AI assistants are so back

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss announcements from Google I/O and OpenAI's GPT4o event. Further reading: Google and OpenAI race to build the feature of search OpenAI releases GPT-4o, a faster model that’s free for all ChatGPT users ChatGPT will be able to talk to you like Scarlett Johansson in Her ChatGPT is getting a Mac app OpenAI’s custom GPT Store is now open to all for free OpenAI’s “ChatGPT and GPT-4” Spring Update stream starts in 20 minutes OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is officially leavingl Project Astra: the future of AI at Google is fast, multi-modal assistants like Gemini Live Google’s Gemini AI is getting a chatty new voice mode Google will let you create personalized AI chatbots Google’s Gemini can build an entire vacation itinerary ‘in a matter of seconds’ Google’s Circle to Search will help you with your math homework Google’s Gemini video search makes factual error in demo We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem Google I/O 2024: everything announced Google is redesigning its search engine — and it's AI all the way down Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button Gemini is about to get better at understanding what's on your phone screen Google is building Gemini Nano AI right into Chrome Google makes its AI way faster with Gemini Flash Google’s new LearnLM AI model focuses on education Android apps will soon let you use your face to control your cursor Android is getting an AI-powered scam call detection feature Google targets filmmakers with Veo, its new generative AI video model Google’s invisible AI watermark will help identify generative text and video Google Photos is getting its own ‘Ask Photos’ assistant this summer Blink and you missed it: Google has a new pair of prototype AR glasses We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem Google launches new Home APIs and turns Google TVs into smart home hubs Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multimodal search agents. They can kill you in a number of ways. Knives, guns, they're here. They're agents and they can do anything they want. I don't know why the industry has picked the word agents. I mean, I get it historically, but I don't know if you've ever seen The Matrix in which the agents relentlessly try to kill Keanu Reeves. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. It's The Vergecast. Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:27Alex Cranz?

  Hi, I'm the AI of Alex Cranz. How are you today?

• 1:32David Pierce?

  Not enough emotion, Krantz. More emotion.

• 1:35Alex Cranz?

  Hi!

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God. Krantz is going to flirt with you this entire episode. David Pierce is here. Hi. I will not flirt with anyone this whole episode, I promise. We should just turn up the knobs of how flirty our AIs are, like throughout the episode randomly. There's a lot going on this week. I don't know if you can tell from my voice, I'm very tired. I just came home on a red-eye flight from Google I/O on the West Coast. So Google had I/O, it was very exciting. OpenAI had an event launching their own product. We should talk about those two things together because they're kind of in direct competition with each other in actually kind of hilarious ways. And a bunch of other stuff happened.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  David reviewed the iPads. A bunch of other emulators have launched for iOS. Continuing to reveal that Apple's application model for iOS, maybe a little limiting. The CEO of AWS just unexpectedly stepped down. There's like a lot going on and there's like a Windows event next week. In which Microsoft is basically being like, we're gonna beat the M-series processors. So a lot. Just a big week.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  And I just got off a plane. So, um, you know, who knows? Who knows where this episode of the Vergecast will take us?

• 2:39David Pierce?

  See, they're gonna be the shortest or the longest Vergecast in history and no one knows.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, the thing that I've, I have a new theory about red eye flights.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, in your twenties, you just take them because they're cheap.

• 2:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  And you, and your body can just take it. And then in your thirties, you get a little bit smarter and you're like, I shouldn't do that anymore. Like. Like I have a real job.

• 2:59David Pierce?

  Sometimes.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  I wanna buy, I wanna buy a real plane ticket. And then a thing that happens, and I've only noticed this recently. I'm in my forties now and I have a child and I take the red eyes because I just wanna get home. Like my goal is to just be back at home. Cause I'm like, I don't, I've been places, San Francisco, it's Milwaukee with rich people. Like, get me out of here. Like. You're going back to New York. And then you look at the plane and the plane is like a gradient of like people in their forties going home to people in their twenties who are hungover. And that's a red eye flight.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  One of my favorite early Neelai stories that I still tell is when, I think we were in Barcelona for MWC and your go-to red eye advice was eat two McDonald's McRiddles right before the flight. And you will instantly fall asleep because your body just shuts down and that's how you sleep the whole way home.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  The level of sodium is out of control.

• 3:53David Pierce?

  Decade since you told me that and I still think about it every single time I get on a plane. It's unbelievable advice.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  My friends and I used to call it time travel.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  You just like eat two McDonald's sandwiches. You just wake up wherever you're gonna be. It's like, what happened to me? You're like desperately thirsty and extremely puffy, but you are.

• 4:10David Pierce?

  Sweaty and yeah, it's bad. But you get there.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but I'm back. I'm here. It was a big, it was just a big week in AI. So. Let me set a little bit of the just competitive stage here. We have long known when Google I/O is.

• 4:25David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's it's around now every year. And they have it at the Shoreline Amphitheater, which is a big outdoor amphitheater that Google owns right next to Google campus. And, you know, they invite lots of people. Last year was a little bit smaller. They're coming out pandemic. This year is big again. We we just know when it is. Then there's this other company called OpenAI that likes to act like they're just a bunch of kids, even though they're some of the richest and most experienced people in all of tech. And they're like, oh, we should have an event. We're not going to have an event. And they literally did this move. They they tried to upstage Google I/O by maybe leaking, maybe not leaking, maybe just like swirling some rumors. They were going to launch a search product last week. And then Sam Altman is like, we're not going to launch a search product.

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  And then they announced a demo and they did a live stream called their spring event, which they announced, I don't know, 20 minutes before it started. They they just created some anticipation that they were going to have a big thing before I/O.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  Well, it was weird because there were there were rumors that it was going to be GPT-5, which obviously would have been a huge deal. And then there were rumors that it wasn't going to be GPT-5, but it was going to be a search engine, which would also be a huge deal. And then, right before the event, Sam Altman, I believe, was the one who tweeted like, not GPT-5, not a search engine, but we have something to share. So that, yeah, they are. They're doing this very weird, like, aw shucks routine about like, it's not a big deal. We're just and that's so on brand for OpenAI where they're like, they're both convinced that they are doing the biggest thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity. And like, I'd literally mean that precisely as I said it. Like, they actually believe that. And also are just these like, aw shucks scientists who are like, oh, look,

• 6:06David Pierce?

  we made a thing that will flirt with you. Isn't that fun?

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would, again, I'm just pointing out, some of the most experienced, richest people in tech.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, they know exactly what they're doing.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  And they are, they are very competitive, I guess, is the way to put it. Like, they're they're aggressively competitive with Google. I think they see that their opportunity is to displace Google. Whether or not their opportunity is actually build AGI, we will come to that. Right? Like, one way or the other, OpenAI is gonna make AGI, you know, like, but in the show, we will also come to that. And so there was just that little gamesmanship there of are they going to announce a big thing? Are they an upstaged Google? And then so they had their event, they announced their multimodal search GPT-4O, O stands for Omni, that lets you search with video, with audio, with voice. It is natively multimodal. The, you know, the, the

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  feeling at Google I/O, and Alex Heath reported this in command line, is that OpenAI did the demos Google was gonna do. Right? So this was the big upstage, like, OpenAI saw what Google was gonna do, or somehow heard about it, and rushed to demo those same capabilities first, to make sure that Google was in response to them. I don't know, that's true, right? That's, that was just very much the feeling from Google folks. It's very much the feeling that Alex reported. But there is some real gamesmanship there. And I think the important frame for all of the news is it feels like OpenAI and Google have identified some kind of end state of an AI chatbot, AI search product, and now they're in a furious race to get there first.

• 7:37David Pierce?

  I would actually frame it slightly differently. I think everyone has known this is the end state for decades. Like, the idea that you should have a Star Trek computer as a thing is, is what everyone has been talking about forever. Like, you go back to when we, the early days of Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant, and they were talking about this stuff. But the sense that I've gotten is that I think the thing that has changed, and I think it's changed really recently, is that people think we're close. That there, there is a real sense that like, not only is this the dream, but like, oh my God, we can build it now. And I think that was definitely the sense I got talking to Demis Hassabis, who runs DeepMind at Google and is in charge of all their AI stuff. It was kind of the

• 8:19David Pierce?

  sense you got watching the OpenAI stuff. They think it's here now. And, and you get the sense that we've gone from like, oh, neat pie in the sky, a dream that someday we'll all get to, which everyone has always known is the goal. Whether or not it's a good goal, still debatable. We've tried it a bunch of times. It hasn't really worked. Here we are. But there is this real sense that like, oh, it's, it's happening now. And, and we have to go get it right now. And you, like, it just feels like everyone has gone from running as fast as they could to like, running even faster, because there is a sense that like, you can sort of see the finish line now, which is really interesting.

• 8:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but they're running faster to a not particularly useful place. Like, like, I just watching it, the particularly the chat GPT one was like going to do. Remember at CES, Intel used to have a big booth and they'd always be like, look at the power of what we can do with Intel. We can read your emotions with a camera. And I was like, okay, so when chat GPT did it, I was like, cool. I saw that demo from Intel four or five years ago. Oh, cool. You, you can like read things when you hold the camera down on it. Again, I've seen that demo before, like it felt like a, it was like a nice demo. It was done very well. And like, I can appreciate that there was a lot of new technology there, but it also didn't feel like it was doing anything new or fantastic.

