OpenAI and Jony Ive's AI super-gadget

Bad news if you don't care about AI: this week was absolutely chock-full of AI news. First, Nilay, David, and The Verge's Alex Heath talk about the news that OpenAI and Jony Ive are teaming up to build... something. A gadget, for sure, maybe lots of gadgets. We don't know much, but we have a lot of thoughts, and a lot of questions. After that, the hosts talk through all the news at Google I/O, including what's new with Gemini, Google Search, Project Astra, Project Mariner, and the countless other ways Google is putting AI absolutely everywhere. Finally, in the lightning round, we buckle up for another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, talk through some late-breaking Apple gadget news, and marvel over the future of conference calls. Further reading: OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI hardware company From The Wall Street Journal: What Sam Altman Told OpenAI About the Secret Device He’s Making With Jony Ive Details leak about Jony Ive’s new ‘screen-free’ OpenAI device Jony Ive says Rabbit and Humane made bad products The 15 biggest announcements at Google I/O 2025 Google launches AI Mode to everyone in the US, adds more features to AI Overviews Google’s 3D video calling tech is finally going to ship this year Project Astra 2025: Google’s universal AI assistant is now smarter and more proactive Google has a new tool just for making AI videos Google reveals $250 per month ‘AI Ultra’ plan Google Meet can translate what you say into other languages Google’s Gemini AI is coming to Chrome Google says its new image AI can actually spell Google will let you ‘try on’ clothes with AI Google is bringing an ‘Agent Mode’ to the Gemini app We tried on Google’s prototype AI smart glasses Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on the birth of the agentic web Microsoft’s plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap Google rejected giving publishers more choice to opt out of AI Search Google is stuffing even more ads into its AI results Google’s Gemini AI is coming to Chrome Google reveals $250 per month ‘AI Ultra’ plan FCC Chairman Carr seeks to designate NBC equal time issue for hearing FCC approves Verizon’s $20 billion merger after it commits to ‘ending’ DEI Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're busy. We know that. So we'll keep this quick. Introducing AMX Corporate, now featuring the Corporate Cash Back Card. For one annual flat fee, get 1.5% cash back on eligible business purchases, plus intelligent expense management with the unmatched expertise and backing of American Express. Built to simplify, designed to scale. Get started at go.amex/ammxcorporate. Terms and cap apply.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to Richast, the flagship podcast of Alex Heath and I trying to talk to Sergey Brin and being deflected at every opportunity.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  It was rough. It was bad.

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  Hi, my friend Alex Heath is here. Hey, what's going on? David Pierce is here.

• 0:49David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 0:49Nilay Patel?

  So Alex and I were at I/O, at Google I/O. It's big news of the week. Google announced a bunch of stuff. We're going to talk about it. But there was this moment where Sergey was in the AI sandbox, like the demo area. He was there last year too, and he like talked to reporters for a long time, just riffing about AI. So he was there at the end of this year, and I kept describing it as like the sword in the stone. Like all these reporters kept on trying to talk to him and just like failing. Including me. Including both of us.

• 1:18David Pierce?

  This makes me think somebody must have given him a speech not to talk to reporters. Because the other thing that Sergey Brin likes to do is just say some truly wild stuff that is not helpful if you're Google. But he likes to talk to people. So I assume somebody gave him a stern speech not to talk to reporters.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't think it was that, actually. He was working on a demo. Like he was in the demo area. He was like playing with the stuff, right? And he, it was Flow, the new video tool that Google released that runs on VO3. Where it's like, it's basically, it's like iMovie for AI video, right? And he was trying to get it, I think, to make himself. Like he was prompting it to make himself. I missed that. That's what I heard like secondhand, but he was, I mean, I watched him using it and say out loud, like this isn't working the way it should. And then someone else, you know, then all the Googlers were like, this isn't working. And he looked, he was very locked in on whatever he was doing. And then someone else told me that. It's not supposed to make Sergey brand, so he was trying to make it.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  That's amazing.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Um, uh, so he was like totally focused on this thing not working, which is why he wasn't talking.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  And then he went over to do the glasses demo. Yeah.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  Is that the AI executive of like Googling yourself every once in a while? You like train the new model and then see how successfully it can replicate you. And that's, that's your model of how big a deal you are.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  It's it. Yeah, probably. I mean, how often do you think Sundar Googles himself? I like, that must be crazy making because you are the one person who can actually just change the search rankings and be like, Sir, like Sundar Pichai is, is supercool.com is going to be the first result.

• 2:51David Pierce?

  Everything is an episode of Silicon Valley, Eli. Every single thing.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it was just very funny because everyone saw him. He was just like in the middle of the room. And I had just failed. I walked over and I was like, hey, man. And he was like, whatever. It's like left and then like three other reporters had that experience and Alex, you know, star reporter Alex heath, like super confidently saunters over there. And I was like, he's gonna, he's gonna try to pull that sword up the stone, man. He just like did, didn't happen.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  The eye roll that I got from a Google communications executive as I approached Sergey was, uh, was, was really good. Yeah.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  It was good, but later he crashed, uh, he crashed another keynote.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Like Demis Sabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind was doing it like a keynote interview type deal fireside chat. And so he just like came on stage with him and everyone was like, here I am. And then he did in fact say just bonkers things.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Including like, I just get to tell this guy what to do and, uh, we live, we may be in a stack of simulations. Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, his answer to do we live in a simulation was if you think we live in one simulation, then the people who made that simulation also live in a simulation and you have to deal with that.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Neil, you've been going, you've been going to I O for longer than me. Did this feel like a return to early I O for you? Like, I heard a few people be like, especially the Sergey talk, but, um, it just felt like 10 years ago. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Do you, do you see what I'm saying there?

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  I do. It was different. Uh, Google is just more corporate now.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  In that way, we'll come to it. I think it was very confident and I think that's what people were picking up on.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  Google's feeling itself again in a, in a real way that we should talk about.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're like, we can do stuff and they haven't felt that way. Like, For like the past several years, like here's what we've done. We've added one feature to Android and Samsung is going to use it. And that has been I O. And this was very different. There was a lot of confidence out of this year. We should go after that. We're going to come to that in a second. I we I think we have to start with Johnny Ive and Sam Altman trying to upstage I O by announcing a company called I O. Like literally the next day. Before we get into all the news, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about, like I said, Google I O. There's lightning round. Brendan has Brendaned. Two pieces of housekeeping. One, we have a survey about the Verge Cast. What you want from us, what you want from our podcast. That's voxmedia.com/survey. Go take the survey. Someone will make a chart and then we'll we'll we'll listen to them.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  I think we're obligated to say that we'll listen to them. I think you you know, the truth.

• 5:16David Pierce?

  Here's what I promise is that if you take the survey, I will give a readout on this podcast of Neelai yelling at whoever presents us the chart at the end of this process. So do the survey.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  No one can tell me what to do. That's what we sell here. And then second, speaking of no one can tell us what to do. One of the ways that we protect ourselves from being told what to do is by having a direct financial relationship with you, the reader slash listener. And Verge subscriptions are on sale for Memorial Day because we're like, why not have a sale? They're 40% off, which means they're $35 a year. That's theverge.com/subscribe. And what you are buying, I just to be very clear, but yes, a bunch of great reporting. David getting increasingly redder on the YouTube channel every week. That's something that we provide for that that money. And then, you know, our ethics, what we fundamentally sell here is our ethics policy. You just can't tell us what to do. We don't do brand integrations, sponsorships. I don't thank a phone casemaker in the middle of the review videos because no one can tell us what to do.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  And we we get to do that because you pay us the money directly and then take a survey. And then we don't listen to the survey. It's a weird feedback loop, but it works. I think it's been working for us. It's good.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  $30, $35 is good, too. That's like a salad in Mountain View.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  It really is.

• 6:27David Pierce?

  That's one Arowan smoothie.

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  In LA terms.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  It's good. We're, we don't, you know, we're new to this particular game. This is our first ever sale. We, I feel like, I literally feel like I'm trying to sell you a Cadillac right now. But we have, we're learning all these moves and it's like, kind of fun. It's like new, new problems to solve. So let us know how we're doing. And by let us know how we're doing, I mean, spend $35 a year on our product. Thank you.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Is that how you sell anything?

• 6:55David Pierce?

  Doing great.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  Neil is on three hours of sleep, guys. We just, I just want to say that going into this show. My flight was delayed coming home from IO and so effectively turned into a red eye. And I'm just super loopy. I'm, I'm drinking coffee during the afternoon virgescast for the first time in years. So we're going to get through it. It's going to be great. Okay, let's start with Johnny Ive in his arms.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's what they announced. They announced Johnny Ive's walk. Right? Sam Altman, Johnny Ive released a video. I think they got scooped a little bit, Alex. Like, I think the Journal and Bloomberg kind of had it. And then they, they like, put out this video to announce it. That's, that's my sense of it.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  They had some embargoed stuff. Johnny and Sam Altman did a couple interviews. They did one with Bloomberg, one with the Times. And then in a very good spot, people saw Johnny actually filming this video that he did with Sam on May 2nd.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  That's what it means.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  So this video was done almost a month ago.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  So there's this announcement, the, the basics of the announcement, as near as I can understand it, is that Johnny Ive started a new company that is staffed by a bunch of a star former Apple designers. That company is called IO. Very funny because this company lasted for two minutes. And it has been sold to OpenAI for 6.5 billion in OpenAI stock, which is also a very complicated idea. And then Johnny Ive himself is not going to go work at OpenAI. He is going to stay at his design agency, Love From, which will now have no other clients except for OpenAI.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  At some point, yeah.

• 8:35David Pierce?

  The only tick that's more complicated than that is that OpenAI's investment firm, I believe, was associated with I/O. But OpenAI will tell you that OpenAI's investment firm is not part of OpenAI.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, fun fact, a thing I found out this week is that the OpenAI startup fund is not part of OpenAI.

• 8:54David Pierce?

  None of this makes any sense. It's all pretend, like, the thing to remember at the beginning of this is all the money is pretend. Like, all the money that Sam Altman can raise is always pretend. All of the different machinations of how the money moves around is pretend. Whether OpenAI is or is not a for-profit company is pretend. This new company they created is pretend. Like, it's, it's all made up.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  And the, the products that they've announced, the most pretend of all.

• 9:18David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  So they, they released a video, so they announced this deal. They're going to work together. They're going to make a new generation of hardware products. I think they're coming, the first are coming next year.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  It, you gotta. I would say, like, announced at the end of next year and shipping in 2027, if I had to guess.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  But what they really shipped was this video.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think the reason, my addled, my sleep deprived brain is like, the, the video was, the people, lots of people saw them making this video in early May. And I think everybody understood something was up. And I, the fundamental thing they announced in this video is that Johnny Ive walks around like he owns the place.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, you just, you just have to watch it. It isn't, it is literally one of the most confident walks in history.

• 10:02David Pierce?

  It's very good.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  And it's this very, you know, grandiose thing. And it looks like they're just walking through San Francisco, you know, with a camera following them. And, you know, it's just the normal city street on a given day. And then you see people shooting when they were actually filming and people were like filming the, the set. And it's all staged, like, everyone walking across the, like, intersection with Johnny with his arms swinging, like. Everything, it wasn't made by AI, but it also wasn't.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it does have a lot of vibes. Lots of people on various social platforms are like counting the wine bottles behind them. I saw one person fully crash out being like, the cups are moving from shot to shot. And it's like, yeah, it's because it's a lot of different shots. They edited together. It's fine, you guys. Anyway, the video is those two sitting in a restaurant, having little cups of espresso together, basically saying that they love each other. And that there's a new class of computing devices to be made with AI. And then Johnny is gonna do that in some way with OpenAI. That is the sum of the announcement in the video.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Also, San Francisco is awesome. There's a lot of love for San Francisco. And just generally like, what if we change the world, you know, like it's, it's just this big, like, you know, idea of two guys changing the world. I mean, who doesn't love that?

• 11:19David Pierce?

