool, but Instagram had distance.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I weirdly, I don't think people associate Mark with Instagram the same way. Like, do you remember, this was years ago at this point, so I'm sure it's different now, but there was a pretty strong subset of people in a study that they did that had no idea that Facebook owned Instagram.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, we did that, we did that, that was us.

• 13:32David Pierce?

  Oh, that was us, there you go. Cool.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Ages ago.

• 13:34David Pierce?

  It's a good study, love that. But that is like, I don't think, I don't think he got the shine from Instagram in the way that he would have wanted to. And so, and there was a minute where he was like, he thought threads was gonna make him really shiny and then he was like, I'm gonna be a personality and then Elon Musk just ate all of that airspace completely out away from him. That's a good theory. I feel like if I'm Mark, I want that less and less every single day, but I don't know.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the baggage of that is enormous, right?

• 14:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  But you kind of look at a bunch of these moves. We'll talk about what they're doing with Facebook, the blue app proper. But you're like, oh man, a lot of this is like positioning him as an inventor. Or like the product person, not the guy who just steals all the ideas from Snapchat. All right, what are they doing with Facebook?

• 14:22David Pierce?

  So it was, was it last fall or earlier this year that Mark first was like, we want to get back to OG Facebook. We want to bring back the thing that makes Facebook great, which is people hanging out with their friends. That was a long time ago. I'm not sure that was ever actually what made Facebook great. But that was like, there is that, that is the perception of old Facebook and they're making the first turn of that now, which is essentially they've added a tab to Facebook. So far, at least for me, it's just in the mobile app, not on the website. That is just your friends and it gets rid of all of the other, you know, publications and AI slap and all of the like recommended crap that is all over everybody's feeds now.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  And is designed to just be, it's literally called a friends tab. And it is designed to just be the people you are friends with on Facebook. Which for me is a very funny experience because none of my friends on Facebook are still using Facebook, except the people who need it for like branding reasons.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:22David Pierce?

  Like it's if you wanna like be an influencer on Facebook, you keep posting to Facebook. So I like, I have a few friends who are like outing themselves with like many, you know, large albums of photos of them and their family at Disney World. But other than that, my friends tab is totally dead. But this is like, this is the first turn in, I think, trying to make Facebook in particular, the thing it was a long time ago. And I'm just not convinced, A, that's gonna work and B, that's even possible. Like it just feels like we've left that idea of like, I'm hanging out with my friends on a social network. We left that behind a long time ago, didn't we?

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  I think we did, but this is, this is, by the way, I'm gonna relate this to Elon. Elon made X into whatever cesspool it is, but it is very influential in its tiny sphere. I actually believe that X is less influential outside of its sphere. Like it used to be influential in culture. It used to be influential in sports media. It used to be influential in tech. Now it's kind of influential in MAGA politics and that's it.

• 16:26David Pierce?

  But it is very influential in that world.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  It is, it is expanded its influence in one way and reduced it in another way. And that's a trade and you can have a lot of feelings about that trade. And I certainly do, but it is a trade. You can just look at it and evaluate it however you want. But people are posting to it.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like that's a still a thing that's happening.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Like people are posting to it, they're sharing stuff. It is not a creator platform and like it has creator platform dynamics. It doesn't have any revenue. So it's like, it hasn't been gamed quite in that way. Facebook is turned into a creator platform. This is what you're saying about people acting like influencers on it.

• 17:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Like it's all pages. Most of the individual activity happens in groups, like every school, every parents group at every school is on Facebook in groups. And no one's just like posting their regular stuff. And so this turn back to, oh, I just want people to share with their friends is like, it's a product decision, but it's also a where do you post decision? Like where should this stuff live? And I, I, you get the sense that like, if Facebook turns into Yahoo email lists.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  That's the end of that, you know, like,

• 17:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  If it's just where people go to complain about their car, like I'm in a lot of car groups on Facebook and it's just people being like, the tires fell off my car. Did this happen to anyone else?

• 17:45David Pierce?

  And that's the thing Facebook, I think, is desperately trying to rectify here, right? Like, groups is still hugely successful. Marketplace, by all accounts, is hugely successful. But the like core Facebook thing is just kind of gone. And I feel like for me, I think I'm me plus like plus or minus four years, I would say. So like sort of our age range and a little younger was like, that was the Facebook generation, right? Like, there are albums that I posted that are just like 125 pictures of me drunk because I took every picture on my camera and put it on Facebook and tagged all my friends. And that was like peak Facebook.

• 18:25David Pierce?

  That's gone. Like, we learned the hard way that that is a terrible way to interact online with our friends and that there are all kinds of problems that come with that. And that like the whole idea of sort of harmless, low stakes, hanging out with your friends on Facebook is just wrong. Younger generations never learned that in the first place, right? Like, they they gravitated to Snapchat because stuff disappears, because it doesn't stick around, because it is this like ephemeral thing. Group chats have become really important. Like, to me, the the very idea of like posting what I'm doing that day on Facebook so my friends can see it just feels weird now. Like, I don't, that muscle is gone, and I don't think it's ever coming back for people.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  And that's why I remember I just like turning this product knob, like wanting to be influential in this specific way. You can see that it's getting away from, like Threads is not that platform. They lost to Blue Sky in a very real way. They have a much bigger number, more people are using it because they're juiced against their entire graph. But like, Blue Sky is where a whole conversation is happening. X is where a whole conversation is happening.

• 19:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  Instagram is a creator platform. Like, I don't, I know lots of regular people who just like do stories or whatever, but the vast majority of the content is creators doing stuff that gets shared into a group chat or a DM, and then that's that's the action there. So you just see like, oh, these platforms are really big, but they're losing influence in a very specific way. And I'm telling you, there's there's jealousy there that I think is. You can just see it. He really needs the metaverse to work.

• 19:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I buy it. And I think what's weird about Facebook is it seemed like Facebook's fate was to be sort of the, the overall repository for everything, right? Like you make a reel on Instagram and it accrues back to Facebook and becomes a thing, but you didn't make it for Facebook.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:10David Pierce?

  Threads posts show up on Instagram and Facebook. So it was like Facebook became this thing with a huge, kind of unengaged user base that is doing other stuff on the platform and then you just show them a bunch of content. And that, it's not an exciting product, but as a product strategy actually kind of makes sense to me. And so the only reason I can think that this friends thing is so important is because it's important to Mark for exactly the reasons you're describing. It's like, it is, it is the thing people like about Facebook.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:38David Pierce?

  Not the thing that people tolerate in order to get to marketplace. And like, especially as they, they continue to promote AI stuff all over the feed, they continue to juice engagement and publisher stuff, like the, the, they have to have something that people like about being on Facebook, or it's just going to keep getting worse. And it really does feel like this is Mark in particular saying, this is what I want back. It's like, he is nostalgic for this thing so he can build it into Facebook.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to start posting AI. I slapped all my friends. I'm just gonna AI generate some new children. Here they are. First day of school for my AI-generated baby.

• 21:15David Pierce?

  That would, that would do numbers.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Huge engagement. Did I mention this last week? Last week there was the Nvidia conference, we talked about it a little bit, and there was one segment in it that I think will form the basis of yet more editor in chief assigning stories in Slack, because you saw it.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  But Nvidia is part of their conference demoed, uh, this thing that I've been calling infinite creative. I think they actually titled it infinite creative. Um, do you know ad agencies make creative? Right? That's, that's what Mad Men does. They're like, here's an ad, like here's the ad, the creative of an ad. And the creative in that is like made of components. It's made of photos of the product. It's made of tagline and copy. And then there's targeting. Right? So like you send it, you open Facebook Ads Manager and you're like 18 to 35 year old men who like shampoo, get them. Right? Like it shows people those ads. Nvidia demoed infinite creative. So they, the AI generate the shampoo bottle, then the AI

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  generate the copy, the AI generate the tagline, the AI generate the photo shoot of the shampoo bottle. And then they, when you say target these people, it starts remixing all of the elements in an infinite way until it starts converting. So everyone gets their own ad. And if you thought AI slop on Facebook was bad now, wait until there's real money behind it. And it's already here. Like there, this is why these big companies like Google and Meta in particular are chasing AI video generation so hard.

• 22:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Because that's the promise is as you're scrolling, an AI generated video ad will pop up that's perfectly targeted to you. And then you will buy the shampoo.

• 22:49David Pierce?

  I, I wonder a lot about whether that actually becomes the thing that sort of viscerally turns everybody against ad targeting. Uh, cause until now it's been like, you know, we're going to serve you better ads. And I think-

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Until now, it's been, are you listening to me?

• 23:06David Pierce?

  Well, fair. Uh, but like the, the promise of ad targeting is we will, we will send you an ad for something you want instead of something you don't, right? Which is fine. Um, I don't think people actually want that, but like, if you're going to serve me an ad, serve me a good one. Sure. But the idea of like an ad coming up in my feed that's like, hey, David, do you want these shoes? That's-

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 23:25David Pierce?

  frightening. And like that, that makes a thing plain to people in a way that I think has not been clear before. Like that is all the data about me that you have being spoken aloud to me. And that feels really different from, oh, this ad is a thing I like.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  Do you know what I mean? There's, it connects different neurons somehow in a, in a way that I think might backfire.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  I would just argue that it already has. Ad targeting either works so well that you think Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you, or it works so poorly that it shows you an ad for something you've already bought. There's no middle ground. That's everyone's experience to, with advertising today. Right? And most people think Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you. And it's like, well, not really, because you, you bought those shoes and he was like, show him more shoes.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't think he's listening to you closely enough. But sure, like, he's listening to you. This is gonna turn the he's listening knob all the way.

• 24:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  All the way up to not only is he listening to me, he's talking back to me.

• 24:29David Pierce?

  Right. Mark Zuckerberg is in my house.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And maybe, you know, and you make all the arguments for why they're not listening. Like, Apple would never allow it. It's actually easier to do the data fusion about what Wi-Fi network you were on, at what time and what location, because you're not as special as you think, which is really the core argument to they're not listening to you is you're not as special as you think you are.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, every other 18-year-old in this city Googled these shoes at this time. We just guessed that you probably did too. And that's, that's the heart of the argument is it's simpler to guess and be right some of the time. This is gonna be something else entirely. And then all the cost curves have, but Nvidia did demo Infinite Creative. TikTok has demoed variations on Infinite Creative. It's coming. And I, I think some of this push to do friends again is very much, we need more surface area for these experiments that is out of the creator's end.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  They need people to look at their feeds again. And if I'm in, if I'm in Marketplace and groups, I'm not looking at my feeds. That's like, it's, it's a real thing.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. It's, uh, I think we're gonna do a lot of stories on this stuff over the coming year, but you, well, I'll, I'll link, I'll put a link to this TikTok in the show notes. How's that? Just like everyone else can experience the absolute insanity of my TikTok feed, we'll do it in the show notes.

• 25:45David Pierce?

  By 2027, we're gonna have a version of this podcast that is individualized to every single person who listens to it.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  That is the dream.

• 25:52David Pierce?

  Sick.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  That's our final subscription tier is. For $5 million a year, David will just call you.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  Just make you a podcast.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, there's actual gadget news, some, some little stuff, a bunch of Apple stuff, really. AirPods Max with the USB C, they're updating it to support lossless audio, which is way overdue. Like way, way overdue and they're going to cut some latency down. I have no idea why this took so long.

• 26:18David Pierce?

  It is a strange one and uh the AirPods Max for me kind of goes in the category of products that Apple seems to forget about for years at a time. It's like the Mac Pro, the AirPods Max, the iPad Mini. It's just like every, every 18 months, the company forgets it exists and it's like, oh crap, we should do something with that. And here we are. Uh, but yeah, this one, they, they put back wired playback through USB C when they switched to the connector. They dropped wired playback, which I had forgotten about and was so weird at the time. You just couldn't play audio over a wire, like just weird stuff. But now that's back. So that's good. And like you said, super low latency stuff.

• 26:56David Pierce?

