Two possible futures for AI

Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about the recent dueling AI blog posts from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. What do these CEOs think the future of AI looks like? Then, Will Poor tells us the story of ShakeAlert, an earthquake alert system that has huge potential and some surprising challenges. On The Vergecast Hotline, Allison Johnson joins Will to figure out whether the iPhone's new Camera Control is really as fast as advertised. Further reading: Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age Dario Amodei: Machines of Loving Grace Anthropic’s CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia — he just needs a few billion dollars first OpenAI plans Orion AI model release for December ShakeAlert If you live on the West Coast and you have an iPhone, here's how to turn on the "Local Awareness" feature that speeds up WEA messages: Download the MyShake app on for iOS or for Android Ready.gov's earthquake advice: About emergency and government alerts on iPhone Apple iPhone 16 and 16 Plus review: all caught up 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of decreasing the costs of AI infrastructure. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here updating all of my AI gadgets. So like six months ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I reviewed both the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1, kind of back to back, didn't like either one, neither one was any good. And to be totally honest, I basically turned them off, stashed them in a drawer, and forgot about them. But six months later, these companies are still here, they're still making stuff. Humane has slashed its price in a way that suggests not a lot of people are buying that stuff. Rabbit, I think, has confused people more than enticed them over six months, but they've made a lot of changes. Rabbit is saying it's getting close to shipping the

• 0:45David Pierce?

  large action model that it's been promising for forever. Humane does timers now. So I figured after six months, might be time to pull these things out and see if we're any closer to AI gadgets getting anywhere. That's for a future Vergecast. I literally, I have spent like hours just sitting here charging and updating software on these things. And I had to find a SIM card for the Rabbit, and I had to redo service for the AI pin. It's been chaos. That's for a future Vergecast. Today, we are going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about the sort of dueling blog posts from Dario Amodei at Anthropic and Sam Altman at OpenAI about the future of AI. I think normally, I find these blog posts sort of ridiculous, but the fact that there were two of them, and they're from these two people at this moment in time, I think matters. So we're

• 1:30David Pierce?

  going to talk about what's in those letters, what they agree on, what they disagree on, and what we might be able to learn about the future of AI. We're also going to talk about earthquake detection, and this huge sprawling project underway, especially on the West Coast, to alert people more quickly to earthquakes. Super important problem turns out to be more complicated and challenging than you might think, for lots of super interesting reasons. Will Poor has been reporting this story out for a while, and he has come to talk about it, and I'm very excited. We also have a hotline, lots of fun stuff to do this week, very excited about this episode. All that is coming up in just a second, but literally, as we've been sitting here, both of these things just finished an update, and now both have another update. So I'm going to go do more software updates, and we will be right back. This is the Vergecast.

• 2:16Speaker 01

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• 2:45Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 3:15David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So about a month ago, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and probably the single most prominent person in the AI world right now, wrote this blog post called "The Intelligence Age", all about basically his vision for the future of AI, why it's going to be huge, why it's so exciting, why we should all be so excited, when it's going to happen, sort of big flowery stuff about the future of AI. Ordinarily, those blog posts are like, whatever, I think people paid more attention to this one because it's Sam and Sam is like right at the center of the tech industry right now. But still, we wouldn't have spent a ton of time on it otherwise. But then, a couple of weeks later, Dario Amodei, who is the CEO of Anthropic,

• 3:56David Pierce?

  which might be OpenAI's most interesting competitor, wrote his own blog post called "Machines of Loving Grace", that is sort of spiritually the same, but structurally very different. He wrote this 10,000-word-plus opus full of details and full of thoughts about specific ways that AI might be implemented to make the world a better place. And he lands in sort of the same place, which is everything's going to be amazing. But I think the structure of the way he talks about it is really different and really interesting. We talked about both of these, I think, briefly on the show before, but... What they say together is really interesting. These are two of probably the three most important people in AI. I think the third would be Demis Hassabis,

• 4:41David Pierce?

  who runs DeepMind at Google and is increasingly more powerful in all of the stuff that Google is doing in AI. He, as far as I know, has not written a many thousand-word blog post about how terrific AI is, but these two have. And so I think what I wanted to do was really dig into these and see what we can learn about where AI is going from these two blog posts, where they're the same, where they're different, where there might be conflict between these two companies and these two ideas. But also, if you believe the vision of Silicon Valley, and I think somewhere in these two blog posts is the vision in Silicon Valley for AI. What does it look like? The Verge's Kylie Robinson has been covering all of this. She has read these blog posts. She's talked to people about the blog posts. She, I think, could probably recite some of these blog posts from memory at this point.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  And I figured, who better to come on and see if we can make sense of all of this than Kylie? Kylie, welcome to the show.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 5:34David Pierce?

  Just unrelenting AI chaos in your life.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it never stops.

• 5:40David Pierce?

  We do have a little bit of tiny news that we're going to get to at the very end, some next model stuff, which we should just talk through really fast. But the thing I have brought you here to do is talk about these two blog posts.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  And first, I want to know if you agree with my assessment that most corporate CEO blogs are nonsense. Well, that's the first one. That's, do you agree that most?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:03David Pierce?

  Okay, good.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  But also, I don't know. Something about the fact that both of these happened from these two people in particular, like, within a couple of weeks, just felt like more of a moment to me than your average, like, CEO pontificates about the future thing. Has that been your read, too?

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Yes, and at the time when I wrote about it, I had real, like, AI- AGI believers yelling at me because like, how could I ever consider, I keep saying this, your messiahs are businessmen. I'm sorry, it's calculated. So yeah, I drew the same conclusions.

• 6:38David Pierce?

  Okay, so the homework I gave you ahead of this was to come up with three ways in which these two men agree and three ways in which they disagree. Let's start with what they agree on. What's the first thing you feel like these two agree on?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  So I think that they do agree on that the world is going to be such a beautiful place with AGI, of course. I would say to flip on disagree, I think that Dario was a lot more measured, where Altman was a lot more, you know, grateful dead about it.

• 7:13David Pierce?

  Wait, I would actually put that slightly differently. My read on this has been, I think Sam Altman feels like it's inevitable, that like, his whole blog post is basically like, we've done it. It is done. And there's even a line in it that I pulled out that was something like, deep learning works and the rest will solve itself. Like, that's not what it says, but that's essentially what it says.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:37David Pierce?

  That compared to Dario, who goes over and over and over, like to the point where it makes the blog post too long of being like, none of this is inevitable. It doesn't have to be like this. We all have to do it on purpose. A lot of things have to go right. Like, you just get the sense from Sam's that he is like, problem solved, we just have to sit back and wait for this. Like, you're talking about beautiful, incredible future where everything is wonderful. And Dario is like, maybe. That future exists, but it is not certain that we're going to get there. And that, to me, was like, tonally the most striking difference between the two. And it sounds like you caught that, too.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  That is 100% a great take. That is exactly right. No, because it's been a long week and I haven't thought about these blogs. But yeah, that is exactly correct.

• 8:22David Pierce?

  Who do you believe? Do you think Sam's right? I really want you to just be like, I think Sam's right, we did it, it's all done, future's gonna be beautiful.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  I just keep thinking, one of these two men has been fired from their job for lying.

• 8:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, well said. All right, what's the second thing? What else did they agree on? Wait, actually, let me let me drill down into the first one before we get to the second one.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:44David Pierce?

  Do you think, like, biggest picture, most beautiful future, they roughly agree on where that might go? Like, in the in the absolute best case scenario, do you think these two CEOs, and by extension Anthropic and OpenAI, think it might be as good in the same way as each other?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  I think you can see this in the actions of both companies. One is absolutely gutting safety and the other is doubling down on on safety. So I would say that they disagree or like what the future looks like. I think Altman is a lot more optimistic than Dario. And Dario says at the top, like, you know, there's a there's potentially a lot of bad things. I don't want to talk about that here because we talk about it a lot. So I think that's that's the difference between the two of them. I think Dario sees a lot of the what could go horribly wrong. And Altman's like, dude, it's gonna be beautiful.

• 9:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think that was the thing I kept having to remind myself, reading Dario's blog post. And like, to his credit, he says right up front, I think there are a lot of problems. I'm not going to talk about them here. And like, every paragraph of his thing, I kept wanting to like, raise my hand and be like, well, I have 1,000 questions about all the things that might go wrong in service of doing this cool thing that you're imagining. And I'm like, OK, that's not that's not what we're doing here. I have to I have to take him at his word that he thinks there are problems. We're just not talking about them right now. So, fine, we're talking about the big, beautiful future. What else did they agree on? What else did you write down?

• 10:16Speaker 03

  How this is going to transform labor, the economy, work. They both seem to agree that a lot of rote tasks and monotonous jobs are going to get replaced by AI and that perhaps we should have some plan for that. I think I think that's something they both agree on. For Altman, he has explored UBI, universal basic income. He ran a test giving people certain amounts of money for an extended period of time to see how it changed their life. Anthropic has not done that same kind of research, but I sense that they both agree that this is going to change the way humans work, and that's important to explore.

• 10:55David Pierce?

  Were you satisfied by either of their answers as to what we do about it? And again, to Dario's credit in particular, he's pretty upfront about, I don't have all the answers. This is going to be complicated. But they do both treat it as inevitable that at some point, this thing will essentially blow up our day to day lives and the overall economy as we know it. And they kind of are just like, yeah, we'll figure it out.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  No, I'm not satisfied. No, of course I'm not satisfied. And I was just on Decoder talking about this with Neelai about, you know, there are so many unanswered questions. This is so nascent. It's not a fun answer to hear. You know, you expect the AI reporter to be like, we have all the answers. And I think that's what people expect from these executives too. Like, but we don't. We just don't have all the answers. And it is unsatisfying. Like, OK, if AGI was real, which like, I don't even see that as a possibility necessarily. But if that were to happen, then we could all be out of jobs, but we'll figure it out.