  I think the only like specific thing I can think of that comes out of it is there is one device that already exists in some form. They have made a thing together. And there's been reporting that these two have been working together on hardware for a long time now. So something exists. I don't know how many of them there are. I don't know how finished it is, but like, it is clear that there is one product in actual honest to God development. But their plan is to build a whole family of devices.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Altman actually says in the video that he just took the prototype home. So this was in early May. He just got to take the first device home. I think we should talk about the reporting on the device and how it may or may not work. I just want to really quick through, really quickly run through how this whole thing came about because I think this probably surprised a lot of people when they saw this. So I've talked to OpenAI and LoveFrom now, and the rundown is basically that two years ago, Sam and Johnny were introduced. About a year ago, actually almost exactly a year ago, they decided to start a new division inside LoveFrom to work on AI devices together.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  And that division includes a bunch of legendary early Apple design leaders that worked under I've, including Evans Hanke, who ran the industrial design group at Apple after he left. And then she left in 2023 and went to LoveFrom. And they were doing this for several months and then employees at OpenAI, employees at OpenAI were starting to come in and work at Love From together with them. And then towards the end of last year, Love From was thinking about raising a lot more money for I O, this division of the company doing hardware. And that was when Altman was like, what if we just buy you guys fully? So they had already invested in this Love From subsidiary through the OpenAI Startup Fund that is not owned by OpenAI.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  And they just bought the rest of it. And so now a team of about 55 people, who are a lot of early Apple design people, are going over to OpenAI in a new hardware division that's rolling up directly to Sam. And Johnny is staying at Love From with his design team, but will now also oversee all of design at OpenAI, not just hardware. And Johnny also works with Airbnb. He helps Brian Chesky on high level design stuff. He works with Ferrari. He's actually designing the first ever electric Ferrari. And I think he wants to keep doing other things. But I think once there are projects that they're doing, you know, and they're going to be almost fully devoted to OpenAI.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  But he's also staying independent. So pretty unusual.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Because if you're Johnny Ive, the idea that you will ever have another boss has to just not even.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  It's just like not a square on the bingo card that exists.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:08David Pierce?

  But also like, Neil, your point about the thing that they made is this video is the thing, right? Like, this is, this is the cachet that OpenAI literally couldn't buy for any amount of money, except to give it all to Johnny Ive. There is like, this company is desperate to convince people that it can make good, interesting, cool products, and that it is not going to get lapped by big tech companies as all of the like, science behind this stuff gets closer and closer. And like, the way to win here is to convince everybody that you're Apple and that you're going to do the hardware software services thing. And boy, is there not a better way to do that than to put Johnny Ive and his confident walk in your video. So like, I frankly would be shocked if at the end of all of this,

• 14:51David Pierce?

  Johnny Ive is like day to day involved in making products with OpenAI. But it doesn't matter. This, this, today it was like, the announcement was the thing. And that's, that's all you need from Johnny.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we literally just need his voice in their keynote.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  For, you know, being like, plastic is inevitable. And like, it's fine, he'll be, he'll be fine.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  But I, before we get into the device, because there's some reporting about what it might be, we have a lot of guesses over what it might be. The idea here is that Sam Altman is Steve Jobs, right? Yep. That it's very clear, like even in that video, he's like, I'm, everything in my life has led to this moment. Altman makes reference to the iPhone and the Mac Book Air, and he's like, we're going to build the next version of this. And then, you know, they just spend a lot of time looking deeply into each other's eyes and talking about working together in California. And you're like, oh, I know exactly what they want people to take from this. Right? It's, it's just very clear. They, they want to be Apple and they hired Apple's legendary design team. And then you're going to position Altman as the next Steve Jobs and Altman reveres Steve Jobs. He's best friends with Brian Chesky, who also reveres Steve Jobs.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  Chesky was just on Decoder. He talks about Apple as though he is like the world's foremost PhD student of Apple. It's very funny. Also, that episode doesn't come out, it'll come out next week by the time I listen to this. Um, I asked Chesky very directly about I've and Altman, and all he said was, I'm very proud to have introduced them. Good dodge. Uh, I told, I congratulated him on that dodge. But, uh, there's some big, like foundational things to point out about wanting to be the next Steve Jobs. With AI is the foundational technology for the next device. And I think the most important one is that the AI systems don't work well yet. Like, you just have to acknowledge it, right?

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, I've and Jobs together, the first thing they made was the iMac, right? That's the first big hit product that those two combined to make. And the iMac was an, right? It was just an all in one CRT. It was a piece of hardware. Like, the big innovation was that it was blue. And the thing that made it a hit was that the web existed. Right? That was the whole thing of the iMac was there's a new application. There's a new killer app for desktop computers and we're going to sell you this blue one with a handle and it's easier to set up than the Windows PC and that rejuvenated Apple. And the, the technology bet was that people wanted to get on the internet and that worked.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  That was just there. It was, it was happening. The next one was the iPod and I, it's easy to forget now, but the technology bet there was John Rubenstein went and found a tiny Toshiba hard drive and Phil Schiller invented the click wheel and, and they were able to package that together into the iPod, but the core technology was Toshiba made this little hard drive and they don't know what to do with it. And you can like go read Stephen Levy's book. It's called the, the perfect thing. That's what it's called. But it's literally like, what are we going to do with this hard drive and the music player? The iPhone was like, we invented multi-touch and that is a thing. We're going to make a whole phone out of this. And you just keep going on and on. There's these like big core technologies that I was able to package into new kinds of products with a

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  visionary who was like, I know what kinds of technologies will lead to products. Like the iPhone, for example, they were doing the iPad first and Steve Jobs was like, no makeup phone. Then we'll do, come back into the iPod, right? Like that's the dynamic we're seeing the two characters here. AI isn't that product yet. Like this is like, I made an iPod and sometimes the hard drive just lies to you. Right? Like that would be weird. I mean, I invented the iPhone, but the screen sometimes tries to bang Kevin Roos is like that. That is the, the level of capability that the core technology they're trying to build these products has. And I, I, I'm just, I find myself

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  just like utterly full of skepticism that OpenAI is it's presently configured, having lost a bunch of its research people and its product people. Can can turn the corner. I don't know. I the it like, maybe I'm just like very sleepy, you know, and more cranky than usual, but I'm just like, all of the hit products had a core technology innovation that definitely worked. Right. And people were like, really skeptical of some of them. People are really, really skeptical of typing on a multi-touch keyboard. And the thing they were able to do was design their way through that and make it good.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  I mean, I think that's A, a lot of credit to give to the first generation of all of those technologies, which like the first iPhone was not good. It was like fascinating and cool, but it was like, it was bad at a lot of things.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  But multi-touch worked.

• 19:42David Pierce?

  Multi-touch worked. I think so. Okay, here's, here's what's wild to me. And I think this, this is going to be a theme of today's episode is, I think your assessment of how good AI is, is correct. And I think most people don't care. I think most people think AI is very good.

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  Um, and I, I increasingly don't know what to do with that, that like, people, the, the like approval rating of chat GPT is actually very, very, very, very high.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:09David Pierce?

  Whether or not it's any good, or lies to you or not, is, is relevant, but also in a weird way, sort of beside the point at this point. Like, people are so enamored with this stuff that they're willing to look past all that stuff. And so maybe it doesn't matter. And I'm like, this is where I'm so torn on all of this, that like, the big question about all of these AI devices, right? Is like, A, do people want another device that they have to buy? Um, I think the answer to that is yes. Like, everybody always wants another device to buy. Like, that's fine.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Point and shoot cameras have made a comeback, David. I think we can confidently say yes.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Smartwatches, when there was a reason for smartwatches, people got on board with wireless headphones that are really expensive. Like, people will keep buying new gadgets if there's a reason for them. The question is, is there an AI specific thing to do? And I think, to me, that is both a like, is the tech any good question? And is there a UI for this that makes sense? Question. The UI for this that makes sense, I think, is still a wildly open question. But like, is the tech good enough for people to want to use it all day, every day? I think the answer is yes. Whether it should be or not is a different question, but I think it is.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  The UI is voice. And I think back to Nilay's point, like there was a key tech bet of how people wanted to use it with each of the things that Johnny did with with Jobs. I think here people do want to talk to ChatGPT. They want to do advanced voice mode. And they don't want to have to configure the action button on the iPhone and wait three seconds for it to load up and connect to the internet to actually work. I think if you had a always on listening, ambient aware thing that you could have a conversation with. I think people would do that. I mean, my wife told me yesterday, she was like, I just said, thank you back to ChatGPT. And it made me feel very strange, like unprompted, you know, like people are building.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  I mean, we were hearing this at I O like afterwards, like people are having real almost relationships with these AIs. And yeah, if you introduce something that you can just talk to all day long, it's it's the her concept, which Sam Altman is obsessed with, the Spike Jones film. And you know what I've heard about this product and the form factor is is a little mushy. Is basically the ideas that bike demo we saw at I O this week where a guy is trying to fix his bike and he's talking to the AI throughout it and it knows what he's looking at. And it's guiding him through it. And if it does work, if it's not hallucinating, that is just fundamentally a more human way to use technology. It's just like talking to it and it's helping you.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Does it lie? Does it get things wrong? Yes. Does it matter? And will it be good enough? Maybe.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's very funny how many tech demos at every stage of technology involve trying to fix something. Like my first ever Microsoft HoloLens demo, they had me change a spark plug in an ATV. And like, this is the future of changing these spark plugs. And like, we're just doing it again. And lots of people change lots of spark plugs without like data centers in overdrive.

• 23:11David Pierce?

  But yeah, there's only like three ideas, right? It's like every new technology is is for playing Assassin's Creed. Fixing your car more successfully and buying elaborate vacation plans. Like that's it. That's all we're doing.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  In Spanish. Yeah. Yeah, those are the three. Which one is it? You just tell me which one it is. I get all that. I, you know, my skepticism about AI is not, do people like it? I've, I've really come around to, there is a widening gulf between how people talk about how much they hate AI online and then people using it in real life and how much they use it, how much they like it. It, you can sense it. It's, there is a turn. Sundar at I O. On stage said, we're entering a new phase of the platform shift. And what he meant was the products are coming out now. Right. That we're not just talking about model scores. Like here's a bunch of new products. I think chat G P T is that product for open AI, but it does, it chat G P T as it is currently configured will never return on the massive amount of investment that open AI has taken. Correct.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  They need to be Apple. They need the iPhone. They need the app economy of the iPhone. They need to be the richest company in the world, but this is literally, that is the only target that makes sense for their level of investment. That's a big problem. And I'm just, again, I'm just coming back to, does the core technology let them do the thing they want to do? Or is it people just like it so much that they will skip over the fact that it's brittle? And what I've has traditionally been successful at is designing to the limitation. Right? He makes, he makes the limitation, the, the most successful part of the product. It's a little hard drive. The whole thing looks like a little hard drive. And we're going to talk about how many songs it has. Remember unapologetically plastic, like these are his moves.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like he says, I, I made it feel inevitable. And the thing that's inevitable is the limitation of the technology is the product and you don't feel the limitation because it's designed to make that the, the thing that makes a product good. And you might think that I'm just like a sleepy man who's rambling, but think about the first iMac and how it was translucent. So you could see that C R T display. That was the limitation of the product. Yeah. They had to build it around this giant vacuum display. And he made it the centerpiece of the product so that over the lifetime of the product, they made that plastic clearer and clearer. That was the investment in the materials was to do the appropriate E M F shielding in the plastic itself to be transparent instead of just translucent.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  And so that the C R T became the center of this, but that's I've like at the highest level that is Johnny I've. We're to make the antenna, the band of the iPhone four. So you can't, if you hold it wrong, the signal drops. That's Johnny I've stuff, right?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  How do you design to the limitation of AI as it currently exists?

• 25:55David Pierce?

  I think the question of how much credit for that kind of stuff IVE gets is going to be one of the pieces of this that is really interesting because if you look at the Johnny Ive era at Apple after Steve Jobs, it's a lot less of what you just described.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:08David Pierce?

  And it is a lot more of Johnny Ive pursuing things that are aesthetically lovely for the sake of making things that are aesthetically lovely. And that's, that's fine. That's a perfectly good approach to doing a lot of things. That's also how you get the butterfly keyboard and it's how you get like laptops that literally just stopped working for people for a gen- like they just made a series of bad decisions about laptops in order to make pretty laptops.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  It's how you get a mouse that you have to charge upside down.

• 26:34David Pierce?

  That's just the thing that happened. And I think about even like the, the Apple Watch, which was a true like Johnny Ive led project. Uh, Johnny Ive decided to build a watch and then worked backwards towards the Apple Watch and they landed in the wrong place. They landed in a place that I think is really fascinating, but it took like two pivots from the first idea before Apple had a hit product. And so I think this question of like Johnny's capability to make beautiful things is like beyond question.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Well, we'll see. He's doing the electric Ferrari. We'll see how good that looks.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  I mean, nobody's perfect every time, right? But I think like in terms of, I would bet, I would bet a lot of money on whatever they make looking and feeling great.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the bet. That has to be the bet. I mean, look, so Sam Altman had this meeting inside OpenAI that was reported on by the Wall Street Journal and he told them that this 6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add one trillion in value to OpenAI, which is just like, you know, making up numbers.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  You can just say things.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  But like, this is where he started to talk a little bit about those limitations, Neil, that you're talking about. Um, he said the device isn't going to be a pair of glasses. And then it's something to wear, although it sounds like they're not going to want to call it a wearable. Um, and then. You know, he's saying we're not going to ship 100 million devices literally on day one. Duh, but he does think they'll get there faster than any company ever. And the Altman is just, this is, he's great at hype, right? Like this is, obviously, he's hyping this up to employees who are like, why did we just give Johnny Ive $6 billion and he's not joining us? But he did, so this is from the meeting.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  He said, "The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user's surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one's pocket or on one's desk, and will be a third core device a person would have after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone." So here we go, this is like a better Humane pen?