• 9:37Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I think you're underestimating the level to which the billionaires of Silicon Valley believe that people want to bang an iPad.

• 9:43Alex Cranz?

  Oh, this is true. This is true. Yeah. You're like, where's your David Zaslove love? You've got to like, love people, not, not just devices.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And FMK with David Zaslove, an iPad.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Like Sydney Sweeney is like a real, it was like, I don't know, guys.

• 10:00Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful lineup. Incredible.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Nightmare rotation.

• 10:06David Pierce?

  I think Sydney's gonna lose.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people are gonna pick the iPad.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  So that's the frame. And I actually want to come back to that, Alex, because it feels like the core technology that we're everyone that has gotten everyone so excited, has a fatal flaw with these hallucinations that everyone is ignoring. And we should talk about that a lot, but let's go through the news. So, you know, we covered the hell out of OpenAI's event, Kylie Robinson, our new senior AI reporter, talked to Mira Maroti, their CTO, about some of their technology. We sent an army to Google AI, like we always do. Soon our Patawa's on Decoder, which will give a little preview of that's going to come out Monday. So just a lot. We covered all of this stuff. Let's go through the news. OpenAI's news, pretty straightforward, right? The GPT four O.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  That's the Omni model. It's faster. They changed some of the pricing so you can just get it for free now. You don't have to pay for it like you did with GPT-4. There's a Mac app now, which is very funny because they have a gigantic Microsoft investment. By the way, their answer to why Mac app is that's where the users are, which is this both a statement, a true statement, and also the sickest possible burn that you can deliver to Microsoft, your major investor. They are letting people use the GPT store for free now. So like, really, it's like a pricing change, this new model. And in classic sort of OpenAI fashion, you know, they announced Sora, their video generator. No one can use it. They announced GPT-4O. It's out, but the thing where you like wave your phone around and look at stuff, I don't think has hit yet.

• 11:35David Pierce?

  No, you can, you can get at the model and like every AI app on the planet has been integrating that model over the last, whatever, 96 hours at this point. It's out there and by all accounts is, is very good. People like it. It's really fast. But the, yeah, the, the like super agent stuff that everybody is talking about is, as far as I can tell, not anywhere really at this point.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so the idea here, and this is where the, the idea that you're going to bang an iPad comes from is, you've got a phone, it talks to you, the, the voice is very much like Scarlett Johansson in the movie Her. Sam Altman tweeted the word her. Mira denied that it was Scarlett Johansson's voice. Boy, is it close. But the idea is you're just like looking at stuff with your phone. You're talking to an AI and it's much more personable, even a little flirty. It's like telling jokes. It's saying, you look nice in that hoodie. And it's like more powerful because it's not going from your voice to text into the AI model, back out to text and back out to,

• 12:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  text to speech. It's all just happening natively, which is a speed up. But that's like the thing, right? Like that, the, the announcement here is very much, this model can now talk, can like look at stuff with you and you can talk to it in a much more emotive way.

• 12:47David Pierce?

  Okay, right. Can we talk about that actually? Because I was talking to somebody about this yesterday. And they just sort of casually made the point. That this is a user behavior that does not exist and doesn't make any sense. And I have not been able to stop thinking about it. And like I go back to the, when I was at the Rabbit R1 launch a couple of weeks ago. One of the demos he did was write a spreadsheet out by hand, just like a table of numbers. And then point his R1 at it and say, I think it was like, can you invert the rows and the columns? And then send this to me. And it's like, cool technology. What the hell is that for? And is anyone in the world ever going to actually do this? And so many of these demos that we've seen, both from Google and OpenAI this week,

• 13:31David Pierce?

  are basically people walking around a room, asking their phone what a thing is. And, and I just like, and this goes back to Alex, your point of like, what is all this technology actually for? That's either a user behavior that we just have never developed because we've never had the technology for it. Or it's just not a thing people want to do. And I'm increasingly leaning towards the second thing.

• 13:52Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if you can't see, you probably, it would be very useful to the point of phone in a general direction and be like, what's there?

• 14:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's it. That's a good one. It's a good accessibility feature, no question.

• 14:04Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  The demos are weird because they need to create them so that you can verify that the thing is happening in the way that you think it's happening. Like the dumbest one I've seen so far is someone holding up GPT-4O at like Buckingham Palace and being like, is the king here? And it's like, yes, the flags are raised, so the king is here. And it's like, dude, like, well, you don't need all this technology to get that. Like they've been answering that question since the 1200s. You know, it's like, that's why that's the thing. That's the whole thing. And there's just a piece of that where it's, you need to construct the demo. So it's obvious the computer is doing the thing. And the actual use cases are yet to be seen. Because real people have to get the stuff and try doing things that no one's ever thought of doing.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  This actually ties in with what Google demoed, right? Which is you have some sort of problem. You point your phone at it. You're like, help me fix this problem. We will come to that because both of their demos were kind of weird for various reasons. But that it's like that thing where it's like, I don't know what this part is called, but it's rattling. Fix it, right? And then like the computer knows some things and it like helps you get to that answer. Whereas all these demos, I think they're just trading on the fact that people will know the answers already. And what they're proving is that the various AIs can. And I think that's what you're getting at, David, is like, these demos are not compelling because at the end of the day, they're designed so that you can see that it's doing the thing that you already know.

• 15:34David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, it was like the person, uh, they were in the London Google office demoing uh, Project Astro, which we'll, we'll get to, but running around with the same kind of multimodal assistant and they point their phone out the window at King's Cross Station and say, what is this? And it goes, King's Cross Station. It's like, who did we help here? Like, you're in Google's London office and you're like, gosh, what enormous station is that?

• 15:59David Pierce?

  I don't know. And I think to your point, I think as a, as a like search input, it's super interesting. But the idea of that as a sort of ongoing assistant that I'm just gonna like pipe the video of my world into all the time and it's just gonna chat to me about what I see, that I am suspicious of. I just don't see that yet.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  The funniest thing about that demo in particular is I believe it also asked, in the demo, I believe they also asked Astro, what is King's Cross Station known for? And Tom Warren and our team, who is British, said, no Londoner would have given such a milquetoast answer. They'd have been like, that's where you get hookers and cocaine.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  That's actually the answer.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  If Gemini had said that, I would be more impressed.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  You're just like, finally, billions of dollars of technology later, we're heating the oceans with all this GPU usage, but I can finally ask a robot where hookers.

• 16:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, hey, hey, ChatGPT, who in this audience is most likely to sell me drugs? Like, now we're talking.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, so that's like the open eye news and the, the big piece of it is this emotion stuff. Right? They they they made the thing multimodal, but the I think the thing that was compelling to most people in this demo was that it was flirting with the people who were giving the demos and in a voice that sounded very much like Scarlett Johansson.

• 17:17Alex Cranz?

  Was it compelling, though? I mean, it definitely was flirting, but like, was it compelling?

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  So I I'm just gonna caveat this with two things. One, it's been a long time since I was called upon to flirt with anyone. And whenever I try to flirt with Becky, she's like, I don't know what you're doing. Like, those days are a long time. And so like, I read it as like, they, this is what they, this is what a bunch of nerds think flirting is.

• 17:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, you want a flirty female voice to be like, you look good in that hoodie. But it's like, maybe you shouldn't be wearing a hoodie.

• 17:55Alex Cranz?

  Like, like, I don't want a computer to just reinforce all the bad, stupid things I do all the time. I don't need that kind of hype person in my life, because they're not productive.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's just an element where you should listen to it. It's it's hard to talk about it, just like, away from the actual thing. But if you listen to it, what they've added is a bunch of stutters and pauses and like, intonations to what would otherwise be a pretty dry text to speech output.

• 18:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, it sounded the most human, I think, that we've heard one of these sound, right? And and I know that, like, back to that Project Astro demo, too, they're actually saying, don't talk to them like you talk to Alexa or Siri or any of these other ones. Talk to it more like you want a human. And that's like, kind of compelling. But at the same time, I go back to, I don't want a yes man. Like, the yes man is how I ended up with a leather newsboy hat in the 2000s. My friend was just like, she wanted to just get out of the store. She was like, yeah, get that hat, Alex. I worked for weeks before she admitted it. And that's what, like, I don't need that from a computer.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, our nation's teens during that same period of time was like, swing dancing, that's what we're gonna do.

• 19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, that's just a collective delusion. Honestly, what you want is an automated system to put a stop to.

• 19:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  And we just didn't have the technology at the time. And now, maybe that technology's pointed in the wrong way. I went through Brian Sutter's face. Like, I'm I was, I was a teen during that time. It happened to me. It's great. If it's still happening to you, please.

• 19:24Alex Cranz?

  How many people do you fling over your shoulder and then around your waist?

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  When I, when I say that he's no longer interested.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  In these antics, like the thing that's always on my mind is she is a divorce lawyer. Like, we just don't play. The, the thing about all that, right, is what people reacting to is the personality. And then all the demos at the bottom, it said, check your facts.

