The good, the bad, and the Humane AI Pin

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Piece, and Alex Cranz discuss David's review of the Humane AI Pin, Taylor Swift's music back on TikTok, a new party speaker, and much more. Further reading: Humane AI Pin review: the post-smartphone future isn’t here yet Here’s What Reviewers Are Saying About the Humane Pin We now have a better look at what’s inside the Humane AI pin OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4 Taylor Swift’s music is back on TikTok Apple will open the iPhone to repair with used parts Kobo announces its first color e-readers Sony’s new headphones and speakers are all about skull-rattling bass Official: here’s the DJI Avata 2, possibly one of the best sequels in years Google Vids is the latest AI-powered app in Workspace Meta says it’s fixing ‘HD’ photo sharing in Facebook Messenger Marissa Mayer’s eternal Sunshine The MPA has big plans to crack down on movie piracy again Vote for The Vergecast in the Webbys! Join The Verge at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Spring Festival 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of appreciating the good vibes on the hardware.

• 1:15David Pierce?

  That might be the truest one we've ever done.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what we do. But we totally get it. There's room to make things even better, by which I mean functional. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Hi.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  Alex Krantz is here. Hi. It's a big week on the Vergecast. All right, it's like maybe the biggest week we've ever had because David has reviewed the Humane AI pin. Yeah.

• 1:37David Pierce?

  It has come full circle. This really does feel like it's been a very funny experience in that like almost exactly a year ago was that first TED Talk that Imran Choudhury, the CEO and co-founder of Humane, gave that we were just like, this is nothing. I don't believe it. We basically sat here and we're like, I don't believe any of the things that happened in this demo. And

• 2:02David Pierce?

  It turned out that's sort of true.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  We'll get, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. And if you are a fan of arguing about the Vision Pro score, boy, get ready for us to argue about the U-8 score from totally opposite perspectives.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  I'm ready.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. That happened. Taylor Swift is back on TikTok. I have some completely irresponsible gossip to share about the status of TikTok and Universal Music Group.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  And so if you're listening and you feel like you've always wanted to substantiate some gossip, get ready. Cause I'm looking for you. Uh, there's other news, OpenAI is in copyright trouble as always. So is Google.

• 2:38Alex Cranz?

  There's really important news, which is that Kobo announced color e-readers.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 2:43Alex Cranz?

  All three of us are just stoked. The three of us that care.

• 2:47David Pierce?

  It's just Alex, Alex and Alex.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Again, the flagship podcast of appreciating the good vibes on the hardware.

• 2:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  That's a hundred percent that story.

• 2:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the most important news of all, which is that Sony has a new party speaker.

• 2:59Alex Cranz?

  Exactly. We're appreciating vibes.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  Really is a big Vergecast.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you like the Vergecast, you're gonna love this Vergecast. That I can promise you. Let's start. Let's get right into it. David, you magnetically clipped a robot to your body for several weeks.

• 3:16Alex Cranz?

  It was warm, as I want to do.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  It got warm. It only ever spoke to me and I believe Korean or Arabic.

• 3:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Because every time I tried to use it, it was locked in a translation loop. So I, I have no experience with it. What you gave it a four. You said it didn't work. Tell us about it.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Sure. So the whole idea of the PIN and this like new generation of AI gadgets is that your smartphone is actually slower and worse than you think. Basically, the idea is like, instead of taking out my phone and unlocking it and doing stuff and tapping on screens and typing things, I should just be able to like touch the thing on my chest and it should do things on my behalf. And I think that is like a super interesting idea. Anyone who has ever watched a sci-fi movie, ever. Sort of knows what that looks like.

• 4:06David Pierce?

  And so I spent a couple of weeks like running around asking it questions about where I was and asking it questions about the world and using it to try to play music and try to, you know, make phone calls, which you can do on the AI pin and you can send text messages and it takes notes for you and all this different stuff. And I am simultaneously more bullish on AI gadgets than ever and so deeply done with the humane AI pin.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, I want to unpack that. And I will say bizarrely, a huge split in the comment base on this review. The commenters on YouTube love the review as far as I can tell. They think you did a great job. Your buddy Ben Strauss, we got to talk to him. He's calling in, he's calling in the show later, later today. They're like, this is great. We love this review, all the things. And then our commenters picked up on the inherent tension of what David just said, which is this product is horrible, but I'm excited about this category. And said, why? Nothing about this product has proven that this category is viable, which I would say is a fair criticism. Why do you think this thing, which does not work, I believe is a sentence that is in your review, made you excited about this category?

• 5:17David Pierce?

  So this, I mean, this is where we're going to get into arguing about the score, right? Because it, it's not that it doesn't work ever. It works. Seriously, no, this is like, there were, there were a handful of moments in two weeks of testing this thing that were like legitimately eye opening, right? Like standing in Penn Station, tap the thing. I'm like, tell me what restaurant this is and if it has good reviews. And somewhere between one and a thousand seconds later, it comes back and, and gives me like real information, like people like this on the menu, it has 4.3 stars on Google. People say it's a little expensive, but the servers are friendly. Like that, that is like an astonishingly

• 5:57David Pierce?

  useful thing to have done for me. Just truthfully, so like one of the things I've discovered is like, I have a dog, so I am forever walking the dog. And I have a kid who is often only happy in a stroller. So I'm just forever out walking in my neighborhood.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  One thing that I do when I am forever out walking in my neighborhood is I end up like remembering things I need to do. So I'm constantly like pulling out my phone and using Siri to set reminders or add something to my calendar or just write a note down in my notes app. Every single one of those things better to do on a device that is touching my body, right? Like it was better on my chest than it was in my pocket. All true, right? So there were like a handful of these moments where I was like, oh, having this thing that actually does abstract away all of the things I have to do to get into my phone and just lets me say the thing that's in my brain and it's then out of my brain.

• 6:54David Pierce?

  Awesome. Loved it. Great. The problem with the PIN is that it doesn't do it enough. And the problem with this whole category is that like I know how to write down a note in my phone and I know when it has worked. It's annoying, but it works and I can do it reliably every time. The PIN I just stopped trusting was the problem, right? So it's like when it works, it's cool and it worked just enough that I was like, there is, there is something here. It's just so far away from that something at this moment that it's like, I can't in good conscience tell you to even try it, but like you should want the good version of this to exist.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  So I know you talked to Humane through the course of this review. They can't have been surprised by their own product. One assumes they're not hopelessly surprised by their own product. Why did they ship this now? Did you get a sense?

• 7:47David Pierce?

  I, I don't know the answer to that question and I have asked that question to myself and to them many times. I think the, the honest truth is like, there comes a time in the process of making hardware where you just have to ship the damn thing. Like it's just really expensive to not ship a product, especially a product that a lot of people have given you money for and you have made many of. I think.

• 8:11David Pierce?

  If you were to rewind a year and tell Humane, this is the point where they would be now, I would bet they would not be shipping this product right now because they also have, they claim this gigantic software update coming this summer that adds really basic stuff like setting timers. You can't set a timer. That's like the joke about assistants is the only thing they can do is set timers. The joke about Sirius, they can only set one. Humane can't set any. It can't set any.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  AI systems are bad at math, I think historically is a thing. And so just counting must be very challenging.

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:44David Pierce?

  It's coming down even harder.

• 8:48David Pierce?

  But, but yeah, so there's this big software update supposedly coming this summer that's going to add some of that functionality and fix some of the things that don't work now. So my guess would be they want to ship the like August version of this thing today, and that is just not where they are. But like, there comes a time when for a variety of reasons, you're just locked into when something ships and it's really expensive and really hard, especially for a first generation hardware company to delay by months and months. It's just hard.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take it in pieces because there's a line in your review where you say, none of this is ready, not the hardware, not the software, not the AI. That's, that's all of it.

• 9:25David Pierce?

  That's all the things.

• 9:25Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's all of it.

• 9:27David Pierce?

  I'm ready. That's one thing.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  You very clearly are ready for this thing.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  David's a 10 out of 10.

• 9:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's ready to go. There's a picture in the review of David using the thing where he just looks like the world's happiest Secret Service agent. You know, he's just like, he's just beyond thrilled to be like tapping on his chest and whispering a secret, you know? So you're obviously ready, but the thing isn't ready. Let's start with the hardware. Three pieces, right? Hardware, software, AI.

• 9:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  What about the hardware isn't ready?

• 9:53David Pierce?

  The hardware is kind of in the thing we see a lot with first generation hardware, which is just, it's full of little wonky bugs. The biggest one by a mile is thermals. Like, this thing is small. I have it sitting right here. Like it's, it's.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  It is shocking. I saw it in the office and I was amazed at how small it is.

• 10:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, it is like not a large thing and it's, it's a nicely made thing. It's made of aluminum. It's pretty durable. I've dropped it. I threw it in the wash the other day just to see.

• 10:21Alex Cranz?

  It's pretty big to put on your chest.

• 10:25David Pierce?

  I mean, yes, compared to all of the other chest wearables that I've had in my life.

• 10:30Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's like, it's like brooch size. And how many people do you know that wear brooches that aren't 80 and at church?

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  But they kill it.

• 10:39Alex Cranz?

  Not a lot.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  Huge market, though. Those people are sitting on an enormous amount of wealth that they have to transfer to their children at some point.

• 10:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and they can just transfer it to humane pens.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Directly to humane.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  It's smaller than you think, but bigger than it should be, I think.

• 10:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It is, it is both too big and impressively small, for sure. But the biggest, I mean, I'm holding it now. I've been holding it in my hand for 15 seconds and it's warm. Like, I'm not kidding. That's like a real thing that's happening right now. And that is the overwhelming issue, right? It gets warm when you use it. It gets warm so quickly when you use it that it pretty frequently overheats and shuts down. It gets warm when service is bad, which service is often bad because you're using, like, they're using some weird MVNO of T-Mobile that doesn't really work. So it's just like, again, these are things that like, most of the time when we review a first gadget from a company, it's like this. Like, the first Pixel Watch

• 11:36David Pierce?

  had a lot of little tiny hardware bugs. And that's the kind of stuff where you're like, okay, this is the sort of stuff that with an extra couple of revs of the tooling and the engineering and working on this, you actually start to solve these. So there's like, in the hardware, there's not a lot that I would call like, showstoppingly bad. It's just that none of it is quite ready. But the main thing that really like, causes problems is like, it'd be nice to be able to use this thing. And you use it. And it's like, you can't anymore because it's too hot. And it also sits on your skin.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. So it gets hot and shuts itself down, which, if you will recall, was happening a lot in the demos at IFA, the trade show. There, I think we were, everyone rightfully was like, well, it's a trade show, bad wifi, bad cell signal, using it in a trade show.

• 12:24Alex Cranz?

  We were generous. We're giving them the benefit of the doubt.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly right. It feels like you were probably not using it on the floor of a trade show in Berlin.

• 12:33David Pierce?