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  I mean, not for nothing, the Humane pen was designed by two former Apple designers who regretted their work on the iPhone.

• 28:44David Pierce?

  Many of whom were called legendary when they started this company. Imran Chowdhury, as legendary as it comes, coming out of Apple.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Did you get, Altman gave them millions of dollars in funding.

• 28:52David Pierce?

  He was the single biggest investor in the company. Like, it's just, we're doing Humane again, but now it's Johnny Ive.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  Ive did say that Humane pen was a poor product, which tracks with your view, David.

• 29:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, and the truth. That's right. Good call by Johnny.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  I would say that I called that watching the first demo video of the Humane pen. And maybe I've, maybe I've lost some friends forever because of that.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  I've also called the Rabbit a poor product, which I think Jesse, Lu and Rabbit loved because Johnny Ive knows who they are. And they released a long statement being like, "We love that the pie is growing." And I, good luck, guys.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Let me read this, Jesse sent us a statement, it's actually amazing. He says, "It's an honor to get mentioned by Johnny Ive and Sam Altman. However, we don't like to be put side by side with Humane, a company that stopped trying, got acquired and shut down."

• 29:42David Pierce?

  That's very good.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal.

• 29:44David Pierce?

  You can call us shit, but don't compare us to Humane. That's very good. That's very good, Jesse.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  It's really good. Yeah.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  You can tell that he wrote that, not, not the robot. You know, like you can tell when it's like, that's human. Like, don't compare me to Humane.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  But that, those are the products and there's a million of them. David, you read a bunch of like note taking products. Right? Like I'm gonna have a microphone that's talking like recording all the time. Um, yeah. Last time I saw Joanna Stern, she was wearing a wristband that records everything. And the lights were backwards. It was red when it was off.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  It's called the bee. Vison reviewed it for us. It's, it's a delightful and terrible product.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, there's just like a million of these devices. That's like, what if we just feed input into an AI? And then it does something.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  Summarize or talk to you or whatever. And that's what I mean by the limitation. The limitation of those products is very, very obvious. Right? The AIs can't, they can't take actions for you. Like the agents don't work yet. Maybe they will. We'll talk about that with I O. Like there's a lot of activity around how to make the agents work and go do stuff for you when you ask them to do it. The AI, right? They don't actually know a bunch of stuff. The, the search features don't work as well as they should. Like there's just a bunch of stuff where the limitation of the product is so obvious because the interface is so good. I'm just gonna talk to this thing and it's gonna talk to me. And then everything beyond that is like house of cards. And I, I just, yeah, okay, maybe we can make a more beautiful humane pin and we won't call it a pin. Maybe we can make

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  earbuds that talk to you like her, which Altman really has been obsessed with for a long time. What's it gonna do?

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  That makes it valuable.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I do come back to that Google bike demo. I think the idea is just always on AI that can be your girlfriend, boyfriend, or your assistant. On the device itself, Ming Shi Quo, who's a pretty reputable analyst, he, he covers Apple. He's saying that mass production for this is expected to start in 2027. The current prototype is slightly larger than the AI pin with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod shuffle. Okay. Um, and then one of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck. It will have cameras and microphones for environment detection, no display. It's expected to connect to smartphones and PCs.

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, it's one of these just always on listening AI devices, but made from brushed aluminium.

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Eli, to your point, this is everybody's idea, right? Like this is, this is the thing everyone is, is pushing towards. I have, I have four of them on my desk right now that are like a little thing with a microphone in it that you wear on a lanyard that goes around with you. And I think in a lot of ways, that is actually probably the correct format for this kind of stuff right now. If the goal is just like lots and lots of AI input, especially if this thing is going to have a camera, which I think it has to, to come even remotely close to what Sam and Johnny are talking about here. Sure. Like a little thing on a lanyard makes a lot of sense. I will say I went back this morning and watched the, the intro to the original iPod Shuffle, uh, which was from 2005. And Steve Jobs like shows off the thing, does a

• 32:50David Pierce?

  great reveal, the whole thing. And then they have this giant set of promotional photos of people wearing it around a lanyard. Like Apple really wanted to make this the thing that you would wear it. They had a white lanyard. It was like the, the cap for the USB port was also the cap for the lanyard. It looks so stupid. And just looking back, I'm like, I don't think I ever once saw a person in the wild wearing an iPod Shuffle around their neck. The Shuffle became like a pocket device. And the problem with like the humane pin, maybe not above all else, but one real problem with the humane pin was that it sat right here. It was a thing you had to look at all the time and that was looking at you all the time. And this is very similar to that. I think you have to do it if you want to have a camera.

• 33:34David Pierce?

  But that is a, that's just a high bar to clear for any of these kinds of products.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, anything that size does not have a battery or a chip in it that can do any of the things that they want it to do.

• 33:44David Pierce?

  I will say, I think if you, there, there are a lot of ways to do this. And one of them is just to like offload a ton of that onto your phone and just do all the work over like Bluetooth and local wifi and not worry so much about it, which is like, that's what Meta's glasses do. Humane didn't do it and it was a huge mistake. Uh, and I suspect anyone who is doing this going forward will learn that lesson of like this thing actually isn't ready to be a fully self-contained device. But I think if you just take it as like a pure input system and do all of the work on your phone.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  I can sort of see how you'd get a battery that could last.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  So you're selling 100 million Johnny Ive designed microphones.

• 34:26David Pierce?

  And cameras.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  That require an iPhone to use.

• 34:28David Pierce?

  You know what it makes me think of? Do you remember the Google Clips camera?

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:31David Pierce?

  It's going to be that with a microphone.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's, you know, there's a couple of players in there who have a vested interest in not letting Johnny Ive just supplant their products.

• 34:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. One of them is Apple. They're stumbling around lately, but I think after this video in which Johnny Ive referred to his own products as legacy devices that are 10 years old and should be replaced, are not going to show up and be like, yes, you can have preferred Bluetooth access to it. You're always on ChatGPT. Like, good luck. No watchmaker in history has gotten that access to iOS. And maybe, you know, maybe governments around the world will shatter Apple into a thousand pieces and let this happen, but you've now made a $1 trillion bet on that. So good luck.

• 35:11David Pierce?

  Well, the deep irony of all of this is that is the exact thing that OpenAI and all these other companies are desperate to get around. They're like, we have to build the next platform so that not everything is, you know, intermediated by your phone and these two operating system makers. And yet they all are going to have to be completely intermediated by your phone. Otherwise, the hardware is going to be bad.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then the other one is Android, which is more open and would allow many, many more of these things to happen. But Google is, as we'll talk about in the next segment, a pretty ferocious competitor to OpenAI when it comes to AI products. And then your market in at least the United States is people with Android phones. Good luck, Johnny. Like, there's just a problem there, like, to solve. Like, either all the compute is in the device, which is what Meta is pushing towards. And I mean, we've heard Zuck, I think Zuck has said it to you, Alex, like, he's furious that Apple won't give him access to the Bluetooth stack on the iPhone.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  And the glasses are worse on the iPhone than on Android. I don't think Altman's going to get that deal.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  Again, I'm just like, what are the limitations? Johnny has great success and maybe he did a better job of it when Steve Jobs was there than after. But his great success is designing to the limitations, making the limitations feel like they're not there because they're so apparent. In having covered Apple for all of that time, right? In like gadget blog days where we would obsess, we would write thousands of words about screen radius and on LCD screens like we did it and we I we are immersed in the culture that that developed, but it's now the design culture everywhere. Part of the problem for I've like in a big way is every product company has a design culture that is his design culture, right?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Why is that a problem?

• 36:54Nilay Patel?

  Cause he has to do something new. He has to stand out like his moves are, you know, um, uh, when I was like learning to play the guitar, my guitar teacher was trying to teach me how to play Guns N' Roses and Van Halen. And I was like, this stuff is whatever. It's a garbage. It's like, it's so cliche. And he was like, that's because they invented it and now everything is this. That's Johnny I Johnny I is Eddie Van Halen. But you listen to like Van Halen now, you're like, this is this is some campy stuff. And at the time it was like a revolution. It's because it's everything. Yeah, like it's the foundation for everything. And like he's got, he's got to reinvent some moves here. And I just, I'm just, I'm focused on, there are some real limitations to these products and making the limitations the strengths. Maybe he'll do it. I'm not a great designer, right? He's the legendary designer, but what's we've seen a lot of shots.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am going to remain cautiously optimistic about this just because of I, the fact that I do think a lot of people would talk to chat GPT in a device like this if it worked. If it was a good looking version of the humane pen that actually worked, that didn't take five minutes to load, that didn't also like blow up after five minutes because the battery doesn't work. Like if all of that is fixed, which he has is a huge if, uh, and you get access to, you know, the leading chat GPT models and it syncs with your chat, chat GPT account that by the way, already knows everything about you because you are saying thank you to it, even when you don't need to. Um, that's interesting. And you know, one of the things that Altman said in this meeting that really stuck out to me

• 38:22Speaker 03

  was he said, we both got excited about the idea that if you subscribe to chat GPT, we should just mail you new computers.

• 38:29Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  And he actually said something else at a VC conference I caught a couple of weeks ago, where he said the goal for OpenAI is to now be the core AI subscription for your life. So my prediction, and this is an informed prediction, is that ChatGPT subscribers will just get these devices or they'll get them heavily subsidized. And he's going to build a subscription model around not just software, but hardware, which everyone has tried. Apple has tried it. Didn't really work. I mean, they have the installment program, but they wanted to bundle everything more and that program never got off the ground. We'll see if they can make it work.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  Do you know why that program never got off the ground? Because the cell carriers wouldn't let them get it off the ground.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Ah, there you go.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  The cell carriers want that recurring revenue.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  And that's another thing is like, do they need cell carriers for this? Right? How does that change things? TBD. Probably.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a different set of gatekeepers who are even worse to deal with than Apple.

• 39:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. Question of how ambitious this thing sets out to be, I think it's going to be just as interesting as anything else because like Alex, to your point, there are, there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle here and OpenAI and Johnny Ive together control more of those pieces than anybody else has, right? Like in terms of being able to actually make the whole stack work together, that's a lot of the stack, but it's not all of the stack. And a lot of the stack is either out of their control or will require like honest to God, like physics breakthroughs that no one has made yet.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  If there's no display, the physics breakthroughs are probably not as bad as we think. I mean, they probably have disassembled Humane and figured out exactly everything they did wrong and are going to learn from it. And Sam saw that as like a, I'm going to invest in this thing to see how it doesn't work. And I'm going to do it the right way with Johnny. We'll see.

• 40:17David Pierce?

  I mean, Humane was not full of dumb people. No. Like the cautionary tale of Humane is it's like, like one of the things Conan O'Brien always says is it takes a lot of really smart people working really hard to make a bad movie. Uh, and like the humane pin is, is the perfect version of that to me. It's like a lot of people doing their best who are very smart and very capable and have really long track records who made a horrible product.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:39David Pierce?

  And there's like, that's such an easy way to go.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we should, we should not beat up on Humane too much more. I just am saying like.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  No, I think you should read the Jesse statement again, actually.

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  But like if by the end of next year, there's an option in ChatGPT to get this, you know, Johnny Ive Pokédex mailed to your house for an extra $20 a month in your Pro subscription and it will automatically hook into everything ChatGPT already knows about you. And it's an always on listening device for talking to ChatGPT. Do I think people will want that? Yeah, I think a lot of people would want that.

• 41:12David Pierce?

  I totally agree.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 41:14David Pierce?

  If you're Sam Altman, you've looked at how many people happily ponyed up $200 a month just to use your cool stuff. And I think the like, subscription is whatever they want it to be for this kind of stuff. I think is where they're headed.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should wrap this up. I will say that I can already hear the people furiously writing us tweets and emails about the iPhone upgrade program, which it currently exists. What we are talking about, just to be 100% clear, is that Apple wanted to bundle getting a new iPhone every year into Apple One, and they were not able to do that.

• 41:44David Pierce?