• 19:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? The thing they have not improved is, is this thing getting more accurate and more useful or smarter? Which I want to put a pin in because Alex, you wrote a great piece about that. That also comes up in a Google example. But the, the part where everyone's excited about this enabling technology to build these experiences that everyone's always wanted, that David was talking about is like, did they, is the thing good enough to do the thing that they want? Or is it just convincing enough? I actually don't know the answer to GPT-4O because I haven't had a chance to use it very much. And the feature, the big feature isn't actually available to be used.

• 20:21David Pierce?

  I do think it's becoming increasingly clear that it's getting convincing faster than it's getting good.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:26David Pierce?

  Which I actually think is sort of scary. Like, just, just looking at the reactions that people had to the OpenAI demos this week. Like, it made a lot of mistakes. It got a lot of things wrong. The interaction was kind of weird, but it was mind blowing to a lot of people, just the fact that it sounded passably human and it made jokes and it was sort of silly and flirty. And they could dial up and down the emotions. There's one point where the, it was two researchers who were doing this demo and one of them, he's sitting there and he asked a question and she responds and the other guy goes, not enough emotion, like, give me, give me more, more drama. And it like correctly amps up the drama and like to the point where it's funny. Like, I laughed at the thing and that's remarkable.

• 21:07David Pierce?

  But I, I, I don't know that there's any evidence that it is making fewer mistakes in those moments so far than these things have in the past, or that it is like meaningfully closer to getting to zero, which is ultimately the only thing that actually matters.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And zero is a hard place to get, like, people aren't at zero. But at least you understand the failure mode of another person. You know, like, you, you can evaluate whether a person is trustworthy or like you have some history, or you can find a number of TikToks going through someone's entire backstory to tell, right? Like, there's a whole thing you can do to evaluate whether another human being is trustworthy or telling you the truth, or whether they're experts or whatever, in a way that. Like AIs are just like a different kind of thing.

• 21:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  And we don't have the skills as a society or a culture to do it. And also, we're going to come to this, this is Alex's piece. Everyone seems to be just ignoring it because it's fun. Right. And it's like, that's weird.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  If I'm going to briefly defend AI, I will say there are a lot of things about these tools that are very low stakes that are fine, right? Like, there's a lot of things for which there's not a right answer that it, and it doesn't matter if it gives you the slightly wrong answer. And again, I think the thing that we're learning is that more of the point is the interaction than we expected. Right. Like, the more you hear about Kevin Roos's girlfriends in The New York Times, I loved that story. Like, we've given Kevin a hard time. It was an unbelievable story idea, and I'm very jealous of it.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, his beat is, what if you banged an iPad?

• 22:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable idea. Incredible. And you, you hear about like the, the meta celebrity AI things that they have, like half the point of these things is just to use them. And I think I really underestimated that for a long time. I was like, these things are tools and the goal is to accomplish something as quickly and efficiently as possible. And having ums and ahs is actually just a waste of everybody's time. And for my own use, I actually still believe that. But I think in general, the, the fun of using it, it's a real like, the real friends with the friends we made along the way is like, that's very much. That's very much where we're at with a lot of AI. And I think it, it forgives a lot of the wrong stuff in a way that is

• 23:20David Pierce?

  a little scary, but also if you're a company like OpenAI, really productive. Because as long as it's fun, people will forgive so much. And they're making it fun.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, but you're kind of getting to the point where it's like, what if your computer was Calvin's dad from Calvin and Hobbes? Yeah, just like, I don't know, I was just gonna make sense to go away, kid.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  Fine, you know, and that was life before computers, like before Google. People would just make stuff up at parties, like, ah, that's what it feels like. And fine. Like, society made it through many moments without being able to Google stuff on their phone at a party. But it's just weird that we're at a place where we had that facility and now we're like, it's less accurate than before, but it's flirtier. And the point is the the interaction. That's a change. It's like worth remarking on.

• 24:05Alex Cranz?

  That kind of mirrors like people's search behavior in general, right? Because everybody's like, I could use Google, which will take me probably to the correct answer. Or I could just go on TikTok and be like, does anybody know why this happens? And take the first answer I get from the most charming person.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  And the answer is your water doesn't have enough hydrogen in it.

• 24:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just pack it full.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI announced all this stuff, which is interesting, right? Again, the timing, then the day of I O, they announced that former chief scientist now, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company after all of the drama about Sam Altman getting fired. Ilya was one of the people that voted to remove Sam. And then he said he made a mistake and he went back and there was the whole thing. And now Sam is back with a bigger board, whatever. It always seemed likely that Ilya would leave. And then they announced it on the day of I O. And I I only bring this up, you know, it's like this sort of machinations of OpenAI are very interesting because of Sam getting fired.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  But it's interesting timing in that they made all this noise about maybe we're doing search, maybe doing a thing. It's it's but it's magic anyway. And also, our chief scientist, who led a coup, will be leaving the company.

• 25:09Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  Don't pay attention to that. Pay attention to Google's news. Like, weird. It's just a weird, that I think OpenAI is in a weird spot where they are. It doesn't feel like this from the product side. I think the product has captured more imagination. But they are, as a company, like, pretty reactive to Google. Like, they're in, they're weaving their way around Google in a fairly interesting way.

• 25:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think Google is getting powerful in this space more quickly than anyone gave it credit for not very long ago.

• 25:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't think that.

• 25:41David Pierce?

  Do you remember 12 months ago when we were sitting around being like, Google blew it? They blew it. Where had they been? Google fucked it all up.

• 25:47Alex Cranz?

  We knew that Google was like, slow, but like, I don't think it's surprising that Google, the one of the largest companies in the world, is is going to run circles around this company that was originally created, to be clear, to protect people from AGI while also creating AGI. Like, like, they're still a startup. Yeah, they've got a ton of money from Microsoft. And they're and they're hunting for more investment all the time, but. Google has been investing in this space for a very long time, investing in those resources, investing in those people. And I'm like, I'm not surprised that it came up and said, yeah, we're going to do it and we're going to crush it. Like, of course, OpenAI is going to be on their back foot the entire time. That's why they rolled out their store so quickly. That's why they've

• 26:30Alex Cranz?

  been moving so fast is because they're like, okay, we beat them to market. Now we have to keep beating them to market because that's all we have. We don't have all of the the infrastructure. We don't have all the resources that Google has. So this is what we can do.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I I I buy that a lot, actually. And I think that, you know, what OpenAI is good at is having a product and caring about our product and having the product be existential to the company and making the product good. And Google is not good at that.

• 27:00Alex Cranz?

  Real bad.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, Google has a product that it cares about for a long time, not in Google's core skill set, hasn't been for a while. And, you know, last year, they announced a bunch of stuff and I'm like, where is it? You know, again, they were at Bard last year, like, oh, it's gone. They already wiped out one whole set of products and replaced it with a long list of other products, all of which are named Gemini, which we will get to. But they had, you know, their announcements at I O were very confident. We should go through at least the chatbot stuff here. I did talk to Sundar afterwards. We talked a lot about sort of how people feel about AI, you know, that's coming on Decoder next week, but it felt like he has a handle on it. You know, like, he he knows

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  that he has to do this stuff and he knows that it's like very much like can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And he's like, I'm I feel bad for the eggs. But he's doing it like they're in an aggressive posture. And the thing that they are, I think, the most aggressive posture on is Project Astra, is some of their search improvements. And it's the idea that they have the infrastructure to scale this stuff and make it cheap. Right? So Sundar said to Deirdre Bosa on CNBC, our cost of queries are 85% like cheaper than it was a year ago. And that, if you're OpenAI, is like, oh shit, like, Google can just deploy this stuff to everybody who has Google. And it's cheap and they can like figure out their business on the back of search ads and all this other stuff.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  And we are at, well, 20 bucks a month was a lot of money and people weren't paying for it. And now we're giving away the best model we have for free. Right? Like, there's a real challenge in there and you can see these companies kind of battling it out, each using their own advantage. OpenAI very much, their advantage is they can tell a compelling story about a product that everyone believes will be here a year from now. And Google's advantage is that it's huge.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  Yep. And you also just described basically the whole reason that Microsoft and OpenAI got so tied up. Because Microsoft promised AI that same level of scale and infrastructure. And I think if we've learned one thing, it's that it's very hard to do that in a partnership.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:04David Pierce?

  In a way that it's much easier to do it inside of your company. And I think, like, if you look at what we've seen across Google the last year or so, that company has just like relentlessly consolidated itself to be able to move all of that stuff faster.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  And that's like, that was the Rick Osterlo story when they, they put him on top of hardware and on Android. It's to move AI into Pixel and Android more quickly. And the infrastructure stuff, like one thing Demis Hassabis said to me is that the, the fact that Google's infrastructure exists is how you get Astra to be so fast. Like, he just literally tied those two things together. And he's like, that's, we, we spent six months taking the tech that we had and making it fast. And what that meant is putting it in the rest of Google's infrastructure, like that becomes the job. And, and you're right, cheap and fast are how you win. That's, that is the next phase of this is we take all of this stuff and we figure out how to do it. We figure out how to do it in a way that is like economically sustainable and doesn't have latency, because latency kills all of these products, just as a user.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  Like, if it's slow, it sucks. And that's where we are.