  And when we were hearing rumblings about there maybe being an announcement along these lines, I was like, oh my God, are we going to get new AirPods Max? I, I want them and that's very exciting. And what's interesting about this is this suggests to me that Apple is pretty happy with the hardware of the AirPods Max. And it's like this, this is very much like a meaningful software update on top of a piece of hardware. They have no intention of updating imminently.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  So I want to be clear here, the lossless audio is only if you use the cable. Like I've

• 27:31David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, that's true.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  And so you get 24 bit, 48 kilohertz lossless audio. You get personalized spatial audio, musicians can now mix in it using these headphones. But you have to use the cable, which is wild because Apple owns their Bluetooth stack. They own the chips on both sides of this. These headphones cost $550. What are we doing?

• 27:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing?

• 27:53David Pierce?

  Did you also see, the real reason I wanted to talk about it is I wanted to see if you had seen the new USB C to 3.5 millimeter cable that Apple is selling.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  It's very nice.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  It's $40.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 28:05David Pierce?

  So for four, for, for $40, you can approximate having a headphone jack again. Congratulations to you.

• 28:13David Pierce?

  And it is, it is 1.2 meters, which is what, like four feet? You can just have a four foot long adapter cable. I think this is just for airplanes, right? Isn't that, this is just for plugging into the, the seat back thing.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  This is the thing you need for everything, for all these new features. So you're going to plug this in your Mac and do lossless personalized spatial audio mixing.

• 28:35David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm calling this right now iPhone 17 headphone jack is back.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we, there was an entire like blue sky kerfuffle about the headphone jack being in tritification. I was like, I wrote about this to the iPhone seven. Like, this has always been what's coming. They've compressed the audio and now pendulum swing back and people are like, what if my music sounded good? And the answer is dongle town. That's just the way it goes. And it's weird. And the bad thing happened. I made a prediction when I wrote that piece, taking the headphone jack off of phones as you draw some stupid, which Apple hated at the time. I want to be very clear about this.

• 29:12David Pierce?

  One of your better headlines.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  It was. It was very direct. But my prediction was that we'd get DRM audio where only approved headphones would work with certain streaming services. That did not happen. What did happen is arguably weirder and worse, which is that every phone works best with the headphones from the same company. Right? So Pixelbuds work best with the Pixel, Galaxy Buds work best with your Samsung phone, AirPods work best with your Apple phone, and then they all have weird proprietary extensions like spatial audio head tracking. And that is arguably worse than here are some headphones that have the DRM chip for Spotify and we're all, maybe it's not, maybe, maybe, maybe it's all just equally bad. But that, I got

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  my prediction wrong in that way. But the thing happened where the headphone market contracted.

• 29:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  And now everyone's kind of has ecosystem lock in on headphones.

• 30:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, it is just purely platform based now, which is, which is a weird outcome.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:08David Pierce?

  In a lot of ways.

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of ecosystem lock in, there's some Apple Watch rumors. What's going on here?

• 30:13David Pierce?

  So we've been talking a lot about AI gadgets in general. And a thing that Allison Johnson keeps floating to me is that actually the AI gadget that should exist is the Apple Watch. Like, that's the one. Forget the humane pin, forget the rabbit, just make a smart watch that does AI things. And it turns out, Apple appears to agree with that. I think it was over the weekend, Mark Kermit at Bloomberg reported that Apple is trying to put Visual intelligence and thus cameras inside of the Apple Watch in the next two years. And I think I actually need you to help me visualize this because the, the way he reported it is on the regular models, the camera is going to be inside of the display, which I would assume means it's pointing

• 30:56David Pierce?

  kind of up off your wrist. Uh, but then on the Ultra, it's going to be on the side between, I guess, the, the crown and the action button, uh, which would indicate that it's pointing out the side of the watch. So I like, I've been spending all week trying to figure out like, what is this thing going to be looking at? And how are you going to use it? Um, but I'm like, there's a real, uh, energy within Apple, it appears, to figure out how to put cameras both in your watch and in your AirPods as a, as a like visual intelligence, AI input system. Uh, the AirPods one kind of makes sense to me, right? Like you just, you just put a camera here, it faces this way. Like you have the sort of Ray-Ban meta visual and that makes sense. This one I can't quite wrap my mind around.

• 31:41David Pierce?

  Like I get the idea, I just don't get how you do it in the product.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Or like truly where it goes, like fundamentally.

• 31:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  What is it looking at? If you're wearing a watch, be like, you're gonna beep.

• 31:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. It really is like a, like an old school, like Dick Tracy kind of thing where you're just, you're going to hold it up and like shoot lasers at the side of your watch.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  And then if you do the face, you're always kind of a.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  This is, yeah.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Looking at stuff. And then where's the shutter button here? You got a weird problem there.

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. Can you just imagine like we're two years away from just walking around and just like shoving our wrist in people's faces, being like, look at this.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't even use, uh, I know a lot of people who do use Apple Wallet on their watches and they're just like beep. And I find that to be awkward and I use my phone all the time. I get it. I, I like, if you've got a big wearable and you've, you've got your own proprietary Bluetooth link back to a phone with a big battery or a bigger battery, more processing power. It makes sense to have this thing be the thing. I don't know. I, I don't know why you would put a camera on it. I, I think.

• 32:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  Unless you want it to be totally separate from the phone, which runs directly into a classic of the David Pierce genre, which is when you profiled the Apple Watch for Wired and you said it's goal was to get away from the, the phone.

• 32:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  And Apple basically yelled and said that wasn't true.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:05David Pierce?

  They told me on the record it was true. And then told me off on the record it wasn't.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Um, but like this has been the problem with the watch forever. Like, can it be independent of the phone? And maybe AI is the thing that makes it independent of the phone.

• 33:18David Pierce?

  Maybe, but I also think, I, I think one of the other stories of the Apple Watch is, uh, another thing that I reported in that story that Apple hated, which is that they decided to build a watch way before they decided why to build a watch. And I think you still see that in the watch. Like, they figured out one thing. This is a, a health device. But that has a ceiling for both what they can like literally do scientifically, and the number of people who are going to be interested in it. So you need another thing if you want this thing to sort of continue to grow and become a huge business, which it obviously already is. Uh, now the bet obviously is that it's an AI thing. And you, you either need a ton more processing inside of it, which is very hard to do on a watch,

• 33:59David Pierce?

  or you need some new input thing that it can do. And I think that's how you get to, oh, the way we do this is to, is to make it a camera somehow.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  Or you give it AI voice Siri. You know, the thing that's confusing everyone.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  Really well for Apple.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, the thing that's currently confusing this entire industry.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  Honestly, if Siri were good, it would have solved an enormous number of problems like this for Apple. Because, because it, the watch would have been much closer to the thing that Apple originally wanted it to be if Siri was good, because you would have been able to do stuff on your watch and thus not do it on your phone. Which was the goal.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you run into that Siri problem. Also, you probably have to wear headphones all the time.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  It's like the combo platter of AirPods and an Apple Watch replaces your phone. Is a dream, I think they've hinted at, right? You get some AR glasses in the mix there. That's a lot of stuff.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  It is a lot of stuff.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  You know, on, on the, the chart of wearable bullshit, that's a lot of gizmos to care for that does not necessarily deliver more value than having a giant phone.

• 34:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  In case you're wondering, Neil, I's theory of wearable bullshit is that you have a Y-axis that's fiddliness, and an X-axis that's like value, like utility.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  I change the axes every time we talk about this. And you have a huge penalty for a face on fiddliness. And so, regular glasses are like a perfect device. You don't have to care for them a lot, a little bit, you have to care for them. But they're so valuable, they overcome the "it's on your face" penalty. And then the Apple Watch had to curve up. It wasn't useful enough at the beginning, and now it's pretty useful, you don't have to care for it a lot because it battery lasts a long time. And then the Vision Pro is all the way at the bottom, where it's really fiddly, has an external battery pack, it doesn't have enough apps, it's on your face, and it doesn't do a lot.

• 35:45David Pierce?

  It is the most penalty.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  And like, many people have sent us variations on this chart. Please, by all means, send us where you think the combo platter of Apple Watch plus AirPods plus glasses lives compared to phone.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Because you just see that math doesn't math.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I just reviewed the Light Phone 3 this week, and we shouldn't talk about it, I'm gonna talk about it a bunch with Allison next week, but one of the things that kept striking me in the course of doing this is like, intellectually, I would like to use my phone less, but then every time I am given a thing that would maybe make me use my phone less, I'm like, you know what kicks ass is my phone. Like, my phone is so good at so many things.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  And it's a real problem for this whole industry.

• 36:34David Pierce?

  And like, would I like to do some of those things less? Yeah. But I still want to do, I still want to look at Reddit sometimes.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The screen is really big and this internet connection's pretty fast.

• 36:46David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a real problem.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  The camera's pretty good. Speaking of Apple, WWDC was announced, it starts June 9th. We're expecting a big overhaul to iOS. There's some notion that, I don't know, instead of squares, we'll have circles for icons.

• 37:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, speaking of Vision Pro.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  Aeroglass will finally come to iOS.

• 37:07David Pierce?

  I will say two like old head internet references that we've made in the last couple of weeks. One was Aero Glass on Windows. We got like an email or two from people who were like, oh, I remember that. And then just offhandedly a drinking out of cups references. And we got an absolute outpouring of support from people who were like that. You are my people drinking out of cups.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't.

• 37:29David Pierce?

  It was amazing.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Many people in YouTube comments, I'd love to get this joke. What? And I, the video doesn't hold up.

• 37:38David Pierce?

  It was funny to watch again, but if you've never seen it, it won't be funny.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like it's an old video. You can Google it. It's an animated. It's, I'm not even gonna explain it, whatever. It's just if you were drunk with your friends at a particular moment in internet history, this was the funniest thing you'd ever seen in your life.

• 37:55David Pierce?

  Hundred percent.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  And that DNA, I think is shared with a great many for chess listeners.

• 38:01David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  Johnny Hammersticks over here.

• 38:04David Pierce?

  But on the, on the WWDC front, it seems like, uh, there, there's been a bunch of hype about a huge redesigned iOS 19. And I would say every little bit we learn about it makes it seem like a less and less huge redesign of all the time. It's just gonna be slightly glassier and that'll be it.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, this is what, three months away, right?

• 38:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Not even two months away. Uh, think about all the things that aren't gonna get paid off at this WWDC. Apple Intelligence with Smart Siri not gonna get paid off at this WWDC. Like, we already know, they've announced it. Next generation CarPlay, 50 years after they announced it.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Not gonna get paid. Last year, they were insistent, like, this is happening. But big car companies were meant to like, didn't happen. Porsche, which actually did announce it, not, hasn't shipped a car yet. With the next generation hardware, it's still not paid off. What are they going to say in two months? Is will they will they be in auto industry in America? Who knows? But it's not there.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Then iOS is conceptually, if you're reorienting it around Apple Intelligence, what are you going to pay off?

• 39:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Even marketing these phones is having Apple like, I think there's a lot of pressure. And then you've got just angry developers in general, right? Like, this has been the story forever. So I'm curious to see what they say, actually WWDC.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's it's very funny because last year, right about now, there was this sense of, okay, Apple has not talked enough about AI. AI is the thing. It's all anybody wants to talk about, but we know WWDC is coming and it's going to be the time. Apple takes its big swing and sort of announces the perfect productization of AI. And Apple like attempted to do that. And here we are. And I think this time Apple is coming into it on its back foot in a way that it is not accustomed to, that Apple is going to have to explain itself in a way that it is not used to having to explain itself. And it's not going to, because that's just not what Apple does. Apple is better than any company on earth at just pretending everything is fine and posting through it.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  But but that is where it is right now. Like this, this, at some point, it is going to have to look people in the face and be like, hey, remember that Siri thing we told you about? That that one's on us.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sign up for App Intents, where we commoditize your app.

• 40:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  For a product that doesn't work. We'll see. Speaking of AI and agents, we're kind of waiting on next generation Alexa to hit. It's like any minute now. And then there's a rumor that Amazon will rename the entire Echo line to just Alexa.

• 40:44David Pierce?