  Also, subscription hardware is a bad idea, and everyone should feel bad about doing it. Do you remember when Logitech said a Forever Mouse and we laughed at them? This is a Forever Mouse.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Sam Altman's Forever Mouse sounds like an incredible movie. I just would like, I would go watch whatever that is. That's a stage spectacular that I would absolutely go watch. I don't know what it is. It feels like one of those like places in London. It's like next to the wax museum. Sam Altman's Forever Mouse. Like what I was, you ask ChatGPT to render that and email that to us instead of your angry emails about the iPhone.

• 42:14David Pierce?

  There we go.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  I beg of you. All right, we have to take a break. And we're going to talk about the other side of I O, which is actually Google I O. See what I did there? We'll be right back.

• 42:25Speaker 04

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• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We got to talk about Google I/O, which if not for Johnny Ive and Sam Altman, literally trying to upstage Google I/O with their own company called I/O, would have easily been the only thing we talked about in the first half of the day because so much happened there.

• 43:06David Pierce?

  I do feel a little bad. We allowed OpenAI and Sam Altman to get away with this by putting it first in the show.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  They did it again. That was you. By the way, I want to be 100% clear. That was David's decision.

• 43:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I did that and I stand by it and I am deeply annoyed that I'm giving Johnny and Sam what they want.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  It was interesting timing because Google had a great I/O, like by all accounts. I think they announced a bunch of stuff that people were excited about. The demos are all really good. They announced a bunch of stuff that is shipping soon. We got to try a bunch of the stuff, including the glasses, which are, you know, they're just more prototype air glasses, but they were there and we, people got to try them. There's a video with V wearing them. And they, Google, just everyone from Sundar on down, just full of confidence. David, run us through the big news and let's get into it.

• 43:59David Pierce?

  Oh, boy. Okay, so I think the overarching story of Google I/O is Google is absolutely convinced it's winning at AI. And especially, I talked to a bunch of the folks over there ahead of I/O, including Demis Hassabis, who runs DeepMind and all their AI stuff, and they are like really feeling themselves with Gemini 2.5 and are convinced that not only are they ahead, but they might be ahead in a way that is hard for others to quickly catch up with, which I think is fascinating. And so now Google is like, okay, we have what we perceive to be the best model. We have vast distribution everywhere on the internet and we are going to put AI in front of you

• 44:39David Pierce?

  in every single imaginable way, all the time, everywhere. So there were a bunch of things. There were new models, new Imagine and Vio models to make images and video, which were like not super impressive. I don't know how they felt in the crowd at Shoreline, but like watching some of those on YouTube, it was like, this is like not as cool as you think it is.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  You're talking about the video stuff?

• 45:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I disagree. Some of the video stuff was cool, but the part where they demoed the like, the woman, the filmmaker, who made a video about herself being born. And it was called Ancestra. And I was like, this is a horror movie. Do you know that you made a horror movie?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  It's Darren Aronofsky. Yeah.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  I agree that what they showed on stage was not as compelling, but the stuff I've seen on like X that people have been making with this is mind blowing. It's like full on reality is over stuff.

• 45:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, some of it is very good. So anyway, so there are a lot of like new things coming to existing products, sort of improvements inside of Gmail. But I would say the biggest things we heard a lot about were AI mode, which is the the new tab inside of search that is basically just a full AI experience next to traditional search in a way that is messy and complicated and we should talk about. There's also Gemini is now being baked into Chrome, which is fascinating in the context of everything else going on with Google, which may or may not have to sell Chrome at some point in the very near future. The Gemini app continues to get better. So the Google has set it up so that there's Project Astra, which is it's like,

• 46:16David Pierce?

  they called it a concept car of an AI assistant. And that's where they try all their like truly wild stuff. And it was Astra where they're showing off all of the like wild demos where it's like watching you do stuff as you live your life and then can speak up. But as stuff gets better from there, it all graduates into the Gemini app, which got a bunch of new stuff. There's new features for Gemini Live. There's now like some of the live stuff is also in the search app. It's very confusing.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  You were saying this like it makes sense and it does not.

• 46:45David Pierce?

  No, it doesn't. None of it makes any sense.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  There's one part, there's one little part that makes sense, which is Google has figured out a vocabulary for what things are shipping mainstream products and what stuff is weird Google ideas.

• 47:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  So there are projects of which there are too many and all of their names are confusing because it's Google. The projects are like, here are the demos. But here's this thing. Project Mariner is the is the tech demo of we're gonna let our agent go click around the website. And then the verb which David just used is that stuff graduates to the actual products like search. And then there's like weird hybrids where search has the new AI mode tab, which is not a project, but an actual thing that rolled out to everybody in the United States. But eventually things in AI mode will graduate to the main search experience. So they've just introduced, I'm not saying it's great. I'm saying they've introduced a verb to make sense

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  of like how Google does stuff, which is instead of shipping products, they now just graduate.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Like you graduate from preschool.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  It's very simple, guys. Project Astro is the Google lens to Gemini's AI mode.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  Jesus, that's true. I hate that.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lot, but that little, once you like understand that Google needed a way to make people stop asking when the thing would become the real thing. And they came up with the word graduate, like some of it clicks into place. And then everyone at Google would be like, yeah, it's still pretty bad, though, right?

• 48:18David Pierce?

  The important thing, though, is that there are essentially two places that really matter to Google. One is the Gemini app and one is search.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  And so every other thing it's working on is at some point moving towards one of those two places. And the Gemini app is designed to be your assistant, right? Like, that's the thing. It's trying to be what what ChatGPT is for lots of people. It's competing with Claude. Like, it is the all in one operating system for your life thing that Google is trying to do. Search is search and AI mode and all this stuff is a big bet in a slightly different direction that it can be what search has been for 25 years, but like much better. And I think Gemini and search are actually, they overlap in sort of how you can use them, but they are different things in Google's mind. But those are the two places that all of this is designed to end up.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Gemini is the big agentic assistant.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  That goes and does things for you. That's the demo, right? Alex has been talking about the bike demo. If you go watch the video of that demo in particular, it's the guy's got his phone open. He's looking at his bike. He says, pull up the instruction manual. Gemini goes and does a search, gets the PDF of the bike's instruction manual. And he says, scroll to the page about whatever breaks. And it finds that basically like you have to believe that Huffy has produced an OCR capable PDF. But like, whatever, there's a lot of steps in there, but it scans the manual, finds a thing. You watch it literally scroll the phone. In the background, it calls the bike shop and has a whole interaction on the phone with the bike shop. That's agent stuff, like big hairy agent stuff.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  And then search is like, the vision for AI mode is that every search result page you get is a custom built application.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  All the way down to like, we can build charts for you. We might actually build custom code apps. Like you ask a question about stats in the NFL and we will build a data visualization app for you on the fly. And show that to you as a search result, which is a big, huge idea, but not an agent, right? And at some point they're going to overlap.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Gemini can do that. This is what I don't understand. I mean, the reason these products are separate is because Google makes all of its money from search. That's, and they are shipping their org chart quite literally, which is like Demis has his fiefdom of DeepMind and now the app and he's brought product into his org. So now he controls the app fully. He doesn't control search. That's a whole nother org that is 10 times as large. That is the most profitable software business in the history of the world. And they cannot disrupt that to the degree that they're willing to do wild stuff in Gemini. And should these be one product? Like, does OpenAI say, no, we have a separate app for you to search with ChatGPT? No, they don't. It's just one big product. And it's actually, it's way simpler to understand.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  And Google's struggle, I think, was that from this I O is that yes, they have the best models. They suck at product. They suck at making it work holistically and making it simple for people to understand. And that's still something they're, they're working through.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  That's Google. Google loves to ship its org chart. And it was even on like apparent on stage at I O. Where like different executives got to announce the same product in different ways.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Cause everybody needed a bite, you know, like this stuff happens. But from the product perspective, what I actually saw was all of their big bets that they've taken over time and all of their data about people is now resulting in products that look like they might work, which again has been my criticism of AI for a long time. I don't know if they're actually going to work, but they have Gmail.

• 51:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  They just have Gmail. And so a lot of their like personal context boils down to, well, we had, we, we were just going to read your email, right? Like, we know when your flights are because it's in your email. So we don't have to do anything else. Like, what if we were just better at reading your email to you? Is like an incredible product for AI to solve. And now Google has all this like research and the models to do it. And then you can just productize that. And I think the search piece of it, I, yeah, I do think there's two different art charts and that's all their money. So they can't screw with it too much. But there's a world in which you would make that decision anyway. Because you don't want every search to be like agentic.

• 52:37David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  Right? You do just want some information presented back to you without like the emotional package of your agent, like reading your email to you. And I, I don't know where that line is. And I think it's actually useful for Google to know, like on some timeline, they converge, but not know when or how, and just see how it plays out.

• 52:55David Pierce?

  I also think if you're Google, there is very little evidence to suggest that you need to overhaul search soon. Google, like the, the, everybody is like, oh, you have to cannibalize your own product or somebody else to do it. Google just continues to destroy everybody at search. And, and everybody's like, oh, you know, zoomers use chat GPT and, and, and Google is just like, show us in the market share, friendos, like.

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. So there's, they are playing games with their metrics.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  Pretty flatly. Because Eddie Q was at the Search Remedies trial and he said, look, you don't need to do this. Search is already under threat. Searches in iOS Safari have gone down for the first time in 22 years. And Google's, we talked about this, Google's stock price dropped like that day because everyone is waiting.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  For it to kind of drop, right? So Sundar is on Decoder. You'll hear it on Monday. And so I asked about that directly. And I will just, we'll just play the clip. Eddie Q on the stand in the trial the other day said, search in Safari for the last month dropped for the first time in 22 years. That's a big stat. Obviously, your stock price was affected by it. There was a statement. Is that trend bearing out that the standard Google search is dropping from devices and different kinds of searches are increasing?

• 54:15Speaker 05

  No, look, we've been very clear. We're seeing overall query growth in search. You know, it looks.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  But have you actually seen the drop in Safari?

• 54:25Speaker 05

  Look, we have a comprehensive view of how we look at data across the board. There's a lot of, there can be a lot of noise in search data. But everything we see tells us we are seeing query growth, including across Apple's devices and platforms. And specifically, you know, I think we quantified the query growth from AI overviews. And what's, what's healthy is that the query growth is continuing to grow over time.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  So first of all, children, if your parents ask you how you did on your report card, you should just say, I have a comprehensive view of the data.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  That's good. That's really good.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Incredible answer. That whole, that whole interview coming on Monday was a good one. But Alex, you weren't laughing because he keeps saying query growth.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, from what I have gathered from our conversations over the past couple of days, you're, you're very skeptical of this.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Well, so two things can be true. So overall queries for Google can be growing, but the growth rate can be declining. So yes, do I think that queries in Google products or across everywhere that search touches have just like literally gone negative like year over year? No, like in aggregate, is it probably growing? Yes. Is it growing as fast? Google will not say. And also like, are the amount of searches done per person growing? Or are fewer people doing more searches? Right? There's a lot that they are not saying. And they're just trying to flat out say like broadly query growth is growing because the moment you drill down into what's actually happening, maybe you learn, oh, wait, like maybe in North America, in a key cohort for advertisers, which is like, you know, 20 to 35.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  A significant chunk of people are doing increasingly commercial intent searches on ChatGPT. And that's like, if you actually try to drill down into how search works, which they don't want to do, they want to just talk about it at a high level, you maybe learn stuff like that. And, you know, we saw that reaction in the stock price because I think investors are so on edge. And you can see it in the way Google, just how the stock is traded, like it's, it's heavily discounted relative to its peers. Because there is this fear, not only of will the company be broken up, but is ChatGPT and these other AI products actually eating into search in a meaningful way? And so far, Google's answer is our types of queries are expanding, people are using search in deeper, new ways, which yes, that's true.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  That's how these AI products work. You want to thank it and have a conversation with it. That doesn't mean that overall query volume is growing like it did.

• 56:49David Pierce?

  I'm just not sure there's any evidence to suggest either way, right? Like the, all, all we know is that people like ChatGPT, right?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  I mean, no, there's, there is, I mean, there's the fact that like 500 million people use ChatGPT every week. And people also use all these other AI chatbots. There was like a bunch of things that did not exist three years ago that now exists that directly do what Google used to do. And like, we all see it, and I bet a lot of our listeners feel it like in their daily lives.

• 57:19David Pierce?

  You think all 500 million of those people every week are firing up ChatGPT to do web search?

• 57:23Speaker 03

  I think I'm getting answers from ChatGPT that I would normally use Google for. Whether it's like searching the web or not, it could be like, do a math equation for me. It could be like, what is a time zone conversion? Like, there's a ton of things you use Google for. And yes, ChatGPT doesn't do the commercial shopping stuff especially yet, though I think they will. And that's when it really gets potentially scary for Google. But yeah, do I and my family members and my friends, are we using ChatGPT like we used to use search? Absolutely. And I think a lot of people are.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  There's also other search replacements.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:55David Pierce?