• 30:04Nilay Patel?

  And Google has known that forever, right? I mean, Google has always known that speed is the thing. Uh, so we should talk about some of Google's news. Uh, the main one is Project Astra, uh, which is their natively multimodal take a video of a thing. Search for it, ask it questions. I did a demo of it with V Song. It was weird. Like, there were Google executives there doing demos on their phones, apparently. We didn't see that. We went into a booth where we put on like a gaming headset and there was a, you know, a top mounted camera pointing down on a big TV screen. And we were asked to take objects out of like bins and like put them on the top, you know, so the top time camera can see them and like ask questions about the objects. Which to David's point is a completely insane use case.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, you're just never gonna do this.

• 30:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, what?

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  But like, the idea is that it could see the things, like, instantly sort of latency free chat with you about them. So, you know, V picked three things and like said, tell me a story, name the stuffed animal. Great. I broke it. Just instantly broke it. I had a spaceship, a pleosaur, like a, like a plastic dinosaur.

• 31:12David Pierce?

  Did you know it was a pleosaur or did it tell you it was a pleosaur?

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was ichthyosaurus and it told me it was a pleosaur. I don't know, by the way, I don't know who was right.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  Dinosaur people, you know, the one dude from Jurassic Park was not there with me.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  But Alan, what's his name?

• 31:31Alex Cranz?

  Alan Grant?

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Alan Grant was not there.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:34David Pierce?

  Good pull. There we go.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  What was the, who's the one who played Ellie? This is what I care about.

• 31:40Alex Cranz?

  Laura Dern?

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  Laura Dern?

• 31:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Oh my God, I wish she'd been there with you.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Alex Cranz?

  I just wish she's around.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  If Google's listening, the next time we do this demo, Laura Dern should be there. And I was like, tell me a story about these three objects where the moraca is the winner. Which, to be fair, is like an idea that can only come from my, like, booze-addled human brain. And it was just, it was like, get ready for a story.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I'm ready. And it was like, once upon a time, and it just stopped, it just dead in its tracks, like, could not predict the next word in a sentence that added up to the moraca will beat this dinosaur in the spaceship, like.

• 32:19David Pierce?

  And there is nothing more awkward than that specific silence.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:23David Pierce?

  Where you're like, is it, is it about to happen? Did it break? Is it doing?

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  Is there a hamster on a wheel somewhere? Like there's a data center on fire and the poor guy giving the demo just like hit this base where I was like, get out of here. Like he was like, we have other demos to give. Like I don't trust you anymore. And it's fun. Like that is a weird demo. It's a weird use case. It doesn't make any sense. The point is to show that it can like see, you can like use its camera and do text to speech like all at the same time and the same way, right? Natively multimodal. But right, like you would never walk up. Like if you asked a normal person, tell me a story where the Morocco is a winner, they would also be like, get ready.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  And walk away.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  But I think there's just a part of this where we're, we're asking these things to do like incredibly esoteric things, just to see where their limits are, obviously. And it, you gotta bring that back to reality. So the one demo they gave, which is coming to Google Lens, it's like an extension of Google Lens is a video search. Which is sort of related to Astro, like Astro is a thing over here, but video search is a thing over there. And it's, it's weird to pull them apart. So Astro, you're just like talking to a computer. You're like waving your phone around, looking at stuff and talking to it. Video search and Lens is you like take a video, like you hold down the shutter button of a thing. While you're talking and you say like, why is this record player broken? Which is one of their demos. Or why doesn't the lever on this camera move? Which is another one of their demos.

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  And it, they feel to me like the very related ideas, but they are separate in classic Google fashion. Like these are not the same idea. They're different, have different names. But the thing about it is the Astro demos, you know, they felt very esoteric. Can a Moroccan win? The video search demos were very tactile. Like I could see how they would be useful. Yep. Right? This thing is broken. I'm just gonna take a video of it being broken. I don't even know what the parts are called. Help me fix it. So the record player one, which is a lot on stage is pretty good, right? They had it. If people know about record players, there's a weight on the back of the tone arm. And if you don't have the weight balanced right, the tone arm just like skips around. Cause you need, you need some weight pushing down on the needle into the record to like hit the whole thing.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Um, if you're a record player nerd, this is like the most exciting demo that you've ever seen. If you're a normal person, you look at that and it, it just tells you this thing. Go watch the demo. I encourage you to watch the demo. It's like that. It identifies the model, the make and model of the turntable. It's like, that's an audio technical turntable. And the reason that stone arm might be moving this way is because it's not counterbalance correctly. And it has a whole list of like things you could do to counterbalance correctly. And it's like, oh, this actually isn't useful, which I thought was fascinating. It's the right answer, straightforwardly the right answer. Like, that's why it was doing that thing. But if you don't know what the tone arm is called, you've gone two steps too deep, too fast.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? You're like, the, the, the information you need is like, record players work by putting a needle in a groove and you need to put pressure on that needle. And this round weight at the back is called the counterbalance. And you need to spin it. So you put enough weight on the thing. And the amount of weight you put on it is actually dependent on your needle. You go, it's like you fall down the rabbit hole and suddenly you realize like you own four record players.

• 35:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, then you're just an audio nerd.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  It's just a thing that happens to you. Um, that's fine. But like, that was really interesting to me, right? It's the right answer, but sort of in a way that was like too far, too fast.

• 35:45David Pierce?

  Oh, I think you're totally wrong. I think, I think, I think you, what you just described is Google search. Like, which, which is the way that it works, right? Which is that essentially-

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  But I'm saying like, if you don't know what a tone arm is called, you couldn't follow the directions that were given to you.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  Right. That's, I mean, that's fair, but I think maybe a better example of the, the opposite case is, uh, one that Liz Reed, the head of search, talked about when she and I were talking, which is, your dishwasher is broken and there's a light blinking. And you don't know what brand your dishwasher is. You don't know what model it is. You don't know how to describe which-

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  You're just a baby.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  You're just like, my dishwasher is broken. Like, off the top of your head, do you know the, do you know the model number of your dishwasher?

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  I could make up anything.

• 36:24David Pierce?

  If you had confidently answered, I would have believed you.

• 36:26Alex Cranz?

  Just be confident. Just make something up.

• 36:29David Pierce?

  Like, but, but again, I don't, that's not information most people have. It's not information most people need. It's not information most people should care about. It should just say, take out the filter in the bottom, rinse it out and put it back. You'll be fine. Like that, that is the answer. I don't need to learn about dishwashers. I just want mine to work. And it's the like, I take my car to the mechanic. Some people are like, oh, I'd like to understand cars so that I can, my, I can make sure that my car runs better. Most people come in, they go, my car's going, fix it.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I'm saying that.

• 36:57David Pierce?

  The end of the interaction.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  That's great. But if you're asking like, what is this thing and why is it broken? And it's like, here's how to fix it. Telling you what to do is actually important, right? And here it was just like.

• 37:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that doesn't require teaching me about it. It just says, pull the, do you see the thing there? Pull it down.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  Fair. I, I just thought that was a particularly jargon. Maybe it's because I just like, I'm a turntable person. But the answer there was like particularly jargony in a way that I thought was interesting, right? It didn't like, it didn't help you understand the actual answer.

• 37:25Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think you're also someone who thinks like, you want to understand the thing that you're talking about and the working with. Like, we're all gadget nerds.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  Or I just want to lie to David confidently.

• 37:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, that too. But like, you know, we're all nerds. We, we want to know how the thing works. We want to know all the processes. And it's true. Like the reason, you know, when you first used Google search 20 years ago, you would have to be really think about your search prompt, right? Like you'd have to think about what you type in. And now you just type in like, my dishwasher doesn't work.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Alex Cranz?

  And, and people just don't care as much. But, but to your point, like, yeah, if, if it said, if the dishwasher said, yeah, go replace the filter, I'd be like, where the hell is the filter? What the hell is that? Like, I would still, like, to your credit, like, I would still want to know all of that. And I don't think it would necessarily get me there yet.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm just saying, I think that one's interesting because the, it was the right answer. There's no question it was the right answer.

• 38:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  That, that's the reason the tone arm was flying back and forth. It was just, is the, is it a useful answer? Right? And I think we can obviously disagree about that and we are, but that's the level that we're at. Like, is this actually useful for you to go sort of like spit out an answer like this? Where it's fix the counterbalance.

• 38:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  And you need to know some information to like, take action on that instruction.

• 38:36David Pierce?

  Well, and there's a really interesting sort of AI all the way down piece of that too, which is that like, what that indicates is that the, the AI for sort of understanding what's in a video that you're sending to it. Is capable, right? Like it did the job. It figured out the question you had by you pointing a video. That's awesome, right? Like, I actually think the the video searching lens is a very good idea. And I think pointing your phone at something being like, what is this thing that's happening is an actually totally normal user behavior. So I'm like, all in on that. The output thing is actually much harder, right? Because it's like, okay, in this case, is the right thing for Google to do to just sort of give me an answer about the tone arm, which is not a term that I know to your point. So if it says, pull the thing on the tone arm,

• 39:19David Pierce?