  What do you think of this? I've been thinking about this for like two days now, since Gen 2, we first saw this and I think got a tip about it and wrote it, wrote a story. And some people on our team were seeing Alexa, like when you go to the Amazon listing, we're seeing Alexa show, other people are seeing Echo show. What do you think of that switch? They just go full on Alexa, everything?

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  I think they should go full on Alexa, everything.

• 41:07David Pierce?

  I kind of think so, too.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  It's the name of the platform. It's the argument was always that Alexa is Windows. And then you have to have this ecosystem of products that run Alexa and Amazon's products would be called Echo.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  Even just explaining it, that sounds stupid.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  Right.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, it was not the right idea. And no one knows the difference. No one's like, I better buy an Echo and not a Lenovo voice operated Alexa bot.

• 41:30David Pierce?

  Well, I think the other part of it is that stuff never really materialized. Like, there isn't a giant third-party universe of Alexa speakers. Like, they just are Echoes.

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  Because Alexa's not useful enough. Just to be, to hammer that home, that never took off because Alexa itself was never useful enough. Like, when carmakers are like, there's Alexa integration in the dash. It's like, why? To do what? Set a timer in my car. Like, I'm not doing that. Maybe play music, but you don't need Alexa to do all that. Like, the promise of this brand name hasn't meant anything. Now it means something, or it's supposed to mean something, which is all this Agentic AI, actual assistant stuff. And I think you need to reclaim that. Because I don't think they're going to run this new Alexa on third-party devices the way they were in the past. I think they want you to buy a screen. Like, Panos has said, I want you to buy an Alexa show. And then there's going to be new hardware.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  And I think you gotta, that's the brand.

• 42:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, I think that, I think that's right. And it actually, it makes a lot of sense to me, too. Because I think, I would bet most people who own an Echo device don't know that it's called an Echo device. It's just, it's, it's the Alexa. That's how almost everyone I know who has one of these refers to it as, it's the Alexa.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  You don't, you don't talk to your Dell XPS 500 Alexa bot?

• 42:48David Pierce?

  What was the Harman Kardon one that had? That was good stuff.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we'll see. The Alexa, the new Alexa is going to start hitting. If you have access to us, let us know. Where everyone on our team is sort of like, are you useful now? Like, we'll find out. But this is a make or break. If this stuff doesn't work, if it's not more useful than the current Alexa, I think we're going to learn a lot about how useful any of these will be.

• 43:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Just down the line, including Siri. But if Amazon can't pull it off on this turn, I think we'll learn a lot about what the industry is able to do as a whole and on what timeline.

• 43:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. If anyone can pull it off right now, at least based on what we understand about the way these companies are approaching it, it seems like it ought to be Amazon. Like, Amazon is doing these things the way that seems most likely to produce success. So if it's gone wrong, it's kind of like, maybe it just doesn't work.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there's 50/50 shot, as David in particular has reminded me over and over again.

• 43:53David Pierce?

  Every bit of evidence we've heard says this thing sucks. I hope we're, it's like, it's, I like to remind people occasionally that it's more fun when things are good. Especially with all of these new gadgets, it's so much more fun when they're good. And like, I really hope the new Alexa is awesome, both as like a person who uses it and a person who gets to talk about it. But boy, have we been burned a bunch of times in a row by this stuff.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's a good time to take a break. We're going to come back with Kylie Robinson. So we can talk about OpenAI.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  See, it's a good segue. We'll be right back.

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• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Kylie Robinson is here. Hey, Kylie.

• 46:06Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  Big week of AI news, big week of AI feelings.

• 46:10Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  Mostly centered around OpenAI, the, I would say, the most emotional of the AI companies.

• 46:15Speaker 07

  Right.

• 46:17David Pierce?

  That's really true, isn't it? I never really thought about it like that, but that is true. There are a lot of feelings inside that company.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Just big feelings all over the place.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  Big feelings.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, Microsoft as a company is not like a big feelings company, you know?

• 46:29Speaker 07

  No.

• 46:30David Pierce?

  No.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  Anthropic, you know, they're sort of like dead ahead. They're like, here's some stuff, it writes code. And then OpenAI is like, I'm feeling all of them.

• 46:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. We're creating God, please save us.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a lot. Like, it's like, I tell my daughter, like, you have to feel all of your feelings so you can get over them. And OpenAI is like, I'm feeling all of them.

• 46:51David Pierce?

  I feel like there's like two things we need to talk about here, but before we get way into the inevitable Studio Ghibli weeds, which I would very much like to do, there was some like business leadership stuff that happened at OpenAI. And speaking of companies that are unusual, nobody does a C-suite quite like OpenAI does a C-suite.

• 47:13Speaker 07

  Right.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  What do you make of this whole like shift? What, what happened this weekend? Do we need to actually care about it?

• 47:18Speaker 07

  Um, no, I don't think people need to care about it, but for their information, the CEO, Brad Lightcap, he is expanding his role, he's taking over day-to-day operations, basically becoming a CEO. And Sam Altman, who is the CEO, is going to shift to a more product research focus, which to me, my reading is he wants to focus more on Stargate, he wants to more, like, focus more on shaking hands and making these deals, and he can't exactly do all that and be the leader of OpenAI news right now. Is my take, but it's like an ever shifting thing. They're going to become a for profit soon. Brad seems like a nice person to put at the top and be like, this is the guy running things right now. And Sam is just tinkering with robots and AGI.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Are they going to become a for profit soon?

• 48:07Speaker 07

  Great question. Great question. I think they would like to.

• 48:12Speaker 07

  But I don't know how this lawsuit with Elon and all of that will, you know, totally change the trajectory, if at all. That remains to be seen. I think they have to get through that first.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  How far are we into the two year window that they had to do it? We're not at a year yet, right?

• 48:29Speaker 07

  No, no, I don't think so. Please fact check me, but I, I think off the top of my head, it was supposed to happen like mid, midway through this year around the summer.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  It does seem like the boring part of changing the corporate structure is what they want Brad to do.

• 48:44Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 48:44Nilay Patel?

  Do this paperwork. So Sam can say he's building God. Is that, is that all, is that all that is?

• 48:51Speaker 07

  I've had a lot of people ask me about this and I think, you know, you know how Elon was like, I'm leading Twitter. And now he just put someone to CEO. So he doesn't have to fucking deal with it. That's sort of like you, he's been running this company long enough. Clearly he wants to do other things. And he's like, can somebody else deal with the logistics is my read.

• 49:11David Pierce?

  I also wonder if, Neil, I, we were talking about Mark Zuckerberg in the last segment. And one of the pivots that Mark made pretty aggressively was, I don't want to be the person required to apologize for this stuff anymore. And so he made like Nick Clegg, the person who had to go apologize for Facebook all the time. And he just got to go like announce new products. And I, I keep thinking about, and this is where we should get to the images and chat GPT stuff. But there was a, there was a Sam tweet this week where he was basically like, you know, be me, build in silence for a long time. Nobody cares. And then it was like, and then we do images and now everybody's being weird. And it's like, oh, you.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  You just didn't want to say the word that he said.

• 49:50David Pierce?

  What did he say? I honestly don't remember what it was.

• 49:52Speaker 07

  Let me tell you, I know the exact sequence. So, you know, for a few years, building a silence, then for two and a half, everybody hates me. And then wake up today and everyone's saying, ha, ha, I made you into twink studio Ghibli.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly what he said. To be clear, Sam is a gay man. I think he's allowed to use that word in a way that David and I are not.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  But I mean, that this is the thing, like, he's the product person now. He's the face of the product. He's still the CEO. Famously, he was not the CEO for about 20 minutes last year. So I don't think he is allowed to step down as CEO again after that fight. He has to stay the CEO, but to like, operate the company, be the corporate person. Okay, we're shifting to somewhere else. I will not be the face of the product and the fundraising and the hype. And then that face, quite literally this week, is image generation.

• 50:39Speaker 07

  Right. Not to take away from Studio Ghibli, but I think the strangest thing is that they don't have a CTO, and they've said they have no plans to replace Miramarati anytime soon, which would probably help Sam in his product research mode to have a CTO.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  And Sam, notably, does not have a reputation as like, a great product person. Like, he has an incredible reputation as a fundraiser, and a guy who can build hype and talk about the story of the product. And, you know, he used to run Y Combinator, like, he's a great spotter of things. But like, are you the great product visionary? I think there's a reason that Johnny Ive is building whatever he's building for them, right? Like, he hires that talent, so he doesn't have the CTO building that now. That said, the image generator come out in Foro this week has led to a wide variety of reactions.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  There's no other way to say it. A wide variety of reactions. What's going on there?

• 51:35Speaker 07

  Is this where I bait Neelai into talking about fair use? Because I was really hoping I could.

• 51:39David Pierce?

  Let's do that in a minute. First, what I would like you to do is describe every single interaction that you personally have had with images in ChatGPT.

• 51:46Speaker 07

  Perfect. The first thing I tried to do is to break it and make pictures of CEOs. And that worked pretty well, actually. I described, this is in the piece about Ghibli, I described, like, this social media executive that everybody knows, and he went in front of Congress, and, you know, there's this fictional movie about him, and he wears gold chains now. And they're like, oh, that's interesting. Okay, let me generate that. And it's literally Mark Zuckerberg. So it's not super hard to get around the whole, like, make a famous person thing. And then I put him in a Verge brand hoodie, and things started to get weird. It started amalgamate into average tech CEO across whatever its data is. And then the Ghibli trend kicked off and I did not expect that.

• 52:29Speaker 07

  When this, when I got the embargo and I talked to the team, I thought, okay, this is a cool upgrade. And I really think the autoregressive approach instead of the diffusion approach. So it goes from left to right, top to bottom, instead of generating it all at once. I think that has made like the craziest difference in the fidelity and the accuracy, which was wild to see and people globbed onto that really fast.

• 52:53Nilay Patel?

  What you mean it generates the pixels of the image left and right, top to bottom, instead of, okay.

• 52:57Speaker 07

  Instead of just like the whole thing at once. So I think that probably helps with hallucinations. The lead for the project, he said, I am speculating that that's the case, which is funny because it's like that unknown to them as well. So I think people globbed onto that pretty quickly. And one person was like, I've made a Ghibli version of my wife and my family. And then the internet said, oh my God, I can make nine 11 with this. And then it got crazy.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  I do love, A, that those are the two steps. And that B, that is precisely, of course, how it was going to happen. So I will say, my impression, and I have not personally played with this at all. So all I've seen is what other people have made from it. It is remarkably better than basically any other image generation tool that I've seen. It does text really well. It seems like you have to pretty carefully describe the text that you want. Where if you're just like, just put a logo, it'll do some of the sort of insane gibberish that we've seen. But if you're like, no, replace that with Marlboro, it'll do it.

• 53:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  But the stuff is more accurate. It's more realistic. It is more like true to whatever style you ask for it than basically anything I have seen. Certainly that is like available to people at any kind of scale. And some of the stuff people are making is wild. And it does feel like we're going to get into all the fair use of this all in a minute because it is the most straightforward. You just say like, make a Rick and Morty and it just makes a Rick and Morty. But now it looks like Rick and Morty. And it's it's nuts, but like Kylie, I know you made a bunch of stuff.

• 54:30Speaker 07

  I did.

• 54:31David Pierce?

  Like, was it was it different to make stuff with this than you've had experience with image generators before? Like, you used a bunch of selfies to make images of yourself.

• 54:40Speaker 07

  Yes, because I don't want to feed it pictures of my family, actually. It's inevitable, but I just don't want to start there. Yeah, I uploaded this mirror selfie I took in a bar bathroom in San Francisco and was totally shocked by how it got the depth and lighting correct. And then it got it didn't get the small text of the graffiti correct. It said like lost lover instead of like dirty hairy or something.

• 55:06David Pierce?

  But like, the vibe was right. Like, it felt like the it was that bathroom that you were in.

• 55:12Speaker 07

  It got the style of my shirt correct. It knows that it opened on one side and I was I was totally I was totally surprised. And then I asked it to combine some photos I took in Amsterdam and add Totoro. Add a Totoro like character to see if it would work. And then, sure enough, I got Totoro and we put that in the article as the lead image. I was like, are we going to get sued over this? I can't tell, you know? And that's the fair use of it all. My first question is, where the fuck did you get all of this data? Is is my first question. What are these people going to do when they see Homer Simpson doing, you know, 9/11? Like, like, what happens? I don't know.