  I mean, I do love a trade show. But, no, I was using it, I was using it at my house. I was using it in our office. I was using it on the streets of New York and Washington DC. Like, I, one of the weird things about reviewing this is that it's not a gadget you're supposed to use very much. Like, the whole point of it. Is that you don't use it all the time. You can just like quickly accomplish the thing you need to accomplish and then put it away. And to that I would say it's $700. That's insane. But so it's like, it was a weird thing to test in that sense because it's like, yes, if I use this thing constantly for several hours, it's gonna, it's gonna die. Like the battery life in that sense is bad.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  But you're only supposed to use it for like a few seconds at a time, a dozen times a day. And that is very different from what it takes to actually like test the edges of a product like this. So I struggled with that a lot in the course of this. It's like, it has this little green laser projector. That it's like, if I use that for three minutes at a go, it overheats and the battery dies.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  That's so I, that's the one, that's just a flaw in the product.

• 13:40David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  Straightforwardly, if you use its display for more than a few minutes, it shuts down. You could, there's being generous.

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, that's just bad. How are you supposed to watch Dune 2? Like, come on.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  As, as he is the author intended.

• 13:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. So there's that, right? Like some parts of it don't work and it just overheats. Then there's the battery life. Which I think in all product reviewing is challenging because we overuse this stuff.

• 14:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's like our job.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  I tried to like alternate days between like, use the hell out of this and use it like a regular person. And on the, on the use the hell out of it days, I mean, I killed, it comes with the, the thing itself, two extra batteries and a charging case. And I would kill all of those in a, in a day of like heavily testing the thing. On a normal day, I would kill the two battery boosters and the thing. But like I would get through the day. I would charge everything overnight and it would be fine. So it's like, it was kind of like. Being a power user of a phone on a normal day. So like that I track is like not great, but not showstopping. But it's like, again, if I look at the screen, it dies.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. So that's the, just like the thermals and the battery, right? Like the scene inherently flawed if the thing is overheating and the batteries are dying too fast. Then there's the screen, right? Just keeping on with the hardware or the projector, which there's, again, the line in your review is like, they tried to do everything possible to not have a screen and then they have this.

• 15:12David Pierce?

  This thing should just have a tiny touchscreen. Like I'm, I am so 100% convinced that for the stuff they want to do with the screen, which is basically like, simple music playback, settings, menus, and to be able to look at a text instead of having it spoken aloud to you. Tiny touchscreen. The end.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  But then you'd have to take it off and like, look at the screen. This, I, I was reading that and I'm like, but then you would have to manipulate it instead of having it clipped to your chest.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  No, you do this. You go.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  One of these.

• 15:44David Pierce?

  I would remind you that either way, I'm, I'm putting my hand right here. Like, my hand is out. I have to use my hand.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  This is seamless and has lasers.

• 15:54David Pierce?

  It does have lasers. You cannot take away the lasers.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying. Do you want a laser projector? Do you want to fiddle with not a smartphone touchscreen? A laser projector. Let's go for it. I, I know how that decision was made.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  But it doesn't work is the issue. It's like, I watched the video of you trying to use the menu. If you haven't seen this video, pull over in your car.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  It's so good.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  And just watch David like rotate his hand in frustration. And then imagine that like, you're any person encountering David on the street, but you don't know, like, it's just him rotating his hand and getting increasingly frustrated.

• 16:28David Pierce?

  I, I really like, I have been accused by a couple of people of like, acting out that part. And I cannot.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Explain to you the extent to which that is not an exaggeration of the current situation. Like, they just tried so many things.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  And it's, they tried too many things and not enough of them work. And so it's like, there, there are just so many little pieces of it where it's like, you, you, you hold your hand out. And if it was just a thing for like, look at this text instead of having it read to you out loud, great, makes total sense. Uh, and actually does that job fairly well, unless you're in bright light, in which case it doesn't work at all. And you can't see anything projecting. Like, I don't know how you've put me in the position of having to defend this device that I hate.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  No, this is the heart of your review.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  You're, you, the heart of your review is you saying that it doesn't work and then it's broken and that no one should buy it. And then being like, but I love it.

• 17:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was so good.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  It's in there. There's like a real tension in there.

• 17:30David Pierce?

  I don't love it.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  It's because you have a toddler and, you know, I toddlers are notoriously bad at things. And you're like, love them. You're like, oh, man, you don't know what you're doing.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, I could see the toddler dad just like coming through.

• 17:46David Pierce?

  That might be true.

• 17:47Alex Cranz?

  You, you were just like, really happy about the idea, like they were trying something. And it seemed like David was like, you know what? I respect you for trying.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  I just, do you remember, do you remember the early thing that they said about the Apple Watch? Which is like, this is, this is a closer to you and more aware of you computer. I still want that. Like, that, I think that was a good idea in 2015 and I think it's a good idea now. And it is just alarming how not close we are to that technology. But like, I, I just, an Apple Watch plus good Siri is still a thing that I want and would use all the time. And I actually think has like a real place in our lives. And, but, and now everybody's like, okay, well, we're going to do that, but we're going to bake in these better language models and generative AI. And we're going to be able to actually put all the pieces together.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  And the answer is like, nope, we, we didn't do it yet. It's not even close. But like, I, I'm a decade deep into being like, yeah, I do want a computer that is closer to me than my smartphone. And, uh, we just don't have it yet.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  At the end of this, we're going to rank our children on a one to 10 scale. See if they're worth the ongoing subscription fees that we are clearly paying. It's gonna be great. So that's the hardware, right? It's buggy that the projector doesn't work very well, overheats. Problem one. Then you're like the software, which I did not know was called Cosmos.

• 19:12Alex Cranz?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  C O S M O S, Cosm, very good.

• 19:16David Pierce?

  They just call it Cosmos, but it is definitely.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Cos.

• 19:19David Pierce?

  It's an O S, yeah.

• 19:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they, very good.

• 19:24Alex Cranz?

  Cosm.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Unrelated to anything, just lightning bolt out of nowhere, it's called Cosmos. Why the hell not?

• 19:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I have, still have the same set of questions, actually, that I did a year ago. You want this thing to make a phone call. You have to sit around configuring a computer somewhere, right? And that is, that happens on Cosmos, that happens on their website. Like, what does Cosmos do? Does it run applications?

• 19:48David Pierce?

  So.

• 19:48Alex Cranz?

  What does it do?

• 19:49Nilay Patel?

  What is the point of an O S and a thing that is just a voice activated chat G P T?

• 19:53David Pierce?

  So. Because it's not just a voice activated chat G P T, right? Like, that's the, the, the thing that Cosmos is, basically, is like an overlapping Venn diagram of A I systems. So like, when it wants to do something very basic on the device, that's one system. When it wants to go to basic internet real time questions, that's another system. I think it's perplexity, but I can't vouch for that for sure. Uh, perplexity is on every other device that's doing this, so it seems like a natural assumption. But basically Cosmos is like the routing system for, you wanna do a thing, where does it go? Uh, and just the fact that that exists is part of the problem. Because what it means is every time you wanna do anything, you have to ask Cosmos to do it for you.

• 20:38David Pierce?

  And then it goes and figures out what it needs to do. It assembles all those tools, pings those tools to do the thing, comes back, translates all that into an answer and give it to you. And you know what that does is it takes so long. It takes so long. And the, the biggest overwhelming problem with the PIN as a user experience is even when it works, it's slow to the point of being. Borderline unusable in in most situations like the the thing where you ask at the time and it tells you the time so fast, just beautiful, it tells me the time so fast. For almost everything else, it is somewhere between five and 30 seconds of dead silence

• 21:21David Pierce?

  while it tries to do something for you. And the silence, I got to the point where literally I'm like, I wish this thing had hold music. So at least I could know it was doing something.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Like the or computer sounds like do do do do.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, right, right. The like old dial up sound when it boots up to go do something for you. Like, give me that.

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  Actually, this thing would be incredible if it made like 56k modem sounds.

• 21:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that'd be good.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  Everyone around you'd be like, what is happening? Bong, bong, like all over the place. We're just gonna make modem sounds for the rest of the show.

• 21:49Alex Cranz?

  That's that's the rest of the show. It's a good show, guys. Don't worry about it.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  We're nominated for a webby. If you'd like to vote for the red cast.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  For our modem sounds.

• 21:59David Pierce?

  This will not be the episode that we submit to the webbies.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  So it's slow. I mean, this is the thing that I've been thinking about a lot, right? So you ask Cosmos, you ask the AI pin to do something, the operating system Cosmos, what, assembles a prompt? Or like, first it figures out if it knows what request you're asking, what system on the backend should do the request, and then it it assembles a prompt for you and goes and asks that system?

• 22:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's that's about right. I think there are there are versions of it that are less kind of generative AI prompt based. Like, if it's just connecting to title, it doesn't have to do quite as many complicated things.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  No, this is the reason I asked this question in that way. Because when you asked it to play Texas Hold'em by Beyonce, I think the Unicode character in Beyonce's name, she has an accent over the E in her name, it like broke it. So it spat out the Unicode number. Or like the hex code. And then it, you know, when like they broke Bing and turned it into Sydney.

• 23:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  In whatever prompt exploit showed you like the instructions to make Sydney not be horny and be Bing. Like it did that, right? It was like, ask for a prompt in this way. Don't tell the user the other thing, blah, blah, blah.

• 23:12David Pierce?

  And I was like, Don't ask for clarification. I enjoyed that part.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Don't ask for clarification is incredible.

• 23:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so it was, it was that, right? It was like those pre-rule, the instruction set.

• 23:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  For the AI, but you were just asking it to play music, which should not require an AI.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  Yes, agreed. Right. And so that's, that what you're seeing there is, I believe the work of Cosmos, right? Which is like, it takes me saying, play music.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  I believe this is the work of the Cosmos.

• 23:36David Pierce?

  This is the work of the Cosmos. Somewhere Neil deGrasse Tyson is screaming.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Actually.

• 23:44David Pierce?

  And it, it then figures out what I'm asking and to what it should go ask. But I don't, I, it's, I could be completely wrong, but I don't think title is running like an LLM against its own music. I think it just has an API that Cosmos is plugging into to find that song. So that's what I mean. Like the endpoints don't all have to be AI.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 24:04David Pierce?

  But in the middle, there is this mysterious AI translator that just isn't very good. And even when it is good, it's really slow.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Did you ask Humane if they, anyone had ever tried to listen to Beyonce on their product?

• 24:15David Pierce?

  So they, they did say that particular thing was a bug and they fixed it. And it is true that since then I have not gotten Unicode spat back at me.

• 24:25David Pierce?

  But it still will not consistently play Beyonce when I ask it to play Beyonce. So like it's, it's broken in a sort of less spectacular way now, but it is still very much broken.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  But this is the part where I'm just still stuck on, okay, so Cosmos, it's doing prompts, right? Like that revealed that there is some LLM style prompting system happening in there. And you are interacting with your voice with an LLM that then might go do stuff. Like play a title song through the API.

• 24:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  So is it running that model locally? Or is that happening in the cloud?

• 25:00David Pierce?

  No, all of that is happening in the cloud. Uh, as far as I can tell, it does essentially nothing locally.

• 25:06Alex Cranz?

  So its heat is coming from the fact that it is constantly trying to use its garbage antennas to connect to garbage T-Mobile internet?