• 11:52David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  It's like, OK.

• 11:53David Pierce?

  It'll be fine. Somewhere between three years and a million years from now, everybody's screwed, but we'll figure it out.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Hopefully the sun explodes before then. I don't know.

• 12:03David Pierce?

  Well, I'll live on Mars, and then it won't even be a problem.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 12:06David Pierce?

  What's the third thing?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  They both, in practice, in, not even in practice, in writing, agree on the alignment of these systems. And I'm going to talk to researchers, I think, tomorrow about what alignment really is and how, it's such a fuzzy term. But I think that they both agree that broadly, these should be safe systems that are aligned with what we value as humans. They shouldn't be running amok in writing. However, as I said earlier, one has gutted safety and the other has not. But I think they broadly agree that it would not be good to create world destroying AI.

• 12:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a hot take, but you know, it's a theory. I like that.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:48David Pierce?

  I, yeah, I caught that too. And I think the idea that that is a thing we have to do on purpose is sort of encouraging, right? Like, again, you can read what you want into the actions of these two companies. And I have a lot of thoughts that are a lot less optimistic than these two blog posts based on what they do. But the sense that like, the way we build these tools and the way that they get used and the way that we manage them together. Like, one of Dario's big ideas was that we should have, I don't think he called it this, but essentially like a United Nations of AI, where like a bunch of countries bands together to build and manage AI in a way that promotes liberal democracy around the world.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:26David Pierce?

  Like, I don't know if that makes any feasible sense technologically, but that's the kind of thing we should be thinking about. Right? That it's like, okay, we are, if this thing is going to be anywhere near as powerful as we think, that's the kind of stuff you have to start doing and you have to start building the tools at the beginning to be like that. And I think, I think they both agree on that. Whether both companies are interested in taking the time to do that in a crazy gold rush of AI,

• 13:55David Pierce?

  the answer seems to be no, mostly so far. But I like in the, in the long run, that at least strikes me as slightly encouraging.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Totally. This is something I've been digging into recently, just about, if for the listener, researchers who want to do safety research at these big companies require a certain amount of compute to do these studies to figure it out. And kind of a block of important safety researchers at OpenAI left because Altman promised them about 20% of the company's compute to do safety research and they did not get that and it really pissed them off. So I think, as Dario said, it is, you have to continue making this choice to align to do that work. And I think that's important, important to watch to see how, how seriously they're taking it. Because their researchers will tell you, they will yell about it.

• 14:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're not shy.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 14:49David Pierce?

  All right. So any, any other agreements before we move to the stuff they, they don't agree on?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  No, I think that's it.

• 14:53David Pierce?

  All right. So that's all the stuff they agree on. What do they disagree on? What's first on your list?

• 14:57Speaker 03

  I would say that Dario is a little bit more scared of hyping up AI than Altman is. And I think that's kind of what we discussed already is that he's like, I, you know, I don't know if I should be doing this. Like, I don't know, this is not inevitable. And Altman's like, in a thousand days, like hits the joint. In a thousand days, this is all gonna be so different, you know?

• 15:16David Pierce?

  So this is actually a good thing I was gonna ask you about, which is why these two people wrote these two blog posts at this particular time. And you have a strong theory about why, and I wanna know what that theory is.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  I have a strong theory, and people like to talk about this topic. And they're like, you know, motivations aside, I'm like, well, aren't motivations like the biggest piece here of why they're writing this at the time that they're writing this? Um, so Altman wrote his, just around the time he was closing $6.6 billion in funding for OpenAI, the largest round for a private company in history that we know of. And then when I read this blog, the first thing I was thinking was like Anthropic is also trying to raise money. We don't know how much yet, but Anthropic is also trying to raise buttloads of money. And that's, I think that's the timing of this is, you know, investors are kinda trepidatious

• 16:07Speaker 03

  because there's this problem of you need to sink so much money into these models. And there's a lot of promise and hype involved that this will change the future. But at the moment, it cannot even count the number of ours in strawberry. So, so I think 14,000 words is a good way to say, look, I promise. I mean, like, I guess he doesn't promise. He says it could or could not happen. We have to make those choices. We have to do the work. However, it is such a beautiful future if you give us billions of dollars.

• 16:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. Do you feel like spiritually, this is not that different from like Travis Kalanick back in the day, who was just like, once I'm, I have, you know, cars on the road with an app, but eventually robot cars are going to transform the way that every, and it's like, I feel like that is, to some extent, just the classic Silicon Valley story. Like, you have to tell a story that is 10 times bigger than your actual story in order to get people to give you all this money because of like the structure of venture capital demands that you maybe be worth that much money. It's like, it's just all this weird stuff that eventually you sort of have to lie about the possibility for the thing that you're building in order to get the money to even try and maybe get to half of that over time.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yes, I a hundred percent agree.

• 17:26David Pierce?

  So you can imagine both of these blog posts as like hostage negotiations, right? Where they're like- It's like, they're like, I know, I hear you. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. Let me just, I'll put this out and then you can give me money and everything will be fine.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. No, I, I think that it is, it is exactly the same. Um, and luckily I work at The Verge with a bunch of great people who have lived through a lot of bubbles. And they're like, hey, I remember the CEO saying almost exactly the same thing. Like, um, Sergey Brin once said that, um, their new health division at Google was going to cure death.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  I forgot about that.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  That's in the article.

• 17:58David Pierce?

  That's a good one.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Oh, and I put this, this is even a bit in Silicon Valley, the TV show, where one of their, their caricature for a tech executive, he says, I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to live in a world where someone makes it a better place than we do.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  And that is, that, I mean, it is just a tale as old as time. And unfortunately, the people who really believe in AI are like, this is different. And I'm like, I, I get it. I, I don't want to slam AI. I do think that it could prove to be really useful and it is useful in limited use cases today. However, it is not, we were talking about the spreading democracy thing. That's something I read in Dario's blog. I was like, okay, come on, man.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  You know, they do have to make these grand proclamations. It's the same as decades before them.

• 18:43David Pierce?

  Well, there's a certain amount of, uh, like, you know how in TV shows, when they get to like, season five or six, they've made the stakes so high because you have to keep inventing new things to do to keep people interested. And you're like, well, we've already exhausted all of the interesting stuff. So like Fast and Furious nine is literally like in space. Like, it's just, the, the stakes creep is so real. And I feel like AI in general is such an incredible case of stakes creep where

• 19:08Speaker 03

  It's so good.

• 19:09David Pierce?

  we have hit this point now where like, everything has to be the biggest thing. It's, Sunil Prachay said it's fire. Like, you can't, you can't come back from fire. And so like, this, all I read now is I just see these things and I'm like, this is Fast and Furious in space. Like, this is, this is like Die Hard where he jumps a car into a helicopter. Like, we've just, we've just lost our minds on how big all this stuff has to be because we're so desensitized to the rest of it.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  That is so good, I'm mad. So funny. Yes, this is Fast and Furious in space, yeah.

• 19:38David Pierce?

  This is, I've spent a lot of time the last couple of days lying on the couch watching TV. So this is, this is, it's for work now. I get to expense all that time that I spent on the couch watching TV. What else? What else did they disagree on? What's next?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Weren't you supposed to tell me one?

• 19:50David Pierce?

  All right, fine. I'll give you mine. The timing they disagree on in a way that I found actually very surprising. And I think this is one way in which, and again, this is just, it's two blog posts. What, what these men actually like are saying in meetings and what they believe in, even what they've said publicly sometimes differs from this.

• 20:08David Pierce?

  Sam Altman is less convinced that this is all going to happen tomorrow than Dario was, which I was very surprised by. Like his, his thing is basically we're a few years, this is Dario, a few years away from what he calls powerful AI, because he doesn't like AGI, which, fine. And then after that, all this stuff he's describing, all the stuff we've been talking about, all these changes to democracy and we're going to cure all diseases. He puts that on a five to 10 year timeframe. Like that, this, like, we're, we're looking at like, I don't know, 2040? At a, at a conservative guess for Dario as like, everything about the world has completely changed forever because of AI. Sam is comparatively more restrained. Like, he says, he says the next couple of decades, which again is like, it's soon,

• 20:53David Pierce?

  but it's not the same, he's sort of immediate, like we're a couple of years away from the thing and then five more years away from it changing everything. And then, yeah, what is it? He says a few thousand days, which is such a like delightfully meaningless thing to say.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I should check, but I feel like, yeah, maybe he does say a few thousand days. Cause I thought he said 8,000 days, but yes. I told an OpenAI source of mine recently, because they hadn't read that blog post. And I was like, well, Sam says in about a thousand days that we'll get this AGI. And he was like, really? I think it's gonna be, well, he thought, he was like, it's gonna be a lot sooner than that. He's like, I know.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Which is just really interesting. And I really want to know what the listener thinks. But like, I think most people think that this is bullshit. And then there's these people, I live in San Francisco. I'm talking to these people all the time. I'm, you know, having drinks with them, going to dinners. And they're like, yeah, it's inevitable, you know, next year. I'm like, what the, where am I? So I don't know who to believe because I think that these people are really smart and they are building really smart systems. Like, I believe that, but also we're going to cure death, you know?

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, and we are all going to be in robotaxis. But like, again, this is, this is the game that we play. And I think, like, the, what's the Bill Gates thing? Everybody underestimates what they can do in a year, or no, overestimates what they can do in a year and underestimates what they can do in 10 years. I think there's probably a lot of that coming.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 22:12David Pierce?