• 55:54Speaker 07

  I actually was, um, this might dismay some listeners and maybe even Neelai, but I wanted to argue with ChatGPT this morning through voice mode about fair use in this context. And it did not it did not have really great responses. It was like, oh, yeah, this does seem bad. I'm like, oh, okay.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  No, that's the right answer. I just want to be clear. It it seems bad.

• 56:15Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, the the fatal flaw at the heart of this entire overhyped industry is the amount of copyright infringement that is occurring. Like, obvious, not subtle, right out in the open. Did you copy a bunch of Studio Ghibli stuff so that you can generate Studio Ghibli art? You sure did. It's obvious, like it's not a question mark. And then you have OpenAI and Google going to the United States Congress and the White House being like, can you write us an exception to the copyright law? So this isn't a problem that destroys your business? Because that's how bad it is. Copyright law is stupid. I say this on the show all the time. It's not, it's not some sophisticated legal doctrine. It's, did you make a copy? Did you have permission to make a copy?

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  If you didn't have the permission, does it fall into one of these narrow categories where we say, we know you made a copy without permission, but that's okay because of X. And those categories are like scholarship, right? Like commentary, parody, like it's not make more of it. Make more copies of it. And like, I don't know, like I truly do not know how any judge looks at all of this and says, oh, this is fine. I can shoehorn this into that legal doctrine.

• 57:28David Pierce?

  Well, and this is why it's become so important for all these companies to obfuscate where the data is coming from. Right? Because if you boil it all the way down to, did you make a copy of this? They're trying very hard to convince everybody that the answer is like, we don't know.

• 57:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 57:40David Pierce?

  The internet is a mysterious place.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  Can I just underline again how stupid copyright law is as a, as a legal doctrine?

• 57:47Speaker 07

  I'm glad we've gotten here.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  It's not smart. It's not like sophisticated. We had to litigate as a society, moving images across the internet and making all of the copies on the RAM of all of the routers is okay. Those are called ephemeral copies. We, that would, that's lawsuits. We had to litigate. This is a real lawsuit.

• 58:08David Pierce?

  Kylie, you asked for this. I just want you to know, Kylie, you asked for this.

• 58:11Speaker 07

  I did.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  MAI versus Peak. This nation had to litigate and decide that loading software from a hard drive onto the RAM of the computer was fair use if you didn't have permission to do it.

• 58:26David Pierce?

  Cause it is a copy.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's just a copy. That's how dumb copyright law is as a doctrine. It is so blunt as an instrument. It is used for all kinds of purposes because it's so blunt and so stupid. It is the only speech regulation that exists in this country for real, because you, you don't have the moral component of speech. You're just like, did you make a copy? Jail. And like, that's the end of that. Like you don't have to do all the work. But like, that's how dumb copyright law is. And so with all of this, like maybe you can get all the fair use, but you start with, did you make a copy? And like, yeah, you sure did. Like, without question, they did.

• 59:04Speaker 07

  I was reading this anthropic lawsuit sent to me by, shout out, Cranz. And I was reading through it and the judge seemingly threw out the case and their one thing was like, okay, you have to create guardrails to prevent it from spitting out actual copies of copyrighted work. But otherwise, it seemed fine. And I thought, okay, I'm not a legal expert. But in this case, I can get Rick and Morty's face on just about anything. So that seems like a problem. OpenAI has surprisingly lax guidelines. I was waiting for them to respond with comment and they gave me a ton of very interesting guidelines. I thought it would be more like, we do not depict, you know,

• 59:47Speaker 07

  copyrighted material. We do not depict Totoro or Donald Trump, but they say it's fine for artistic endeavors, the long and short, just don't trinket, because you can upload a photo and be like, do this in Studio Ghibli. Don't upload photos that you don't own the copyright to, which is basically what everyone is doing. But otherwise, they say you own whatever it generates. And I, I feel like this is going to end up being a nightmare. That's the only answer.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there's some amount of this that I think you depend on the volume, just overcoming the objection.

• 1:00:21Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  There's so much infringement that it can't be stopped. You will be perceived of as the bad guys. Music industry, you're going to shut down Napster. Lars Ulrich is the bad guy now. And that's basically how that playbook worked. That's how the playbook works against Google. We scanned all the books and made Google Book search and the Evil Authors Guild does not want you to have it. And the judges were like, but these goofballs have slides in their office. Right? Like YouTube is okay, even though you copied all of South Park onto YouTube. And the utility was so high and the- The industry was so new and young and cute that like they they kind of like Google in particular wrote a lot of the fair use law here. Like they just litigated their way through a lot of fair use law. And you can see that reflected.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  Like Eric Schmidt, like gives talks at Stanford, uh, would she try to get taken down? We wrote about it and he got tried to get taken down, but it's still up on YouTube. You can go find it. He's like, here's what I would do. I would start an AI company. I would fire out products until one hit. And then when the lawsuits came, I would just pay off the lawsuits. And it's like, oh, that's good. You did, you would do Google. That's what Google did. And I just don't think these companies are positioned the same way as Google in the early 2000s. Right? Like this is here's anime nine 11 is just not the same product as YouTube at first impression. And I, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen here. I will like agree with David. The amount of usage is off the charts. Like people love this shit. They love it.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  And there's something to that, that I, we talk about all the time. Um, you're in it. You're like, you're reporting on companies. The gap between how much the audience says they hate the tools and then how much people are using the tools seems to get bigger every day.

• 1:02:02Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. The commenters on my Ghibli post are so fun because they are arguing so intensely about my favorite comment is someone, um, talking about fascism. And then another person who's like, I just think it's pretty.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. That's perfect.

• 1:02:18Speaker 07

  It's like the perfect, uh, verge audience comment section. But I think that, yeah, it does get wider and you know, this is a very silly thing, but I was just at a doctor's appointment and all my doctors now use this AI scribe. So it takes notes and they ask for permission and it just feels like this has become truly like permeated into our society. There's no way to stop it. That's sort of the argument with the Ghibli thing, like artists can't stop this. This is here. This is now, we just have to adapt. I'm not sure that's a fair argument. I would love Neelai's legal take. I was going to ask, what do you think happens? But you already said you don't know.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think two things happen. I have this theory. Every time AI art comes up this way and people use it and they go crazy for it, like OpenAI, their line is like the GPUs are melting, you know, like, they have all this usage. First of all, they're not making a dollar on this usage, right? Like, they're just giving this away at 20 bucks a month. Like, they're losing money on this, especially now that they're melting the GPUs. Like, they're already losing money. Now we're using even more compute. We're losing more money. So I don't know what happens there. Like, on its own, I don't know what's happening. I do have this, like, broader, like, vergier thesis that all of this technology is meant for us to make art with. And like, the most human possible instinct is to somehow communicate

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  art and try to get people to feel things. Yeah. Like, Becky has, like, live, laugh, love ants, you know, like, you go in the Midwest. And I always think about those. It's like, oh, they, this is a command. Like, they just want me to go in their kitchen and they're like, laugh! And like, that's how they want me to feel. Right? And I have a lot of empathy. I'm like, it's kind of blunt force, like, love! Do it!

• 1:04:03David Pierce?

  And they have a sign that says eat over the dining room table.

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  Eat! These are just instructions of like, what to feel and ever sleepy, you know, like, that's all it is. Like, it's, it's so human to try to communicate what you want other people to feel. And it's pretty hard to do that. Like, I have a six-year-old and like, mostly what she wants me to feel is pain, I guess. Like, I don't know. There's something there. She's very sweet. She kicks hard, that's all I'm saying. But like, you see people get access to these tools and they're able to communicate that emotional thing so much easier. And then they're into it. Yeah. And that, to me, that's the point. That's like, you watch the original Steve Jobs

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  demo of GarageBand. That's the argument he's making about all this stuff. And so people have cameras on their phones. And so like, there's something very important there. But then there's also, you shouldn't steal it from the people who figured out how to do it well. And that is by far the tension that I see.

• 1:05:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think make it easy for people to make things is a very different argument from make Rick and Morty do 9/11. Right? Like, I just, I think the AI companies-

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  It did make you feel feelings, David.

• 1:05:20David Pierce?

  I think-

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  Love!

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  But I think, I think the AI companies would like you to believe that those are the same thing, right? And that this is, and I think this really comes also back to a lot of OpenAI, like, running away from guardrails. Like, the, all of these companies are basically like, all we make is, is sort of underlying technology. And what you do with this, good and bad is up to you. And that is, that is a thing they have to put on society so that they don't have to put it on themselves. That like, the results of this black box are not our fault. All we built is the box. What you do with it is up to you. And that's very clearly what OpenAI is doing here. Like, they've, they've tried to set up guardrails. They've tried to do the right thing. They write long documents. And then people make Rick and Morty do 9/11. And now OpenAI is like, that's your problem. You, you typed in the words, what comes out is not our responsibility.

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  I saw someone say that the larger story isn't that you can make Ghibli now. The larger story is that they've just dropped their guardrails. And they're walking away from those guardrails very publicly. And like, where does that line stop? Because clearly, it hasn't, you know, we were just talking about Grok not that long ago, making Kamala Harris with a gun. And that was a bad thing. And I just saw like, a depiction of Korean Americans in the 80s, holding guns on rooftops during the LA riots. Like, I mean, like, where is the line? It's, it seems to blur more and more, as they think that maybe this will make them more money and get them more users. I'm not, I'm not sure.

• 1:06:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, this is the same thing as Meta walking away from content moderation, right? Like, it's, it's just easier to say, this isn't our problem, than to take any kind of responsibility for it.

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  And this is where I will remind you once again, the only functional speech regulation in this country is copyright law. It's the only thing that regulates the internet. Because when Disney shows up and says, you stole the Avengers, the court system is like, yep, jail. And it works every time. Like, without question, if, what is the most, what is the most effective regulation on YouTube that has built its own culture is copyright strikes.

• 1:07:24David Pierce?

  Disney.

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's copyright strikes. It's using the music wrong. It's what, why is TikTok full of weird sped up movies with that line down the center, to avoid the copyright filters that everyone agrees should exist? There's no moral outrage about that filter. But if you do actual content moderation, then there is moral outrage. And so you just, here's this problem, right? Where OpenAI isn't going to make these choices. This government is certainly not going to make these choices. Or if they do, it will be in the worst possible way and you'll be abducted to El Salvador in the dead of night. That's weird. That's a thing that we're comfortable doing, but like, content moderation is not. So the thing that will step in will be these copyright fights and they are existential and everyone kind of glosses over them.

• 1:08:09David Pierce?

  I had never thought about this until you said YouTube copyright strikes, but I almost wonder if what these AI companies are going to want is a version of the same thing for these AI tools that doesn't say OpenAI is guilty of copyright problems. I am when I upload the, when I ask for a Studio Ghibli style image. Right. I think OpenAI would really like that to be my problem and, and that Studio Ghibli or Disney or whoever can come after me and not OpenAI.

• 1:08:37Speaker 07

  You can go to a copyright page at OpenAI and report copyright and infringers, like people who have done it multiple times, they will ban their account. That's what it says. So, I mean, that is already in motion.

• 1:08:49David Pierce?

  I was just about to say, that's one of the things that has been really successful on YouTube is the like chilling effect that the possibility of copyright strikes has. Every creator worries about this all the time. Even like, even the possibility of an incorrect copyright strike can be a huge problem because it takes a long time to litigate. These things can be overzealous sometimes, like, and it's a huge problem. If you, if you get copyright strikes, you get demonetized, you get kicked off the platform, like, you lose your living in a lot of ways. And I, a system like that for AI content, boy, does that benefit the AI companies at the cost of everybody else.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  But that's all rooted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Like, the, say, literally, it's called the safe harbor in the DMCA, where by having notice and takedown and copyright strikes and all this system, YouTube doesn't have the liability for the infringement. Right. The law says if you can build this mechanism where things get taken down, you will avoid the liability for the copyright infringement on your platform. That doesn't make the same sense for OpenAI because they don't distribute it. Right? Like it's weird to be like, I will report this Mickey Mouse to OpenAI. Like, why? You're going to distribute it on some other platform, right? So like, they're using the law in a way, a way that doesn't make any sense. And none of that has anything to do with how much data have they trained on?