  I'm like, what the hell is the tone arm? And you've lost me. Should it send me a YouTube video? Should it send me a compilation of stuff? Should it like, superimpose AR on top of like, that is just such a different problem from the sort of search query recognition thing. And my sense is, Google is getting really good at the search query recognition, right? They did it with voice. They did it with video. They did it with images. Like, it, Google is very good at understanding what you're asking, almost no matter how you ask it. And then the question of how to answer is so different and so much harder and full of thorns and wildfires.

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  So the, by the way, this is kind of exactly what I was getting at, is what it presented was like, a list of words, like vocab words. And then in the demo, she was like, and here's a link to AudioTecnic's manufacturer page, which is more words. And what you actually want is like, a YouTube short where someone just does it in five seconds.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  Right. Somebody just reaches down and pokes the thing and it works.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. And they're just like, here's this thing, like, do this thing until it floats, and then like, turn the number to whatever numbers on like, that's what you, that's all you need to know. And like, the actual answer to that is a video of someone doing it. And that's, again, I just like, you got it right in one specific way, but it actually got it wrong, like, another way, which is like, the form of the answer is not the most useful thing, which is really interesting. Then there is the other demo, which it was just wrong, like, wrong in a way where I'll just preview it. My, the first question I asked to Nourpachaya in the Decatur interview was, is language the same as intelligence? Because the question was, that someone was pointing a camera at a broken film advance

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  lever on a SLR, like a film SLR camera. And so these cameras are really manual, right? So you take a picture, you gotta move the lever to move the frame of film over in the camera. If you've never seen a film camera, this is like, a very satisfying mechanical thing to do. Right? You like push the button, the big, you know, the shutter goes kachunk and then you like move, you're literally pulling, you know, the notches in the side of film. You're literally pulling the film over and winding it around. Such a good feeling. Expose the next shot, the next frame, when the next time you open the shutter. This is great. I love like, I'm a nerd for these things. Uh, and the answer, the question was why, why won't I, why can't I advance this thing? Why is this lever not moving all the way to advance the next thing? This is a problem with these cameras. They have them. There's a million reasons you might have this problem.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, one of like, one of them on can like old cannons is like, there's a magnet at the bottom of the thing. And one of the answers is like, get a magnet and like, run it over the bottom of the camera. Like there's all these, there's like folk tales and superstitions, like, you know, it's like, drink the blood of a goat and like wave at a crystal and like move your film advance lever. It doesn't matter. There's just like a lot of information out on the web of how to do this. And the answer that Google delivered in its own video and highlighted is the most wrong answer. Like it's right in one way, which is as a last resort, just open the back of the camera. It will technically work. It will technically work. But if you open the back of a film camera, you expose all of the film, you ruin all of your photos.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? So when people do this, when I asked Becca and Veron and a bunch of other photographers on our staff, like, when you have a broken film advance lever, would you ever just open the back of your camera? And Becca was like, no, no, no, no, no. You go into the darkest closet you can find and you pray. And then you open it and monkey with it because you don't want to expose your film. You don't want to lose your photography. And Veron was like, I've spent a lot of time in that closet, which is a very funny thing. The most Veron thing you can say. Right? Like these cameras break. They're, they're finicky mechanical objects. But there's not a place where anyone with even the slightest bit of intelligence about those kinds of cameras would recommend and highlight, just open the door and fix it. Because necessarily you're going to ruin all of your photos. So I actually asked you about this.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  I was like, uh, this is not a thing. I don't see the intelligence going up. I see the language. I see, I see the capability, right? Like David's saying, it can see in the video what's wrong. It can go search the web. It can synthesize some answer. But this answer is wrong. Like this is not the thing you should advise people to do. And he's like, I went and talked to the team and they're like, well, in some cases, if you were willing to destroy all of your photos, it's the right answer. Which is correct.

• 43:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  That is the correct response. We should just run it. We should just run that clip. Let's run that clip now.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Now ironically, I was talking to the team as part of making the video. They consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don't want to expose your film by taking it outside of a dark room. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. If you don't want to break the camera and if what you've taken is not that valuable, it makes sense to do that. You know, it's a good example of, you're right, there is a lot of nuance in it. And part of what I hope search serves to do is to gives you a lot more context and around that answer. And allows people to explore it deeply. But I think, you know, these are the kind of things for us to keep getting better at.

• 44:25Speaker 06

  I do see the capability frontier continuing to move forward. I think we are a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but I think we are all making more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  I mean, to me, that answer is like, yeah, we should have probably told you you're gonna destroy all your photos, right? Like, that's the answer.

• 44:42Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  But it's also like, why, why are we rushing into a world where the products can't quite do the thing you need them to do? And Alex, this was your piece, which is, these things are hallucinating left and right, and everyone's kind of like over it.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, I just keep being baffled by it because people, it just screws up constantly. Like, if you give me one of these things, I can probably get it to hallucinate within four to five questions. Fairly easily, like consistently, I could get it to screw up. And it's just because they're not good at it yet because they're computers, they're not people. They're not actually, all of the stuff that our brains do is really hard to do. And they're not prepared, but these companies are like, well, it's really cool. We're on our way. So like, enjoy, and this is now how we're gonna have everything work. And it's like, well, no, stop that. Like, I don't, I need my computer to know how to do my taxes. I don't need it to know like, what a nice accountant should sound like.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen the one where people keep asking it how to get a man and a goat across a river and literally none of the models can like do it? Like the question is you have a man, a boat and a goat. How do you get them all across the river? And it's like, first you take the goat across, then the man comes back and he takes himself across and it's like, that's not the answer.

• 45:58Alex Cranz?

  This is a bad answer. Yeah, they, they, they don't, they don't, the like, the AIs don't think like humans do, they're not meant to. And, and that, that is remarkable. And it's like, it is cool that we're now effectively engaging with like these alien thoughts and things, right? Cause it doesn't think the way a human does, but it also doesn't think the way a human does. And we keep asking it to, and we keep putting it in these situations and then we're like, don't worry about it. So it hallucinated a little bit. So it like decided that Neelai wasn't the founder of the verge and that Alex is a man. It's fine, keep going. And it's like, right? Yeah, materially, those aren't harmful things to say, right? Like, like I, I think we'll both be fine if somebody said that. But it still shouldn't say it.

• 46:40Alex Cranz?

  And that's, that's what you want to now become the new form of search. Like for me, it really feels like Google has lost the plot for what Google is supposed to do. And Google is supposed to get you to the information. It is not supposed to be the arbiter of the information. And increasingly it feels that it needs to be the arbiter of the information. And, and that's like the whole point behind a lot of its new search products. We're just going to tell you how to think. And it's like, well, no, one, you're a company, you shouldn't tell me how to think. Two, you don't actually know because you're relying on these AIs that don't know. Just stop this. Like this is a really bad path for them to go down. I feel like it's going to eventually bite them in the ass, but they're so financially incentivized that they just keep doing it.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the truly the, the competition between OpenAI and Meta and Google is ferocious. Microsoft's obviously in the mix there.

• 47:29Alex Cranz?

  Apple wants to be.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, Apple's just going to buy some model from the other, right? At least for this stuff that Siri goes outside your phone. That, that's the rumor. We'll see, WWDC is coming up, but. It just feels like there's that ferocious race to get to this product that everyone has dreamed of for a long time. Whether or not the core technology can do the task reliably. And, you know, just go back and think about that film camera example for a minute. But if you had a friend who was like, you were like, for some reason, like my phone camera is broken. I can't move this lever and they're like, yeah, just open the back. And then you open the back and it destroyed all the photos you've taken. My film's not cheap, which I think the Becker reminded me of instantly, like film is expensive. You're going to ruin all these photos, you're going to ruin that you're a sensitive piece of film. You would be pissed at your friend.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Like just as a matter of course, you'd be like, what? Dude, like you could have told me to go to a dark room. Like I asked you because I assume you know this other piece of information. And there's none of that accountability with these tools. You can't just like be mad at it because, you know, in a market, you would leave Google and go to OpenAI. And it's like, it's going to lie at you, but in a way that suggests it might also have sex with you like.

• 48:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Fine. But I, I just, that's the part where it's, it's like everyone's building a really fast car, but they're not telling you that the engine just doesn't work about 20% of the time. And it's like, okay, but is there a path to stopping it?

• 48:51David Pierce?

  That would be a bad car. I, I actually, I would, I would put it slightly differently. I think it's, it's they're building a fast car and not telling you how to use it. Right. And I think like the, the camera thing to me is such an interesting example because I would argue that's not a hallucination. That's a terrible UX mistake. Like it, it gave you a true answer without the actual bit of information you needed to know what to do with that true answer. You can open the back of your camera to get the film out. That is, that is a true thing. And so in a certain way, the model was successful and like, that's what I hear Sundar saying. It's like, it didn't get it wrong. It just didn't tell you what you actually needed to know. And, and so now we're in this place where like.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is the you're dancing on the

• 49:38David Pierce?

  Sort of, but like, I think, I mean, there are, there are things that are wrong. Like Alex Cranz does not have a beard. That is wrong, right? Like, got it. Nailed.