  Perplexity. Last year, we talked about TikTok a bunch, right? Like, people just search in TikTok and TikTok has search surfaces. Whether or not they're useful.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think TikTok search has like dramatically declined in quality since all these other products have the scene. I think the point is like to connect this to there's Gemini and their search. They need search to remain competitive and vital.

• 58:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  And that's why you don't make your big bet on Gemini. Cause then you are head up against ChatGPT and perplexity and whatever else.

• 58:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  But you're saying, oh, actually this thing is just really good. Like you don't need to open this other app, but Google's search is now just incredible. And when assistance happen, we're gonna have one ready for you.

• 58:34David Pierce?

  The real fear for Google here, I think, is less about how sort of meaningful a competitor ChatGPT is right now. And how good a brand ChatGPT is. Like the, the thing that no one has ever been able to touch with Google is like sheer awareness.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  And ChatGPT is like running at it really fast in terms of like, when I need to do something, where do I go? The answer for 20 years has been Google. And like the, the Omni Box in Chrome was the most important surface on the internet for two decades. And ChatGPT is, is pushing at that about as fast and hard as you could possibly imagine. And like ChatGPT is a, is a terrible business and has many limitations as a product. But like, again, it is, it is hitting that like mainstream Kleenex-ization. Like kind of at record speed. And I think if I'm Google, that's the thing I'm afraid of. And that's the reason, Neil, to your point, that's why you don't bet on Gemini. Because your brand is Google.

• 59:33David Pierce?

  And so what you, what you want everybody to think of is you want to think of Google as the thing that is like ChatGPT, not Gemini. Gemini is like off here doing other stuff.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  But I really think like the, the confidence we saw from Google this last week is, cause it's there. Like they have a lot of products.

• 59:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  That are good, not just ChatGPT, right? Like.

• 59:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  Sora is not a great video generator yet.

• 59:59David Pierce?

  Sora doesn't exist yet.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, it's around, like some people have used it sometimes. VO3 is just like, you can just screw with it. I watched Sergey Brin try to generate his own face for a while. At least that's what I was told. Like, it's just, people are using it today, and it will lead to some outcomes. I think some of those outcomes might be like negative for the film industry. Like, who knows? But the products exist, and the changes are going to happen around them. Some of the agentic stuff, like, I just literally watched a live demo of Project Mariner, like, look for jobs. And it was just clicking around a remote desktop Chrome session. And, you know, I have a lot of questions about that. Like, why would any of those services agree to that? Like, I don't know. Is that pretty brittle? And like, should you just use some of these new technologies like MCP?

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know, maybe.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  But it works. Like, it's there. And the rate of improvement is so fast that Google is like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna do this. Like, this is definitely just happening for us.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  They have the best models, and that is a tremendous advantage. I was talking to someone who works in another big AI lab, and they were saying, model quality impacts usage of the products more than anything. We, we don't think it does, but if you release a shittier model and a chatbot, people use the chatbot less. People can feel how these models react and what they want to get out of them in a way that maybe we just broadly discount in how we cover them. And Google is objectively leading in model quality right now. And that was like, the first thing Sundar came out on stage and talked about was like, we're number one on all the leaderboards. And like, that is true, but is everyone talking about Gemini? Is Gemini like the thing I hear when I go home for like Memorial Day weekend?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  No. No one even knows Gemini has an app, except like early adopters and certain, you know, pockets. Like, ChatGPT is the Kleenex of all this, and that's a problem for Google. Unless we hit AGI like Demis once, and none of this matters anyway.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and Demis the only one left standing, just openly being like, I'm doing AGI. Yeah, that's what this is all for. I'm on stage with Sergey Brin being like, the AGI moment is coming. We're, we're taking bets on whether it happens before or after 2030, and they were six months on like either side of the line.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  You know, like every other company stopped talking about it because they have to make some products to make some money to justify all this huge investment. And Google's like, yeah, we did it already. You know, I think Google, maybe last year, particularly two years ago, was incredibly insecure about having done all of the research investment. Like, we've been joking for years now that if you say ChatGPT, a Google comms person like leaps out of a bush and is like, the tea in ChatGPT was invented at Google.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Like, they're over that, right?

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  They're like, okay, we're, we caught up, like, we, we're gonna ship products that are good. But I think the interesting part of that, Alex, is maybe ChatGPT has the brand name, Google has the distribution.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? So they're loud about AI overviews being the most single, most popular generative AI product at scale.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Like, most used, I would, I, you could just, you could remove popular and used, like, yes. Do people know what they're using? Do they know that Astra is the lens to DeepMind's, uh, you know, AI mode? No, but like, that's the problem is like, yes, I, I think it's more of a ego thing, honestly. And I think it's a recruiting thing. And I think for Google, yeah, they're seeing metrics that are not as bad as everyone thought. But this, this race, this perception of the race, this perception of how far ahead ChatGPT is and just consumer mind share. Is it, it's an ego problem for them. It's maybe a long-term strategy problem. And I think it just hits them more in that realm. I don't think it actually, it's clearly not hitting them on the business. And that's what you and I were feeling being on site.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  But like, is it still a problem for them and that they are not winning at it all? Yes, there, I met, I was with a Google exec who's been there forever, uh, at one point yesterday. And they were like, yeah, you know, just like a thing we really have a problem with is like not being first, you know? Like, that's, and that's like every company, but I think Google for so long just had this perch that was untouchable, right? They just ran the internet and now they're getting challenged on all sides. And I think that just, that, that messes with the, with the ego a little bit and, in a way that makes, it seeps into the products. It seeps into the decisions they make. But yes, is the business maybe doing better than we thought? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was crazy, like at the very end of the keynote, Sundar mentions Waymo for like 30 seconds. It's like,

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  You know, they may have a trillion dollar company in Waymo that has solved self-driving and is now doing more rides in San Francisco than Lyft. Like, that is happening in one part of Google.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  YouTube is unshakable. YouTube is probably going to eat the entire entertainment industry. So they have all these products that are just huge and dominant. And I think they were feeling that.

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, at the end of the keynote, uh, sooner just casually mentioned their satellite constellation to detect fires. Uh, and he literally is like, it will be fully operational by your end. And I was like, that's how they announced the, the second Death Star. I wanted to be like, that's, those are the words they used for the Death Star. And he was like, come get I O, everybody. It like left.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Also, I think they're feeling really great because, you know, Dieter is more famous than Giannis, so.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Dieter got the biggest, single biggest cheer at the I O keynote. Shout out to Dieter. It was very fun seeing him as a popular Google exec on that stage. Uh, also, when he came out, uh, we were, we were all sitting next to each other live vlogging and V just goes, Dieter. Like, it's like totally quiet, right? Like, she just screams, Dieter. Incredible moment. It was very good. Uh, there's the distribution, right? That we have A I overuse, everyone's using them. Is it popular? Does a brand work? On some timeline, it doesn't matter because they're just there and they get really, really good. And then you just, you know, the next new person never even thinks to get Chat G P T.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  And that feels like a big part of this bet, right? That's where A I mode really comes to play, where you've got this big new search experience. And over time, things will graduate to the main search experience. And then maybe no one's ever using Chat G P T. Cause the people who have yet to experience A I are just like, whatever. Google just does this. Like, I'm looking at this other, you want me to use this app that's doing the thing that's already happening?

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  It could be like stories. It could be like how Meta copied Snapchat. And yeah, Snapchat got big and it's still big, but it never became a multi-trillion dollar company. Because a company with tremendous scale just copied it quickly and leveraged its distribution. Yeah, that definitely could happen.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  This is where Google shipping its org chart, I think, is, is hurting it pretty badly. Because the thing I can't figure out and that no one at Google will give me an honest answer to is, do they care about Gemini as a like public facing brand? Like, is it, is it important to Google? That we know and care about Gemini.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Yes. It's funny. They wouldn't tell you that. I think it's because they know they are nowhere near where they need to be. And they don't want to say it on the record.

• 1:06:57David Pierce?

  I mean, they all say yes, but I don't believe them.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  No, it's it's it's actually Sundar told employees at the beginning there that is the top goal for the company is that Gemini like wins the chatbot race. Like it's like they need people to think of Gemini.

• 1:07:09David Pierce?

  I believe that, but I think like i- if it were, if Google were a different company where it was easier to succeed by making things good and not by launching new things. Would it have made a lot more sense to just do all of this work inside of AI mode from the very beginning?

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  And you go back to how can we make Google.com the most important thing on the internet again forever? And you you you just you pull this thing from a tab slowly into search. Like the thing I think they're doing with AI mode makes a lot of sense. And the fact that it's not called Gemini doesn't make any sense. And so I'm just lost on this thing about like, Google is actually trying to point you in so many places that I think it is risking like diluting the actually interesting work that it's doing.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  It's because it's the money. Search is the money. They can't. They can't do this. Like they can't disrupt. This is classic innovator's dilemma. This is what OpenAI is attacking head on.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Is that Google cannot change its business fast enough for the consumer awareness and just attention sucking that ChatGPT is doing right now. And yeah, that is exactly what it should be. Gemini should be searched. There should be no distinction. The problem is, is that Google isn't a company. It's a combination of like 14 companies. It's their own CEOs, you know, and yeah, should Westeros like run it all? Probably like, would things run smoother? Yes, but there's a lot of lords and they all have their own people.

• 1:08:31David Pierce?

  I even think about like, there's, there's a, there's a Google app.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  That was a seamless Game of Thrones reference.

• 1:08:35David Pierce?

  That was really good. But like, there's a Google app in which you can either do Google search or with one button, go to Gemini. And then there's also a Gemini app. And in no sane world do both of those things need to exist.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  No, I cannot believe I am the person who's saying this. I don't think any of this shit matters. I really don't.

• 1:08:53David Pierce?

  It might not.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Like, I think the main search experience is going to get better.

• 1:08:59Nilay Patel?

  People are gonna see the words AI mode and like click it because it just says AI mode. And that is a clickier thing than the word Gemini, which means nothing. Then they're gonna be like, wow, people are using AI mode and that's gonna become the main thing. And at some point, they will do the thing that Google is uniquely capable of doing and say, click this link to download the Gemini app and they will just get Gemini distribution. And that will all just happen like they're, they are uniquely capable of doing that. One of the, they have, and yes, they got the innovators, still no problem. Like they can't burn down the most lucrative business in favor of the, the cheap disruptive thing. That's almost good enough, but works better for some people, right? Like, yeah, they have, they got that problem.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  I think their other problem is they're basically gonna torch the web. Like along the way, the web as we know it is coming to an end and they are, you know, what sooner will tell you, it's not a zero sum game that the web is growing. They're crawling more webpages than ever. You'll hear that in decoder next week. Every Google executive there is like more stuff is happening on the web. There, there are more and better applications on the web than ever. Like the web is the place where you deploy new apps. High point of like maybe of all time.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Because of all this app store ruling and the epic case, the web is a place where you go to buy stuff. About to become incredibly important again. Right? All these apps are gonna kick you out of in-app purchases to the web. And we're gonna all be buying stuff on the web because you don't have to pay the Apple tax. Like it's all that stuff is great, but like the web is a media platform where the new information is. It's like, it's already under pressure from all these tools, right? It's already dying because of these tools. You can see it every day. All that's, all that new information is on, I mean, you're, you're listening to this in your podcast player on YouTube. Like it's in these other weird platforms. It's on Tik Tok and Google has to figure out how to get that information. Or it has to figure out how its agents can go and look at all those databases and make that worthwhile for people.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, I don't know if that stuff makes sense yet. I don't know if it makes sense for OpenAI, but at least they're the upstart. Right? Like, yeah, if their core business fails, like Sam Altman will just lit a bunch of money on fire. And that's kind of what we expected him to do. If Google can't pull it off, like a lot of things go wrong, but they have to, they have to work that curve of like.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  The web is the place where the information is.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Is quickly getting abstracted away to the web is the database that the new AI Google search synthesizes for you.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I heard that too at I O. I heard execs saying like, no, like the content on the web is bigger than it ever has. We have more to crawl than we ever have. And I just was thinking like, wait, isn't that all AI slop? Like, isn't the reason you have more to crawl is because your models are producing a bunch of garbage? And I really think they view data like, like sand. Like, it's just like, the beach has gotten bigger. But it's like, yeah, but there's like, a bunch of dead animals in it. Like, that's kind of how they view data.