• 1:10:10Nilay Patel?

  How much did they ingest to do the training, which is a real problem? Like Meta is getting in trouble every day because in their court cases, it's coming out that they torrented books to put into the, into Lama's training. And like, that's just copyright. Like, did you make a copy? Yes. Did you have permission? Definitely not.

• 1:10:28Speaker 07

  And the researchers are scared of it. In the lawsuit, the researchers are like, we shouldn't be doing this, especially on company laptops.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yeah, I'm just, again, it's a copyright law, it's a stupid flow chart. Did you make a copy? Yeah. Did you have permission? Well, you knew you didn't. Does it fit into one of these exceptions in fair use? The judge has to decide and you're not exactly like a friendly cuddly little kid anymore, Mark Zuckerberg. You're Mark Zuckerberg. Like, good luck.

• 1:10:57Speaker 07

  So the move is like, break the law until it changes for us? Is that sort of the vibe?

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  The move, and I think, I think this is just a law of the Verge cast. If you're young and cute, you should break the law as much as you can. And then later on in life, you should stop.

• 1:11:12Speaker 07

  Incredible.

• 1:11:13David Pierce?

  Both as a, as a person and a company.

• 1:11:15Speaker 07

  I have some felonies I can pick up.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. You got time. If you're under 30, go nuts. You know, like have a good time. And then later on in life, you know, settle down. I think that's.

• 1:11:25David Pierce?

  You buy a suit and you testify in front of Congress. That's.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  And that's why whenever people get caught now, they're like, he was young. And you're like, he's 45 years old. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:11:32Speaker 07

  That is a grown man.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  That's just an adult. Like, uh, he, it's a house and two kids and a mortgage. Like, that's an adult. Um, I don't, I don't know what's going to happen. I, I, I think the economic pressure on OpenAI is high. Like, they, they have to be losing more money than they were yesterday because of this tool, right?

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  Are we sure that's true? Kylie, I actually want to know what you think about this, Kylie. Because one of the other things that happened this week was OpenAI said it expects to earn, was it $12.7 billion in revenue? That's a big number. I'm sure it comes underneath a much bigger cost number because that's what OpenAI is doing. But this company seems to essentially be able to raise as much money as it needs, whenever it needs, for any purposes whatsoever. And I'm sort of at a point now where I'm like, maybe this company can just capitalize itself forever. And, and all these numbers are fake and none of it really matters. Where is your head with this stuff?

• 1:12:23Speaker 07

  I agree, because I'm more of an AI expert than I am a finance expert. So when I see those numbers, I'm like, how is this company not totally crumbling? Some of these AI leaders will point to Amazon. They never turned a profit, but I mean, they were doing something more useful, I think, honestly.

• 1:12:42David Pierce?

  Amazon took all of the money that it made and put it back in the company. They didn't lose money on every single thing that they shipped you. That was not, that was not the Amazon way.

• 1:12:53Speaker 07

  Right. And I genuinely do think that OpenAI is OK with losing this amount of money. Maybe their new CFO isn't, but it seems like Sam Altman is totally fine with it. And I don't know where that stops and what happens to a company. I've never seen a company like this. Their new valuation would be $300 billion and they're not even close to profitable. They're losing billions and billions every year. And they only want to keep losing more money for Studio Ghibli renderings? That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. And it does make me nervous, especially what we saw with the DeepSeek moment and what that did to the markets and Nvidia.

• 1:13:33Speaker 07

  I worry that the OpenAI bubble will be really destructive, but I don't want to scare anybody. I'm not sure.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's funny, I don't like, you know, the new image generation features, they're not the promise. Right? The promise is in the reasoning models and the agentic stuff and the replace all of your employees with this system. And image generation might be some component of that. But you see, it's not like the interest in it and the hype around it. It has nothing to do with what might ultimately justify the valuation. Right? And that seems like as big of a disconnect as anything like, oh, this costs more money than it did yesterday. It doesn't meaningfully bring us closer to earning all that money back.

• 1:14:16Speaker 07

  Right. You still need users, though, and they don't, the average person does not care about AGI. They want to make their daughter into a Studio Ghibli character. Like, they've got to get somebody to subscribe and care. And I feel that way about, you know, OpenAI for a while. It's like, no one cares about, you know, a very small sect of people in Silicon Valley care about it being the best coder and getting a PhD in mathematics. And I think these are important endeavors, but, you know, Google is baking it into every product. Meta is baking it into every product. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm not sure. But it seems more real than AGI. So make something people want to use. Right now, it seems to be Studio Ghibli.

• 1:14:55David Pierce?

  It's also, like, sneakily a really mainstream use case. Like, it's, we've talked a lot about, like, none of these products are things regular people are actually going to want to do all the time. But you're right, like, I can take my family portrait and make it into any style I want, and it is, like, compelling. That's interesting to everybody. I don't think many people will pay 20 bucks a month for that for the rest of their lives. But that is like, that is a genuinely mainstream use case for AI in a way that even, like, Help Me Write My Emails isn't.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, also, you can see it, right? It's like, we're doing the pixels left to right, up to down, is like, a meaningful visual improvement over regular diffusion. I would just compare that to this other headline, which says, "Google says its new reasoning Gemini AI models are the best one yet." It's like, most people can't evaluate slightly better reasoning.

• 1:15:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  They can say that it looks different. Like, Microsoft is adding reasoning to Copilot AI for research and data. Like, great. Is it better than it was yesterday?

• 1:15:53David Pierce?

  This is, this is one of the things Kylie and I always enjoy talking about, is this, like, endless race where every 15 minutes, somebody makes the best model that has ever been made in history. And it is, it wins all, it is at the top of every leaderboard for somewhere between an hour and a week, and then it is not anymore. And I think this, this week was, there were like, three of them, that they were like, this is the best model we've ever made. And Google, Google and Open, is it Google and OpenAI that are obsessively trying to, like, front-run each other's announcements with? It's so fun.

• 1:16:24Speaker 07

  It is so fun. When I saw, you know, I got the OpenAI announcement and then the Google announcement came in, I thought, oh my God, they're back at it again. It's the most pointless thing. And what's even funnier is I have all these people's tweet notifications turned on and I was watching Demis do some retweets that were like subtweeting OpenAI and saying like, oh, well, we already had image generation and blah, blah, blah, before they had even properly announced it. And I thought, wow, you guys are petty. And it's, it's like such a useless, the average consumer does not notice this, does not care. You know?

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  But it is good to know that you can be a billionaire Nobel Prize winner and still be just furiously subtweeting your competition.

• 1:17:05David Pierce?

  Turns out Twitter breaks your brain no matter who you are. Like, that is, that is the great lesson of our times is that Twitter will destroy you no matter who or what you are.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  When we get to AGI, we'll finally take this app off our phones. That's the goal.

• 1:17:18David Pierce?

  I do think, I, there's one trend inside of all of this that I think is really interesting, which is that everybody is getting really comfortable making slower products. And we were on this race for a while where everything had to be fast and everybody was obsessed with latency and everybody was like, how do we make, you know, smaller, better, quicker models? Everything should be instant and feedback is, and now everybody's like, we're going to build a deep reasoning model that is going to take its time and it's going to think and it's going to show you that it's thinking and it's going to take a while and it's going to happen step by step. But then at the end, it's going to say true things and not lies. And that is, we've just like hard turned into it's okay if this takes a while because the product is going to be better. And that is like so completely different

• 1:18:01David Pierce?

  than the conversations I was having with AI people even like a year ago, who were like, speed is everything. We have to make this a real time. It has to be fast or else nobody's going to use it. And it is like, we've just gone all the way away from that.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause lying fast turned out to not be a great product.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  I think they will come back to speed once they solve the like, is it good enough?

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:18:20David Pierce?

  That might be true.

• 1:18:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think that this is useless. Does being useless fast does not get you what anybody needs to keep the promises that they're making.

• 1:18:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just always enjoy every time somebody talks about deep reasoning. I just hear slow.

• 1:18:35Speaker 07

  That's when they, when they ask me about the like, the new reasoning powering images. My first question was like, is this slower? And they said, yes, but I think people are going to enjoy the product and it won't matter was their answer. And it's wild.

• 1:18:48David Pierce?

  It turns out it's fine, right? Like, turns out. And, and they're learning how to build a product that like, shows you the slowness, right? Where they're like, it, it, it shows you the turns in its thinking. And part of that is to like, help you understand whatever. But part of that is also to like, give you something to do while it's slow. And all of the sort of affordances these things are getting so that they can be slow, so that they cannot lie to you all the time is just fascinating.

• 1:19:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the best part, though, is people putting in a prompt that it should not generate. And it starts generating and you see a sliver of the, the banned content before it stops. And that makes for incredible memes, unfortunately.

• 1:19:25David Pierce?

  That's very good.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's happening less and less, apparently.

• 1:19:29Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  Do you think OpenAI is going to react to this, right? Like Sam Altman is saying, uh, this is, I shouldn't be this person. Like, all my last work has ended with this picture. And then OpenAI had some reaction saying, we should, we don't want this to happen as much. There is the looming copyright threat. Do you think they're going to, to pull back on this a little bit?

• 1:19:48Speaker 07

  Right, someone made the joke about how he's like, doing the legal backflips he did after the ScarJo stuff, the Scarlett Johansson stuff. Yeah, I think that they're seeing, you know, Sam made this his profile picture. He made a Studio Ghibli profile picture and he said, can everyone make me a better one? So they're not shying away from it. And, and the email they sent me, they're like, we encourage and we love to see all these renditions. And something that was really weird in their statement was, you know, uh, we don't allow the recreation of art from living artists. And I'm like, the Studio Ghibli co-founder is still alive.

• 1:20:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Miyazaki is alive and he hates AI.

• 1:20:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, he's even tweeting about how much he hates all this. Yeah.

• 1:20:28Speaker 07

  It's, uh, so I, so putting that aside, uh, I think that they are leaning into this until they get a cease and desist is my guess.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38David Pierce?

  I mean, they have to, right? They have to keep saying this is okay.

• 1:20:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42David Pierce?

  Because if they start apologizing, it all falls apart.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  Exactly. Exactly. It's much like what's happening with signal messages. If we start admitting things.

• 1:20:51David Pierce?

  Which, which we will get to. But there is one, one more AI thing I want to talk about. Uh, and then we should probably take a break, uh, because we all need a break before we get into Signal. Um, is perplexity gonna buy TikTok?

• 1:21:02Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. You know, um, I've, I've gotten not so nice notes saying that I should really believe that they're doing that. No. Can you imagine TikTok taking perplexity seriously? Some analysts think that TikTok, uh, their US operations will sell between 30 to 50 billion dollars. And TikTok is, and perplexity is valued at about 18 billion. Um, and also, those are kind of made up numbers when it comes to a startup. That's a GPT wrapper. I'm, I'm not trying to be mean, but like realistically, how, how would they actually buy TikTok? Uh, it would be great for them, much better for perplexity than I think TikTok ultimately.

• 1:21:43Speaker 07

  We'll see. I would be, that would be the best day on my job on the internet if that actually happens.

• 1:21:49David Pierce?

  True.

• 1:21:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, I've definitely seen other companies be like, we're gonna put this on the blockchain. Like, you know, everyone's got dreams.

• 1:21:58Speaker 07

  Everybody's got dreams.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  I mean, it is funny because in a, in a more, uh, normal political moment, it would be much more likely that TikTok would just quickly buy perplexity and then make it like its search products. Be like, we're really leaning into search on TikTok. Just do that.

• 1:22:16Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the perplexity CEO is sitting there searching like how to get TikTok to do reverse buyout or I become CEO of TikTok? If you got the AI, you might as well just ask the question.

• 1:22:26David Pierce?

  That's true. Yeah. It, it might know.

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  How to end up CEO of TikTok?