  In AI. Like, I, I would put a lot of money on the over of one year from now.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Certainly.

• 22:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. So what, what is the next one on your list of, of how they differ?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  So I think that, just generally, these are completely different people. For instance, if you guys don't know, Dario left OpenAI because he was like, this is not safe and calculated and we need to make a more safe public benefit corporation that became Anthropic. So I think the difference is just these two people. Dario is safety slowness, which is why I thought this blog was so out of place. And that's what made me think about funding. And Sam is more like hitting a joint in space, Fast and the Furious. This is going to happen, it's happening soon. I think that these are categorically different people attacking the same problem. They both want to build AGI. They're both building it in basically the same way.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  They both have big cloud partners. But they're just completely different people approaching it much differently.

• 23:15David Pierce?

  Totally. I mean, I think the funniest thing about looking at these two blog posts side by side is how sort of embarrassingly underthought Sam's seems in comparison.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  Like, it, it really is like, this is like a long tweet from somebody who got like a little high and had some thoughts about AI. And Dario is like, my man just like wrote an academic thesis about AI. And they might both be totally wrong, they might be wrong about different. Things, but like the just the sheer like difference in level of thought here is just crazy. Like, I just went back and found this. There's such a funny moment in Sam's blog post where he says, there are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. That's like, Dario says like 11,000 words about those two sentences.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yes, he does.

• 24:04David Pierce?

  It's just, it's just, it's just crazy to me. And I do think, again, to some extent, they're like trying to do different things. It's fine. But reading Sam's after reading Dario's was like, this is like a kindergarten level of thinking compared to that, which was striking to me.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  That's funny, the, the order that you read them because, yeah, of course. And I think that's why it's hard for me to compare because this isn't like the only piece that Altman has wrote about AGI, but it is like, timing wise, easy to compare them. And I agree. It is a thesis about, you know, I think he wants to genuinely inform Dario, wants to genuinely inform the public of his thinking. And he talked about how he's been writing this since August. He's gone through a bunch of different versions. And yeah, it definitely seems like Sam just fired this off and here we are.

• 24:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. And that's fine. Who among us hasn't just fired off a blog post that too many people read, right? Like it's, it's a, it's an occupational hazard.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  I will say, one thought that I had in this was that it makes a lot of sense to me why Anthropic is building better products than OpenAI right now.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Damn, girl.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  Like, like consumer products. I mean, you go through and like, Dario's is just full of ideas about things a person might do with AI and ways that they might be used. The only one Sam mentions is like, it's going to be a personal assistant that will help you accomplish tasks. And like, fine, everybody has that idea. We've had that idea for decades. But like, it's, it's a bit of a galaxy brain take to just read that out of two blog posts. But like, I think Anthropic is just destroying OpenAI when it comes to actually building good products for people to use. And you can sort of see that from these two. I don't even think that's that hot a take. Claude is better than ChatGPT right now. It just is.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I, I agree. I agree. Um, keep, I keep name dropping podcasts I've been on recently, but I said this on Pivot. They were asking me, what's my favorite? What's my favorite? And I was Claude, obviously Claude is so much better than the competition. It's crazy.

• 25:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think the question of what is the underlying technology is going to be like a forever game of leapfrog between a bunch of companies, principally these two. But right now, like Anthropic is just a mile ahead in terms of actually building good consumer products. And you can see it in Dario's stuff, like he has ideas about how people might use it in a way that I'm not sure. There's not a lot of evidence that OpenAI does.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Right. So you're counting Gemini out?

• 26:21David Pierce?

  Gemini has just so its own thing that it's they're just like, Google's just like over here, kind of like winning Nobel prizes. And I still like, my true galaxy brain take is I think Google is just going to win all of this and it's not going to matter and we're going to have to reckon with that sometime very soon. But that's for another day. I have a lot of, I'm also like, I've been fighting that fight for too long now, so I have to die on the Google is further ahead than anybody realizes hill.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  And I think I'm OK dying on that hill, but we'll see. All right, real quick, some news, and then I'm gonna let you go here.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  We had two scoops last week about upcoming new big stuff from both OpenAI and Google. Tell me what's going on.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my scoop with Tom Warren, our Microsoft reporter, was about how by the end of the year, OpenAI is planning to release Orion, which you can think of as GPT-5. It would be the successor to GPT-4. So they're just in September, we wrote in the article that they threw, the researchers threw a party for finishing training the model. At Microsoft, they are preparing the compute to host Orion. Microsoft gets it first. And then they're going to release it to limited partners so they can, you know, find their own use cases, find the features that they want to build with Orion, which is the code name of the project, Orion. So that's supposed to happen by the end of the year. Altman, I

• 27:47Speaker 03

  had my first real run in with tech executive hits joint and takes to Twitter. He called it fake news, which it's not. And I said this at the top of the episode, and I'll say it again, one of these people was fired for lying.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  So yeah, that's what's coming out by the end of the year. It's of course subject to change. And then more interestingly, in December, Google, Alex Heath, my colleague Alex Heath, wrote this in command line. He wrote that Google is planning to release its next big Gemini model in December. So OpenAI loves to front run Google. So that's something to watch every time. If Google's gonna have a big announcement, you can almost certainly expect OpenAI is going to fire somebody or release a big new feature or something.

• 28:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do think, I mean, to your point about like, who's really gonna win here? OpenAI certainly thinks Google is its main competition.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:48David Pierce?

  And Anthropic is just kind of over on the side doing a different thing. And that might turn out to be true. It's certainly true right now in terms of like shine and resources. But I think Anthropic is closer behind than it gets credit for in a lot of ways.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Totally. I agree. And, okay, have you ever watched Mad Men?

• 29:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Do you know the elevator scene where he's like, I feel bad for you. And he's like, I don't think about you at all. That's very much Google and OpenAI's relationship, I think.

• 29:14David Pierce?

  Oh, 100%.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15David Pierce?

  100%. Google is, yeah, Google is not super worried about it. Like, they're just after winning Nobel prizes. Like, it's, Google's gonna be fine.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  Demis's office will eventually write an even longer blog post and will be back doing this again, I'm sure.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, I can't wait. And part of that, I forgot to mention, that Alex wrote that Demis is not super thrilled about the capabilities of its Gemini model right now, the next one that it's supposed to be releasing. So that'll be interesting. I think I would love a way that's more clear than benchmarks of how to weigh these against each other. I don't think we're there yet, and I just don't trust self evaluated benchmarks in a lot of cases. But yeah, I'm excited to see how these all stack up in December.

• 29:55David Pierce?

  It'll be fascinating because we've been at this now for, I don't know, a year and change, where Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all just continued to release better and better models. And we're at the point where like, every two weeks, somebody is releasing a slightly better model. And I've been asking people forever when it's going to stop being so easy to improve the state of the art. And everybody I've talked to, at least, is kind of like, I don't know. It would be fascinating if it started to be these. If somebody comes out already behind.

• 30:27David Pierce?

  That might change things.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  You know, that's funny because the AI people I've talked to just last week were like, I think that we're hitting that point. We are finally hitting that point where it is getting harder to scale these or to make them better than before. Because for a minute, it was really easy to just like leapfrog, leapfrog, leapfrog. But we're starting to slow down in that sense. But I guess we'll see in December.

• 30:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it might be a messy holiday season in the AI world. There might be a lot of Googlers working over Christmas.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Typical.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  All right, Kylie, thank you as always.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 30:58David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break and then we are gonna come back and we're gonna talk about earthquakes. We'll be right back.

• 31:08Speaker 02

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• 32:08Speaker 06

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• 32:35David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Will Por is here. Will, hello.

• 32:38Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 32:39David Pierce?

  What are we doing here, Will? You've, I know earthquakes. That's all I've got. What are we doing here?

• 32:43Speaker 07

  Yes. Um, so to, to start us off, um, I have a terrible, terrible sound that I want to play.

• 32:49David Pierce?

  Our favorite.

• 32:51Speaker 07

  The best way to start a podcast, I, I'm told, is to make people take off their headphones as quickly as possible. So with that in mind.

• 33:01David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 33:05David Pierce?

  Oh, that's awful.

• 33:11David Pierce?

  Okay, that's enough. Okay, can I tell you where my brain immediately just went?

• 33:16Speaker 07

  Yes, please.

• 33:17David Pierce?

  A mix of jackhammer on the streets of New York City.

• 33:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 33:20David Pierce?

  And like the, the sarlacc pit in Star Wars opening up. Like the really creaky metal door opening up plus jackhammer. That's not fun. I didn't like that.

• 33:33Speaker 07

  I mean, it's spooky season as we record this, so that all kind of works.

• 33:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. So what, what is this? What am I listening to?

• 33:40Speaker 07

  That is the sound of my house getting seismically retrofit, which is basically like earthquake proofing. I wanted to get my house earthquake proof because I live in Seattle, which is earthquake country. I am also very terrified of earthquakes. And so I was told by a lot of experts that this is a thing that I should do. And so a few weeks ago, a bunch of people came to my house and crawled under my crawl space and drilled a whole bunch of bolts into concrete right beneath my feet. And I thought it was a good idea to try to work from home while this was happening.

• 34:16David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 34:17Speaker 07

  So, which lasted about five minutes, but uh, this, this is me trying to work from home. They are crawling around in the crawl space and drilling very large bolts into the concrete foundation of the house, which I get, the whole house is vibrating. Like I can feel this work in my teeth. And I need to get out of here. It was a bad day. I had a bad day.