• 49:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  But the rest of the answers on list, that's the one I focus on because it was the most destructive. The rest of the answers in the list that generates are bananas. Like, one of them is just like nudge the shutter a little bit, which is like, no.

• 50:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Alex Cranz?

  I've already done that.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  Don't do that.

• 50:03David Pierce?

  But I think, I mean, one of the things I think a lot about with Google right now is Google used to make you do a lot of work, right? And that was, that was the job, right? Like, when you did Google search, you did most of the work when you were interacting with Google. And now Google is trying to do most of the work for you. And it creates this incredibly different version of Google that needs to exist. And what Google thinks is that actually it can just put a paragraph summary at the top and then let you use Google the way you normally would. Because if you want to know more than just the paragraph, well, here's regular Google. And I think that is like woefully underestimating how differently people are going to start to use Google as a result.

• 50:43David Pierce?

  And so to me, it's like, it's making these things in such a way that is like weird and different is one thing. But to just push them at people and be like, this is a familiar thing that you totally understand is a disaster. And that's so much of what we're getting is like, this thing sounds like a person. Talk to it like a person. It works like a person. Like, it super doesn't. Not even close. And it's all it's going to do is run you into trouble.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, to me, this is the question that like, all of these products have to answer. Right? Is what are people's expectations? And can you change them fast enough? I, I truly do not know the answer to that because I think what people are responding to is these computers are talking to them.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out, people confidently, flirtatiously talking to you, charmingly talking to you, is a great way to get a lot of people to believe a lot of lies.

• 51:35David Pierce?

  That's how you get Alex Cranz in a newsboy cap.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. This is how swing dance happened to America. I don't know if that's true, but like, Google knows this because it operates YouTube. It knows this problem intimately, right? There's a lot of charming liars. Here we are. We're on YouTube. But it's interesting that it's like running full force into making the problem. And like you said, Alex, owning those search results, like, that's Google's fault that they told you that answer. Whether or not you think it's appropriate to pop open the back of a camera, that's Google's answers now. It's not some answer in a Reddit thread. It's not some answer from a friend that you're kind of mad at. It's just Google's problem now. It's gonna be opening eyes problem. There's one more to talk about. We should talk about, we should talk about search very briefly. We should talk about everything else Google has. We gotta take a break, though. We've been at this for a minute. We'll be right back.

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• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Existential crisis about banging an iPad is on pause for the rest of this first cast. I know you wanted more of it.

• 54:00David Pierce?

  I thought you were gonna say over and I was like, well, that's a lie, but on pause, we can live with it.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Kevin Roos still wanders these streets, David. By the way, we're good friends with both Kevin and Casey at Hartford.

• 54:10David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  We out of love. Although I do worry. Out of love.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  All right. Just not as much as we love our iPads.

• 54:21David Pierce?

  It's like my wife, my iPad, Kevin Roos is like, I would say the big three.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Man, the dog just got a job. He's a child.

• 54:31David Pierce?

  He's there. He's fine. He doesn't play me any YouTube videos.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. Uh, look, the OpenAI stuff and the Google stuff, right? These like video multimodal search chat interfaces, those are the main events. Google announced 10 million other things at I O. All of which were named Gemini. Basically, or variations of it. It's very confusing. David, can you just run us down the stuff?

• 54:58David Pierce?

  Sure. So basically, the the theme of Google I O is just Gemini in everything. There was Gemini in Google Photos, which powers a feature called Ask Photos that lets you ask questions of the photos in your Google Photos. The example they gave was you can just search what's my license plate number? And it'll find your license plate number in your license plate in a photo in your Google Photos, which as somebody who only knows my driver's license number because it's in my Google Photos, rules all about that feature.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes. By the way, that might be the single most important thing that they announced was AI search in Google Photos.

• 55:33David Pierce?

  Oh, it also, as far as I could tell, I wasn't there live, but it it got a big reaction as far as I could tell, both live on the live stream and just in our office, people being like, yes, license plate search.

• 55:43Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Turns out no one knows what their license plate is. You know what I think it is? It's Google Photos is so close to being able to do that now. So is Apple Photos and it's why that you start to ask it things it can't do. So if you ever search your Google Photos, you quickly start to ask for things that it can't do because it's so close to being able to do that now. Right? So you can just ask it for like, show me all the people wearing a blue shirt on this day in the past and like it'll figure it out. Right? Because it has some ability of that knowledge. I personally search for the word truck a lot. Just a gaze at my now departed pickup truck. I needed to know my VIN number for when I traded in the truck. And I just searched for the words VIN number and it just like found it, right?

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Because I'd taken a picture of it. The idea that you can extend that, I think people responded to it because they're already trying.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  So now you're going to give the people what they want. It's like very good.

• 56:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. So that was one thing that got a lot of excitement. Sort of in the same vein of like things you already kind of want to do. They announced a bunch of Gemini stuff in Workspace. There's a, there's a thing where you can like ask similar questions of your email. The example they gave was if you have concert tickets, or I think it was Nick's tickets was one of the examples they used. You can just say like, what time do the doors open at the next game tonight? And it'll actually look in your email for your ticket to find that information. That kind of stuff is neat. There was a bunch of stuff in just the kind of general model universe. There was a new version of the Imagine model, which is one of the ones that developers can use for creative tools.

• 57:20David Pierce?

  There was VO, which is Google's answer to Sora, which is a text to video model.

• 57:25Alex Cranz?

  Which seemed really cool, but like

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Alex Cranz?

  It seemed even better than Sora in a lot of ways.

• 57:30David Pierce?

  It also debatable whether either of them actually exist in the world. So we'll see. There was a new thing called Gemini Live, which was like a always on voice chatty thing. Basically very similar to the one that OpenAI announced. Project Astra is the big like long-term vision. Gemini Live is that just sort of specific voice thing. There were, there was an update to Synth ID, which is how Google is attempting to figure out a way to watermark AI-generated stuff. They're now doing it with text, which I thought was really interesting, but also with videos, which goes along with VO and all the stuff they're doing there. Bunch of stuff for Gemini Advanced and Gemini Nano and Gemini 1.5 Flash,

• 58:12David Pierce?

  which is a new model just designed for all of us to be fast. Like it's, the names are insane. And I'm sure I've gotten two thirds of them wrong and I don't care because it's Google's fault. You've gotten them all right so far. The names are dumb. There was a new one. There's a new AI thing in YouTube called Music AI Sandbox, which I confess I don't totally understand because there's been a bunch of kind of overlapping AI music things inside of YouTube and they glossed over it so quickly that I think it might just be kind of an amalgam of some of those things already. But that's the thing that exists. They're working with musicians on that stuff. Uh, new Gemma models, which are Google's open sourced AI models. Uh, Circle to Search is in Android doing more stuff. They had a bunch of little things in

• 58:56David Pierce?

  Android designed to make kind of Gemini all over the operating system in interesting ways.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  So the Android piece is really interesting to me. Uh, like in a big way. I don't know if any of it will come true because Google, but Dave Burke got on stage and started demoing AI features in Android and he's like, this works as we control the operating system. And you put that sort of right next to, we've combined the Android team and the Pixel team under Rick Osterloh. And you're like, oh, like this is the, like, if you make this really good, this is the thing that is actually compelling to switch from Samsung phone or iPhone.

• 59:34David Pierce?

  This is how Google thinks it wins for sure. Both with Pixel specifically and with Android in general. Like, I think this is true or false, the thing they have identified as their chance to leapfrog Apple in a really good way. But they've always thought AI was their way.

• 59:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but now it's like the user interface for the operating system is AI. Like they built like a Super Rabbit. You know, it's like, that's the thing that they're getting at is like you can just be on your phone and like circle a thing and like the robot will like go do it for you or like you can just talk to it and like use the app for you. And unlike Rabbit, uh, Google has some AI technology. Yeah.

• 1:00:11David Pierce?

  Well, and there was one thing that they talked about where the sort of context awareness, where it'll actually understand what's on the screen as you're talking to your phone. That's the kind of thing that you genuinely only can do if you control the operating system. Like, no one else has that access. But also, Google has been trying to do this for forever. Do you remember Google Now, which was just the same damn thing? Like, the promise of so much of the large language model stuff right now is all this stuff we've been trying to do for 15 years, we can do now because the tech is better? Like, these ideas are not new. It's so funny. They just think we have the tech to do it now.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  Or the tech to do it convincingly. I just have to keep putting that asterisk there. To do it convincingly, maybe not to do it.

• 1:00:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. To at least make you want to try it.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58David Pierce?

  Is as far as they have to go. Uh, there's more, there's a bunch of search stuff that we should talk about, but it was basically like, they made all the models better and are starting to introduce some more specific models. Like, I think Gemini 1.5 Pro Flash, in addition to being an unbelievably stupid name, is really interesting because it's just a different version of Gemini that is just designed for speed. Its whole job is we just pared everything down and made it as fast as we possibly could. And I think you're gonna start to see more little things like that as they tune to these kind of specific use cases over time. So it really, top to bottom, was just, here's the thing, we Gemini'd it. Is it better now? Do you like it? That was the whole vibe.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  So I will say, I think the most important one is Google Photos. It's the one that will hit the most people the fastest and change how people use the application, which I think is cool. Uh, like, really cool. Then there's the rest of it, which, you know, I think the major criticism I had was like, there's too much stuff, it was too unfocused. Like, they just said the word Gemini. And if you just read that list of things named Gemini, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini Live, Gemini Now, Gemini... Like, it's insane.