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  Look at the amount of rubble we're standing on. It's like, well, this blew up the city.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, yes, in aggregate, is there more data for them to crawl? Probably. How much of that is human? How much of that is high quality? We know, we feel this as people in the media business, like, all of the best content is going behind paywalls. It's, it's going to be hard for agents to get to this stuff. And how does that work? How do you solve the fundamental business tension of people who make the good stuff cannot support what they do on the web as it exists today?

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, let's take a, like, a tiny detour into MCP, because David wrote about it in the context of Microsoft Build this week. We had Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, on the code this week. MCP is like a phenomenon, right? It's a standard from Anthropic that is basically, here's how an agent shows up to a website or a database and interacts. It's basically just an API replacement. Like, it's, it's, it's not more complicated than, like, we made some APIs for agents to go do stuff. And if you just run it all the way to the end, it's kind of like, oh, you don't need websites anymore. You just have, you need off and maybe payments to databases. And then the agents can just like, go an API into the databases and come back and give you stuff. And I, I just, I don't know how that business works. But David, you wrote about it this week.

• 1:13:15David Pierce?

  I mean, I think built into the way that you're talking about it is the assumption that everyone will access every part of the web via some chatbot, uh, which is what a bunch of these companies would like you to believe, but I don't think is true. And I don't really think has ever been true. The the theory is that like, okay, what we what we can do in one of two ways is help plug AI into the web. Right. And I think that's like MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. And basically, the idea is it's like a structured way for me to say, I have a bunch of information on my website. Here is how to give the model access to that information in order to be able to do things.

• 1:13:57David Pierce?

  Fine. Uh, Microsoft is also working on this thing called NL Web that I think is very cool, which is basically an open version of a protocol like that that says, okay, what if I could actually run all of that AI stuff on my website? And so now, instead of going to ChatGPT to talk to my website or go to Claude to talk to my website, you come to my website to talk to my website. And that is like, as somebody who believes in the open web, that is a future I am much more interested in over time. But I think to Alex's point, I don't think these companies care about the information on the internet. Like, I think a lot about, I think Mark Zuckerberg has said a few times, which is that like, everybody talks a lot about news content on Facebook and that is like a vanishingly small

• 1:14:40David Pierce?

  portion of what people do on Facebook. And so eventually they just stop caring. Like, this is no longer worth our time and investment and energy to care that much about what happens with news content, because it doesn't matter that much to our platform. And I think most of these companies feel the same way, that actually, most of this is just headache. And what people come to Google for is to like, find Adele music videos and chocolate chip cookie recipes and not read politics news.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06David Pierce?

  And there are all kinds of terrifying downstream effects from the fact that they don't really care. But I think they don't really care. And and the idea that what they're going to do is set up a world in which everybody who owns a website has to stop thinking about Google Distribution and go build themselves into a destination people go to on purpose. And that that's going to require reprogramming 20 years of behavior of how we do the internet. Like, it's a mess and it's going to kill a lot of the web. And I just don't think these companies care because it is, there's new stuff to do.

• 1:15:36Nilay Patel?

  I think Google wants you to believe that it cares. But it on the longest timelines that Google thinks it does not.

• 1:15:42David Pierce?

  So I would say it the other way. I think Google cares a lot about the web and very little about websites. Like the making sure that websites that exist today get to continue as they exist today. I don't think Google cares that much about that.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, sure. No, we're agreeing, but I I think Google cares about the web is this like really. The web is a miracle. Like I just like straightforwardly. The web is a miracle. We have in the world a giant interconnected, interdependent, mostly open application platform. That's weird.

• 1:16:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:16:13David Pierce?

  Thank you, government spending.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  You can just, yeah, like, right. We like, we just horsepowered this thing into existence. Because honestly, Marc Andreessen got a bunch of government funding in the middle of the country. Like, that's a thing that happened. Like, that's Mosaic. It it turned into Netscape and like, here we are. It's all here. And now Figma exists. And like, Johnny Ive, legendary designer, probably opens a web app to do a bunch of design work. That's crazy.

• 1:16:41David Pierce?

  Now, he uses pages for everything.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny. You brought up Andreessen. I actually talked to OpenAI to their MCP lead this week because they joined the steering committee for MCP. So they're now working with basically every AI lab has agreed that this is the new standard. And I actually came away thinking we are actually still pre Netscape on agents as it relates to the actual plumbing that it takes to hook them together. So this OpenAI lead was like, there's still no registry. Like, there's no, there's no discoverability mechanism for a developer to even know who has an MCP server. Like, we know there's a few of them. There's like Stripe and Zendesk or whatever. But no one's even built the interface for then the developer to go, okay, X model, go make this happen with this server.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  And that that will happen. It'll probably happen this year. But we're not even at the browser point. This is funny to be talking in these words because like, yes, agents are supposed to like replace browsers, but like, we are not in the browser phase of agent building yet. Like, this has not even been connected in that way. It's still very, very early and it will be enterprise and very developer focused first. It's not like we're going to be getting some. All powerful agent that can just like go and order a bunch of stuff for you and talk to a bunch of apps like anytime soon, even though Google showed that off like this is going to be a developer replacing function calling with telling a model to go talk to an API.

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's really interesting.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  That's interesting. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:07Nilay Patel?

  You can see there's a new web you would build on that. Like, yeah. And that's what I mean. Like, I agree with David. I think they care a lot about the web. Because this big interconnected application platform where you can like instantly deliver complex applications to a runtime like Chrome is a miracle. And I think Google is very invested in that particular miracle. I think as a media platform where you read a bunch of text and it's a doc, they don't care about that at all. And like, I know this because Alex and I were sitting in the audience for the Demis Hassabis and Sergey Brin fireside chat with Alex Kantrowitz. And Kantrowitz asked, what do you think the web is in 10 years? And Sergey was like, who knows?

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  Right? He was like, the world will like hit the singularity. Like, I will be one with the sun, like off in space. And Demis said, it's a good question. And then quote, I think the web in the near term, the web is going to change a lot if you think about an agent first web. Do the agents have to see renders and things that we need to see as humans? Do we need to actually render webpages?

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  Do we need websites? That's the question. And he's, I mean, his answer clearly is no.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  His answer is no. And then I asked Sundar a riff on this question. I read him that quote. And he was like, what is the web but a series of databases? Which first of all, is the vergiest verge answer of all time.

• 1:19:24David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, I literally started, you're gonna hear him. I just started laughing. I was like, thank you. Like, I feel very validated. Like, what are we but a series of databases?

• 1:19:31David Pierce?

  Dying out on that one for a while.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  But like, if you reconceptualize the entire interconnected application environment of the web is just a bunch of databases that you can go ask for stuff. And some of those databases have Toyota's Camrys in them. And some of them have vacation houses in them. And some of them have sandwiches. It's like, oh, those are just businesses that are going away.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Or like businesses that get funded through API calls instead of ads on their webpages. Like, will the incentives figure themselves out because do agents need things to do? Yes. So like, if everything that an agent would talk to suddenly goes away because its business model is destroyed, like, guess what? Agents don't work. So will this get figured out? Will it be super messy? Will a lot of companies go away? Will whole new categories of companies get invented? Yes. Yes, that's all true.

• 1:20:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  But do I think like the fundamental building blocks of the plumbing of the web, like content and things that that an agent could do will go away? No, because then there's no agent. And what Google and ChatGPT are both racing to be is the interface to interact with all those databases on your behalf, which is like the greatest abstraction of technology I think maybe we've ever seen like in our lifetimes. If that happens at scale. And the value that will accrue to the interface is arguably greater than the value that Google gets now from running ads on search.

• 1:20:50David Pierce?

  I mean, this is, this is the funny thing is like Alex, you and I have now spent a lot of time on this podcast in the last week talking about display ads. But like, the fundamental question here is what is, what happens when display ads don't work anymore? What is the business of the internet without display ads for the people who have traditionally relied on display ads?

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Paying 250 a month for Google Ultra.

• 1:21:11David Pierce?

  And maybe that's the answer. Maybe Google, maybe the end of this is Google and OpenAI pay websites directly. That, I don't love that, but that is one possible outcome of this. But if, if the web is a series of unrendered databases, the whole business of the web is suddenly immediately gone.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  Ben Thompson, by the way, wrote about this this week, uh, based on MCP. And he was like, this is what stable coins are for. And like a, like full body grown basically is.

• 1:21:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I, boy, I hate that. Oh, man.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Like, this is the idea that we'll, we'll have these like crypto microtransactions pegged to the dollar in some way that make all that happen.

• 1:21:49David Pierce?

  I would just say we, we have, if, if one more person says microtransactions are the answer, I'm going to send everyone a thousand links to all the times you've tried microtransactions and it didn't work. And then I'm going to heave myself out of a window.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  I, I will, again, full body cringe in reading that stable coins are the answer. But he did make one good point. Ben Thompson made it at one particularly excellent point here.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  In that the web already runs on thousands, if not millions of microtransactions every second, because that's how the ads work. Yep.

• 1:22:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it's not me giving them.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  All of those banner ads are are microtransactions.

• 1:22:21David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:22:23Nilay Patel?

  But but it's there. You just hate stablecoins. I get it.

• 1:22:26David Pierce?

  No, but that's. That's that's sure. All of that exists. But if you made me type in the IP address of every website I wanted to go to, that wouldn't that doesn't work either. Like making the users do it falls apart.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  Go order me a sandwich and it's gonna be like. Or or you have some subscription to one of these centralized indexes that needs to get built. And that subscription like has the weird Spotify model where it's like, you get a penny and you get a penny and Taylor Swift gets most of the pennies and like, maybe that's how it plays out. But you can see just at I O in the conversations they're having, that the web we have today is is reaching its like termination point and this new other kind of web is definitely like the thing they all want to build. It's the thing Microsoft wants to build. It's right. That's why they're doing N L web. It's a thing. Google is just sort of openly talking about.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  It's what OpenAI needs to have happened to make its dreams realized. Like if you wear your Johnny Ive iPod shuffle and it can't do anything, you're kind of stuck, right? Like, it it needs that whole ecosystem to be developed and built and for the money to all work for that product to be as useful as they want it to be. And I I think this is a marker. I think part of Google's confidence is they think they can horsepower into existence while sort of preserving the best of the old web and bridging the revenue into the future. I will say publishers are furious about this. Yeah. They are super mad. We have a statement on our site from the News Media Alliance, Disclosure, Vox Media and the News Media Alliance, along with Conde Nast. It's it's the business side of the company. But we're also taking money from OpenAI.

• 1:24:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's true. We have an open idea. It doesn't it doesn't even occur to me. I also made a Netflix show. You should watch it. It's great. Um, uh, that that's relevant, right? It's not just me bragging. Google wanted to buy Netflix. It's true. Google.

• 1:24:18David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  Soon our announced that Google wanted to buy Netflix at one point. Um,

• 1:24:24Nilay Patel?

  but the publishers are like, the whole point of this deal was us getting traffic and now that's gone. And then they called it theft. Like that is, that is what the publisher industry, the news industry is saying about AI mode. And I think Google is like, well, it'll be sad when you're dead. Like, that's kind of how it feels. And I, I, I think that will get litigated even harder. Not to mention the fact that they might have to sell Chrome, which I don't know what will happen at this.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  I don't think they're gonna have to sell Chrome. No one, I got no vibe that anyone was worried about Chrome at I O.

• 1:24:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, what are they gonna, they're not gonna like wander around their own party being like, well, this is gonna suck.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  No, no, no. But like, you know, like when you're, when you're actually like having a drink and you're staring at someone's face a few feet away and you ask them like, are you worried about Chrome? Like, yeah, you're trained, but like you do it enough and you kind of get a vibe. And I did this on a few topics and like, I was very curious, like, are they worried about this? Like up and down the, the chain? And I think they know they're gonna have to stop, uh, just like mafia style buying out search distribution. Like that's gonna go away, but do they think they're still the best search engine? Yeah. So I don't think they think they're gonna have a divestiture. And that's another topic. I mean, on the website thing, I'm curious what you guys think about this. Our website's just going to become like driving a vintage car.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  It's gonna be this thing you do because it's a luxury. It feels good. It's like a really bespoke, unique, like visceral experience. It's not as efficient, but you do it and you spend more money. Like, I kind of feel like that's the direction websites are gonna go.

• 1:25:55Nilay Patel?