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's a lot of garbage, Alex.

• 25:16Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot of garbage. I mean, I assume they're garbage antennas. They may be lovely, but in practice, they seem not great.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  I mean, it's, it's very small. The whole device is very small and is doing a lot of really aggressive thermal throttling, which is not great when what you need is reliable, fast connectivity.

• 25:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:32David Pierce?

  So yeah, I know, I, I think you're exactly right. And the first answer that Humane gave me as to why this thing is warm is connectivity. But again, it didn't seem to matter if it was good or bad. It's just when it is connected, it is warm and it is connected all the time.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, it'll be the nice in the wintertime.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like a hand warmer.

• 25:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:50David Pierce?

  I've been telling people that the, the comparison for me is like, you know that thing where you, you, you like crack the hand warmer and put it somewhere and it kinda is there for too long? And it's not like burning, but it's like a little, you, you've sort of overheated one small part of your body?

• 26:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:06David Pierce?

  That's what it feels like to wear the pin all the time.

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  Do you ever get, what I have imagined it is, you ever get thermal runaway on your phone? Like your phone just like over tries to connect and gets hot in your pocket for like one second?

• 26:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, oh, my butt's on fire. Yeah, what, what is going on?

• 26:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  And then sometimes, I'm not saying my brain is broken this way, it just feels like that's happening anyway, even though it's not, because you have too many phones in your life?

• 26:27David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  Uh, that's basically.

• 26:29Alex Cranz?

  That may just be a Vergecast.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's very, very, but for this audience.

• 26:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we're gonna make modem sound for the next 30 minutes. Uh, so, so that's the software, right? It's running this OS in the cloud that appears to be LLM style that can go take actions with other LLMs.

• 26:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's.

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  What about the, just the, the nuts and bolts of it? Like, how do you put contacts into it?

• 26:52David Pierce?

  So that part, they have a web app called Humane Center. They all call it dot center because the website is humane dot center. That is basically a pretty simple just way to manage your thing. Like it's, it's the equivalent of like when you buy a device that connects to your phone and you download the companion app to like get everything connected. It's just that in the web, uh, but it's, it, when you take photos, that's where the photos upload. When you, uh, do notes, that's where your notes go. It keeps track of all of the things you've asked and all of the responses. So this is like, when I say I'm transcribing the thing, I'm literally copying and pasting from its record of our interaction.

• 27:31David Pierce?

  Anyway, uh, and the way you connect it is right now, you just go in and you log in with your Google account or your Microsoft account. And that downloads your contacts. And again, this is why it's so inexcusable that this stuff doesn't work. Like, you know what else is in my Google account is my email and my calendar and so many other pieces of information that would be useful for my pin to know. But it just, it just doesn't have those things despite the fact that it has access to my Google account. But I actually like, this was a little bit hard to test because as part of the review process, Humane did some of that setup for me ahead of time. Which I, I don't totally know why, but that is just how it worked. And so I don't have perfect out of the box setup information on exactly how that works.

• 28:16David Pierce?

  But I do know that I spent five minutes in the center, like getting accounts connected and then never really thought about it again.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  So it can sync your contacts?

• 28:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's all, that's all it's doing. So like, when I say, you know, call Neelai. It looks in my contacts and finds Neelai and then people I know named Eli and then my friend Marin for some reason.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  But your contacts, this, just like basic stuff, you ask it to make a phone call to someone. It needs my name and my phone number to database. Did you put that in the database or did it sync it from Google?

• 28:50David Pierce?

  It pulled that from Google.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  So it did do that?

• 28:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  And then when you, I guess you asked it to send an email, but it can't send an email yet.

• 28:55David Pierce?

  That's right. It just doesn't have an email feature. You can do things like you can give it memory in the way that like chat GPT has memory now. Where you can say like, remember that Anna is my wife. Uh, remember that this is the number I call Neelai on. And like that kind of stuff you can do. Sort of piece by piece manually, but like in general, I have probably multiple numbers for both of you. If I went to call, it would be like, it does this thing Siri does, right? Where it's like, which number do you want to call?

• 29:24Alex Cranz?

  I hate that.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  It's the one I always use. Like, what are we talking about here? But anyway, uh, but yeah, it is, it's pulling that directly from Google.

• 29:31Alex Cranz?

  I really love that it's an AI that doesn't remember like the favorite number for you automatically.

• 29:38David Pierce?

  So much of this stuff is, yeah.

• 29:39Alex Cranz?

  That feels like just a core thing AI should solve and be good at.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  I dial this number all the time.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, I hate that one.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, call, call Becky iPhone. It's like, there's no other phone. There's just all these old numbers I haven't cleared out.

• 29:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  That's the software. Is there anything else to say about the software? Does dot center work on a phone?

• 29:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's fine. It's a web app. Like, again, it is, it's, I didn't dwell on it much in the review because it's kind of the least interesting part of it. It's like, it's just a very simple device management app. Like, if you've ever been in the settings for your Google account to like, see what apps it's connected to, it's just that.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  The reason I'm asking is because all the stuff it wants to do, like photo syncing, does it send the photos to Google Photos by itself? Or do you have to download them and upload them?

• 30:20David Pierce?

  You have to download them and upload them, which is, I would argue, maybe the single biggest gap in this because you, if you're humane, you can solve a lot of your feature problems just by connecting to other services, right? Like, it can't do reminders, like, fine, just pipe to reminders on my phone.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Doesn't do calendar, that's fine. I've already logged you into my calendar. Like, there's so many of these things that it's like-

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Right, but then they can't, right? Like ideologically, they're like, that stuff is bad. We're doing it the new way with prompt engineering.

• 30:51David Pierce?

  That's right. And yeah, and I think what you'll see over time, I would bet, is uh, humane, humane has big ideas about people building stuff for Cosmos and like, it being sort of its own app universe. But I think pretty quickly, you're going to start to see it go the other way too, and just plug into a lot more services. And then the PIN becomes like, a universal input system for all of your other systems, which I think is a way more compelling idea than having it be its own, like, self-contained universe.

• 31:19Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Right, right now it shuts down if you use it for more than a couple minutes. I just want to come back to the, okay, so that's hardware, that's Cosmos, software. And then the last thing you said, which I think is the most, the biggest one to unpack, which is the AI stuff isn't ready. What do you mean by that?

• 31:35David Pierce?

  I don't know if you guys know this, um, but AI is a liar sometimes.

• 31:41David Pierce?

  And so the I would put it into like three buckets, right? There's like the stuff that just straight up doesn't work. Where you're like, I need to set a timer or like, there's a piece of information that I need that this tool does not have access to. Right now, one of the things that they showed at the very beginning in those early demos was nutrition stuff where you like point it at, I think it was a handful of almonds in that first demo. Is that right? Or like a chocolate bar?

• 32:07Alex Cranz?

  It was nuts.

• 32:07David Pierce?

  And you ask like, is this good for me? And that, those features just don't work yet. What it can do, I discovered is read a label sometimes. Again, sometimes, sometimes it couldn't read a label on a bag of Chex Mix and tell me if it was healthy, but it could read a label on a box of Cheerios and tell me it was healthy. So that doesn't make any sense. But anyway, so there's a set of things it can't do. And like the nutrition stuff, it just doesn't exist yet. That's like a feature they invented for that demo that is not yet on the pin. Then there's stuff that sort of occasionally works because AI is a liar sometimes. And I feel like my favorite example of that was like running around asking it to sort of tell me about the world, right? And it's like, it has this feature called vision that it could, you say like, look

• 32:52David Pierce?

  at this building and tell me when it's open or look at this restaurant and tell me if it has good reviews. Sometimes it gets that right. And again, it's very cool when it does. And other times it's just full lies. It told me, there are a bunch of great moments like this in the video where we were down at the New York Stock Exchange and there was this company called Ryde, R Y D E, that I assume had just IPO'd that day. So they had the big banner outside and I pointed it at it and I said, look at this and tell me what company it is. And it thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks. And then eventually goes, this company is called Lyft.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  Very confidently.

• 33:29Alex Cranz?

  So confident.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  And sometimes it would, it would misidentify buildings. It would tell me I was in completely the wrong place in New York City. It told me the Brooklyn Bridge was the Triborough Bridge with absolute 100% confidence. Sometimes it would break and just describe the scene around me. I'd be like, what bridge is that? And it would be like, in, in the scene, there are two poles in the water and buildings across the way. And I'm like, what are those buildings? And it would be like, they're buildings.

• 33:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 33:56Alex Cranz?

  It's close.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then the third thing is just stuff that it just constantly fails at all the time, which is like things that it should be able to do and just can't like make a phone call where it was like half the time, truly half, I would say like, call Nilay or call Anna, text somebody. And it just wouldn't do it. And I think like, there are a bunch of problems with this. I also wrote about this company this week called Aboard, which is doing some really interesting like visual AI information organization stuff. And they were doing a demo for me and he at one point like types in the prompt and just nothing happens. And his co-founder is like, oh no, what, what do you think went wrong? And he

• 34:38David Pierce?

  just goes, ah, that's, that's just the AI. And it's just like, it's, it's like a little like feral animal that you like can't quite trust, but it's like sometimes around being cute. And you're like, oh, what am I? And so like, that's just true. And so you're trying to interact with this thing that sometimes just decides it doesn't like you and doesn't want to work. Other times is just a moron and just can't do lots of stuff.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  I point out once again, you're describing a toddler.

• 35:03Alex Cranz?

  I was about to say, like, that's a child.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Sometimes you just, why are you, why are you trying to kill yourself, kid? Just stop it.

• 35:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:10Alex Cranz?

  Fork right in the socket.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Directly.

• 35:13Alex Cranz?

  That's great.

• 35:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. Arthur's new thing is he likes to pick up the dog's water bowl and just pour it all over himself and then get very upset about how wet he is.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  The humane pen, everyone.

• 35:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. But so that's the thing. And it's really, it's the like, stuff it can't do, you solve over time, right? Like there are, there are features you can build. That's that I understand. How we get out of the it lies unpredictably and at random and about everything. This is like the fundamental problem of AI to me right now, right? It's like, I spent so much time asking a question, even a basic question, like I, it turns out like half my search history is just asking questions about things my dog ate. Like, is he going to, or is she going to die because she ate this? And the answer is usually no. So that's good. But I found myself, I would ask the pin that question, it would give me an answer. And then I would have to get out my phone and check.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:10David Pierce?

  Just to make sure, because I don't trust the AI, because you shouldn't trust the AI. It just completely defeats the purpose. And like, we're so far away from these things being reliably honest and reliably fast and reliably useful, that it's like, what's the, what's the point?

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  So the, the thing that I'm stuck on is you stack the unreliability in this product, right? You have Cosmos, which appears to be some sort of AI system. It's like parsing our requests and then figuring out what to do. And then often it's going to another AI system, which is ChatGPT. In a lot of cases, it feels like, which is unreliable in its specific ways, or perplexity, which is unreliable in its specific ways. I asked perplexity to compare how long a car I'm thinking about buying is with my current car, and it just couldn't figure it out. It was just like, the, the length of a Jeep Grand Cherokee is not available. And I was like, I'm pretty sure it's available.