• 34:45David Pierce?

  First of all, incredible podcaster instincts to say, this horrible noise is happening. I must record it.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  The people must know.

• 34:53David Pierce?

  I applaud you for this. Also, why, why are you doing this? Why did you do this to your house?

• 34:59Speaker 07

  So this is sort of the culmination of just like a, a long journey between me and earthquakes. I lived in San Francisco, the Bay Area for like 10 years. And that's where I developed my, uh, my fear of earthquakes. I had reason to, I felt them a bunch and I was told constantly to prepare for the Bay Area big one, which in the case of San Francisco, would be a repeat of that famous 1906 quake along the San Andreas Fault that burned down a lot of the city, among other things. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that in San Francisco and then moved to Seattle, which seismically is more quiet day to day. Like I've lived here for four and a half years. I haven't felt anything, but it's also very

• 35:43Speaker 07

  much earthquake country and not feeling anything is a real false sense of security. Did you ever read, there was a New Yorker article that came out about 10 years ago.

• 35:53David Pierce?

  Oh my God, the really big one.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  The really big one.

• 35:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 35:57Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  This piece scared me more than maybe any magazine story.

• 36:02Speaker 07

  It was very good and terrifying. What do you remember from that story?

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Wait, okay. Can I go find a line for you in this story that I read that I still occasionally think about? "To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the International Space Station." That's just a sentence I think about a lot. And this isn't the New Yorker. This is not a thing that is like prone to hyperbole and intensity. Can I read you another sentence? Now I'm looking at this piece and it's scaring me all over again.

• 36:29David Pierce?

  This is fun for me. I'm, I'm having a great time, uh, here in Virginia.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  Here, yeah, here in geologically ancient Virginia.

• 36:36David Pierce?

  Says, "Ospac estimates that in the I-5 corridor, it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and 18 months to restore healthcare facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up." What?

• 36:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's a quote, there's a quote somewhere in there that someone said effectively, everything of, everything west of I-5 is going to be toast. That, I think those were the words. I live west of I-5.

• 37:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. And again, this is of like sober magazine article that is essentially like, we're on borrowed time. So I can understand how you would become somewhere between rationally and irrationally terrified of what's happening here.

• 37:15Speaker 07

  Yes. So let me give you all the other, like, the full rational cause to be concerned.

• 37:20David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 37:20Speaker 07

  So at some point, probably roughly, maybe in the next 500 years, but also maybe tomorrow, because that's how earthquakes work, there's, there will be this mega thrust quake in the Pacific Northwest. It's going to be felt from Northern California all the way up to British Columbia. It's on a fault that's called the Cascadia Subduction Zone that runs north, south, all up the West Coast, just off the coast. It could hit category nine on the Richter scale. It'll produce maybe five minutes of shaking in Seattle, which is bananas. It's going to do a ton of damage all on its own. And like you remember, it's going to produce this even more devastating tsunami all across the Pacific Northwest.

• 38:01David Pierce?

  Right. The earthquake is the first thing, but then it's what it does to the water that causes the worst of it all.

• 38:07Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 38:08David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 38:08Speaker 07

  So really, really very bad news.

• 38:11David Pierce?

  And you lived there on purpose.

• 38:12Speaker 07

  And I moved there intentionally after I read this article. And so that, I don't know what that says. So that's the very, very bad news. The good news is I, not long after I moved here, I heard about this earthquake early warning system called Shake Alert that had just gone fully live all up and down the West Coast. So there's no way to predict earthquakes. That's not a thing. That's not a science right now. But scientists can detect them right as they're beginning. And the internet moves a whole lot faster than shaking from an earthquake. So if there is a big quake today, and I happen to be far enough away from the epicenter, like if it's off the coast. I'll get an alert on my phone that says there's an earthquake coming.

• 38:56Speaker 07

  And it might be a few seconds, or it might be a minute or two before the shaking reaches me, which is awesome for me and my fear of earthquakes. But the more I've looked into this, the more I realize that making a detection and warning system that's both reliable and fast enough to be effective turns into this massive, massive challenge. And in a lot of ways, detecting the earthquake is the easy part. The hard part is using existing technology to notify a ton of people all at once about this disaster that might only be seconds away.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  So I figured the best way to understand all this earthquake early warning stuff is just to follow the chain of technology from point to point. Basically, how an earthquake is detected, how an alert message gets generated from that, and how it gets all the way to my phone. Which turned into this fun goose chase all around Seattle. And it started with this small, kind of creepy shed next to a wastewater treatment plant right here in town.

• 40:02Speaker 08

  So let's pop out, I'll show you everything, and then we can chat.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 40:13Speaker 08

  Front light switch. Is this gonna wanna stay open? Oh, that's fine. Oh, that flickering is not fun.

• 40:19Speaker 07

  The locks, good thing it's not a video.

• 40:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, right?

• 40:23Speaker 07

  You're hearing Doug Gibbons. He's a field technician at the University of Washington, or the U-Dub, as we locals like to call it. He offered to meet me here at this shed and show me some earthquake surveillance hardware.

• 40:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, so what we have here, this is a Titan Strong Motion Accelerometer that is bolted to the foundation of the building here.

• 40:43Speaker 07

  The device is this plain green box like the size of a loaf of bread. So if the ground starts to shake, electronics inside this thing will capture a three-dimensional snapshot of the movement.

• 40:55Speaker 08

  It's oriented north to south. And inside of there, there are actually three different seismometers. There's one placed in the north and south direction, measuring shaking on that axis, one placed on the east and west direction, and one placed in the vertical direction.

• 41:09Speaker 07

  Doug plugged a laptop in and he showed me the raw output of the seismometers. It's basically three different graphs that show the amplitude of motion at this one spot. It's basically like a digital version of those old earthquake readouts you see in movies. The needle that scribbles back and forth on that rolling piece of paper.

• 41:28David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, the one that kind of looks like a lie detector test.

• 41:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  It's like it's it's small and then it's huge and then it's small again.

• 41:33Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 41:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, OK.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  Bigger scribbles, bigger earthquake, three of them for three axes of motion.

• 41:38David Pierce?

  Got it.

• 41:39Speaker 08

  And it's so sensitive, it can even just detect me just bending my knees up and down.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  Literally one little shift in weight and two of the graphs went, "Boo!" So that is, wow, that is incredibly sensitive.

• 41:49David Pierce?

  That's wild.

• 41:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 41:51David Pierce?

  So it must just be doing things all the time.

• 41:53Speaker 07

  It is, and it's constantly feeding that to places that we'll get to soon. But it's it's it's taking samples many times a second constantly. So over the past 10 years or so, field techs like Doug have installed maybe 1,500 sensors like this all up and down the West Coast. It's part of this huge effort led by the US Geological Survey to keep tabs on all the seismic activity in this part of the country. And it's sensors like this one that power Shake Alert, the early warning system for people like me.

• 42:25Speaker 08

  And we now are confident that we've got enough instruments to issue good warnings to people.

• 42:31Speaker 07

  So here I feel like we should stop and just do a little earthquakes 101 because it'll help a lot with everything we're about to talk about. So when an earthquake happens, when when two parts of the Earth's crust suddenly slip past each other, there are two kinds of waves that ripple out from the epicenter. They're called the primary and secondary waves, or P waves and S waves. The primary waves move really fast, like a little more than 3.5 miles per second. But they're too weak to do any damage. You probably wouldn't even notice them. The secondary waves are the ones that can really cause harm. But those move about half as fast as the P waves. And that's the big opportunity for early warning.

• 43:16Speaker 07

  All those really sensitive seismometers, like the one I just saw, they can pick up those P waves when the real shaking is still miles away. Let me put this all in real world terms because I think that'll help it make more sense. So let's take this really big one, that 9.0 earthquake that I am completely petrified of. That could start anywhere up and down the West Coast. Say it starts due west of Seattle. This is like worst case scenario for me. Better to just face your fears head on. That's about 135 miles west of Seattle off the coast. The Cascadia Fault is about 40 miles offshore. So that means that those first P waves have a good 40 miles to get ahead of the actual shaking.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  So when the P waves ping those coastal sensors, the real earthquake is still about 10 seconds away from the shore, which means it's 40 or 50 seconds away from downtown Seattle. So that chunk of time, let's call it 45 seconds or so, that's the window of time that Shake Alert has to warn this major metropolitan city that this huge natural disaster just appeared out of nowhere. So step by step, here's how they actually do that. When the P waves hit those first sensors, those little seismometer graphs spike, and that data gets forwarded straight on to UW over radio or hardwire internet or satellite,

• 44:45Speaker 07

  really whatever is available right where the sensors are located. And that part happens really fast.

• 44:51Speaker 08

  Within a fraction of a second.

• 44:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 08

  A second or less, we want this data to head back to UW. And that's from shaking in the ground to the sensor recording it, creating a packet, sending it to a communications device. That communications device either sending it through a radio wave or through the internet back to UW.

• 45:11Speaker 07

  It lands at a server onsite at the university. This one.

• 45:15Speaker 09

  So we just walked into kind of a smallish room that has a bunch of computer racks in it, including and a whole bunch of computers that just have green blinky lights. All the data from the field comes in here continuously and then gets processed.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  We're now in the basement of an Earth and Space Sciences building at UW in Seattle. My tour guide is Renata Hartog. She helped build ShakeAlert's algorithms. The servers in here, along with others in Northern and Southern California, they run a pair of algorithms that analyze any incoming quake.