  I do like thinking of the verge.com is like a cranky vintage Jaguar.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's a kind of always broken, but you love it. Um, it's gonna be great.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I, there's other kinds of web, like, you know, Substack and Ghost are, are web properties. Blue Sky, like at Protocol, built on a lot of web ideas. And the thing about Google is that all of these websites are effectively addicted to Google's distribution. That's why SEOs polluted the web so badly. There wasn't another choice. And so like, yeah, maybe agents are gonna turn everyone into day basis. Like, I think if you're a retailer, if you are Walmart or Target or Macy's or whatever, and you're looking at Google's new try on mode, which looks very cool.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  Like the promise there is that once you've tried on the clothes virtually, the demo was you set a price and then at some point, Google just buys the clothes when it hits a sale. If you're a target, you just totally got disintermediated. Now you're now you're just doing high frequency trading with a Google. Like this is a really weird business to be in. And Google's kind of answer there is like, oh, well, we'll talk to them and make sure that we show some of their webpages sometimes. And I said, well, what's that negotiation going to look like? And Google's like, it won't be a negotiation, it'll be a conversation. This is ice cold, right? Like, there's a whole universe of businesses that are going to have to get reconfigured. And a lot of them are going to want to say, well, actually, we don't want anything to do with this. We want you to come to our website.

• 1:27:19Nilay Patel?

  Substack for, you know, it's many, many faults is a web property. It's expressed on the web. There's not like a Substack desktop app. And the innovation is they've solved distribution inside of their own middle network. And that is really, really lucrative for a lot of people on Substack.

• 1:27:33David Pierce?

  All of that is the optimistic case, right? The pessimistic case is, is yes, websites die and everything becomes the high frequency trading, you're essentially fighting for Google scraps. The upside is for the first time in two decades, everybody's going to have to care about their website. Because it has to be, I mean, this is, this is the verge bet, right? Like this is, this is the thing we've been talking about for a while that like, the bet is we have to make something that you come to on purpose, or else we can't be that upset when nobody comes. I think maybe that's a place we're going to land and a lot of that's going to make things harder for a lot of the web. There's going to be a lot of pain along the way, but like, if, if we do this correctly, I think, and the, the, this guy Guha, who I was talking to about all of the NL web stuff.

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  He's like, the fact that the web trends towards centralization is bad. And it has been bad several generations in a row and we have to stop it. And the only way to stop it is to distribute the good technology everywhere. And I think there, like, the way we think about, like, the federated social networks, the way we think about MCP, the way we think about NL web, like bringing some of this AI stuff to websites is like, maybe there's a chance that actually this ecosystem gets bigger instead of you just going to google.com, landing on a webpage you've never heard of and then never going back. Because like, That's what we've been doing, but you could argue that's not the correct outcome. But it's like, it's an outcome.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, what is this index of MCP servers except incredible centralization on the web that will reemerge, right?

• 1:29:02David Pierce?

  Right. I mean, there's a reason the AI labs are the ones doing this.

• 1:29:07David Pierce?

  This is not Tim Berners-Lee being like, this is great for the internet. This is Anthropic being like, this is how we get internet access.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they can't, I mean, you know, their first shot at it was what if we click around your website, which is just incredibly brittle. It's just, it's never, that is, that is never going to work. That will be the backup plan for all of this and MCP will be plan A. We'll see, I, again, we, like, we walked around Google I/O and they were all feeling it, like they are riding high, like their theme, they kept saying was research and reality. And it's like, what they mean is you didn't believe us for a long time that we had all this stuff in the labs, that we were working on it, that it was coming to fruition. And now here, all like, all at once, here's all of it. And, you know, so it has to ship and, you know, people are, I'm confident we're going to get feedback on this part of the episode. It's like, they're stealing our jobs and boiling the ocean.

• 1:29:56Nilay Patel?

  There are some really weird downsides to all this stuff happening.

• 1:29:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, both of those things are true, by the way.

• 1:30:01Nilay Patel?

  They're true.

• 1:30:02David Pierce?

  They are true.

• 1:30:04Nilay Patel?

  But the weirdest one is that we are staring at the beginning of a wholesale re-architecture of the internet.

• 1:30:09David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  In that, we should probably pay a little more attention to that to make sure it's good this time. Because the last time, like, four people just got to be in charge.

• 1:30:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Nilay Patel?

  And like, I might take the trade off if you can actually decentralize a little bit more. We'll see. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 1:30:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, it's time for the lightning round. Un-sponsored? For flavor. I said it with a question mark because I actually don't know if it's unsponsored. There are rumors that we have a sponsor.

• 1:31:08David Pierce?

  There are rumors that we have a sponsor, but I believe it's not today.

• 1:31:11Nilay Patel?

  And I wouldn't even know because the whole point is you, no one can tell me what to do. That's why Verge subscriptions are 40% off this week.

• 1:31:18David Pierce?

  Next week it'll say sponsored for flavor. Then we'll make new t-shirts.

• 1:31:22Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be Doritos. It's gonna be great, you guys. Actually, does anyone know anyone at Doritos?

• 1:31:27David Pierce?

  Listen.

• 1:31:28Nilay Patel?

  We should reach out.

• 1:31:28David Pierce?

  Yes. I will eat Doritos constantly through an entire Verge cast if Doritos would like to pay for that.

• 1:31:34Nilay Patel?

  Um, it's funny, you know, our great rivals for podcasts within a podcast. My brother, my brother and me, they were once sponsored, I believe, by Tostitos Pizza Rolls.

• 1:31:42David Pierce?

  They were. They made a whole Totino's episode and it was, uh, excellent content, if I may say so myself. We've got a lot to live up to on that front.

• 1:31:49Nilay Patel?

  We do. We will never do that. I just want to be clear. You can't pay us money to tell us what to do. That's where the flavor comes from.

• 1:31:54David Pierce?

  I guess in this case, this would be, uh, Brendan Carr is a dummy brought to by the FCC. Speaking of which.

• 1:32:01Nilay Patel?

  It's time, David.

• 1:32:02David Pierce?

  Let's do this one more time, just for this week and then hopefully never again. Every week I root for it to be the last version of Brendan Carr as a dummy for a lot of reasons. And every week it is not. It is time once again for 2026 Webby Award-winning Podcast Within a Podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Neil, you've slept for three hours. I expect this one to be very, very good.

• 1:32:24Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's only, there's only two items in this one. The first one is so stupid. Like so, so stupid. And the other one is so disappointing. And that's really the heart of Brendan Carr is a dummy, right? How can you disappoint me in ever more stupid ways? So this week Brendan Carr, America's number one censor, who continues to make such a splash as a would be speech cop, that like more and more profiles and coverage of him emerge. Politico wrote a profile this week. Uh, John Oliver did an entire segment that is basically Brendan Carr as a dummy. Thank you to John Oliver for validating us and they, thank you everyone who sent that in.

• 1:33:00David Pierce?

  He is a real test of all press is good press, our buddy Brendan.

• 1:33:03Nilay Patel?

  It's not. You're a traitorous moron Brendan. And I know this because this week he has started to open an investigation into NBC over Kamala Harris appearing on Saturday Night Live.

• 1:33:17Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure NBC, investor in our parent company Vox Media. Just putting that out there. You can do with that what you will. Again, I remind you, no one can pay me to say anything. It's the, where subscriptions are on sale. Um.

• 1:33:32Nilay Patel?

  Hey, do you guys know who won the election?

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember who it was?

• 1:33:36David Pierce?

  That doesn't matter. I forget. Yeah.

• 1:33:39Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember who lost? Definitively lost and is not the president? Do you know who that is?

• 1:33:44David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  It was Kamala Harris. I believe that she lost. Right? She did not win. We can agree that she is not currently the president of the United States. The other guys. Okay. Well, Brendan, here in mid-May of 2025, has decided the most pressing speech issue in the country is whether Saturday Night Live violated the equal time rule for broadcast television stations by having Kamala Harris appear on the show.

• 1:34:12Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I also know definitively is that Brendan knows they didn't. But yet, he has decided here in May of 2025 to reopen an investigation which was closed into whether NBC and Saturday Night Live violated the equal time rule by having Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live. The equal time rule is like an archaic broadcast rule. It says if a broadcaster that uses the public airwaves to broadcast content gives time to one candidate, they gotta give equal time to the other candidate. It's a little more complicated, but that's right. It's called the equal time rule.

• 1:34:44David Pierce?

  Which NBC did the next day.

• 1:34:46Nilay Patel?

  NBC had Donald Trump on the next day. He got a bunch of time during NASCAR race.

• 1:34:52Nilay Patel?

  I reported on this while it was happening, right? Because Harris showed up on SNL. There was a bunch of like MAGA tweets and then Brendan was Brendan before he was auditioning for the jobs. He was like, I will arrest everyone when I make the FCC commissioner. Great. I reported it out at the time. And what I heard from sources in the FCC was the only program that regularly deals with this is Saturday Night Live. They are the best at it because politicians are always showing up on Saturday Night Live.

• 1:35:21David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:35:22Nilay Patel?

  Like they have the infrastructure for dealing with the equal time rule because no one else gives a shit. So of course, they filed the equal time notice with the FCC. And of course, they were offered Donald Trump time the next day. Because they're good at it. Like, this is a thing Saturday Night Live is the best at of all of the shows on all of the broadcast networks. And so, sure enough, Brendan, there's, you know, because emails were FOIA'd because he's threatening this investigation before he was ever made the FCC Commissioner. And he emailed Fox News producers, here's the equal time request from NBC in Saturday Night Live. Like, I know he knows it because I'm reading his email, saying he knows it. They complied. Former FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworth also looked at this and dismissed this because they

• 1:36:07Nilay Patel?

  had complied. And I know they complied because Trump was on the air during the NASCAR race the next day. The equal time was given. Well, here we are, May 2025. Election has been won. We have accepted a jet from the government of Qatar. Like, we're definitively past Saturday Night Live booking Kamala Harris having any effect on anything that happens in this country. And Brendan is running around trying to punish NBC for violating the equal time rule, finding ways legally to reopen this investigation just to put more pressure on NBC for its alleged coverage of Donald Trump being lured. This is just speech police stuff. Like, it's, it's over.

• 1:36:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, the election is over, whatever harm you may have felt, the Trump campaign felt, that Carr felt for his, his boss and buddy, Donald, it's over. They, they won. But like, the harm has passed, right? The, the opportunity for that to have swayed the election has come and gone, and it didn't work. And he knows, we can see his emails, we reported on his emails, that he knows that they didn't break the rule. And yet, he's trying to reopen. I mean, this is just moronic, right? Like, he's doing it to be a cop, to be, to chill the speech of these news divisions that are reporting on Donald Trump. Maybe because NBC owns MSNBC. Even though Comcast is spinning that off into a new company called Versant, which I haven't even talked about yet, but like, that's why he's doing it. So stupid.

• 1:37:35Nilay Patel?

  So, like, I will, I will, we'll put it in the show notes. We have his emails where he's telling Fox producers they complied with the rules. And yet, he's going to reopen this investigation just because he wants to be a cop.

• 1:37:45David Pierce?

  He's not even trying to hide the fact that this is what it's about. It's very straightforward.

• 1:37:49Nilay Patel?

  It's very straightforward. So that's one. That's very stupid. Here's the very disappointing one. We've talked a lot about how Brendan threatens deals that are in the pipelines and tries to companies to comply with whatever he wants, whether it's their coverage, which he says is biased, whether it's DEI policies, which he says are not racist enough, whatever it is, he gets what he wants by holding up deals. So last week Verizon completed its acquisition of Frontier, another fiber provider, and it got that through the FCC by sending a letter to Brendan Carr, saying it was walking back all of its DI efforts. Super disappointing, right? The Verizon just rolled and said, we're going to give up on our DI efforts. This is Brendan at work, right?

• 1:38:34Nilay Patel?

  He went and threatened the business over something that has nothing to do with the business, and Verizon caved, like just straightforwardly caved and said, this is a government regulation that we're going to deal with, even though the FCC telling us who to hire and fire is kind of a straightforward infringement of its like rights as a business. And the thing that is particularly disappointing to me is that whenever the FCC has tried to do something good to Verizon, they have fought it tooth and nail. They're the primary legal antagonists of net neutrality for a decade. Every court case, every challenge Verizon was there. Whenever you talk about increasing broadband access, Verizon fights that stuff tooth and nail. Verizon takes money and promises files will be rolled out in New Jersey. They just never do it. And then they

• 1:39:18Nilay Patel?

  get sued and they fight it tooth and nail. We had the CEO of Verizon Wireless on Decoder. I don't know why enterprise software CEOs or telecom CEOs show up on the show, but they came on the show and I asked him, are you going to fight Brendan Carr and these weird regulations as hard as you have fought net neutrality? Just run the clip. I want to be very clear, very explicit about this. When the government passed net neutrality rules, it wasn't, we have to follow the rules of the land. It was, we're going to file lawsuits for a decade to get out of these rules because we think they're dumb. And in this case, you're saying Brendan Carr, who has been openly censorious, openly chilling of speech, openly hostile to companies because they have diversity initiatives, you're saying you just have to follow his rules?