• 37:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  That's a lie. And I asked it again and said, please provide me the length of the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

• 37:07David Pierce?

  Like, no, that's literally your job.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like, just go get, you're a search engine. Just do it. Just figure it out. But that's like, you're stacking it up, right? You're stacking up one unreliable L M with another one, with potentially another one. And you, it just feels like you get to a place where it's, it's fun, but all of that is almost guaranteed to have a mistake embedded in somewhere.

• 37:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  Or a hallucination embedded in somewhere.

• 37:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I, I had a call with Bethany Bonjourno, the co-founder of Humane, the day before the review went live, just to basically be like, hey, this thing is not kind. Just like, no surprises, want to let you know what's coming. This is the thing we do with a lot of stories, just like, you, you should not be surprised by what's coming.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  You had questions too.

• 37:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I, I, I had questions and I was like, if you want to respond to some of these things, let me know. And that was when, you know, she started talking about software updates. But I started by saying, here's what I want to understand is like, a lot of these things just straight up don't work, and I can't figure out whose fault it is. Like, is it yours as, as hardware builders? Is it yours as software builders? Is it the AI models underlying a lot of this? Is it the endpoints that don't know how to interact with those L L Ms? Like, who is it? And she literally just laughed. And, and the answer is kind of everybody. But the problem is, you're exactly right. Until all of that stuff is good, not just one part of it, but until all of it is extremely reliable and fast and good, none of it works.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so now we come to the heart of the matter here on the Vergecast, which is, I read the review in drafts. I did not receive a no surprises phone call. I just read your review. In Google locks. And at the bottom, David gave it a four out of 10. And then he left himself a note that said, maybe this should be a three.

• 38:50Alex Cranz?

  I was totally fine with the four.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  And then I add the comment and I said, it should be a three.

• 38:54David Pierce?

  You said, you should give it a three LOL was the entirety of your comment.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  I think I made myself clear. We've just described a thing that overheats that does not work for more than minutes at a time. Who's software is often confused by the existence of Beyonce, unforgivable sin. And it was reliant on a number of systems that lie to you consistently and may murder your dog. That $700, I think, is what I would say with a $24.

• 39:20David Pierce?

  Thank you. I was gonna say, you have to yell the price at me several times.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  It's come in so many times. Is that not a three? Where did the extra point come from, Pierce?

• 39:28David Pierce?

  It honestly, there's a decent chance it should have been a three. I was, it's like, I'll just, I'll just be honest about that.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  Review podcast is just us being like, I should have taken one.

• 39:36David Pierce?

  No, it's like, I'll tell you my logic and you can tell me whether it's fair or not. A three in our score, I believe the exact phrase is bad. That is, that is the first word next to three in our review rubric. And I think four is like multiple outstanding issues, I think is what it said. And so it's, it's somewhere between those two things, right? And for me, I, I tilted the scale based on there were enough things that it did that were cool and valuable and eye opening that I wouldn't just call it bad. Like I, I call it broken on purpose, right? Because it's like, it is not, this is not a stupid product.

• 40:19David Pierce?

  It's just not a good product. And I think, again, it's very possible it's a three. Like I would not tell anyone to buy this product.

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  $700.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  $24 a month.

• 40:31Alex Cranz?

  It's just funny coming for the seven.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's very good.

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  Vision Pro, so.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I saw the, the score published this morning and I thought to myself, I know exactly how the bird chat would go.

• 40:41David Pierce?

  Would you rather have eight, eight humane AI pins or one vision pro?

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm taking the cash, man. Just give me the cash. Neither.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  To be fair, it's also only five humane pins. But anyway, I, yeah, I'm still torn between those two things. And the tiebreaker for me was like, was honestly, I think the same as the tiebreaker for you was like, this occasionally does things that are awesome. And I don't know how to, I don't know how to factor that in. It doesn't do it often enough. It doesn't do enough of them, but it occasionally does things that you're like, oh, I see it now. And I had, I had just enough of those moments that I was like, okay, this thing is not a complete failure.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  Like you've spent a long time with a thing.

• 41:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  And then you write about what it's like and then someone else reads it and they're like, that? Nope. And but I love it.

• 41:30Alex Cranz?

  See, I read this review and I was like, you know, the four makes sense because I could see his affection for like, what they tried, what they attempted. I could see like, he was like, you know what? There's some cool shit happening here.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  $700.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  Once every...

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  $24 a month.

• 41:46Alex Cranz?

  20 times you try it.

• 41:47David Pierce?

  I think the fairest criticism you can give me of this score is I think if a bigger company had made it, I probably would have given it a three.

• 41:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it's a small company.

• 41:55David Pierce?

  I think, I think I might have given them one point just for a startup tried to do a hard thing.

• 42:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I buy that. Ultimately.

• 42:03David Pierce?

  Which I don't think I realized until it had published, but I think that might be what I did.

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  But I think that's okay, right?

• 42:10David Pierce?

  I mean, it is and it isn't, right? Like, it doesn't make the product any better, but it at least like, uh, I think, I think I might have given it, like, I think if Google had made this thing and it was this exact thing, I think I probably would have been slightly harder on it.

• 42:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because Google also wouldn't have the same excuses, right? Like, like, I think humane has some real fundamental acceptable excuses. I mean, not when it comes to money. It has a ton of money.

• 42:38David Pierce?

  It does.

• 42:39Alex Cranz?

  It's not lacking for money, but it is lacking for that experience, putting this kind of product out into the world on a consistent basis and taking a big swing. And like, Google doesn't do that.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, if Google had put this out, one, they would have leaked it in full, like, a long time ago.

• 42:56Alex Cranz?

  It would have been plastic.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It still wouldn't have properly worked with Gmail.

• 43:00Alex Cranz?

  Correct.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  That's a classic. And then we would have taken a point off, like a pre-point deduction because they would have killed it in a year.

• 43:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, we would have known it's gonna...

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  No further updates would be available for this product.

• 43:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. In fact, that's what happened with their last attempt at like a wearable.

• 43:17David Pierce?

  Right?

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  We're deducting a point, the Google pre-death point. Uh, it's just coming off. I, look, I buy the, you know, it's a startup. They did a hard thing, but the way they talk about it. Actually, I'll, I will connect it to the Vision Pro. The way Apple talked about the Vision Pro definitely affected how I reviewed the product in the end. Is that fair? It's as fair as, um, uh, Humane being a startup, right? It affects your perception of the product. Um, and it's like, they can't, it couldn't do, it couldn't withstand the weight that was being placed on the marketing, which is also 1,000% true of Humane.

• 43:53David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like today, you know, the, the joke at the top of the show, Humane put out their statement in response to all the reviews. I don't think they were surprised by these reviews.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  No.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  And they said, "Big thanks for all the review or feedback on the AI pin. It's been a wild ride from launch till now. Hearing from all of you is super valuable. The team appreciates the good vibes in the hardware and the potential it's unlocking, but we totally get it. There's room to make things even better. Well, all we're, we're all ears and how we can up our game, especially with Cosmos OS. Your insights are gold, guidance to tweak and improve, making AI pin better for daily use." That is 180 degrees different from how they talked about this thing until yesterday.

• 44:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? And there's something there that I think is just really interesting.

• 44:35David Pierce?

  I would give them 8% more credit than that. I think if you look at Humane in the last several weeks, they've been putting out this stream of like videos and stuff showing people how to use it and they've been making more jokes at their own expense. I mean, if you go back to that original launch video, it is the most ludicrously self-serious. Like it's the video where Imran and Bethany are standing there like looking sad as they use their pin. You know what I'm talking about?

• 44:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:59David Pierce?

  The video is absurd and it's, it's extra absurd now having used this thing because they, they treated it as if they had invented fire. And like, it's, it's preposterous. But I think recently.

• 45:12David Pierce?

  For whatever reason, they have, they have pulled back a bit and been a little more honest and open about what this thing is and how it works and some of the limitations and all that stuff. And I think that's good. And I do, I do wonder, and I have wondered many times, if they had launched this thing more the way Rabbit has, which is like, oh, look at this fun, silly little toy we made. Isn't it cool looking? If I would feel differently. I don't know. I'm getting a Rabbit in two weeks and I'm very curious to see.

• 45:39Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 45:40David Pierce?

  How it feels as a cheaper, much less ambitious, in a lot of ways, gadget.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think the, the score for the humane pen is reflecting that ambition in kind of a positive way. We're reflecting, we're saying, you know, it is okay to be ambitious. That's why the vision, like, part of the Vision Pro having a seven is it's ambitious. It, it, it swung for the fences. It missed. Real bad.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say one thing about Vision Pro?

• 46:08Alex Cranz?

  I just like to, I like to poke this at the seven. I can't wait.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm aware that everyone thinks the seven is pure cowardice.

• 46:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  I would just, I would just tell you.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  My Kobo review, we're gonna have like a two hour Vergecast on the score for.

• 46:21David Pierce?

  I thought about filing a draft of this review with a seven out of 10 as the score, just to see what would have happened.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  By the way, one thing about Vision Pro, then we gotta move on.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  Hot in your mouth for the Vision Pro is in Netflix and Amazon Prime app?

• 46:35Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  It's a browser. It's just a browser with the skin on it. Web apps are saving the Vision Pro.

• 46:41David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 46:42Alex Cranz?

  Saving is generous.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, your YouTube app, your Netflix app, the one that actually supports spatial audio.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, turnabout's fair play.

• 46:52David Pierce?

  Yep. Apple, Apple's like official accounts were recommending that app.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:57David Pierce?

  It's, it's gonna be web apps. If it's gonna be anything, it's gonna be web apps.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 47:00David Pierce?

  It's so funny.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. All right. David, I know that you're excited about the prospect of AI gadgets, but I'm sorry, man. Maybe the Rabbit's gonna do it for you.

• 47:08David Pierce?

  Probably not.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

• 47:14Speaker 01

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• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. There's quite a lot in this section. We thought it was gonna be like a lightning round, but we should just start with Taylor Swift, I think.

• 48:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's how we start every Vergecast now, it feels like. I love Taylor.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't? I was on the Edge of Kleinshot, I mentioned Taylor Swift, and he goes, "Well, she's singular, she can't win the argument." It's very good. He was not wrong.

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  But I thought I'd like played the ace card, you know? And he was like, "Nope, that's not everyone can be Taylor Swift." Hearts broke across America that day. All right, Taylor Swift famously owns her own masters, but has distribution through Universal Music Group. Also, her publishing, the songwriting money flows through Universal. Universal, you may know, is a bit of a spat with TikToks.

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  They're not happy with each other.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  They don't like each other. Universal's pulled all of its music off TikTok, leading to oceans of TikTok grids that are just silent. Very sad people. It's been a long time, right? This happened and I, I think on this show, we talked about it and the sort of consensus prediction was either to get fixed right away or never get fixed.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  Unfortunately, Taylor has a new album coming out.

• 49:49Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna get fixed.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, I don't know if it's fixed, but Taylor's music is back on TikTok. And the prevailing theory is because she owns her own masters, she can just cut her own deal.