• 1:02:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  They announced the thing where they're like, here's a prototype and idea where you have an AI teammate. Who has their own Gmail address and just like yell at it.

• 1:02:12David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  His name was Chip. That's like, this is a ridiculous like this is pure vapor.

• 1:02:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  Like you are announcing vaporware. There's no reason to do this. Like you're just, why? Right? You could pare it down to like, here's our product and here's all the things it can do. And that'd be more focused, but I think Google thinks it has to like cover the waterfront of every idea you might have with AI and like, we had that idea too. And we have infrastructure to pull it off and we have Google Workspace. So we can just deploy a hundred AI teammates to your Google Workspace tomorrow. Startups, don't you dare.

• 1:02:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I really like the, the way I've come to think about all of these things is that they used to be kind of half for developers and half for like the general public to sort of show the world what you've been working on. Now it's like a third for Wall Street.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:03:00David Pierce?

  So that you can make sure investors trust that you have a real AI strategy. Because fundamentally, that's what a lot of this is about. Google is still fighting the idea that it got caught off guard by OpenAI and ChatGPT and is still trying to assert itself to investors specifically as a big player in the AI future, which means trillions of dollars, if you can convince everybody that that's the case. So it's like, it's a third Wall Street. It's like 50% developers and then it's just a little teeny tiny slice left for regular people.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  You almost did the rest of that math and you just, you walked away from her at the end.

• 1:03:37David Pierce?

  Seventeen percent regular people.

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 1:03:40David Pierce?

  And it's just like, you, you could just feel Google getting up there over and over and being like, we are good at AI.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48David Pierce?

  Like that was so much of it. Yeah, like we did it.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  That's how I felt about Apple, the iPad event. They were just like, the best AI piece. It's like, what are you talking about?

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, this is made for analysts. So the one thing that's really interesting there, specifically in the context of Wall Street, is AI overviews and search. Which they announced very quickly. So. Google has had this thing called search generative experience sort of in testing for a long time now, a year where you search for something and there's like an AI answer. And it's like, here's the stuff and they've been tweaking it and messing with it and like seeing how it works for a while. And what they announced at I O, which is a huge deal, is it's rolling out to everyone in the U. S. Like this week, it's going to be called AI overviews. And it's, that's it. This is search now. And on earnings calls last year, Sindhar was saying, this is the future of search, like search will be this thing.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  This is where we're going. And here we are, where you search for something on Google and depending on the query, Google just reads the web and delivers the answer for you. And next to that, they have this thing, AI powered like search page, which is basically what Arc browser is doing, right? Where you like, go ask Arc a question and it like reads the web and like makes a little webpage for you with all the answers in it. Google's going to do that now as the search engine results page, the SERP. Instead of 10 blue links, it will just like make a little custom webpage of like best anniversary restaurants in Dallas and be like, we've concocted this webpage for you. That's wild, right? This is like flip the table on how the internet works in a big way. I would say the response

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  from the media industry in particular is apocalyptic. Like, that's the word I would use. Fair. The, the CEO of the news media lines, which I think we have to disclose, like, I think Fox Media is in it. It's like, not my thing. But someone's in it. Sure. We are in the media.

• 1:05:39David Pierce?

  We are in the news media.

• 1:05:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we run, we operate in the media business and our executives are in various media business organizations. That's their sad ass. I just complain. But there's your disclosure. But the CEO of the news media line said to CNN, this is catastrophic to our traffic. Like, Google's going to keep all the traffic and they're not going to send us any traffic. We've been talking a lot about little sites that are already seeing Google traffic go to zero. I've been talking for years about this thing I call Google Zero, which if you've been listening to Verge has for a long time, you know that like our first big refer when we started was Yahoo. And we would like write stories about fish technology because the Yahoo algorithm loved fish. And we would just like do that on Fridays to fuck with Yahoo and it worked. I don't know. That's, that's how I built this business. It's like, I'm sorry.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  And then, you know, there's like Facebook traffic for a while and went away and I'm always like the thing, it will go away. That's like my inherent paranoia after all this time in the media. And I'm like, that number will go down and that's Google and that's the last refer of note across the entire industry. I've been calling this Google zero for years. Like, what are you going to do if your Google traffic goes to zero? Undecoder asks me to executives all the time.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  And this is the moment where I think it clicked into reality for a lot of those executives. That Google is going to start answering the questions by reading their sites and delivering an AI summary of the answer. And Google's response to this, and again, this is, we, we move through this quickly because I talked about this with Sundar and Decoder quite a bit. That's going on Monday, but um, Google's answer to this, Liz's answer to this, Liz Reader and Search is actually the links and the AI overviews get more clicks.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's their answer. Like straight up, they're like, actually, we're going to send more traffic this way. No one knows if that is true. The only people who know, who have the data to evaluate that are uh, Suneepa Shain and Liz Reed. And it's like, well, if that's true, that's great. If it's not true, or worse, if the halves get bigger, like you send more traffic to the big corporate sites and no traffic at all to anyone else.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  That's bad for the, like, that's bad, right? That will reshape the internet in particular ways. And maybe you think this is great. Like, maybe you think that indie media or whatever, small sites should build their own network of traffic and their own, this is our belief, right? Like, my belief very strongly is we should have our own audience away from platforms. But if you are like operating today and you're like, oh, my traffic is going to go to zero. My Google traffic is going to go to zero. You don't have the runway to like, do the thing.

• 1:08:07David Pierce?

  Right. They just turned it on. Like, it's just on now. Yeah.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, your, your business is gonna go away. And I, that is the thing that I think the pressure from OpenAI, the competitive pressure from OpenAI and all these other companies, it pushed Google to do a thing very quickly that's gonna reshape the internet in almost indescribable ways, because the traffic flows of search traffic are about to, like, table flip.

• 1:08:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do think the, the example that most immediately keeps coming to mind for me for this is the what time does the Super Bowl start? Kind of thing. And that, to some extent, has already died, thanks to the knowledge graph, which now is just like, it just pops up a thing at the top. But what, I, I talked to Liz Reid a few days before I own, one of the things that she said, almost in as many words, is that there is a type of information on the internet that Google just views as commodity information that I shouldn't need to go to another website to know the answer to, right? Like, before, if you wanted to know the years that Abraham Lincoln was the president, you would search that on Google and then you would click on the link.

• 1:09:12David Pierce?

  And Google, at some point, has decided that that is just commoditized information that belongs to no one, and so I should have to go nowhere to get it. And then, if you go all the way down the spectrum, you get down to, like, human perspectives and original stuff and really beautiful art, right? And that is the stuff that I think Google earnestly believes should still belong to those people. And that Google's job is still to send you as the user to those places. And I think Google would like you to believe that it is very obvious where one of those things ends and the other begins. And in fact, the whole middle ground, which is most of the internet, is some, is, is somewhere in between,

• 1:09:50David Pierce?

  and there is just no line that it is possible to draw between what, what is it just sort of out there in the ether that everyone can know? And the idea that you and I both used some of our time to write a story, hoping we'd get some clicks and some AdSense, that that's actually like a Unnecessary thing for the enjoyment of the internet. Maybe that should go away. I'm somewhat receptive to that version of the conversation. Where that ends and good things that deserve to exist begins is now up to Google. And that is what scares me.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they have not really articulated anything beyond like the cream or else the top.

• 1:10:30David Pierce?

  You know, like, yeah, they say high quality information and human perspectives and a bunch of just like vague buzzwords that don't give anybody anything.

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  Isn't this like just what Ask Jeeves was doing for decades?

• 1:10:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Alex Cranz?

  Like, did we all decide that that was a stupid way to interact with the internet? And that's why Ask Jeeves still exists, but way fewer people use it now. I think it still exists.

• 1:10:53David Pierce?

  It's ask.com now.

• 1:10:55Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  Jeeves is fired.

• 1:10:57David Pierce?

  Please.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  Some old tweets surfaced and Jeeves is no longer with us.

• 1:11:04David Pierce?

  But again, Alex, that's it's a perfect example of like, none of these are new ideas, right? The, the, the only thing that's new is that everyone has decided it's now possible to do this well.

• 1:11:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:11:15Alex Cranz?

  Ask.com does TV show reviews now.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  So that's pure, just like Google.

• 1:11:23David Pierce?

  Example, right?

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like why we spent a year last year covering the SEO industry. Because I, I like, I think it's important to describe the thing as it was before you can understand how it changed. So we're like, let's just, these are the lot, these are the glory days of the SEO industry as it exists today. Which is you buy ask.com and you search for which TV shows are trending. And you shove a bunch of content onto a high ranking domain to collect some pennies. This is happening right away across the media industry and that's happening at like AI scale. Like you buy Sports Illustrated and you shove a bunch of AI content on it is a real thing that has happened.