• 45:51Speaker 09

  So one algorithm just looks for, it just looks at the very beginning of the signal. And then it tries to, based on the amplitudes, so it associates it into, oh, this is an earthquake. Just has a point on the map and an estimate of what the magnitude of the earthquake was.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  Basically, it's like a snap judgment of the epicenter and the magnitude of the quake. They have the second algorithm that's slower, but it can model the whole quake beyond just that first point on the map, which is a thing I never knew about earthquakes, incidentally. The epicenter is really just the starting point. As an earthquake grows, it can get bigger and bigger as more miles of the fault line slip. And that means longer shaking and more people affected.

• 46:39Speaker 09

  So for example, a large earthquake off the Pacific coast here on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If it starts somewhere on the southern end, it will take minutes probably before that whole fault plane has ruptured all the way from the southern end to the northern end.

• 46:56Speaker 07

  And finally, based on all of that, ShakeAlert estimates the geographic area that will get hit the hardest, and it creates an alert to be delivered to phones. And that part happens super fast, too, by the way. The first alert leaves the server after just a second or two of processing. And if the quake keeps growing like they do, it can send out additional waves of alerts a couple times a second.

• 47:19David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, so hold on. Do the math for me right now. Where are we in terms of like lag and I'm imagining the P waves are going, the S waves are going. Where are the waves and where are the alerts at this moment in time?

• 47:33Speaker 07

  So this is what I kept trying to do as I was having these conversations. I was trying to add up all of the lag from the beginning to now. And so I kept asking all Of these people about all these steps, how long does this take? How long does this take? And everyone was like, I don't know, a second, less than a second. Everything that we've talked about so far is is just super fast. The sensors picking up the P waves, sending that information over the internet to UW, the algorithm running and making decisions. All of that added up is like two-ish seconds. So in our scenario, the earthquake is still like 40 or 45 seconds away from me in Seattle.

• 48:13David Pierce?

  Okay, that's pretty good. So it's like, I'm imagining sort of Jaws music as it's like slowly creeping towards us as we get here. But we still, we're still ahead of the game here. We still have a solid chunk of time to, I mean, 45 seconds isn't forever, but it's something.

• 48:26Speaker 07

  It is something if it actually gives me 45 seconds. Cause there's this, there's one other link in this chain that we have not talked about yet. And that's the alerts getting from this server to my cellphone. And that's where things kind of get messy.

• 48:46Speaker 07

  So the deal is, we already do have this really good system in a lot of ways for getting alerts out to a gazillion cell phones all at once. It's called the Wireless Emergency Alert System, or WIA. So if you've ever gotten an Amber Alert on your phone, or a tornado warning, or some other kind of emergency ping, that's probably WIA. I'm sure you've seen these things before. The presidential alerts are versions of this.

• 49:12David Pierce?

  Is this the one that also failed spectacularly in Hawaii and scared a bunch of people that that something like a bomb was incoming?

• 49:19Speaker 07

  Oh, the ballistic missile. Yeah, the incoming ballistic missile, the alert that was just like hug your loved ones. And then they were like, sorry, never mind.

• 49:28David Pierce?

  That was WIA?

• 49:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, that was WIA.

• 49:31David Pierce?

  Okay, so we do know how to do this.

• 49:33Speaker 07

  Exactly. That was developed back in 2012 by the federal government. So this has been around for a while. And it uses this kind of funny technology called cell broadcast. And basically it uses cell towers like giant bull horns. They just blare out the simple digital message to any device that's programmed to pick it up. So this is great for earthquake alerts because there's no need to opt in or download anything. If your cellphone is in the danger zone when an earthquake hits, you'll get an alert on your phone as long as your phone and your carrier support WIA, which somewhere between most and all of them do.

• 50:11Speaker 10

  Are we a messages that are get delivered to cell phones are are built for 90 characters because we know that the majority of phones, even non smartphones, will be able to get those alerts that if you go above those 90 characters, people might not be able to get them. So we we're in the position of crafting messages so that we can make even people who still use flip phones to be able to access earthquake early warning.

• 50:38Speaker 07

  That's Bob de Groot. He leads the Shake Alert operations team out of Pasadena, California. He says that Wia is the single biggest, best channel for reaching the 50 million or so people on the West Coast. But at the same time, he's also really aware of its Achilles heel.

• 50:55Speaker 10

  When the wireless emergency alert system was developed, didn't have Shake Alert speeds in mind. Operating at the the horizon of minutes was sort of, wow, that's fast. But now we're asking a system to operate in matters of seconds and fractions of a second.

• 51:16Speaker 07

  Wia is just not as quick as the rest of the Shake Alert system that we stepped through. In fact, when Shake Alert was in development, no one even knew what Wia's lag was. Bob's team actually set up these two tests in California where they pushed out an alert to a specific area and then measured how long it took to reach their phones.

• 51:37Speaker 10

  We took a bunch of cell phones, including mine and including my colleagues. We put numbers on them and then laid them on the table and then took a GoPro, basically, and filmed all those phones.

• 51:49Speaker 07

  He sent me the the video of this test and it's really funny. It's this long table with a whole row of different kinds of phones spread out and a lot of people are all gathered around these phones waiting for the test to start.

• 52:02Speaker 10

  So we waited for the alerts to come through and the phones lit up when the alerts came through.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  The very fastest turnaround that they recorded was around four seconds. The median was in the six to 12 second range. A bunch of phones just never got the alert. And then there were residents within the test area who reported an even wider range of latencies. So the point is, even with that controlled test, WIA is still this really frustrating black box.

• 52:37David Pierce?

  How do we not know better? I mean, this seems like, A, solid technology, B, very important, and C, a thing we've been doing and using for a long time. It seems like this should be a totally known quantity at this point.

• 52:52Speaker 07

  It's, I had that same feeling and it took me attempting to map out all of the people involved in WIA to understand that it's just not one thing. It's not this technology that is implemented by one organization that can be optimized throughout this whole chain. There are the federal government, there are telecom companies, there are handset manufacturers, and every carrier might handle implementation of this standard differently. They might prioritize it differently on their networks. All of this is voluntary for them, so it's kind of whatever systems they've set up. And so there seem to be all these differences in delivery. There's different kinds of lag across the 2G and 3G and 4G and 5G networks,

• 53:37Speaker 07

  across different styles of phones. Bob said that like a burner phone that he got at the 7-Eleven turned out to be the fastest delivery mechanism. So if you like really want to be on point with WIA, just go get yourself a burner phone.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  No babe, it's not a burner, this is my earthquake phone.

• 53:52Speaker 07

  This is my earthquake detector.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  So it's just a little bit of a mess. There's no built in way to measure end to end latency. And again, this wasn't built for earthquake early warning. So no one in any part of this process was ever told, "You have to find ways to shave off every second possible from this system." And again, we've been tossing this 45-second number around in our scenario. And so, given that, a second here or there might not seem like a big deal. But the thing you gotta keep in mind is that that's the amount of time that Shake Alert has to notify me in Seattle about a Cascadia earthquake. First of all, even in that scenario, there are a lot of people that live closer to the

• 54:38Speaker 07

  coast, so they're not going to have 45 seconds to play with. And even for me in Seattle, there are other faults to worry about.

• 54:47Speaker 11

  And good evening. A rather typical late morning in the state of Washington was turned suddenly into a rumbling and rolling panic. An earthquake measuring 6.8 has left millions shaken. The damage is widespread, the injured list continues to change, and at least one person has lost their life.

• 55:07Speaker 07

  That was the 2001 Nisqually quake. It hit right underneath the Seattle area, and it shook the whole region for about 45 seconds. It ultimately did maybe $2 billion worth of damage. It's one of the costliest quakes in US history. And the fault that produced it is really busy. Before 2001, it produced similar quakes in 1965, 1949, and 1927. That's basically every 20 to 40 years.

• 55:37Speaker 12

  Those are our most typical significant earthquakes, I guess you would say. That's a once-in-a-generation event, as opposed to the Cascadia earthquake, which is once-in-the-life-of-a-nation kind of event.

• 55:54Speaker 07

  Gabriel Lotto works on engagement with the Shake Alert team here at UW. And he explained to me that the fault responsible for the Nisqually quake sits a good 40 miles below the Seattle area.

• 56:06Speaker 12

  So, let's say you have a repeat of the Nisqually earthquake today. That earthquake starts deeper down, but it's right below our feet, specifically right below the city of Olympia.

• 56:17Speaker 07

  Since the waves are coming directly up from below us, it means more of the region gets hit all at once. And for this one, we just get a lot less warning time.

• 56:28Speaker 12

  As the area of shaking spreads out, you could get five, 10, 15 seconds, depending on where you are exactly.

• 56:35Speaker 07

  Just to bring that all home, five or 10 or 15 seconds is roughly the amount of lag time that's in the WEA system. So for this quake, the one that I will very likely experience myself in the coming decades, that squishiness in WEA could determine whether or not a lot of people get warnings in time.

• 56:56David Pierce?

  There's definitely a deeply bleak world in which you can imagine getting this notification like two or three minutes after the earthquake has hit.

• 57:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:06David Pierce?

  Which sounds both very plausible and really, truly awful.

• 57:09Speaker 07

  And just, yeah, just the biggest knife twist.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it sounds like if WEA is not the answer, or at least not the perfectly tunable answer, are we just on our own? Is there just not a better system here?

• 57:24Speaker 07

  WEA is not the whole answer, clearly. But the people building Shake Alert are thinking way past WEA to all of the possible platforms for delivering a message like this. So for example, a team at UC Berkeley built a smartphone app called My Shake. I have it on my phone and it works like a normal smartphone app. I share my location with it. And if I'm within the alert radius of an earthquake, it sends me a push notification. And push notifications generally arrive in one to two seconds, much better than five to 15.