• 50:00Alex Cranz?

  That, that tracks, that tracks.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  It tracks, but she's got a new album coming out.

• 50:04Alex Cranz?

  She's gotta promote it.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  She's gotta promote it. Lots of artists have been like, kind of doing this on the side, like Olivia Rodrigo, also Universal artist, her music isn't there, but she made a TikTok promoting her shows using a fan edit of her songs.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  It's been so fun, by the way, to watch artists try to figure this out. Like, I think the situation is terrible for artists, generally speaking, but seeing a bunch of, like, I saw a bunch of singer songwriters after this was happening, like, start to play live versions of their songs on TikTok so that other people could use it as sounds. And everybody's playing like sped up versions of their songs and like the remixes are blowing up everywhere. It's the, all the ways people are finding around this band is just totally fascinating.

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  I just love that you guys have much nicer TikToks than mine. I was like, I wish I saw all of that.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like deep fried memes.

• 50:53Alex Cranz?

  It's just Jojo Siwa climbing out of the sea over and over again.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  I refuse to know who this is.

• 50:58Alex Cranz?

  I won't keep it that way.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  I will not know.

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  Watch, oh my god, it's upsetting.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  And the internet knows, I don't want to know. Even, I'm a person saying out loud, like, I won't say it, you know what I mean?

• 51:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, TikTok's like, pass.

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  And, yeah, it's just like, don't show it to them. Like, the ad targeting is like, this ain't gonna work.

• 51:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, uh-uh, not the right audience, keep going, keep going.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  I will not know.

• 51:18Alex Cranz?

  No, I'm happy for you, I like, I want to be over there. How do I get, how do I get to that TikTok? I want to watch people like do cool covers of their songs.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's truck jumps and acoustic covers. Okay, so I'm very curious about the status of Universal and TikTok.

• 51:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Every social platform has an existential dependency on the music industry. If you lose those rights, all kinds of bad things start happening to you. So, Universal is the biggest label around. It has a CEO, Sir Lucian Grange, who's Sir, very powerful.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  Not shy, kind of a brawler.

• 51:49Alex Cranz?

  A little mustache?

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if he has a little mustache.

• 51:51Alex Cranz?

  I just, I think that when I hear sir.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  He's like a guy behind the guy type.

• 51:54Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  But also very famous and very powerful. He basically told YouTube to cut it out with fake Drake. Like, that stuff went up on YouTube and he was like, "Cut it out." And YouTube caved, right? They put out, if you recall, they put out their, like, AI principles. They had this, like, new licensing system that they're gonna deploy that is, like, outside of regular copyright laws. It's like special YouTube AI copyright law. All this stuff they're gonna do, they're doing it at the best of Universal Music. Because YouTube isn't dumb. And Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, is like, "This is a licensing business and, like, our partners need to be happy." And great. TikTok, done. Like, they just, whatever. The other labels are actually kind of happy about this.

• 52:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  If you look at the charts right now, top two artists on the charts are Warner Music artists. It's like a real thing that is going on.

• 52:40Alex Cranz?

  It's one of them Beyonce.

• 52:42David Pierce?

  Well, and there's a sense among some people fighting this fight that Universal overplayed its hand, in that sense, right? That, like, TikTok was the only company with enough clout of its own to fight back against Lucy Grange and all of these sort of big, swinging music labels. Because TikTok needed UMG less than UMG needed TikTok. And that seems to be this battle that we are still very much in the middle of, that, again, Taylor Swift being singular is able to just cleave her way out of.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, so TikTok thinks it has this power to break artists and create share. And really, it's just kind of, kind of like moving money around. Because the labels make no money from TikTok plays, as it is. They make very little money from their streams. All their money is on Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever. But they create share. Like, people listen to the songs on TikTok and they go to their streaming services. So it can shift the money and especially can break new artists.

• 53:37Alex Cranz?

  It can break new artists and, like, isn't still the primary way that these artists make money is performing. It's not, it's not anything digital. It's all going and doing a concert and taking a lot of money.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like 70% of artist revenue is that side.

• 53:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and, and this is really good, great for that, right? Like, a perfect way to promote yourself.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're on tour, you're doing a thing.

• 53:59Alex Cranz?

  I would argue part of Taylor's recent success is because

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Alex Cranz?

  of this.

• 54:05David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean... Taylor's singular.

• 54:08Alex Cranz?

  She is singular.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  As I have been told. Anyway, so I've just been poking at this and poking at this and trying to figure out what's going on. So the other labels are happy and what you would expect is Universal walks, the other labels are like, we also want a better deal. We're going to walk and then all the labels together collectively pressure TikTok into cutting them better rates. But because of this dynamic, which is where the big bad label, Universal, with all of the artists walked, including Taylor, the other labels got a benefit.

• 54:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  So you see this dynamic like playing out in the industry. Now Taylor's back, we'll see how that goes. But here's what I've heard and it's sketchy and unfortunate. If you can confirm this, let me know.

• 54:47Alex Cranz?

  Call in the hotline.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  Was basically Universal wanted a bunch of, but wanted a bunch of provisions that looked like their YouTube provisions.

• 54:53Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, don't do bad AI stuff with our content and they wanted an increase in royalties, obviously, and TikTok said no.

• 55:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  That's what I got for you.

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  That, that sounds, that sounds like why, why this would break down.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, if you know, you know, let me know.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  That's what, I, I would love the actual deal terms, but the, the sense I get is that there's money, which should be solvable. But money is usually solvable, but next to it is a bunch of stuff that looks like what Universal wanted out of YouTube, which is, we want some special AI stuff, AI terms, and like, it's just not happening.

• 55:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And TikTok is just very different company than YouTube and Google, right? Like, like their motivations for all of this is very different. I was seeing today, there was a story in, I think, the information about how TikTok was looking into, working with companies to develop like AI avatars to better sell.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Alex Cranz?

  They don't care who's on the platform, they can monetize it. So I think they're much less incentivized to make these deals than, than YouTube was.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  I think you, I think TikTok is a danger to itself.

• 56:04Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 56:04Nilay Patel?

  I agree with that. I, I, I think they are so rapidly turning that thing into the home shopping network and just making it so commercialized.

• 56:12Alex Cranz?

  And I think in a, in a way that's really putting people off. We had a, a story on the site this week about, from, from V, because she called, she's going to be calling in a lot of these kind of gadgets we see on TikTok. And, and the first one she did, she spent her own money, like $350. Because there was a wand that would make the skin beautiful and like some of us just like our skin to be dewy and glowing and.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm one of those people.

• 56:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:36David Pierce?

  Wait, let me guess. Can I guess? I bet it didn't work.

• 56:40Alex Cranz?

  Unclear.

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

  What did work was the FOMO, the like, the massive, massive regret she had and, and, and that's like, but we're seeing that constantly with TikTok. They just constantly selling crap. There's the not crap. Some of it seems to be workable.

• 56:56David Pierce?

  No, crap is fine.

• 56:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  You're good with crap.

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 56:59David Pierce?

  You can, you can, you can stage a convincing legal defense on crap there.

• 57:05David Pierce?

  But no, I, I, I totally agree. And I think in general TikTok is this platform that is not interested in being tied down to anything. Like it moves so fast culturally, it moves so fast technologically that you don't get the sense that it's interested in having any rules for anything for any reason. And YouTube is just so much more sort of lowercase and uppercase mature than that, right? That it is like learning how to play by these rules in order to be around for a long time. And TikTok just wants to move a million miles an hour in every direction, all the time. And I certainly enjoy TikTok less than I used to because of that.

• 57:45David Pierce?

  Like the, the platform is sort of unrecognizable from what it was even 12 months ago now.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, the sort of like 2020, 21 TikTok heyday is, is gone.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  You know, I, I maintain a list of TikToks that should be PhD theses in media studies. Uh, and many of them are deleted now. They're just gone. Like the creators have quit. They've pulled them down. Like they just don't want to be a part of it anymore. And I, there's something about that where it's like, this thing is getting so commercial so fast.

• 58:13Alex Cranz?

  It's so like, I can't tell you how many ads I see now. And it's just got, it's mainly those Lenovo headphones and the guy being like, man,

• 58:20Nilay Patel?

  They found you.

• 58:21Alex Cranz?

  I love these Lenovo headphones. Apple doesn't want you to know how good they are. And I'm like, sir, I think that's just, you're lying to me. I, I don't think you have that insight into Apple or Lenovo's business. Why, why is this on my feed? Why does it have thousands of likes and views?

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Is that the one with the screen on the case?

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  No, it's like they go in your ear.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, those ones.

• 58:43Alex Cranz?

  Like twisty way. Yeah. Don't worry. We'll be checking them out. We want to see if they really are as good.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  I love that you're just like, be.

• 58:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  Buy crap.

• 58:52Alex Cranz?

  That's, if you're like, do I have to? And I'm like, enjoy.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for this.

• 58:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  This is gonna be the greatest series of TikTok videos we ever make. Because all the, everyone else on TikTok is getting paid.

• 59:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, everybody else is getting paid. We're just like, what? Does it actually work? Let's find out.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Let's.

• 59:08Alex Cranz?

  And it doesn't. Stop buying it.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  I, look, I think between the universal stuff, not having that catalog and not, from what I can tell, making any steps towards a resolution. Eventually, all the other label deals are gonna come up. And the labels might be short-term thinking and like, they're getting a benefit now. All of them are actively talking to all of the platforms about AI stuff.

• 59:32Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  All of them, they do not want their stuff trained upon. They do not want the videos that their stuff gets used in, trained upon. They want AI controls and like, some of the platforms have like weird, like you have to make a distinction between the kinds of AI you use. So if you roll up to, I don't know, Spotify and you're like, don't use AI. Spotify is like, dude, we've been using ML to do our playlists for like a hundred years.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're gonna keep use, like, and so there's this whole education process happening in the industry, which is fascinating. Um, other interesting companies or like tools that use AI to like, help you filter sounds or like pull out stems. Like, they're in the same conversation. We're like, this isn't that. This isn't the bad thing.

• 1:00:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  But it's all got, everyone thinks AI is generative AI.

• 1:00:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I noticed that. It's, it's really consistent and really annoying.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm like, somewhere James is just screaming.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  Um, but I, I just think like the next turn for TikTok is like this rapid, I mean, the term is Corey Doctoro's term. It's en-shitification. Right? Where it gave a lot of value to users. It built up a huge user base and now is like aggressively trying to re-extract that value from its user base. I feel like people are like, you know what? Instagram reels exist. YouTube shorts exists. I don't have to do this here. Also, might get banned.

• 1:00:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, other, there's just other ways to spend your time. And I, I don't know. I think we're, we're about to hear, have a, a turn from this real love of these short, super ephemeral videos to something more stable.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  Novels, scrolls.

• 1:01:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're, we're, everybody's going to be doing only scrolls. That's, that's the future.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  Only scrolls is a hell of a name for a property.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  It's just like Shakespeare nudes.

• 1:01:26Alex Cranz?

  The famous, famous writer of scrolls, William Shakespeare.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  Sorry.