• 1:39:58Speaker 06

  We have to follow the rules of the land. I don't think those are his rules. Those are the rules of the land and administration needs to follow.

• 1:40:03Nilay Patel?

  Are you going to file a decade worth of lawsuits about these rules?

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  We don't know. We're going to work constructively with them to follow rules that are needed. But at the end of the day, look, our role is to our stakeholders that we have. You know, my stakeholders are my shareholders, my customers, my employees and society at large. We have to manage and we are going to deliver for those stakeholders what's needed for us. And we will do whatever is needed with the administration to deliver to all the stakeholders. It's a balance. When you run a large company our size, you have to balance the different stakeholders. And we will balance those stakeholders. We've done it extremely well in the last 25 years that we've been Verizon. And we'll continue to do that going forward.

• 1:40:37Nilay Patel?

  You had to balance the stakeholders, guys.

• 1:40:38David Pierce?

  We have a comprehensive view and we have balancing the stakeholders. And you can get out of almost anything. That sucks.

• 1:40:46Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:40:46David Pierce?

  That is 60 seconds of him being like, when he says those aren't Brendan Carr's rules, those are the rules of the land. That sucks.

• 1:40:54Nilay Patel?

  That's, I mean, that's straight from a lie. Those are Brendan Carr's rules. He said, I'm going to hold up this deal unless you walk back your D I initiatives. And Verizon, instead of fighting, which they always do when it comes to consumer protection or broadband deployment, they always fight. Here they rolled and it's, it worked. And the thing that kills me is it doesn't have to work. Like if you stand up to these bullies in particular, they tend to roll over. And Brendan getting a win is just like the most disappointing outcome. And it's particularly funny because it's Verizon that always fights. Verizon looks at government regulation and is like, no, no, no, no, no. One decade and here they rolled and I just think, I think it sucks. I'm, I'm incredibly disappointed that it worked in this way.

• 1:41:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm also, you know, not for nothing, it's another merger of ISPs and it will result not in greater service and lower prices. You know how it's going to go.

• 1:41:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, we all know how this is going to go.

• 1:41:51David Pierce?

  I was wondering about this in the context of, uh, there was news this week that AT&T is paying, I think, five and $5.75 billion to buy Lumen's fiber business, uh, and a bunch of cities all over the place. And the timing of this is so suspicious to me because it really seems like AT&T looked at this and said, oh, all we have to do is write a letter about D E I and this will get done.

• 1:42:13Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:42:13David Pierce?

  And I'm like, I hope that's not how this goes, but it sure seems like AT&T is about to just run the same playbook in order to get this thing done.

• 1:42:20Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a renewed sense that some mergers are allowed to happen. You know, there was a lot of excitement. Even in the tech industry, right? They're like, deals are back.

• 1:42:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Nilay Patel?

  Biden and Lena Khan, we're not going to let any deals happen. And now the deals are back. And that actually wasn't the case early on. Like Andrew Ferguson, the new chair of the FTC is kind of a trust buster. He kind of hates big companies. He hates big tech. Brendan is just like, give me an ounce of blood.

• 1:42:48Nilay Patel?

  Just bloviating away moronically. Like, these deals weren't happening. And I think there's, people are starting to figure out, like, there's a path forward. And it involves trading your values to get the deals.

• 1:42:58David Pierce?

  Right. And over and over, they're doing it. They're so happy to do it.

• 1:43:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think the next one we're going to see is CBS and Paramount settling their case with Donald Trump over 60 minutes to get the Skydance deal done. And that will be a dark and sad day for American journalism.

• 1:43:13David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:43:14Nilay Patel?

  To the point where it's like, oh, that's over. You shouldn't trust that network anymore. That's brutal. As always, Brendan, if you're listening, and I super know you are. You can come on the show. You know, I got your press release today. I wrote back to your people and invited you on. He put out a press release about how much more spectrum he's opening for satellite networks.

• 1:43:34David Pierce?

  Great.

• 1:43:34Nilay Patel?

  Loves it. It's his favorite thing to do.

• 1:43:35David Pierce?

  Congrats.

• 1:43:35Nilay Patel?

  You can come on. You can, you can defend this stuff. The fanciest CEOs in the industry, telecom CEOs, come on Decoder and answer the questions.

• 1:43:45Nilay Patel?

  Because they can defend themselves. Sambath, the CEO of Verizon Wireless, he gave maybe the single best answer to the decision-making question on Decoder we've ever had. Even though I completely disagree with, we have to manage for our stakeholders. They can defend themselves. They're, they're smart. I think you're stupid, so you're not going to show up. But if you want to, you can. We're available. You can be on the show. You can be on Decoder. But for now, that has been Brendan Carr's Dunny, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

• 1:44:08David Pierce?

  It's beautiful. I've decided to take a comprehensive view to Brendan Carr. I'll get back to you on what that looks like.

• 1:44:13Nilay Patel?

  I have a comprehensive view of the data.

• 1:44:14David Pierce?

  Can I offer you some breaking news as a palate cleanser? Mark Gurman from Bloomberg just published a big story about Apple with two very interesting pieces of information that I think are germane to what we've been talking about. Thing number one is he reported that Apple has been working on smart glasses and has like really ramped up its effort to sell smart glasses and hopes to do so by the end of next year. And he, he cites one person presumably inside of Apple who said they will be similar to the Meta Ray-Bans, but better made. Which is terrific. Uh, so yeah, presumably he called Tim Cook and Tim told him that and here we are. Uh, so that's piece of information. Number one is that, uh, Apple smart glasses, which we have been hearing for a while, we're, we're sort of being pushed further and further off,

• 1:44:59David Pierce?

  may have been pulled back up in the roadmap. Uh, and the other one is that, uh, we've been hearing for a while about the idea of an Apple watch with an integrated camera. And that is apparently, uh, shut down and that will no longer be a thing, which is a shame because I wanted to know very badly how any of that was going to work in the real world. But this is, this is Apple pushing on the same kind of stuff, right? Like multi multimodal AI assistance is the name of the game here. And, uh, Apple seems to be on the smart glasses trend along with at this point, kind of everybody other than OpenAI and Johnny Ive.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I can tell you why they're doing it. It's because these smart glasses are hitting decent scale. They're doing single digit million sales a year. The Meta Ray-Bans are, um, they may get to double digit millions.

• 1:45:45David Pierce?

  They're also like good and people like them, which I think is an important.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I think everyone is super confused and most of all Meta about why people like them, Ray-Ban glasses.

• 1:45:53David Pierce?

  Oh, that's true, but sure, but they are good and people do like them.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  People are buying them. They are, but what people like is having glasses with a camera in them.

• 1:46:00David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  And a shutter button. They don't like.

• 1:46:01David Pierce?

  But that's also if you're Apple, that's a, that's a core competency, right? Like that's a reason to do it if you're Apple.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  But it, that's not, I don't think they are an AI distribution platform, the way that Meta wants them to be.

• 1:46:10David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  But they don't have a display in them yet. And that's what everyone else is demoing. I'm, uh, Apple smart glasses. If they don't have a display, they're, they're one kind of product. If they do have a display, they're a very different kind of product and no one has cracked that display problem yet.

• 1:46:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  At least about Google, the one we saw, the Android XR, it, it, it is so a prototype. It is not a display.

• 1:46:30David Pierce?

  You, you saw these, right? I'm going to talk to V a bunch about all this stuff on, on Tuesday and the glasses. But I am curious, you, you got to try them, right?

• 1:46:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, just really quickly, it was like a five minute demo and it was basically Gemini on your face. The weird thing about these prototypes is the wave guide is very small and not high resolution, but it's in the dead center of the lens. Whereas I was expecting like a heads up to the side thing.

• 1:46:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're like glassy kind of like up.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  Because it's literally, yeah, it's literally just a Gemini icon and then it reads back what it's saying to it and what you're saying, which is like, I don't. I don't need that. The best thing was the map stuff where like you could turn your head down and it would show where you were. Your pin would move like it had GPS and tracking and who knows, maybe the room was like set up for that. But and then the other thing was like, oh, you when you take a picture with it, you see the picture. Like you can see how you're framing it because it shows it to you. Whereas the Meta Ray-Bans, obviously you have to take your phone out to see what you shot. That's cool. The hardware is not super compelling yet. The software is very bare bones. I think they will actually start shipping these next year and they got Warby Parker and Carrion, which makes Cartier and like Gucci glasses. And they got another cool, the name escapes me, another cool glasses company out of Asia

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  that V was very excited about. They got them on board. So basically Meta has hitched its wagon to Elsor Luxottica, which makes Ray-Ban and Oakley and a bunch of other brands. And Google tried to get that deal. I reported that they tried very hard and they failed. And now they are going for basically every other eyewear partner that they can to get Android as the platform instead of Meta. So I think we're going to see this AI platform, smart glasses, battle between Meta and Google with their partnerships, strategy. Gemini is a better AI. Meta has a head start. We'll see how it shakes out. The demo, though, at I O was like, kind of meh. I do want to quickly say, though, a demo that was awesome and that I'm very excited about, and we have a great video about that I did with Veron is Beam,

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  which was Project Starline and is basically Google's answer to what if virtual meetings suck less?

• 1:48:26David Pierce?

  Starline has been one of those ideas that Google has had that seems to like get cooler every 18 months, but also less and less likely to ever be a real thing.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  It was really cool. Like they invited Vera and I to the lab where they made it. We were the first ones in their like labs, hardware, prototype room externally and got to see like how they moved all the tech into basically what is, it started as like it filled a room five years ago and now it's basically a DVD player and everything is streamed through Google Cloud. So they built this proprietary volumetric 3D AI model that makes you look like a hologram, basically, through a 2D, very fancy. I tried to get them, Neelai, to really explain the panel. It's a highly customized panel that's doing a bunch of fancy pixel work, but I couldn't get a lot of detail out of it. But it's a reference design now that HP will actually start deploying into offices later this year. So they've got

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  Salesforce, Deloitte, some other companies that have committed to installs. And I asked, I was like, Is this expensive because companies will not buy this if it's not, you know, just as like cheap as their existing video conferencing software and they're like, nope. That's why we did the AI work. It's all in the cloud and it costs about the same as the video conferencing setups you see in offices today. So I think there's a real chance we start seeing Beam and people who work in offices start seeing Beam over the next couple of years. And it is, it is wild. Like, go watch the video. It's on our YouTube. Veering got to try it for the first time. I had done it a couple of times because we had it at Code and then it was at I O a few years ago when it was Starline. And Veeran tried it and it's just this like holy shit moment every time someone tries it for the first time. I mean, Eli, you remember.

• 1:50:01Nilay Patel?

  I do.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's cool. It's like one of these classic Google things. Like it reminds me of Wham-O. They just toil away as like with the resources that only a company like Google can to invent this wild new thing. And then five to 10 years and they're like, it's ready. And it's like, now the cars are driving themselves. Now we have holograms that we're like putting into Deloitte offices. Like, it's just happening. So that was pretty cool.

• 1:50:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My understanding of the screen, by the way, is the reason they're not talking about it in detail is it is more a standard one-ticular display than not. I think there is some, a lot of custom stuff going on there, but usually when you have the big tech innovation, you talk about it a lot.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:40Nilay Patel?

  And the reason they're like, it's a secret is like, it's kind of a 3D display. Like, and all the actual happening is in the camera, but eventually these are going to be out there. We can go look at them and figure it out.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Nilay Patel?

  But it is very exciting to see that out. On the glasses, the display is not solved. Meta Orion, like they spent billions of dollars on the wrong technology and it didn't scale to make those displays, right?

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Turns out growing crystals doesn't work at scale.

• 1:51:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  We're just crystal farmers out here, guys.

• 1:51:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I mean, I, I don't know who's going to build those displays. I don't know where they're going to come from. No one, no one's cracked it yet. And it, it's, it's just one of these things. Like, what is the core technology that's going to enable this next generation of products? You need the displays to make the smart glasses.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Or you don't, or you're Johnny Ivan. You make a fancy aluminum Pokedex and like.

• 1:51:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's, we are way over. I'm, I'm, I'm so sorry to everyone for, for the rambles today.

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  What did we expect like this week?

• 1:51:39Nilay Patel?

  The day after. We got a lot on the site, tons and tons of coverage. V is gonna be back next week to talk more about the glasses demo. She just published a story trying to guess what Johnny Evans will do. So way more coverage on The Vergecast from her coming up. Soon, Dar on Monday. Get ready. It wasn't, it's, I will say, it's not as tense as it was last year, but there are some moments. I think you're gonna like it. All right, that's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:52:07Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:52:30Speaker 07

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