• 57:59David Pierce?

  Okay, so this makes a lot of sense to me. And is one of the things I was going to ask is I feel like for you as a Seattleite, if somebody was like, hey, Download this app and give it your location and we will tell you if there's an earthquake coming. That is the single best case I've ever heard in history for why you should download an app. So

• 58:22Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  But I guess, I guess there are challenges there too, but it does make sense to me that, that you would say, just do this one thing and then we can do something much better.

• 58:32Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely. And the Shake Alert people are shouting that from the rooftops. The fact that it's opt in versus opt out for something like this means that out of the gates, you're capturing such a smaller chunk of the population that you are otherwise. There's just no getting around that. The Shake Alert team has been at this for a while and there are now three and a half million or so registered users of this app, which is awesome and huge progress. But again, there are 50 million people on the West Coast. So it's getting people signed on to this before a big earthquake becomes this consumer tech problem. It becomes an app development problem. It becomes a social problem. It just gets

• 59:15Speaker 07

  messier. Now, Google has been thinking about this for a while and they have done one better. They baked Shake Alert into Android at the OS level, which gives them the power to issue a couple of different kinds of alerts that you can't do just with an app.

• 59:33Speaker 12

  If it's a smaller earthquake, it's just, it just looks like a push notification. If it's a larger earthquake, it's a full screen takeover. It will break through silent mode or anything like that. You have no choice but to look at this thing. It makes a sound. It takes over your screen. It buzzes and it's possible to turn off these alerts, but they are on by default, which I think is a really good thing. When life safety is on the line, yeah, you don't want to mess around with whether or not A user will pay attention to an alert.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  Apple so far has not built anything like that into iOS. There is a way to speed up Wea alerts, but it's this toggle that's buried in the iOS system settings. I will put a link in the show notes about that. I did ask Apple about all of this, but they didn't get me any more information. Anyway, the point is, there are these other ways that you can get an alert. But it depends on where you are and what phone you have and what you're proactively signed up for. So this is where everything outside of Wea just gets really piecemeal.

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, it's an interesting adoption problem because you get to a point where you're like, okay, even if we solve this problem, you know, the only way to get people reliably to download an app is to promise them like free, cheap clothing from China.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  So like, I will pass that along to them.

• 1:00:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. But you mentioned three and a half million people have downloaded this thing. The system seems to be sort of fully realized. Has it been tested? Have we been through a Shake Alert earthquake before?

• 1:01:11Speaker 07

  Yes, in California, there have actually been a lot of them that have put all of these different platforms to the test. Actually, just back in September, there was a pretty decent quake in Malibu. And it all worked and some people got like 20 seconds of warning, which is enough time to take cover. It's enough time to get away from Windows that like you can do a lot in 20 seconds. Overall, the rollout has not been perfect. Back in 2021, there was another quake in Southern California that Shake Alert ended up misinterpreting as multiple smaller quakes. So a lot of people just never got that warning. In some ways, though, the mistake that experts worry about even more is a false positive, an erroneous alert. Here's Gabriel again.

• 1:01:56Speaker 12

  If we tell people there is an earthquake and there isn't, we lose credibility. And that reduces public safety because then you have the boy cried wolf syndrome.

• 1:02:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:02:09Speaker 07

  That did happen once in California back in 2020. USGS had to send a follow-up message, which I kind of love because it read, and I quote, "Shake Alert message canceled. Investigating. If you protected yourself, well done."

• 1:02:24David Pierce?

  It's almost like passive aggressive.

• 1:02:26Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's, it's a little bit like, this was kind of a test in a way.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  Gotcha.

• 1:02:33Speaker 07

  Which is great, but also really not great. Because as we all well know, we have spent years and years and years getting really good at ignoring annoying app notifications. And if earthquake alerts get that reputation, then the whole system collapses.

• 1:02:51Speaker 12

  Then people will turn off their notifications. They will go into their phone settings, dig around and find out how to turn these off.

• 1:02:57Speaker 07

  Right, right. But even without any mistakes, alerting becomes this kind of funny mix of art and science. With any automated system like this, there is always going to be some alerting threshold, a preset that says above this amount of shaking will warn people and beneath it, we won't. But finding that threshold is a social problem more than anything else. I actually happened to be in Los Angeles for a couple of back-to-back earthquakes back in the summer of 2019. And back then ShakeAlert was this experimental app. It was just for people in LA, so I didn't have it. But for those earthquakes, actually, no one got an alert because the shaking just wasn't heavy enough.

• 1:03:40Speaker 07

  But the response from the public was, we just made this earthquake alarm, why didn't we use it? They felt shaking, they didn't get an alert, they'd been told that there was this awesome earthquake early warning system that was going online. So that turned into a whole thing. And the feedback from the public ended up helping USGS decide to lower some of the alerting thresholds. So that's just one example of one quake. But the point is, there's always going to be these edge cases and they're going to have to keep dialing in these thresholds. And poor Bob de Groot from USGS hears about it every time there's an earthquake.

• 1:04:19Speaker 10

  I manage our ShakeAlert X social media account at USGS underscore ShakeAlert. And I always entertain these questions of people saying, I got the alert, I didn't get the alert, why did I not get the alert? I didn't feel very much at all, why the heck did I get an alert? And of course, you know, insert your favorite word in their response. Generally, most people are good natured and I love interacting with people on X because they have really good, genuine questions or are very, very thoughtful. But sometimes people get a little, little excited.

• 1:04:54David Pierce?

  As somebody who lived in San Francisco for a bunch of years and thus experienced San Francisco earthquake Twitter, I feel Bob's pain. It's both a good time on the internet and as somebody whose job is the earthquakes, I feel for Bob.

• 1:05:07Speaker 07

  Right, yeah. If you're the one all those tweets are going to, that's a different story.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. But I feel like if I'm thinking about this big picture,

• 1:05:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  You've sort of described a bunch of pieces that we need that all exist, right? Everybody has a device in their pocket that can, in theory, be alerted. We have the apps, the systems are getting better. You were saying the sensors are all over the place. But there are a lot of different parties required to get this together, right? You mentioned the carriers and the operating system companies and the government and so on and so forth. Do we just have a stalemate here where we're going to have a bunch of possibilities, but it would require somebody to just put them all together? And that is harder than it seems like it ought to be? We have this weird bureaucracy collective action problem with earthquake alerts?

• 1:05:58Speaker 07

  Well, so all of this energy has been put into cell phones because that is like the obvious massive delivery mechanism.

• 1:06:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  And so like getting into the weeds around cell phones has taken up a lot of time and energy. And there are places, especially around WIA, where it does feel like, okay, it is what it is.

• 1:06:19David Pierce?

  You know what this makes me think of, by the way? This is a total random aside, but do you remember early in the pandemic when Apple and Google started to work together on some of the notification systems for people who had been exposed?

• 1:06:31Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  And just the sheer amount of work and wrangling it took to get that stuff to work and talk to each other and make sense. And that was, obviously earthquakes are a big deal. Like that took a literal global pandemic for these two companies to actually like sit down in a room together and be like, okay, how do we make this stuff work?

• 1:06:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:06:48David Pierce?

  And I think clearing that bar with anything short of a global pandemic, even for something as important as a natural disaster. Just strikes me as very complicated.

• 1:06:59Speaker 07

  Completely. And they were under the gun during the pandemic.

• 1:07:02David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:07:02Speaker 07

  In a way that everyone involved in earthquakes talks about the fact that until there's a big earthquake that resets the idea of earthquakes in everyone's mind and pushes earthquakes to the forefront of everyone's minds. It's just hard to get people to pay attention sometimes and to identify it as a potentially really important thing to do.

• 1:07:22David Pierce?

  Right. And like you said, with phones, you just without those two platforms playing along, you can only get so far.

• 1:07:28Speaker 07

  Right, exactly. So that's been all of the cellphone development. But there's a lot of other things that you can do with these alerts that go way beyond smartphones. And people are working on that, too. So you think about smart speakers. You think about home assistants. You think about smart TVs. The people I interviewed for this story were basically like, anything with a speaker or a screen should be a delivery mechanism for earthquake early warnings. Like, they're all of those companies, all of those platforms, those could all be distribution channels. Then you think about big public channels like highway signs or PA systems in schools and hospitals.

• 1:08:08Speaker 07

  Then you think about all the other automated things that don't have anything to do with just warning you as a person. You can open fire station doors so that they don't get stuck down if they're damaged by an earthquake. Water utilities can shut off valves or pumps. You can slow down trains or you can recall elevators. There's all this other stuff that you could do with this information. And in a lot of ways, it's just early days in figuring out how to plug this information into all of these different systems.

• 1:08:40David Pierce?

  Also seems like it makes that threshold of when you do and don't trigger an alert become very important.

• 1:08:47Speaker 07

  Very important and potentially different for all of those different systems.

• 1:08:51David Pierce?

  Totally, fair.

• 1:08:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's just a mess. So some of that is already happening. But it means working with one organization or agency at a time, it's really slow going. But Shake Alert has only fully been online for a little more than three years now. So this is still really early days of actually plugging it into stuff.

• 1:09:13David Pierce?

  Is the sense that Shake Alert is kind of a thing, sort of a project out of a university that is like interesting research for how to do it, or is it the thing?

• 1:09:22Speaker 07

  Oh, it's on the west coast of the United States. It's the thing.

• 1:09:26David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:09:26Speaker 07

  There are other similar systems elsewhere, but there's, thank God, there isn't like a competing earthquake early warning, like, standard.

• 1:09:36Speaker 07

  Like, we have to do a whole other story about-

• 1:09:37David Pierce?