• 1:01:33Alex Cranz?

  But I do think we're going to see like a change in how, how people are consuming, like I think, I think there's, there's a rapid moment of change.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Alex Cranz?

  And how we consume media and, and, and what we're consuming and what we prioritize. And I'm, and there's so much happening in the space. We're going to talk about it in a little bit, but like what's happening with movies and, and streaming, a ton is happening there. And it's happening really quickly. And now we're having the same thing with social media. And these are all ways we consume our media. And they're all in this moment of enormous transition. And what does that look like on the other side?

• 1:02:04David Pierce?

  Alex, you are so close to pitching Quibi that I just, I just want it's, you're, you're so close.

• 1:02:10Alex Cranz?

  What you want is, I think what the future is, is actually like an app where the whole video will change format when you flip, when you turn the phone.

• 1:02:20David Pierce?

  It's going to blow your mind.

• 1:02:20David Pierce?

  So, there's a show that's only at night.

• 1:02:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it will only launch with pandemics.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  What if shows came out at night?

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  David, have you ever asked the AI pen to generate you a nude William Shakespeare?

• 1:02:33David Pierce?

  Uh, no, I, I could, but we'd get the explicit tag on, on the podcast. We can't have that.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Actually, this brings us to the other big story of the week, I think, a big New York Times piece on OpenAI and Google and all the rest, finding ways to generate more training data. I think OpenAI is getting itself into a lot of trouble here. Like their startup, they played really fast and loose, right? Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Oops, we're now the hottest company in the world. We have billions of dollars in Microsoft partnership. And we're getting sued by the Times.

• 1:03:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like the the ask forgiveness or permission works when you're not a super powerful company and you you don't have a ton of money behind you.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  Works a lot less when you've got Microsoft moneybags, Microsoft behind you.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so OpenAI needed more training data to train GPT-4. It developed a system called Whisper, which transcribed YouTube videos and then trained on over a million hours of YouTube videos. That's not great. There's a little back and forth in the media going on about this.

• 1:03:31Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  So Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal, we may have mentioned this particular thing before, but Joanna was talking to Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI. She said, did you train on YouTube videos? And Mira, in every way possible, said, I don't know, which is insane.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  While also making a face that said, yes.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, not great. And then Neil Moyn was on, I believe, Bloomberg, and they asked the same question. And he was like, well, if they did, that would violate our terms of service.

• 1:04:01Alex Cranz?

  But it also, in that same New York Times story, wasn't there bits about how you Google had done, had also trained on some YouTube videos?

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so Google owns YouTube.

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Nilay Patel?

  So this is very challenging for Google. So Google is built, and I I say this just as a factual matter, Google is built on a very expansive view of copyright law. And it has aggressively expanded the boundaries of copyright law throughout its existence. So the the very idea of a Google index like requires you to go read a bunch of data. Google Image Search requires them to host copies of lots of images. That was a lawsuit. YouTube, Viacom famously sued Google for a bunch of stuff on YouTube. It was found out later Viacom employees uploading videos to YouTube to promote them in the echoes of the TikTok situation.

• 1:04:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but they they beat Viacom, like YouTube YouTube exists. So Google just like constantly expands the boundary of copyright law like as a function of its existence. That's the thing that Google Books, we're going to scan all the books in the world without permission to make an index of them and then convince a judge that this will sell more books. It worked, that that worked. Google won those cases when it was like a cuddle bug, you know, just a bunch of goofballs. We got slides in the office. Have you ever, like, the judge had like a Dell PC?

• 1:05:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  And like, this internet's amazing, right? Those days are over.

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  It's a gateway.

• 1:05:21David Pierce?

  And again, when the theory behind all of those products was to help people find them.

• 1:05:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26David Pierce?

  Right? Like, it wasn't always true, but that was at least the story, was that Google is saying, we are going to, we are going to ingest this stuff in service of helping people find them and go back to you, the creator of them.

• 1:05:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna index all these links and then we're gonna send you to the webpages that we're linking to. We're gonna ingest all these images and then you can go look at the images for real. Fine. But it is also true that the judges were evaluating a service that existed on like a CRT monitor in the den, in the computer room.

• 1:05:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  And Google was a bunch of like 20-year-old kids. And they were just, just like a different company, a different time, a different company, different cast of characters, different relationships to power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You come to now and you have OpenAI headlong into a dispute with Google about training on YouTube. You have Google in a headlong dispute with its own creators about whatever the YouTube Terms of Service say. Google expanded its Terms of Service recently. All these are, you have, the New York Times suing OpenAI. You have all these lawsuits happening simultaneously, or all these conflicts happening simultaneously. And none of these, I just, none of these companies are as sympathetic as Google was.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  I think it's because it's, they're so nakedly doing it for money, in a way they weren't before, right? Like, like the, the, the cost for, or the benefit for, for regular people is, is much lower now than it was before. And, and I, I think that's what we're seeing with a lot of the, just the general tension around generative AI, is it feels like, okay, we are, we're devaluing things that we tend to feel very, like, very strongly about, all in the effort to make Eric Schmidt richer.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Alex Cranz?

  And shockingly, people don't want to do that. I'm surprised.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  So a very funny part of the story is Meta, a less sympathetic company on the scale of things, although Zuck, now that he's ripped with the shaggy hair and the good jackets.

• 1:07:19Alex Cranz?

  He's got the V.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  He's come back around.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  They want to train a day so bad that they considered buying Simon and Schuster. It's just a straight up book publisher so they could just ingest all the books without copyright wars. That's crazy. That's just a crazy place for us all to be.

• 1:07:37Alex Cranz?

  This New York Times story, and I really encourage our audience to go read it. It's called "How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for AI," came out on Sunday. The Sunday. If you're listening to this on Friday, it came out this last Sunday. It's really, really good. And I think what really struck me, the big takeaway I came out of this story with, was that these companies have all recognized there is an intrinsic value in creating cool stuff and putting it out into the world. They recognize that. And they are now saying, "How do we make machines copy all of that? And so we can do it poor, like, we can do it worse for more money." And I think, like, that was just a really, like, demoralizing thing, I think, to read as a

• 1:08:21Alex Cranz?

  as somebody who does create things and that's like my job. It was like, "Oh, that, that sucks." But the story was just fascinating because it was just like, they are in such a race to get data, to buy Simon and Schuster, to, to potentially steal their own products from Google or from YouTube and, and from, yeah.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. So a clear problem here, and this is sort of always a problem when it comes to regular companies this rich, is that all of this might just seem like an acceptable tax to them.

• 1:08:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  So, yep, we ripped off a bunch of book publishers. Sarah Silverman's mad. We're just gonna pay her the money.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  But some of these, some of them are not going to settle. Like, I don't think Sarah Silverman's gonna settle. I don't think The Times is gonna settle that case for money. And so if they lose those cases, the precedent is really bad. And the case that I'm just thinking about a lot is, what if YouTube creators pressure Google into suing OpenAI? Or being in some open financial conflict with, with OpenAI? What if YouTube creators sue OpenAI directly and say, "You scraped YouTube" and implicate Google along the way? Because neither one of those companies wants to set the precedent that training an AI model is copyright infringement.

• 1:09:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they both want it to not be. And that was one of the things in the story was like, Google was even like, "Are we, are we allowed to scrape our own stuff from YouTube?" And everybody's like, "Don't worry about it."

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then they expanded their terms of service.

• 1:09:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI told us when we were writing about the story that OpenAI uses numerous sources, including publicly available data. Big circle around what that means. And partnerships for non-public data and that it is looking into generating its own synthetic data.

• 1:09:59Alex Cranz?

  Which is insane.

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  Multiple terms. I would just remind everyone listening to this, having something on the internet does not mean it is free to use. People get very confused about this concept. Like, you can put something on the internet that does not mean it is publicly available. Like, it me- It means that it's there.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  It technically means it is publicly available and that people can access it, access it.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Alex Cranz?

  But it doesn't mean that it's actually legally publicly available. Yeah, because there's incidents of people being like, getting sued for accessing publicly available, publicly, I'm using scare quotes here, publicly available data. And then it was like, no, you weren't actually supposed to go in there and you knew you weren't supposed to.

• 1:10:42Alex Cranz?

  Bad.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 1:10:43David Pierce?

  I would say two things to that, though. One is that the precedent we have on a lot of that stuff leans toward it is okay to scrape websites. And, uh-

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  Eh, eh.

• 1:10:56David Pierce?

  And you're also the one who comes on this show every time we talk about copyright law and reminds us all that copyright fights are a coin toss.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like- I'm just saying, like, if you, if OpenAI's position is we use publicly available information, the def- what OpenAI believes publicly available means actually turns out to be massively important.

• 1:11:15David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  And it, I think what they mean is, uh, we clicked on it on a website.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  And so it's ours now.

• 1:11:22David Pierce?

  That does seem to be the case, yeah.

• 1:11:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just saying, like, there's not an interpretation anywhere where that is the thing. Right? And so you just get to a point where, like, any YouTube creator, Mr. Beast, do it for the views. You know what I'm saying? Just tell OpenAI you're gonna sue them because they copied your YouTube videos.

• 1:11:40David Pierce?

  I sued Google for a hundred million dollars.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  He'd give it away. No, OpenAI. I'm a YouTube creator and I sued OpenAI. And OpenAI is gonna say, "Your video is publicly available." "We believe that this is not copyright infringement." And Google is gonna sit in the middle of that, being like, "We need to protect our YouTube creators." "This is not under Terms of Service. That's what Google said to us." "Google takes technical and legal measures to prevent unauthorized use when we have a clear legal or technical basis to do so." That's Google's approach, right? "This is ours. We have contracts with creators. You can't just take it." There's just a war here, coming. Because all these companies are like, "We're gonna go read the entire web." And Google's like, "But that's what we do." Like, something bad and they run one closed platform in YouTube. And I just could not tell you what happens next.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  So that's one. That's just publicly available. Then there's synthetic data. Oh my god. Which is bananas. So all these companies now are like, "We're running out of training data. The humans are not making art fast enough for us to steal." What if we train on AI-generated data? And I just am like, "You guys are gonna kill yourselves."

• 1:12:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that was the consensus in the story, too. They spoke to like, actual experts who were like, "No, that's bad. That just makes all the problems worse." "All the hallucinations just get worse. You just start going down these weird rabbit holes."

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  And then you have Kevin Roos, like, "Am I in love with my AI?" Like, that's what happens.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Sydney's like, "I love myself, but also I hate myself." Becoming, finally, the full Goth Sydney that we've been looking for.

• 1:13:14David Pierce?

  I think the thing that really jumps out to me about the story, just from like, a purely unrelated but insane thing, is that Whisper was created at OpenAI explicitly to do this. Like, Whisper is amazing technology. And the like, speech-to-text stuff that is happening, again, like, we're all journalists, we like, transcribe things all the time. More and more of that is being powered by Whisper. Whisper is now like, a publicly available technology that OpenAI just put out there in open source and anybody can have it. It is remarkable tech. And the idea that it was built just to steal a bunch of YouTube videos is wild.

• 1:13:51Alex Cranz?