• 1:22:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it turns out if you say things out loud enough. Make Studio Ghibli picture of me as CEO of TikTok.

• 1:22:40Speaker 07

  I too am seeking $40 billion to be the TikTok CEO.

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  I would, I think I'd be a great TikTok CEO, just based on my algorithm alone. Uh, all right, we should take a break. Kyle, I think you're, you're on the side of this is not happening for perplexity.

• 1:22:54Speaker 07

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:22:55Nilay Patel?

  But if you have a document that says it is, if you have a document that says JD Vance has seriously considered perplexity buying TikTok, because apparently he's in charge of the deal, Kylie's email is available.

• 1:23:05Speaker 07

  Yes, please.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  Or just hit him, hit up JD on Signal and let us know what he says. We gotta take a break.

• 1:23:09Speaker 07

  Add me to your group chats.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, please. All right, we'll be back with Lightning Round.

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• 1:24:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. The lightning round. Unsponsored.

• 1:24:53Nilay Patel?

  For flavor.

• 1:24:54David Pierce?

  Thank you to everybody who has sent us t-shirt designs. Some of them have been very good. We will make this t-shirt. I like, I don't know when, I don't know how much it'll cost, but like, I'm willing to say on the record, we will make this t-shirt.

• 1:25:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lot. It's just the word, putting the word flavor on a t-shirt just opens you up to all kinds of situations and we'll just, we'll just figure it out. I will say, I would like to continue reminding people that even when we are sponsored, the whole point of our ethics policy is you can't tell us what to do, which I would compare to the universe of brand deals that happen elsewhere in the media, where people often get told what to do. And you just can't do that. You know, amount of money will make me say nice things about you. I'm sorry.

• 1:25:35David Pierce?

  Well, that's the important thing about being unsponsored for flavor is that it actually doesn't mean anything. Nothing changes.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. I do like that implies that some people are sponsored for less flavor.

• 1:25:46David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:25:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, there's an, there's an implied comparison there that says, oh, less flavor when you have, when you have the brand deals.

• 1:25:55David Pierce?

  So maybe our t-shirt comes with stickers that you can, it covers the un and then adds a less when you do.

• 1:26:01Nilay Patel?

  I think instead of, you know, those like boring social media badges that are like, may contain advertising, it should just say sponsored with less flavor. Like that might communicate more about what's happening to the media industry.

• 1:26:15David Pierce?

  Well, I kind of like the idea that actually we go the other way and everything that's not sponsored has like a blinking red light that says flavor and everything that is sponsored doesn't get to have the cool light that says flavor. Yeah.

• 1:26:27Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, speaking of flavor and spiciness, it's time, David.

• 1:26:32David Pierce?

  Oh my God. America's favorite. It's a top two podcast within a podcast based on the emails that I get from people every single week. Uh, it's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:26:42Nilay Patel?

  By the way, people are starting to send us theme music. If you have ideas for Brendan Carr is a dummy theme music, send them in. We'll start running them.

• 1:26:49David Pierce?

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:49Nilay Patel?

  We need some variety, but I'm, I'm, I'm happy to see that the podcast within a podcast is beginning to take on the life of its own.

• 1:26:56David Pierce?

  And it has real momentum.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  It does.

• 1:26:57David Pierce?

  Real momentum. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:26:59Nilay Patel?

  So does Brendan and his unconstitutional nonsense that he does every single week. Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, uh, this week, out of nowhere, uh, said he was going to investigate Disney.

• 1:27:12Nilay Patel?

  Everybody wants to investigate Disney. That's what I got for you. He gave an interview to Punchbowl News. It's on YouTube. It's just like a podcast interview. And he says, he's putting the finishing touches on a letter announcing his efforts to investigate Disney's DEI practices, similar to his efforts against Comcast and Verizon. This is because Disney had a shareholder vote on continuing its DEI practices. And the shareholders voted to continue them because it turns out having a wide applicant pool for your open roles at things like parks is good. Just like, and again, I will point this out Comcast investor inbox me. They do not like me. That's the thing. But there's a disclosure.

• 1:27:56Nilay Patel?

  The investor company Comcast remaining committed to DEI is because it has a huge physical plant, like it has wires in the ground. It hires installers, like it needs a big net of how it hires and who it puts in the field as customer service. Cause its customers are everyone. Disney's customers, the parks are everyone. Like it makes sense that you would want to keep the applicant pools wide open at the top of the company, at the bottom of the company, all the way up and down. It makes sense. And so Brendan just wants to chill the speech of Disney, which owns ABC News. Right.

• 1:28:32Nilay Patel?

  Which already settled a case with Donald Trump about defamation, saying they were going to give $15 million to Trump's presidential library. That was the, was that the George Stephanopoulos case? Yep. Yeah. Which George Stephanopoulos did not want to settle, but Disney caved. So you just see, even when you cave to these bullies, the pressure remains. And that's happening right now with universities and law firms, right? You see Columbia caved and the pressure's still on. You can see that Paul Weiss, the law firm caved and the pressure is still on. It doesn't work. You gotta hit the bully back and Brendan is nothing if not a bully. And so just saying gleefully.

• 1:29:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to investigate Disney for no reason and saying gleefully, any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy, ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination. So he's already saying-

• 1:29:25David Pierce?

  Is that a quote? That's like a real thing he said out loud?

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  He said that out loud. What he's saying is, before I even evaluate the legality of your merger, or the ideas that you might have about what you might want to do with your companies, if you need my approval, I need you to do some racism. Like straightforwardly.

• 1:29:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Nilay Patel?

  And that's power. That's chilling speech. That is just inappropriate. And then on top of that, this week, when I say he's a bully,

• 1:29:52Nilay Patel?

  he's investigating CBS for the 60 Minutes edit, which we have talked about before, which is a very straightforward. They did a long interview with Kamala Harris. They edited it one way for one program. They edited it another way for another program. That's normal. And now the whole clip is out. You can see that it didn't actually make any substantive edits. And you can disagree with me on it.

• 1:30:10David Pierce?

  There are a lot of stupid cases on the, in this universe. This, this is one of the stupidest ones, if you ask me.

• 1:30:16Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, Brendan bullied CBS to release the full unedited clip. And you can see with your own eyes, you don't have to agree with me. You can see that no substantive change was made in that answer. They just cut it differently for two different programs.

• 1:30:28David Pierce?

  They used one part over here and one part over there, which is called editing. Like, what if, what if movie trailers were illegal?

• 1:30:35Nilay Patel?

  I assure you that editing occurs, right? If only we edited the show.

• 1:30:40Nilay Patel?

  This week, because that case is open, is a pending investigation at the FCC. A bunch of former FCC commissioners from Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have written a letter. They put into the docket, this is inappropriate. So Oliver Darcy, who's a friend of the verge, friend of the show, reported on this. We'll link to it. But he's got Alfred Sykes.

• 1:31:03Nilay Patel?

  But he notes that in this letter, Alfred Sykes, who's the former Republican chairman of the SEC, Irvin Dugan, who is a Democratic commissioner appointed by George H. W. Bush, Gloria Tristani, who Bill Clinton appointed, and Tom Wheeler, who I know, who served under Barack Obama, is the chairman. They've all signed on this letter. And they say, it's highly unusual for Carr to take the case up against CBS. He opened the matter without any real explanation for reconsidering his prior decision and said it sets a chilling precedent. Here's a quote, "By reopening this complaint, the commission is signaling to broadcasters that it will indeed act at the behest of the White House by closely scrutinizing the content of news coverage and threatening the licenses of broadcasters whose outlets produce coverage that does not pass muster in the president's

• 1:31:46Nilay Patel?

  view." That is a big bipartisan spanning time set of former FCC commissioners and chairs saying, "You're doing some illegal chilling of speech. You're doing some censorship." Okay, maybe you disagree with him. Maybe you don't agree with me. But I'm telling you, Brendan Carr is a dummy and a bully. And this is how he responded to Oliver Darcy asking him for comment on this. He sent him a Dr. Evil meme that just says, "How about no?" Jesus. Like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. It's just a gif. It says, "How about no?" Not a substantive response to former chairs of the FCC, former commissioners of the FCC, saying, "We're worried

• 1:32:26Nilay Patel?

  about this, the chilling of speech, the precedent you are setting by reopening this case without any explanation." He's sending out Dr. Evil memes because he is a fundamentally unserious piece of shit.

• 1:32:38David Pierce?

  Yep. It's such useful proof that all of this stuff is happening in bad faith, right? It's, I am endlessly willing to entertain arguments made in good faith. And this administration has made so abundantly clear that none of this shit is being done in good faith. No one, they're not trying to do the right thing. No one believes any of this. They just, it's some combination of they're idiots and they think it's funny and they want to.

• 1:33:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01David Pierce?

  And that's it.

• 1:33:02Nilay Patel?

  And there's just this endless search for power and how to use it and how to make other people feel bad. And I, look, we have wrestled with who should do the content moderation? How should you do it? How do you keep kids on the internet safe? Is it even appropriate for the government to have these rules? I have looked Barack Obama in the eye on Decoder. You can go watch the video and said, "Aren't you trying to get around the First Amendment?" And had him try to answer that question. I don't think he gave a very good answer.

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  We're in it. We've been covering this stuff for years and to have real concerns about government overreach into speech regulations met with Dr. Evil memes is just wildly inappropriate. It is disrespectful to the American people. It is on the line of you are a traitor to the Constitution. So Brendan, every week I say this, I know, I know you're listening. I know, I know you get the notes. Come on the show. Come on this show. Come on Decoder. You can argue with AI if you want to. You will lose because you are wrong. But the, the door is always open. Because I, I think you should be held to account for the decisions you're making and the fundamental unseriousness with which you are taking the First Amendment. That's when Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:34:15David Pierce?

  Hit us up on Signal, Brendan. We'll be here. All right. We, we're like 100 years into this podcast and we have not talked about the only thing anyone has been talking about.

• 1:34:24Nilay Patel?

  The joke that we open the show with.

• 1:34:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. Should we just talk about this briefly?

• 1:34:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot to say. There's almost nothing to say.

• 1:34:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's where I'm at too. Uh, so just to like, if I can just very briefly recap what happened here. So Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, got added in some way that I am still desperately trying to figure out to a Signal group chat that included a bunch of people very high up in the government, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance and a bunch of other people, uh, in which they just planned attacks. And, and Jeffrey Goldberg writes this story being like, they planned attacks in Signal and they added me to it. Uh, everyone in the government denied it, was like, this isn't classified. None of that happened. We didn't do any attack planning in Signal. He's a liar. Um, so they just posted the chats.

• 1:35:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, the move here, just editor in chief wise, gold. Like gold, right?

• 1:35:20David Pierce?

  Spectacular.

• 1:35:20Nilay Patel?

  You say, I, I didn't publish everything because I know it's classified, sensitive military information. The government says, screw you, nothing sensitive, nothing classified was shared. And you say, here's all of it. And you just know he had that in his back pocket.

• 1:35:31David Pierce?

  Yes. So, which I will give him credit for because one of the things that a lot of people have been talking about this week is why did my man leave the group chat? Which I agree with, frankly. I would have stayed in that group chat. I would have just, you just sit quietly and just, just watch the group chat happen. But he did take some screenshots before he left the group chat and, and I, I respect the hell out of that. You gotta take your screenshots.

• 1:35:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think you leave once you think that you have information that would be illegal for you to have.

• 1:35:57David Pierce?

  Is it illegal if they add you to the group chat?

• 1:36:00Nilay Patel?

  So this is, this is the complication here.

• 1:36:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:36:04Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, we're, we're all the way down to this story where the President Trump is like, maybe Signal is defective. And he keeps using the word defective, which is like very funny in this context.

• 1:36:13David Pierce?

  I will say, everything the President Trump says suggests to me that he has no idea what has actually gone on here.

• 1:36:16Nilay Patel?

  At one point, he, he referred to this group chat as a call. He said he got added to the call.

• 1:36:21David Pierce?

  And he keeps referring to the signal being bad? And it's like, my guy, that's not.

• 1:36:26Nilay Patel?