  You have to have a folder full of apps?

• 1:09:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, all of the rival engineers and scientists trying to make a different one. No, it's, it's, the, the system is in place. All of the state and local governments are aware of it. All of the big technology providers are aware of it. It's just a matter of making it as useful as it can possibly be.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Okay. So, do you have the My Shake app?

• 1:09:59Speaker 07

  I do, I absolutely do.

• 1:10:00David Pierce?

  How many, how many notifications have you gotten from it recently? What do they make you feel?

• 1:10:04Speaker 07

  Zero. This is the, and this is the thing about living in Washington. It's just, it's, it's like, it's quiet. It's too quiet.

• 1:10:10David Pierce?

  It's too quiet.

• 1:10:12Speaker 07

  And I, I swear to God, I, a lot of these folks that I interviewed for this story all told me some version of, I just want there to be like a good medium earthquake in Washington or thereabouts that just reminds everyone about earthquakes. It doesn't do any damage per se, it doesn't kill anyone. It just puts it back in people's minds. They just want like a, a nice, fun reminder quake.

• 1:10:39David Pierce?

  The earthquake that just knocks like one plate out of a cabinet?

• 1:10:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, everyone loses a plate and it's like maybe everyone's favorite plate. And so they're like, where's that plate? Oh, the earthquake got it.

• 1:10:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 07

  100%.

• 1:10:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, that, that makes sense. Has all of this made you more or less terrified of earthquakes?

• 1:10:56Speaker 07

  I act like, strong both. I, the, talking to the science people about all of this taught me about all the other faults that are around me besides just the Cascadia's abduction zone. There is a fault that runs basically under my house, like very shallow and it's much less well-known and well-understood than the others. So that's just like a new abstract fear for me. So that's cool. On the other hand, it's, it's genuinely very heartening to see this really messy constellation of- Organizations try to figure out early warning. Government agencies, states, local governments, universities, telecom companies, cellphone makers.

• 1:11:40Speaker 07

  Like, they're all doing their best. And the result is something that I can almost certainly say I will benefit from at some point in the future. I just have to wait and see when.

• 1:11:54Speaker 07

  Also, I really want an Android phone now.

• 1:11:55David Pierce?

  We're all buying Android burners. That's my takeaway from this, is everybody gets an Android burner and it's gonna save the world.

• 1:12:01Speaker 07

  100%.

• 1:12:03David Pierce?

  So, yeah, back to the house. We're done with the noises. How was, how was the process? Was this, are you glad you went through this crazy earthquake fitting process at your house?

• 1:12:12Speaker 07

  I am. It was only a couple of days and now it is, like everything else about earthquakes, it's completely abstract until it's not. So I just like, I'm just standing here in my house, knowing that the house is now bolted to the foundation. And I just have this like magical thing that I don't see protecting me in theory. And so now I just have to go about my business. But I will say, just like, it's like having an amulet. It's like much more real than that, obviously, but just knowing that that happened, I can kind of just like put that part of my mind to bed.

• 1:12:46David Pierce?

  Totally. All right, we gotta take a break, but real quick, uh, give people the call to action. What, if you're on the West Coast and you're worried about this, what, what should you do about it right now?

• 1:12:56Speaker 07

  Yes. So if you're on the West Coast, if you have an iPhone, uh, we'll put in the show notes how to turn on a feature called Local Awareness. That's the thing that speeds up Wea messages. Android and iOS, you can download the My Shake app. And you can go to ready.gov for just general earthquake advice for before and during and after.

• 1:13:17David Pierce?

  Love it. All right, we'll put all that in the show notes. Will, thank you as always.

• 1:13:21Speaker 07

  Should I play just like a little bit more of that drill sound to, to play us out instead of the Vergecast music?

• 1:13:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's really ruin everyone's day on our way out. Let's do it.

• 1:13:30Speaker 07

  See you, everybody.

• 1:13:40David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break, but Will, stick around and you're gonna help us do a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

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• 1:14:51Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Will Pore is still here. Hi, Will.

• 1:15:23Speaker 07

  Hi, I haven't left.

• 1:15:25David Pierce?

  Will just lurks in the background with every Vergecast, whether you hear him or not, he's always here.

• 1:15:30Speaker 07

  I could appear at any moment. Just know that that's always a possibility.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  So we've been thinking over the months about all the stuff we can do with the Vergecast hotline. We get tons of good questions. Lots of them are weird and are basically just like, is my iPhone bad? And we say like, no, it's fine. But occasionally we get questions that like, make us really like, go deep down rabbit holes to try and figure out what's going on. And so we've been trying to figure out ways to go down more of those rabbit holes. There are also like an alarming number of people in the Slack room now who see all the hotline questions because everybody loves getting these questions.

• 1:16:06Speaker 07

  It's really fun. It became part of my job somewhat recently, but I would have been doing it anyway. Because it's just a fun way to spend a minute at a time.

• 1:16:16David Pierce?

  It is super fun, except when people are mean to us. Please don't use the email to be mean to us.

• 1:16:20Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:16:21David Pierce?

  But when you call, be nice. That's really all we ask. Yeah. But you, I have no idea what you're about to do, but you found a rabbit hole that you went down.

• 1:16:31Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:16:32David Pierce?

  On the hotline. So set this up for us.

• 1:16:34Speaker 07

  Well, there's not much setup other than I found a question that I personally wanted the answer to. So I was like, okay, I will go try and find this answer and that will be a hotline. So that's what we're doing here.

• 1:16:45David Pierce?

  All right. Set up the question. Who's the question from?

• 1:16:47Speaker 07

  This question comes from a listener who has a kid who is running around all the time and he wants to take pictures of that kid and he has a question about that.

• 1:16:56Speaker 13

  Hey, it's Peter from Brooklyn. I had an idea of how to show the new features on the iPhone 16. It'd be really cool to do a race to take different types of pictures in different situations with the new phones versus the old phone. I want to know, can you really take the camera out, open it up and get a shot of that moving kid faster? Can you really change the aperture faster? All those different settings, is it really faster with the new controls versus the old ones? That's it. Thanks. Have a good one. Rock and roll.

• 1:17:29Speaker 07

  Okay, so I went straight to Allison Johnson for this because A, she did our iPhone 16 review, and B, I know from listening to this show that she has lots of experience chasing small kids around with a camera. Hello, Allison.

• 1:17:43Speaker 14

  Hello.

• 1:17:44Speaker 07

  So I was curious about this question, because I'm one of those people that watches every Apple keynote every year just to see what the camera does now. And I feel like even for me, this year was a very like camera-y event. Do you feel that way also?

• 1:18:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, it wasn't so much that like anything drastic had happened, you know, with the camera pipeline or whatever. But, you know, the camera control was the big thing on both of the iPhone 16, all the iPhone 16 models, and kind of the new filter options you have.

• 1:18:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 14

  So yeah, it's like a camera-forward update, I would say.

• 1:18:29Speaker 07

  Well, I watched, I saw all of that, and my question was kind of the same as Peter's, which is, you know, how much does that button make it feel like you have a point-and-shoot camera in your pocket? Which to me is just like a muscle memory question. It's not a question that you can answer from watching the keynote or watching demos or anything, because it's all about the like routines of how you just like pull out and use your camera without thinking about it when there's a toddler running by doing something cute, for example. So I'm curious to get your take on what routines you have around your phone

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  and what routines you've had over the years, and then whether the 16 and that button meaningfully changes any of that. So, you know, historically, before the 16, walk me through your reflexes for taking a photo really quickly. You've got your phone in your pocket, your kid is doing something cute. Like, what are the steps?

• 1:19:29Speaker 14

  Yeah, so I I switch between Android and iPhone like quite a bit throughout the year. Um, so that changes things up, but on Android, it's actually super easy because I can double click the the power button and

• 1:19:43Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 1:19:44Speaker 14

  Like, I think on basically every Android phone, we'll just open the camera app from wherever you are. Um, so I can do that without looking on an iPhone. Typically, I've will take the thing out of my pocket and I could be clever and map the camera to a triple press of the home button or something. I just am not that um, smart, I guess. And I always just end up like swiping from the home screen. Like you can, you can tap the camera icon and like hold it and that.

• 1:20:19Speaker 07

  Right, that's what I do.

• 1:20:20Speaker 14

  Yeah, that's I think what a sensible person does. I don't know why I have trouble with that. I swipe, I I slide my finger across and and that's how I open it up. So it's like one extra beat where I have to kind of like have the phone in front of me and the screen, you know, wakes up and I swipe and then I'm ready to go.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  Gotcha. So there is some like home screen friction.

• 1:20:47Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Maybe it's of my own making. I don't know.

• 1:20:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I know the feeling of of just like reaching in my phone to to quickly take a picture of something and then I like the the screen doesn't quite want to wake up or the like it doesn't register the the little camera icon tap. There is a little, I've like, I've lost pictures because something in there just doesn't like quite happen the first try or the first two tries. And that's super frustrating.

• 1:21:19Speaker 14

  And then I'm distracted, like trying to swipe on the screen and then my kid has run off and he's doing something else. Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 07

  So disaster.

• 1:21:28Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 07

  Uh, so the there's an in between. That experience potentially and this new fancy camera button. And it's the, the action button on the iPhone 15s. Did you, have you played around with that over the course of the past year? And is that meaningfully different? Cause I know a lot of people just mapped their camera to that button.

• 1:21:49Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:21:52Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's totally reasonable to use the action button as that like camera shortcut button. I find the placement of it a little funny for that. It's kind of like on the other side of the phone that I feel like I'm reaching for. And it's kind of up high above the, the volume buttons. So for me, I feel like I have to kind of do a, do a little maneuver to get there. But it seems to work for a lot of people, I guess.