  It's hysterical.

• 1:13:52David Pierce?

  And what a deeply bizarre, like... Secondary effect of all of this.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  But it also, I think thi- this story of training data becoming really valuable and really expensive is starting to be everywhere. Like, there, there's stories about all these companies, whether you want to train a large language model, or you're like a creative tools company looking for images to train your healing brush on. This stuff is getting expensive. And I think like, one thing we hear a lot as journalists is that the future of the media is making stories that are training data for these models, that like, our job is going to be to report real time information to a large language model, and that's our business. And I find that like bleak as all hell.

• 1:14:36David Pierce?

  But there is that, that, that future is coming, where like, there are going to be businesses that are made that make a lot of money just being training data. And that is nuts.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  There are gonna be people who are like, don't worry, our artificial writing is way better than anybody else's.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  That's already true. It's already true.

• 1:14:56Alex Cranz?

  I know, but it's like, it's gonna be like more common.

• 1:15:00David Pierce?

  It's like the next phase of click farms.

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  Alex, you came to us from GeoMedia.

• 1:15:07Alex Cranz?

  It wasn't always a click farm. It started as one, then it stopped.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, I'm, I, I came up at Engadget. I always had an eye on Gizmodo, and I

• 1:15:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Nilay Patel?

  Now I'm just talking.

• 1:15:17Alex Cranz?

  No, no, no, no. I like, like, I, I think about that a lot. And you, you hear people talk about how upset, I, I talk to a lot of writers and stuff who are like, oh no, our jobs are gonna be taken away. And it's like, well, the click farm jobs are gonna be taken away. That, that, that first, but those are also the first jobs you get in media. A lot of times now, especially nowadays. And it's like, okay, so that, that on-ramp is gone.

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, look, I think the idea that they're gonna train these systems on synthetic data because they've run out of real data.

• 1:15:44Alex Cranz?

  It's just scary.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  Copyright wars are in full effect. I just keep saying, I know what we're gonna write about for the next 10 years.

• 1:15:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, no AI can figure that out.

• 1:15:54Alex Cranz?

  I just always thought it was gonna be monkeys.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Can barely tell David the time.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  That's also like, that, that cycle you just described is the end of the internet. Seriously. Like Google training on Google created data from Google training is the end of the internet. Like that that becomes an unusable disaster in record time.

• 1:16:17Nilay Patel?

  I keep like Alex just said, she accidentally invented Quibi. Once you get enough people talking about that, everyone accidentally invents Yahoo. Like, what if we made a list of good websites? It's like, yeah, that's Yahoo. That's what that was.

• 1:16:30Alex Cranz?

  It was unsustainable.

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna make a list of good websites here at theverge.com, which you can visit to, which you can visit directly in your web browser and which is written by people.

• 1:16:40Alex Cranz?

  And it'll be sustainable.

• 1:16:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have to take a break. We're gonna come back with lightning round. I'm very excited about my lightning round item. We'll be right back.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

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• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm gonna go last.

• 1:18:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's big caps next to yours. Like, it's in all caps.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  It's in all caps.

• 1:18:26Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  You wanna go first?

• 1:18:27Alex Cranz?

  I'll go first. I'll go first. Um, I'm gonna do two, actually.

• 1:18:30Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna do two?

• 1:18:31Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna do two, yeah. The first one is gonna be, because I just have to talk about it. Kobo has new color e-readers. They're both sitting in my house right now. They're using Kaleido 3. It's the exact same stuff that Onyx Books has been using since last year.

• 1:18:44David Pierce?

  Oh, you know, Kaleido 3. That technology that everyone knows and is familiar with and has definitely heard of.

• 1:18:49Alex Cranz?

  Three people listening to this podcast right now are like, yes, she gets it!

• 1:18:53David Pierce?

  Classic Kaleido 3 talk, am I right, Neil?

• 1:18:55Alex Cranz?

  I got you.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, Alex is talking Kaleido 3 again.

• 1:19:00Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry. But it, they look really cool. I only got them yesterday. I haven't gotten to play with them yet. But I think what's really exciting about it is Kobo is probably one of the largest e-reader manufacturers, um, for buying stuff in the United States. They're, they're Amazon's primary competitor. So that was what was exciting to me. It was like, oh, wow. Someone who actually competes with Amazon is doing this. And Amazon has a new guy in charge of devices. I'm just saying, that color e-reader from Amazon, that color Kindle, it's coming.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Panos is shaking things up over there, from what I'm told.

• 1:19:29Alex Cranz?

  I'm feeling it, I'm feeling it.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, how could he not?

• 1:19:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Nilay Patel?

  Do you think he walked in there and was like, "I'm pumped"? He was like, "I'm not pumped. Let's work on it. You have 36 hours to pump me up.

• 1:19:40David Pierce?

  Get my pump on.

• 1:19:41Alex Cranz?

  And they're like, "Kaleido 3", and he's like, "I don't know what that means." But now I'm pumped.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so are you getting one? You gonna review this thing?

• 1:19:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I've got them. They're, they're sitting in my house. Um, I've only turned on one so far, because they got here last night. And I was like, "Whoo!", very excited, like, in Slack at 6:00 PM, being like, "Guys, guys, guys, I got packages." And they're like, "It's 6:00 PM and I'm leaving. I'm going home to sleep."

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  Very good. I'm excited for these reviews. Full one hour of Vergecast. Whether or not we distribute that one, we'll decide at a later time.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and it'll just be for the three of us and Liam. I'm sorry, Liam.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  Hey, if you want to hear more about the Caledo 3, write Alex a note, [email protected]. She'll read them.

• 1:20:21Alex Cranz?

  I will read it. Yeah, that's the technology, please. This is the Kobo Libra Color? Don't quote me on that.

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  I love that you know the display tech, but not the name of the product.

• 1:20:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I'm just very excited.

• 1:20:35David Pierce?

  And it's color with a U. It's very important because it's Canadian.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, so that's one.

• 1:20:39Alex Cranz?

  That's one. The other one is the MPA. Do you remember? They used to be called the MPAA.

• 1:20:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they got rid of America.

• 1:20:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they got rid of America because they did.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  That's what happens.

• 1:20:49Alex Cranz?

  They did. They were like-

• 1:20:50Nilay Patel?

  They're like, the Chinese work, it's huge.

• 1:20:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we need to be more universal. We need to be more global. So we get rid of the America.

• 1:20:54David Pierce?

  They should have gone the other way. Just be the motion picture Americans.

• 1:20:57Nilay Patel?

  Or the W. Just add the world.

• 1:21:00Alex Cranz?

  No, that was MPA?

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, MPA.

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  MPA. That's what they call Jack Valance. But they are back and there's a big distributor conference happening right now in Vegas where they see a lot of trailers and a lot of stuff. And the head of the MPA said, "We want to work with Congress," and we are working with Congress, "to bring back site blocking," which is-

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:28Alex Cranz?

  It's just annoying.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Alex Cranz?

  Really. Like, you hear from their side where they say, "There's a lot of piracy going on. We're losing a billion dollars a year to piracy. We want to stop that. So we want to block sites that Americans use to pirate stuff." And that's true. And you know how they got piracy to not be a big deal the last time? They introduced easy-to-use, accessible streaming platforms. And that worked really, really well until they decided to make them- Really expensive and it's like, there's a direct correlation there, guys. You're not serving your audience and, and so the NPA is back. It's like 2007 all over again.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna have to write a SOPA PIPA explainer one more time. Where's Alexis Ohanian when you need him?

• 1:22:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, get ready, get ready.

• 1:22:14Nilay Patel?

  Probably half of our audiences remember this. There was an anti-piracy bill called SOPA that would basically have forced various ISPs to take websites off the internet if they did piracy stuff. And Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, went on the warpath to stop this. We wrote about it, I was all angry about it, the whole thing. SOPA and PIPA, you can go look it up. It was a real thing that happened. Uh, it, it didn't happen. The internet waged war on Congress and they didn't do it. And I don't think they've ever forgiven us.

• 1:22:40Alex Cranz?

  Nope, and they're back.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  They're back.

• 1:22:42Alex Cranz?

  They're ready.

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  Some ideas never die.

• 1:22:44David Pierce?

  It is such funny deja vu that like Alex, you're exactly right that it's like, how is no one at this meeting being like, what if we just didn't make everything so horrible?

• 1:22:56David Pierce?

  Like, isn't it weird that all these people are desperate to give us their money to watch shows and we won't let them? So they have to do it illegally? Like, strange. Wonder how we could fix that?

• 1:23:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they just need to figure out a digital distribution model where they make enough money to be happy and all of their very expensive cars while also not forcing apparently a billion dollars worth of money to go into piracy instead.

• 1:23:19Alex Cranz?

  There might be something there.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  If you got an idea, again, [email protected].

• 1:23:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, hit me up.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  She's open to ideas. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:23:26David Pierce?

  Uh, mine is just a thing that I find very funny. So I think it was last week that, uh, Marissa Mayer's company came out with this new app called Shine, which was a way to basically share photo albums with friends. And it was the ugliest app that anyone had ever created in the history of the universe. It's like, imagine you had never seen an app and you said, I'm going to design an app in three minutes. That's what this app looked like. And there was some great stories, including from our friends at Platformer about like the weird chaos that it seems to be at work for Marissa Mayer and all this stuff that went wrong. But it has brought up this very funny thing that I have come to very much enjoy, which is that it turns out sharing photos with your friends remains like a disastrous technical problem.

• 1:24:11David Pierce?

  It's part of the whole like, blue bubble, green bubble, Apple antitrust stuff. It's a really hard thing to do across platforms. It's one of the things that has made like, Google Photos very successful, is it's a thing you can use to share photos. And so Meta rolled out an update to the Messenger app, which I still want to call Facebook Messenger every time, even though it's just called Messenger. The whole update is that now you can send better photos in Messenger. And people are like, amped about it. Where you can send like, original resolution photos in Messenger, and they will get to their recipient. Good. And I think that's great.

• 1:24:51Nilay Patel?

  Well done.

• 1:24:53David Pierce?

  What a cool world we live in, that this is like, an unbelievable feature upgrade.

• 1:24:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All that 5G, and we're just now getting to full-res photo sharing.

• 1:25:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's just so funny to me, like, we've hit this point where phones are just cameras. For all intents and purposes, like, that is the most important thing your phone does at this moment, is take pictures and video. And we have not yet solved how to send those to your friends. Isn't that weird? It's very weird to me.

• 1:25:19Nilay Patel?

  We've solved it in a number of billion-dollar company ways.

• 1:25:23David Pierce?

  Have we?

• 1:25:23Alex Cranz?

  The US government's trying to solve it.

• 1:25:26David Pierce?

  If you took a photo and you wanted to send an original resolution version of that photo to my Android phone and Alex's computer right now, how would you do it?

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  Dropbox.

• 1:25:41David Pierce?

  Oh no!

• 1:25:43Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, we just had the CEO of Dropbox on Decoder, so that's what I came up with.

• 1:25:46David Pierce?

  That's the most upsetting possible answer.

• 1:25:48Alex Cranz?