  This is how he keeps putting black people and his, his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, because it says urban in it. This is true. He thinks the signal's bad.

• 1:36:35Nilay Patel?

  And why he keeps mentioning Hannibal Lecter in the context of asylum, because he thinks it's saying, it's very good.

• 1:36:41Nilay Patel?

  Trump, notably, in this context, the most like dead ahead, trustworthy person talking. Cause he's like, that was bad. I had nothing to do with it. He's like, I don't know what they're talking about. That wasn't me. And you're like, yeah, that wasn't you. I don't think you know how to use Signal. But he has claimed that it's defective. There's some amount of like, was Signal hacked? Is a deflection. Elon Musk now is going to investigate how this happened. And the answer is Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat.

• 1:37:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's right there in the screenshot.

• 1:37:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because it's in the screenshot.

• 1:37:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Nilay Patel?

  And maybe he shares initials with somebody else. Maybe he got the wrong 202 area code number because everyone's in DC. And that's the area code. I don't know how it happened, but he did it. It's not a mystery.

• 1:37:29David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:37:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's how Signal works. And maybe Signal's interface can be clear, but he did it. He did the thing. And then they had that conversation, which was inappropriate to have in Signal. I think that much is clear as well. There are classified systems that are meant for that kind of communication.

• 1:37:44David Pierce?

  Potentially illegal to have in Signal, no?

• 1:37:47Nilay Patel?

  Potentially illegal, right, to not use the classified systems for the, the kind of conversation they're having. Now, there's this very tired semantic argument about the difference between war plans and attack plans.

• 1:37:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:37:57Nilay Patel?

  But all of this is like, yeah, it's a tech story because it's a, it's Signal.

• 1:38:02David Pierce?

  They just did it in a group chat.

• 1:38:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm saying the, the, the term that I'm worried about is they're gonna be like, Signal's not safe. We're, we need to break its encryption.

• 1:38:08David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:38:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. That, that's the term that I'm just been on Red Alert for that makes it like really a rich story.

• 1:38:14David Pierce?

  Well, it's, it's tricky, though, because it is, it is clearly a thing that they are using on purpose because A, it's encrypted and B, it disappears. Right? Like, they, they had.

• 1:38:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25David Pierce?

  They had message retention limits in the group chat on purpose, which is, again, not a thing you're allowed to do as a government official doing official business. But it's like, clearly what's going on here.

• 1:38:35Nilay Patel?

  And there's another part of this that's, you know, you can make the argument that Signal's safer than it used to be. Because they have to keep making the argument that it was safe because it's encrypted and can't be backdoored and da, da, da, da, da, da. And now you can't go and attack it.

• 1:38:47David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. So they, they've kind of painted themselves into a corner. Yeah.

• 1:38:50Nilay Patel?

  So I don't, I don't know. But the, the thing that I'm always nervous about is how will governments find ways to attack encryption? And here you have this thing. Here's this mess. And then the person with the big hammer, like the FBI with the big hammer that says, we shouldn't have encryption. Well, it could be up there like, do you have a nail? That looks like a huge nail.

• 1:39:11Nilay Patel?

  That's, it's just always a thing that's on the back of my mind that I should be worried about. Like, will the government try to get rid of encryption because of this?

• 1:39:16David Pierce?

  So the argument is like Jeffrey Goldberg hacked his way into Signal, thus Signal is not safe anyway. Thus, we should break the encryption.

• 1:39:26Nilay Patel?

  Or the argument is we can't know because Signal's encrypted and that's the law enforcement problem we have. We can't possibly arrest Jeffrey Goldberg because there's no evidence because of this encryption.

• 1:39:34David Pierce?

  Our buddy Big Balls at DOGE couldn't figure it out because he couldn't get by the encryption.

• 1:39:38Nilay Patel?

  It's very bad. This, this whole situation's very bad. And then like the Trump administration, like just trying to power through it by saying the things that are obvious are not obvious.

• 1:39:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:39:49Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. Like, all of that's bad and it is all centered on this app that. I hope the Signal Foundation can withstand the pressure.

• 1:39:57David Pierce?

  I will say the Signal Foundation so far has responded to this very well, uh, which is like they, they have mostly been very funny about it. And also it sounds like downloads have spiked. I think in a, in a funny way, one very possible outcome of this is that if the government's going to use it to do attack planning, it's probably pretty safe. Like they're, if, if they're in here doing the group chats, uh, they, that's a lot of trust to have from a lot of various senior people. But then at the same time, this is a fundamentally unserious group of people. And the other thing, Wired went and found that Mike Waltz's Venmo friend list was public. Uh, and it's like, this is just, this is not a group of people who is smart and thoughtful and doing a good job.

• 1:40:41Nilay Patel?

  No. Can we just run the Marco Rubio audio? Cause you know, they all had to do press conferences and I think the Atlantic timed this stuff when they knew that Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz would be in front of Congress because they had hearings in the Senate and the House. Um, so there was this, all these moments for people to talk. But it's Marco Rubio who was in the chat, who I think his response is just such a perfect, yeah, just run the audio. You'll see what I'm saying.

• 1:41:10Speaker 08

  And, you know, so I can speak to myself or my presence on it. I think my, my role, I, I was just thinking for my role, I.

• 1:41:19David Pierce?

  That's it. That's the whole question.

• 1:41:21Nilay Patel?

  Just a primal scream of like, help. I'm in danger.

• 1:41:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Uh, like the story is going to keep playing out. The, the thing that I think we're, we're going to stay focused on. It's like encrypted messaging is important. Encryption is important. Elon Musk is going to somehow investigate this now. I do love that they've landed on Elon will fix it as though. He's good at computers is like that. That's how they're treating it here. And it's like, ah, I think the military is good at keeping its information.

• 1:41:56David Pierce?

  This ends with like Elon telling lies about DMs on X and suddenly that's where the war planning happens. That's where this goes. I just want to shout out to our friends at 404 Media who wrote a story about all this and their headline is when your threat model is being a moron. And I think that sums it up all pretty well.

• 1:42:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's correct. Speaking of Elon, we got a big Alex Heath scoop that we should mention briefly in the lightning round. We kind of knew this was happening, but Alex nailed it down. Elon is very mad about content moderation on Reddit. He's mad about two things. One, which is totally justified. He's mad that there are death threats about him on Reddit. And he apparently has been communicating those directly to Steve Huffman Reddit CEO. The other thing he's mad about is many, many subreddits have banned links to X.

• 1:42:41David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:42:42Nilay Patel?

  Which Reddit hasn't done anything about yet, but there's a lot of, it's a user drama, moderator drama about what Reddit might be doing, how it might be promoting these subreddits, how it might be coming and doing moderation over the top against this perceived pressure. So far, it doesn't seem like they've made any subreddits have links to X. Like, that hasn't been the line they've crossed, but there's a lot of burbling.

• 1:43:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Nilay Patel?

  How much pressure is Elon putting on the top and how much is that pressure being reflected on the user experience of Reddit?

• 1:43:12Nilay Patel?

  And that's, as always, that's bad.

• 1:43:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I would say, A, it's not at all surprising and B, it is very funny because this is like, like for a man who styles himself a free speech warrior, like here it is.

• 1:43:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23David Pierce?

  It's, it's like, this is so of a piece for me with the thing that Elon Musk has decided it's, it should be illegal not to advertise on X, that it is just like, we're just so deep down all of these rabbit holes where it's like, you can't possibly think.

• 1:43:41David Pierce?

  What you just said out loud, it's like every subreddit should be required to link to X. It's like, no, that's not how any of this works. It's just not how any of this works. And, and yeah, and I think the Reddit side of it is interesting because I think there is a sort of ongoing fundamental mistrust on those three levels. Like the users don't trust the mods and the admins. The mods don't trust the admins and the admins don't trust anybody.

• 1:44:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09David Pierce?

  And so it's just like, this has always been a group of people who are all suspicious of each other. So as soon as things like this come up, everybody is looking for like any little thing that happens. And like, there was a, was it white people Twitter that, that got, that was like briefly banned?

• 1:44:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. 72 hour ban.

• 1:44:28David Pierce?

  Because of, that was a place that a lot of the, the conversation about Doge employees and the threats were being made. And there's, there's now pretty clearly a link back to Elon Musk from that.

• 1:44:40David Pierce?

  This is just, it's, it's both absurd in exactly the way you would expect and like a truly terrible look for everyone involved.

• 1:44:47Nilay Patel?

  There's also just some real fear of Elon here. Like if you run a competitor to Twitter, which by all accounts, you know, Reddit is, your, your answer should be go run your own social network. That's the answer. We're going to run ours our way and you run yours.

• 1:45:00David Pierce?

  I mean, I think back to like the first Trump administration, when there was so much happening because people were afraid that if they didn't do it or did do it or whatever, Donald Trump would tweet about it. And I think Elon Musk wields that same thing now, right? Like there, there's been, uh, Trump's like truth, social presence. People pay attention to it, but it doesn't carry the weight that his, his Twitter account once did, but Elon Musk sure does. Like, yeah, he tweets a million times a day, but it's like, he is somebody who can direct a lot of attention toward whatever he wants. And that is like, it just feels like a behavior he learned by watching Donald Trump in his last campaign and administration.

• 1:45:42Nilay Patel?

  But I feel like if Elon was like Reddit is being mean to me, go attack Reddit. Reddit's users would be capable.

• 1:45:49Nilay Patel?

  Waging their own fights. Like,

• 1:45:50David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:45:52Nilay Patel?

  Of all the communities on the internet would be like, no, we're, we're very capable on our own.

• 1:45:56David Pierce?

  Like, come at me, bro.

• 1:45:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're, we're good, actually. Uh, we'll see. I just, you just see that pressure. It's good scoop from Alex.

• 1:46:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Nilay Patel?

  We'll see how that, those dynamics keep playing out. Uh, speaking of social networks that have problems, TikTok, still in the news. David, you keep pointing out that April is, is like tomorrow, basically.

• 1:46:14David Pierce?

  It's so soon, man.

• 1:46:15Nilay Patel?

  A lot of things come due in April, including the TikTok ban.

• 1:46:20David Pierce?

  Next Saturday. Uh, yeah. And there is, uh, we were talking with Kylie about the perplexity thing, which is not going to happen. The Oracle thing burbles along. Uh, Walmart is gonna, you know, come in off the top rope and buy it, according to Eli. But now that the interesting thing is, and I think one of the questions we have been asking over and over is essentially, who gets to decide what constitutes a deal here, right? Like, it, who, who is the one who gets to say that satisfies the brief TikTok gets to remain? And, uh, what happens now is a bunch of members of Congress basically reminding the Trump administration that actually, um, they do.

• 1:47:04David Pierce?

  And I just, I'll just read you the, the quote here. Uh, he says, "To the extent that you continue trying to delay the divestment deadline through executive orders, any further extensions of the TikTok deadline will require Oracle, Apple, Google, and other companies to continue risking ruinous legal liability, a difficult decision to justify in perpetuity." So they're basically like, "Figure this out, or it's going to happen. And we are not going to continue to play these shenanigan games with you."

• 1:47:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the interesting thing here is the actual text of the bill, which we should read, which says, "Here's what a qualified divestiture is." So the bill said, "You have to sell it or be banned."

• 1:47:41David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:47:42Nilay Patel?

  And everyone was like, "This is a ban because ByteDance will never sell." And they didn't sell and they did their little stunt and they shut it down for a minute. And then Trump said, "You're fine until next Saturday."

• 1:47:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:47:51Nilay Patel?

  Which is weird because that's not how law enforcement's supposed to work. But here we are in the Trump administration.

• 1:47:56David Pierce?

  And Congress is trying very hard to remind him that that's not how law enforcement works.

• 1:48:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can't just delay this one to the Supreme Court. This is weird, but constitutional. The government is allowed to ban TikTok in this way. So what ByteDance was supposed to do is enact a qualified divestiture, which is sell TikTok. And so here's how it's defined in the bill. The term qualified divestiture means a divestiture or similar transaction that A, the president determines through an interagency process would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary. So the president, Donald Trump, has to go through an interagency process that results in TikTok no longer being controlled by ByteDance. That's a big one. What is this process? Is the Trump administration capable of a process?