• 1:22:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, but it's not, it's not the like, it doesn't form the muscle memory for you the way that you want it to.

• 1:22:25Speaker 14

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 07

  Gotcha. Okay. So what about the literal camera button that is now on these phones? How is that, has that changed this like quick draw routine to go back to the beginning? Like kid is doing something cute, your phone is in your pocket, what do you do?

• 1:22:41Speaker 14

  Yeah, so I just had a roller coaster of emotions with the camera button. Because it's like coded, like everything I would like, you know? It's like a real button. It's, controls the camera. You can do a bunch of cool like change of exposure and stuff with it. I don't actually like it as much as I thought I would.

• 1:23:03Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:04Speaker 14

  So my kid is doing something cute in front of me. I will definitely press it to launch the camera. The screen has to be awake already before it will do that. Like pushing it though, just the one time will wake up the screen. So you have to kind of do it again.

• 1:23:22Speaker 07

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:23:24Speaker 14

  Yeah, which I would, I would like start that process when the phone is in my pocket.

• 1:23:29Speaker 07

  So it's hitting the button once to turn the screen on and then again to launch the camera app? And then again to take a picture?

• 1:23:36Speaker 14

  Yes, and

• 1:23:37Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 1:23:38Speaker 14

  For the third thing, for the taking a picture, I don't like it very much because

• 1:23:43Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:44Speaker 14

  I know. It is, it's kind of stiff, like it's a little bit recessed.

• 1:23:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 14

  Um, with the, from the edge of the phone, which makes sense because you don't want to accidentally take a bunch of pictures. Um, but it just feels like that little bit, it's too stiff and like, I have to push a little bit too hard on it that I feel like I'm shaking the whole phone. And I'm still, you know, maybe the iPhone can cope with that, but I'm so like, no, I don't want any shake, you know, in this photo.

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  It might be messing with your framing.

• 1:24:16Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's gonna be a little crooked or something. Um, I don't like that.

• 1:24:22Speaker 07

  So you, I'm, I'm just really stuck on this, like one, this like scenario and the like individual beats of this. Kid does a cute thing, one click to turn the, the thing on, one click to get into the camera, and then you're hitting the software button on the screen.

• 1:24:37Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 07

  Gotcha.

• 1:24:39Speaker 14

  That's been my process and maybe the screen will wake up when I take it out of my pocket. You know, there's variations in there, but that's basically it. Yeah.

• 1:24:47Speaker 07

  But it's still a little fiddly. Is it faster meaningfully? Is there anything about this that does speed up the process, even if it's fiddly?

• 1:24:56Speaker 14

  I feel like I do like having the, just a button to press down and that like feels to me like I am starting the process, even if it's not like, you know, bam, I'm going to get a shot just like that.

• 1:25:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Speaker 14

  Um, one thing it is really useful for, and this is something I've kind of like used more in long-term testing and not exactly in those like quick draw moments. Um, is changing the exposure compensation because when you do that like little half press or the light press on it, um, that's how you access, you can set it to a bunch of different things. Um, but the one I like is the exposure compensation, uh, because I don't know if you've ever tried changing the brightness on a, in a photo that you're taking, but it's such a pain on an iPhone.

• 1:25:46Speaker 07

  Is that, that's where you have to like tap the screen until the little sun icon shows up? And then you have to drag the sun up and down. And yeah, I can never, I can never do that. Right?

• 1:25:56Speaker 14

  It never feels like I'm dragging it enough. And then all of a sudden the image is like way too bright. And I'm like, yes, spending so much time fiddling with that, that like, whatever I was taking a picture of is long gone. Um, yeah, this is just like a little, little bonus exposure compensation dial, which I love. So that's been my favorite part of the camera control, honestly.

• 1:26:19Speaker 07

  Okay. Do you feel like it, do you, can you get to other settings really quickly? I just the, the like, the vision I have of what Apple wants out of that button is for people to very intuitively just like wiggle their finger back and forth by a few millimeters and like do 17 things and take a picture.

• 1:26:38Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  Do you feel like you are like psychically connected to this button, the way that they want you to be?

• 1:26:44Speaker 14

  I do not. Um, and it's a little funny. It's like something you have to kind of get used to because you're, you're like half pressing this button. It's not, there's not actually a half press. It's, that's the like capacitive, you know, it gives you a little haptic buzz, like you did it. Um, and then you're supposed to keep your finger on there and slide it back and forth. And I end up like taking my finger off or like I'm, I slide it and I need to reposition my finger to like, you know, do the adjustment some more. Um, which feels a little like choppy and not quite right. And then there's like, no good way to like exit

• 1:27:25Speaker 14

  the control, which is a weird thing that Neelai and I both noticed in the review is like, you kind of want to just like tap to get out of there. And it, it's just weird how it works.

• 1:27:36Speaker 07

  How do you get out of there? Do you even know? Have you figured it out yet? Or has that setting been up since you got the phone?

• 1:27:43Speaker 14

  Let's see. No, no, no. You tap the live view. Oh, God, the little sun icon is back. I don't want that at all. Yeah, no, it feels like you should do a light tap again and that would exit.

• 1:27:58Speaker 07

  And that's not what happens.

• 1:27:59Speaker 14

  That does not work. Yeah, that's the weird behavior.

• 1:28:03Speaker 07

  Huh, okay. Well, I can't say it feels like you're selling this button.

• 1:28:10Speaker 14

  I know. I'm really not trying to, I guess.

• 1:28:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, clearly. That is fair and understandable. I guess the like, I guess Peter's question was, is this any faster? And my sort of tack on question is, is this meaningfully better? And I guess all of that rolls up to, is this a meaningful factor in deciding to buy a phone? If you really care about taking pictures quickly?

• 1:28:38Speaker 14

  Yeah. The thing I've kind of come around to is like, it doesn't hurt. Like, literally, nothing was taken away. You can use the camera in any other way that you prefer. And this is like, an extra thing that, you know, for opening the camera itself, kind of helps. I don't prefer it for taking a photo, but it's not like Apple took away all the other ways to take a photo.

• 1:29:03Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:29:04Speaker 14

  And then you get that little extra control that like, sometimes does come in handy. So, it's, it's like, I don't know if it's a net positive, but it doesn't hurt. And

• 1:29:17Speaker 07

  That's what you want out of any flagship feature of a new phone.

• 1:29:21Speaker 14

  It does. It's not damaging my experience in any big way. Do no harm, something like that. And I think it's just like a lot of other things with phones. It's like, I don't see a lot of new, you know, on iOS or on Android, a feature that I'm like, wow, you should absolutely throw away your old phone and get a new phone this year for this thing.

• 1:29:45Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:29:46Speaker 14

  It's sort of like, Are you in the right, you know, time in that like cycle of, for some people, it's maybe like two to three years, or for other people that they just wanna not shop for a phone as long as they can.

• 1:29:59Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:30:00Speaker 14

  It's sort of like, where are you in the discomfort with your current phone? And how appealing are the things on the new phone? I think the 16, like the regular 16 in particular, this year is a pretty good value proposition of like, you get these new buttons and like, maybe Apple Intelligence will turn out to be something and it's, but besides that, it's just like the new iPhone and it's pretty good. So.

• 1:30:27Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:30:27Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:30:28Speaker 07

  That is fair. I guess my, my last question is that we talk a lot about whether in the future, we're all gonna keep using our phone for everything, or whether the phone is gonna get splintered into a bunch of other gadgets. Point and shoot cameras are having a moment. If you care about, you know, whipping out a device and taking a picture really quickly, is there a world where you should just get a point and shoot camera and not worry about all of these fiddly buttons and software updates? What do you think?

• 1:30:58Speaker 14

  I, I was really hoping I could shortcut to, this could be a cool point and shoot camera with the camera button and with the photographic styles.

• 1:31:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 14

  Cause you get some kind of neat, kind of Fujifilm-esque, you know?

• 1:31:12Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 1:31:13Speaker 14

  Film stocks or whatever you wanna call them. And it, it does not feel that way to me. Like, of course that doesn't. It's a phone. Like, it's still gonna be a phone. It's still gonna be like pinging you with Slack messages when you're out trying to take some pictures. So I think that is true. Like, a button is not going to turn this into like, you know, a super great camera in a way that it wasn't before. It, it's still the camera I use most of the time. But yeah, it's, I don't think gonna, gonna sway anyone from, from a nice Fujifilm camera or, I don't know, is a Meta Ray-Bans like that?

• 1:31:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:31:55Speaker 14

  That will take a photo faster than taking a phone out of your pocket. So, I don't know.

• 1:32:00Speaker 07

  Right. There are other ways.

• 1:32:02Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Speaker 07

  Okay, well, I don't know where Peter goes from here, but. I'm sorry, Peter. I wanna, I just wanna like hit this button a bunch of times now. Now I'm, now I'm curious to see. But thank you, Allison. Yeah, thanks.

• 1:32:19David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. All of our coverage of what's going on with OpenAI, all of our coverage of the iPhone stuff. We'll link to both blog posts in the show notes. You should really read them. It's a lot of reading and it gets pretty flowery at some points, but both of these things are good reads and I recommend checking them out. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or blog posts about AI that you would like to share, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866 VERGE11. We love hearing from you. And like I mentioned, there is that Slack room and everyone's in it. And I can't even begin to guess all of the fun places that hotline questions are going.

• 1:33:02David Pierce?

  So thank you so, so much to everybody who reaches out. It's the best. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about more OpenAI news, all of Apple's gadget announcements from this week and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:33:32Speaker 15

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