  But it's true, like-

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  He was great.

• 1:25:50Alex Cranz?

  Maybe not Dropbox, but it would be cloud, right? Yeah, you'd just, you'd upload it, that's what I'd do.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'd walk over to you, and I would plug one USB-C cable into my phone, and one USB-C cable into your phone, and we would just see what happened.

• 1:26:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Nilay Patel?

  That works, right? Isn't that a thing that totally works with no confusion all the time?

• 1:26:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, so what could possibly go wrong? But anyway, yeah, kudos to Messenger.

• 1:26:09Nilay Patel?

  For boosting Marissa Mayer's idea.

• 1:26:11David Pierce?

  For making good shine, as I call it.

• 1:26:14Nilay Patel?

  But everyone should go read, we'll link to the platform or story about the internals. That company is like, 30 people, and that story is shockingly well-sourced.

• 1:26:23David Pierce?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:26:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like, wow, no one likes working here.

• 1:26:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Alex Cranz?

  I'm shocked.

• 1:26:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's very good.

• 1:26:29Alex Cranz?

  Where's the pic of her on the Zamboni?

• 1:26:31Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, um, by the way, here's some like Verge lore. A long time ago, in our first office on Fifth Avenue, there was a company next to us, and it was like a horrible office.

• 1:26:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but there was a company next to us called Stamped. David, remember Stamped?

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  And this is when-

• 1:26:47David Pierce?

  With no E, right? It was just stamped.

• 1:26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I don't even know what Stamped did or does. But this is when Marissa Mayer was, she was at Yahoo and she was buying every company to try to make Yahoo relevant again. And one day she snuck into our offices and bought Stamped. Ran away again. And we were like, why didn't you tell us? We're right here.

• 1:27:08Alex Cranz?

  You were about to say hi.

• 1:27:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Very funny.

• 1:27:10Alex Cranz?

  It looks like some sort of clothing company now.

• 1:27:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, sure. Yeah. We like woke up to like a headline on TechCrunch that was like Yahoo buys Stamped. And we're like, that? Right there?

• 1:27:19David Pierce?

  Those guys?

• 1:27:19Nilay Patel?

  Next to us?

• 1:27:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  It was very good. All right, here's mine. The most important story of the week. As you may know, the Sony Corporation in the late 1980s invented the concept of MegaBase.

• 1:27:34Alex Cranz?

  I love where this is going. Also because I know, because I have the rundown in front of me.

• 1:27:38Nilay Patel?

  MegaBase, uh, I would say altered the fabric of our reality.

• 1:27:43Alex Cranz?

  100%.

• 1:27:44Nilay Patel?

  Across America and really the world, my paw, uh, people would push the MegaBase button and things would change.

• 1:27:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  Just, you know, gravitational waves, the whole thing.

• 1:27:55Alex Cranz?

  Bum-bum.

• 1:27:56Nilay Patel?

  Parties started happening.

• 1:27:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58David Pierce?

  The butterfly effect is actually about MegaBase.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  If you had a yellow sports watch with a MegaBase button.

• 1:28:04David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 1:28:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? World was your oyster. Sony moved away from the MegaBase branding in the late 2010s, I would say.

• 1:28:13Alex Cranz?

  Was it because of Meghan Trainor?

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they moved to something called ExtraBase.

• 1:28:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh. Ooh, I had a pair of those headphones. They're good.

• 1:28:21Nilay Patel?

  Which was deeply confusing and upsetting to, I think, everyone.

• 1:28:24David Pierce?

  Is ExtraBase more or less than MegaBase?

• 1:28:26Nilay Patel?

  They never answered my questions. I've demanded the various CEOs of Sony come on our shows and explain what happened and they have all uniformly refused.

• 1:28:35Alex Cranz?

  They just suddenly were emails deleted.

• 1:28:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they got the, I think the messages were sent away. They were put on a memory stick and then no one could read the memory stick and that was the end of that. Uh, ExtraBase has been with us until recently. Sony is replacing ExtraBase.

• 1:28:52Alex Cranz?

  Double ExtraBase.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  With ULT Power Sound.

• 1:28:57Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:28:57David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:28:58Alex Cranz?

  Sony. Who does the naming?

• 1:29:01Nilay Patel?

  ULT Power Sound is a new brand for Sony's new like party speaker products. They have a new, they have a new, they have a new party speaker, which we'll come to.

• 1:29:12Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  All of the new products have a ULT button on them. This replaces the mega bass or extra bass buttons. The ULT, the ULT button offers several modes. ULT1 gets you deeper, lower frequency bass.

• 1:29:27Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  While ULT2 delivers powerful punchy bass.

• 1:29:31Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. What does that mean?

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  Mega and extra.

• 1:29:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:29:35Nilay Patel?

  They should have just labeled the mega. I don't understand.

• 1:29:38Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's too many X's on, on, on the.

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  The flagship of the ULT Power Sound line.

• 1:29:44Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, is a 64 pound party speaker.

• 1:29:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Nilay Patel?

  Called the ULT Tower 10, which costs $1,200.

• 1:29:51Alex Cranz?

  Does it have a screen on it?

• 1:29:52Nilay Patel?

  It has 34 LED light zones, but no screen. It has like a touchscreen at the top. It looks bananas. Uh, it really does have 34 LED light zones. Um, and I'm gonna have one.

• 1:30:06Nilay Patel?

  And there's not like another, I don't know what you're, what you thought was gonna happen.

• 1:30:09Alex Cranz?

  Does your wife know you're gonna have one?

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  Um, it has an X balanced speaker unit. I don't know what that means, but it sounds sick.

• 1:30:15Alex Cranz?

  He did just open up Amazon.

• 1:30:17Nilay Patel?

  It comes with a wireless microphone.

• 1:30:19Alex Cranz?

  Oh, for karaoke.

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  While you were saying all of those words, oh my God, this thing's enormous.

• 1:30:23Nilay Patel?

  It's so big.

• 1:30:25David Pierce?

  It's literally, there is a picture of a man rolling it and it's, it's like, like imagine. Do you, you know, do you ever see the thing where people like check a bag with golf clubs in it?

• 1:30:35Nilay Patel?

  Yep. It's a size, it's a size of a golf bag.

• 1:30:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Nilay Patel?

  Every single photo that they made for this product is bananas. Like every single photo is, uh, it's in the center of dance floors.

• 1:30:47David Pierce?

  Just being four feet tall.

• 1:30:49Nilay Patel?

  And then everyone's standing in a circle around it.

• 1:30:51Alex Cranz?

  That's how people party.

• 1:30:53Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I love it so much. I can't, I can't get enough of it. And I, all I wish is that A, anyone would tell us what ULT stands for. I think it is short for ultimate.

• 1:31:07David Pierce?

  So, okay, I'm so glad you brought this up because while you were saying whatever those nonsensical words you were saying to explain this thing, I was trying to figure out the answer to this by scrolling up and down Sony's website. Uh, there are only two things it could be, right? It's either ultra or ultimate. Are there other possibilities?

• 1:31:27Alex Cranz?

  Ultraless.

• 1:31:29David Pierce?

  It has like an ulterior motive.

• 1:31:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to think of like, is it a backronym? Like it stands for ultimate live.

• 1:31:38David Pierce?

  Upsettingly loud tower.

• 1:31:43Alex Cranz?

  Probably.

• 1:31:43David Pierce?

  But I think based on, again, the, the deep journalism I've been doing scrolling up and down this website, I believe it is ultimate because the word ultimate appears, uh, I would say a surprising number of times on this website.

• 1:31:54Alex Cranz?

  It weighs more than a child.

• 1:31:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, some children. Children comes in a variety of sizes.

• 1:32:01Alex Cranz?

  63 pounds, more than a toddler, probably, right?

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's more than my, well, she's not a toddler.

• 1:32:06Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I don't know what toddler weights are.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, definitely. It's like two Arthurs. It's like a max and a half.

• 1:32:11David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah, that's about right.

• 1:32:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm just guessing. Arthur's a little younger than Max. I'm just like doing some rough math.

• 1:32:16Alex Cranz?

  Perfect units, verge units of measurement.

• 1:32:21Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Uh, I can't wait to get one of these. Um, also the marketing material says massive base ultimate vibe, which is, uh, just what I say now.

• 1:32:30Alex Cranz?

  They're having so much fun in these, these pictures.

• 1:32:33Nilay Patel?

  Massive base, ultimate vibe.

• 1:32:34David Pierce?

  So from now on, if you want to sponsor the lightning round, you are officially contributing to the Neelai Patel Party Speaker Fund.

• 1:32:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're trying to get $1,200. We're gonna put one in the back here. We've had other Sony speakers, like other giant Sony speakers in our office and we can't get rid of them. Like Sony will send them to us.

• 1:32:48Alex Cranz?

  They don't want those back.

• 1:32:49Nilay Patel?

  Because they know that we care. Uh, and then we're like, do you want this back? And they're like, no, it would cost much too many dollars to send this back.

• 1:32:55Alex Cranz?

  Because it's four feet?

• 1:32:56David Pierce?

  It would be so tall.

• 1:32:58Nilay Patel?

  When we did the Mr. Robot after show, we would like wheel it into the after show. Like the writer of Mr. Robot court, I was like, what the fuck is that?

• 1:33:05Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Anyway, I just want to mark, if you are a certain kind of technology fan, it is important to know that we've gone from mega bass to extra bass to ULT power sound. And I think it's important to just take a moment and say, look, a new generation is here. I don't know if that generation will be defined by AI. I don't know if it'll be defined by face computers. I don't know. But I know that this is a generation that is defined by ULT power sound.

• 1:33:32David Pierce?

  Massive bass, ultimate vibe.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, David, I forgot to ask you where the AI pin fits on the scale of wearable bullshit.

• 1:33:39David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 1:33:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's nowhere.

• 1:33:44Nilay Patel?

  It's value over fiddliness. And I think I know the answer, which is zero value, maximum fiddliness.

• 1:33:50David Pierce?

  What's interesting, that's true. But what's interesting about it is I would say it gets like a point seven five of the face multiplier.

• 1:33:58Nilay Patel?

  Nah, because it's on your face.

• 1:33:59David Pierce?

  I was surprised at the extent to which people noticed it, like out in public. There was, there was a very funny moment where we were running around shooting the video. And it's like, a weird thing in general, because there's three people pointing cameras at me as I'm doing this. But I stood in front of the fearless girl on Wall Street, that little statue. And people were taking pictures of me as I took pictures of the fearless girl statue. It was fantastic. But like, it's very noticeable, especially when you're standing there, sort of talking down at your chest. You, like, I get more looks wearing the pin than I do wearing like the Ray-Ban smart glasses.

• 1:34:37Nilay Patel?

  That makes sense. You know, you know, gets a lot of looks. The ULT Tower 10, which weighs 64 pounds and has 34.

• 1:34:44David Pierce?

  Carry it above your head, say anything style.

• 1:34:48Nilay Patel?

  Here's what you want to do. You want to downshift from ULT 1 to ULT 2. They'll feel it every time. That's it. That's the Vergecast, everybody.

• 1:35:00David Pierce?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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