• 1:48:46David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:48:46Nilay Patel?

  Who are the agencies?

• 1:48:48David Pierce?

  But the Trump administration seems very confident that an executive order counts as an interagency process.

• 1:48:53Nilay Patel?

  I guess. Right? I mean, they have to, a bunch of agencies, including our national security agencies, have to weigh in. We don't know if that's going to happen by Saturday. And we don't know if the sort of moves that they have on the table, like ByteDance will reduce its share of this to X amount of dollars and Oracle will increase its share, will satisfy this process. And all we've got is like JD Vance being like, we'll have the high level structure of a deal by the deadline. I don't know.

• 1:49:23David Pierce?

  So my guess would be, and we're going to find out in eight days, but my guess would be they're going to use that because there was, there was a provision that if there was a deal in the works, they could do another 90 day delay in order to finish that deal.

• 1:49:38Nilay Patel?

  But that's over. That's over. That was in the original text, there was that.

• 1:49:42David Pierce?

  But wasn't the 75 day delay that we just did something else?

• 1:49:46Nilay Patel?

  No, because the deadline passed. This all matters if you believe the rule of law in America still matters. And what matters is did Donald Trump tell the attorney general to enforce this law? And the answer right now is she said to her, don't do it. So she's not doing it.

• 1:50:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:50:02Nilay Patel?

  And will that matter on Saturday? Maybe he'll, maybe he'll say it again. And like, that's where you have letters from Congress saying, hey, we passed this law. Your job is to enforce it, not to delay it.

• 1:50:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:50:13Nilay Patel?

  And we gave you this grace period, basically, because the law went into effect on the first day you were in office. Okay, grace period's up, enforce the law or don't.

• 1:50:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:50:24Nilay Patel?

  And we just don't think there's gonna be a deal. There's this other part that says like, maybe you can get the algorithms out. The goal of this law is for them to sell it is to get ByteDance out of social media.

• 1:50:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:50:36Nilay Patel?

  In the United States.

• 1:50:37David Pierce?

  And at least as far as I can tell, uh, there is not a lot of indication coming from anywhere other than the Trump administration that a deal is happening.

• 1:50:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause I think everyone is, except for perplexity.

• 1:50:51Nilay Patel?

  Which I think tells you a lot about the status of their efforts here.

• 1:50:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's the, what is it Frank McCourt's thing, Project Liberty? Is that what it's called? Like, that's, that's out there.

• 1:50:58Nilay Patel?

  That's the one where Alexis Rahanian and Mr. Beast want to put it on the blockchain.

• 1:51:01David Pierce?

  Oh, God, yeah, sure, sure. Why not put TikTok on the blockchain? Like, it's whatever. That's the same as banning it. It'll be fine.

• 1:51:11Nilay Patel?

  Everything's an NFT.

• 1:51:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:14Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna light the ocean on fire. Some other lightning round items here. This one's real quick. The Google antitrust trial, the remedies phase, where they already determined that Google had a monopoly in search and now it's what do we do about it? That's set to kick off in April as well.

• 1:51:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:51:30Nilay Patel?

  The government, including Trump's administration, wants them to get rid of Chrome. Right, that was the approach of the DOJ under the Biden administration who won the trial. The Trump DOJ is sticking to it.

• 1:51:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:51:42Nilay Patel?

  We won the case, the DOJ won the case, the United States won the case, you're a monopoly. We also think the remedy is you getting rid of all this stuff. Google has filed an answer. The news here is that Apple moved to intervene in that case. And you should basically be like, don't take our money away. And the court ruled that they were too late.

• 1:51:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, which is really interesting.

• 1:52:01Nilay Patel?

  So they're not allowed. So that's 20 billions of Apple's revenue on a calendar error, basically.

• 1:52:05David Pierce?

  Apple was like central to that case. I mean, there was so much Apple in that case. And it's fascinating to see it just totally looped out of the last part of this.

• 1:52:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see, that case is coming up. By the way, the FTC's case against Meta, in which the government is asking for Instagram and WhatsApp to be sold off, also coming up in April.

• 1:52:26David Pierce?

  You're very excited about that case.

• 1:52:28Nilay Patel?

  I think that is the most legible case to the biggest audience. The government wants Mark Zuckerberg to get rid of Instagram. There's not another, I don't have to say more words.

• 1:52:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:52:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone understands exactly what it means. Like, I honestly think Google is a monopoly in search and so the government wants it to get rid of Chrome is totally opaque.

• 1:52:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Nilay Patel?

  You have to explain a bunch of hoops.

• 1:52:51David Pierce?

  Well, which is why it's funny like Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the search engine in Safari is actually more legible than Google is a monopoly because of Chrome.

• 1:53:05David Pierce?

  Even though I think both are sort of equally true, but you're right, like is Meta a monopoly? And thus should it have to get rid of Instagram? Is it's just it is as perfectly simple a monopoly case as I think you'll find, but they're going to spend seven weeks making it really complicated.

• 1:53:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so you could ask every celebrity in the world if Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram. Like I think about the local TV news test. You know, like, is this a local TV segment? And it's just like whoever, like man on the street. Should Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram? They're like, no, and like, there you go. Like, that's great TV.

• 1:53:36Nilay Patel?

  That's coming up as well. It's big April. And then the other thing that's happening is tariffs hit in April. Trump yesterday announced 25% tariffs on cars and car parts. If they're not manufactured in the United States, this is going to be a huge problem for every carmaker.

• 1:53:51David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:53:52Nilay Patel?

  Most cars are made of parts from all kinds of places. There are some like USMCA trade carve outs here. The whole audio industry is like sort of reorganizing around this problem. There might be some benefit to Tesla because Tesla makes so many of its cars in the United States. But it's coming like tariffs are here. He got held off on them once, he got held off on them again. I don't think he's going to blink this time.

• 1:54:21David Pierce?

  Didn't seem like it.

• 1:54:21Nilay Patel?

  The tariffs on Chinese products were like 45%. So I think we're just going to see a bunch of consumer electronics prices go up. We're going to see a bunch of car prices go up. I will say that there's a lot of, a lot of memes of people trading in their Teslas for Rivian's, which is really interesting. Yeah, I've seen a Cybertruck with the Rivian logo on the back. I've now seen a Cybertruck with the Toyota logo on the back that's floating around New York City.

• 1:54:43David Pierce?

  That has been my favorite meme, the people putting like Honda and BMW logos where the Tesla thing used to be. It's very funny.

• 1:54:51Nilay Patel?

  I've also seen a picture of a Cybertruck where they just have put like huge fender flares on it to make it look like a different car.

• 1:54:58David Pierce?

  Well, I was just gonna say the Cybertruck famously easy to make look like other cars.

• 1:55:01Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a Cybertruck, bro. One big wiper really sells it every time. And then, you know, there's just the general angst around Tesla. BYD, the Chinese company, is outselling Tesla right now. It did BYD to 107 billion in revenue for 2024, which is way over Tesla's 97.7 billion. BYD ships more than double the vehicles of Tesla if you count hybrids. And then they're investing in charging tech. Their new BYD's new charging tech is twice as fast as Tesla's. You can get 250 miles of range in like five minutes.

• 1:55:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, and we talked about like the the ongoing boom in like excitement about Chinese EVs coming to the US. Like the cars are not, but the the like TikTokers and YouTubers are reviewing them. A lot of BYD stuff starting to show up.

• 1:55:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Andy Hawkins is working on a story on that. I bet we should have him on when he does that story.

• 1:55:53David Pierce?

  There you go. Yeah. And the the like supposed biggest day of Tesla takedown is this weekend. And so I think we're gonna, we'll have Andy on next week, maybe. We'll we'll talk through a lot of this stuff.

• 1:56:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know people get, there's whatever noise about Tesla takedown where it's all just like domestic terrorism. First of all, domestic terrorism, very fuzzy concept in American law. It's just true. It has been for a long time. It's not illegal on its own, but the things you do are illegal. And there are some definitions, but there's not like a law. So like the government keeps saying this thing and it's like cheat codes to get surveillance warrants. It's very, it's very weird. And like a lot of the Trump administration is invoking powers that are reserved for special circumstances. Like we're at war with Canada. Say, you just like say these words to to justify, even like tariffs are, they're being justified under emergency powers, right?

• 1:56:50Nilay Patel?

  So there's some weird stuff with the Tesla protests that we will cover. But yeah, there's big protests coming. Tesla's under a lot of pressure. These terrorists might benefit Tesla. So there's some back and forth there. And then last little, little one, which I think we should end on a high note. The cars, Rivian had a secret e-bike company that it spun out called Also, which is pretty cool.

• 1:57:11David Pierce?

  I'm pumped about this. The, the idea of Rivian taking its tech into, like they, at first they were like micro mobility and I was like dope, we're going to get some scooters. Cause you, you know, I love a scooter startup. But it sounds like it's going to be bikes, but they're going to use some of the Rivian tech. They're gonna, they're going to use a lot of Rivian's like manufacturing capabilities. And one of the things that RJ, the CEO said is that he thinks it is ridiculous how expensive these great e-bikes are. And I also think it is ridiculous how expensive they are. And so that made me very happy.

• 1:57:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46David Pierce?

  Like if Rivian can figure out how to economies of scale its way into good e-bikes for like half what they currently cost. Great. Forget cars. Just do that. I'm good.

• 1:57:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm super down with that. I am looking at an R1S like every day right now.

• 1:57:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I've, I've test driven one a million times. Like RJ was on Decoder, they gave me one for a weekend. It's cool. It's like, they're not as nice on the inside as our Jeep. But they're obviously better cars because Jeeps are made by stellantis.

• 1:58:19Nilay Patel?

  About that, like you want a three row SUV for your family and you want a bunch of range, like the R1S is the thing that exists.

• 1:58:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Nilay Patel?

  But they're pretty Spartan on the inside. They're also expensive. I just, I'm just like, oh, these tariffs are coming. All these cars are going to get more expensive.

• 1:58:34David Pierce?

  So buy it now. That's the only answer.

• 1:58:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like, I'm like, am I just going to pull the trigger on this car for kind of no reason, except I think the tariffs will make it expensive a year from now.

• 1:58:42David Pierce?

  I'm sure that's a case Becky will buy. Listen, I don't need this car now, but it'll be more expensive in two weeks.

• 1:58:46Nilay Patel?

  By the way, if you have a Jeep four by E, if you have one of the hybrids, you need to go to the dealer today because they just issued the software update for the recall they had where the, they told everyone to not charge their cars because they might start on fire.

• 1:59:01David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:59:01Nilay Patel?

  And part of that was not just don't charge your car. It was leave it outside in case it starts on fire. This is a real thing. They had defective Samsung batteries in them. So the recall's out. You could go to the dealer. They do the software upgrade. Part of the software upgrade is just making the software know if there's gonna be fire. Like, oh, these numbers are out of spec, like, there's gonna be fire. And then another part of the software upgrade is after they do it, they drive your car around. Uh, and there was like some specific set of miles you have to drive at specific speeds.

• 1:59:29David Pierce?

  To see if it does fire?

• 1:59:31Nilay Patel?

  To see if it hits the threshold that requires a battery recall. You can understand why I'm like, I should get a different car. Cause we did all the things and our car was fine, but like, once that happens, you're like, I don't like you anymore.

• 1:59:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I, you know, I just, I have uncomfortable feelings about you specifically.

• 1:59:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. You don't get that trust back. I don't think.

• 1:59:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, yeah. So I don't know. If you, if you can talk me into an R1S, you know, send me a note. I'm also open to a 2002 Escalade, which you can buy at any point for $2,000. It's all, every time we talk about a computer on the show and we're like, it's $1,500, like a new iPad. I'm like, I could get a 2002 Escalade.

• 2:00:12David Pierce?

  It's the dream. All right. We need to get out of here.

• 2:00:14Nilay Patel?

  We got it. Let me know if you have a 2002 Escalade. That's awesome. If you've got one, you know, let's make a deal. Let's talk. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast.

• 2:00:29Nilay 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-VERGE-11. 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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