• 1:12:00David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. You, you buy these like zombie domain names. What's the last one?

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  The All.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  The All.

• 1:12:08David Pierce?

  Oh, no, was it the hairpin?

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  The hairpin. That's what I'm thinking of. Like this beloved women's blog and you shove a bunch of AI content on it. Like, that's already happening. This should wipe all that out, right? And that's, I think, what Google would like is to wipe all that noise out. That implies, by the way, that Google can make good determinations about what's good and what's bad, which the current state of Google does not provide a huge amount of evidence for. It also implies that Google will prioritize the beautiful human content over the AI content, when a huge part of Google's business is making the AI content.

• 1:12:45David Pierce?

  And monetizing the AI content.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48David Pierce?

  But actually, Google has an incentive for that content to exist at giant scale.

• 1:12:54Alex Cranz?

  It also kind of pulls the curtain back on like, Google, probably more than Google should want it to, right? Like, we, especially in our industry, we know that Google is an enormously powerful thing that really controls a lot of conversations and stuff, simply by virtue of the fact that if you want to engage in these conversations, you first go search for them, and the first place you go search for them is Google. And so Google kind of dictates how you, how you perceive these things. If Google just starts answering the questions, it is like the theater of, oh, I search Google to figure this out, and I have the agency of finding the answers is gone. It's just Google.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  Dude, this is the phrase.

• 1:13:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  They use this on stage, let Google do the Googling for you. This is the frame for how they talk about search.

• 1:13:34Alex Cranz?

  Horrible way to do it.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot there. We can talk about this forever. I mean, I personally can talk about this forever in tiresome ways, and I assure you that if you work at Vox Media, you have heard me talk about nothing else for four years. Like, a lot of The Verge is designed around Google Zero. And the point is, I, I don't think anyone deserves traffic from Google, right? That expectation, I think, has actually been really unhealthy for the media industry, that like, we're entitled to traffic from platforms, especially for us, because we cover the platforms. I would like some distance there. In a real way, and also just like, I'm a brat and I don't want to be dependent on anyone ever for anything. But this is a pivotal moment, like, Google waving through,

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  we're gonna do AI overview and search for everyone in the US, and then sort of immediately pivoting to, oh, and also you can search your Google Photos. That was, they like lit a bomb, and they're like, and you can find your license plates. And they spent no time on it. It does not appear that anybody knew they were gonna do this. We'll see how it shakes out. I think the next 12 to 18 months are gonna be an absolutely bananas time in media. I think this is the thing that's gonna, I would predict that there are some lawsuits filed over this from the various media lobbying groups, the same way that they've already started suing OpenAI. There's gonna be a big shakeout from AI overviews. And a huge part of it, and this is just what I'll focus on, is Google's claim is that it will send more traffic. You cannot

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  measure that claim inside of Google's own tools today, or with any data that Google is providing. And if they want to close that loop, they have to make it like testable, that this is true, right? That you have to be able to see the data for yourself and say, okay, like, we were the one that showed up in the AI overview box, and we got way more traffic from it than when we were getting, like, you cannot measure that today. So, we'll see. But I, you listen to the code or send our, because we talked about a lot, that's one of my day. But we're gonna be talking about this. I guarantee you for about 18 months, because the internet is gonna get reshaped around this particular feature in search.

• 1:15:39David Pierce?

  And it's gonna change a lot between now and then. Like, there are, the weirdest thing about this is like, SGE changes a ton in a year, and I think Google is maybe going to be surprised at how different it looks once you give it to everybody.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's gonna be weird. All right, we should take a break, we'll come back with the lightning round, which as of yet is unsponsored, but the bytes, they're coming. It's gonna happen one of these days. We'll be right back.

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• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's the lightning round. Sponsored by me, Neil Eppetele.

• 1:17:43Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  The guy who coined the phrase.

• 1:17:45David Pierce?

  I didn't get any of that money. I don't know.

• 1:17:48Alex Cranz?

  You're so generous. Where is it?

• 1:17:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm just moving money around my own house. I'm just doing tax fraud.

• 1:17:55Nilay Patel?

  There's kind of a lot in lightning round. David, do you go first?

• 1:17:59David Pierce?

  So there's a Microsoft Surface event on Monday, which there's been a lot of hype for because Qualcomm and Microsoft and others have been kind of quietly intimating that they were about to get a new generation of Snapdragon chips that are going to be like as good as the M-series Apple chips. And the war between Mac and PC is about to go on. And then we got a huge leak from Dell. I think it was a 311 page document detailing the next XPS 13, which is Dell's best laptop. It's like the default which Windows laptop should most people buy. It's the XPS 13.

• 1:18:35David Pierce?

  And the, the things that they're saying on here are pretty unbelievable. 12 hours of battery life, 13 hours of battery life on the lower spec models, local video playback for 29 hours, tons of power that like, at least according to the marketing copy, the things that we've been thinking might be true of this run of Snapdragon processors, uh, might actually be true of these Snapdragon processors.

• 1:19:03Alex Cranz?

  I just wanna highlight that Apple last week, like in kind of a surprising move, announced their M4 processor in an iPad. And I don't think that's an accident, right? Like, like Neela, you were talking earlier about how a lot of these things are for Wall Street. Apple did it for Wall Street because it is very aware that this is happening right now.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see.

• 1:19:29Alex Cranz?

  We'll, yeah.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  I would be remiss if I didn't note two things. One, boy, we've heard this story before. So who knows? But two, a lot of what we have, a lot of our coverage is in Tom Warren's new newsletter Notepad by Tom Warren.

• 1:19:43David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  Which is his new newsletter about all things Microsoft, particularly AI, the future of PCs in this particular way, and whatever Microsoft is doing in gaming, which I won't even continue to talk about because it will immediately be another hour of the first guest. You can, you can sign up for Notepad now. You can get it in a bundle with command line. We have two paid newsletters. All right. See, you see our empire is growing.

• 1:20:07Alex Cranz?

  I hope there's some like arrows pointing down saying buy now.

• 1:20:10David Pierce?

  Subscribe to Tom's newsletter so that he can buy one of these new XPS 13s. That's really, that's really what Neela is saying here. Tom needs the battery life so he can write his newsletter. Please subscribe to Notepad.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's got, he's got to write a lot of those every week now. Okay, Alex, what's yours?

• 1:20:24Alex Cranz?

  Uh, have you heard of?

• 1:20:26Nilay Patel?

  It's a great name.

• 1:20:27Alex Cranz?

  Otherwise known as PPSPP. You could say it like that, which is how it's supposed to be because it's, it's PSP.

• 1:20:38David Pierce?

  Lure cats, right?

• 1:20:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Alex Cranz?

  You just keep saying it until somebody tells you to shut up and then you're like, yeah, do you want to play it? It's a it's a new emulation software. It's PSP. Do you guys remember the PSP?

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, I had a PSP. I had one of the great cartridges of all time.

• 1:20:54Alex Cranz?

  Um, I broke one of those cartridges, but I loved the game and I was like, poor, so I couldn't go get a new one. And I always have to be like flicking the plastic just to get it just right and then putting it back in.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  Only Sony invents MiniDisc and then invents another MiniDisc.

• 1:21:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  For the PSP.

• 1:21:11Alex Cranz?

  But somehow a little worse.

• 1:21:14Alex Cranz?

  But now this now you can play it on the iPhone, which is really exciting because it was like a tank game and I really want to play that tank game. I'm going to be able to play it on my iPhone now. And also RetroArch, which is like the emulator software. So RetroArch lets you basically play just about any kind of if if somebody out there has created emulation software for a console you have never heard of, you can probably find it in RetroArch.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 1:21:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's the software itself is a little.

• 1:21:44Alex Cranz?

  It is not the most user friendly. It is not going to be as neat.

• 1:21:46Nilay Patel?

  It's hideous. Just just saying. It is the ugliest app of all time.

• 1:21:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it works. I just put it on my my my Apple TV. And as almost as soon as we are done recording, I will be putting a bunch of games on my Apple TV and testing it for for work and definitely just for work. But it's it's cool and it's just remarkable because like even a couple of years ago, you were like trying to figure out how to get all of these emulated games onto your TV. And it was really limited and you could do like a Raspberry Pi, you could mess around with Android. All of that. And now you can just do it on an Apple TV and it's like, welcome, Apple. I've been here for 10 years, but I'm excited you're here because I kind of like my Apple TV more than my Shield TV. I'm so sorry to all the Shield people. I'm sorry.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  Dude, end of the show.

• 1:22:36Alex Cranz?

  Bedroom now.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  So most of this, wow.

• 1:22:39David Pierce?

  I have have been stewing on the idea and being increasingly angry about it that the Apple TV is the only good set top box left. They're all bad, but it is the least bad. Because it is the one least destroyed by like ads and scams and all kinds of other nonsense.

• 1:22:59Alex Cranz?

  I watched Palm Royale because it was like, do you want to watch Palm Royale?

• 1:23:02Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, yeah, Carol Burnett. That it can just do, it can just be a Roku.

• 1:23:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  It's headed there in extra.

• 1:23:07David Pierce?

  It's infuriating, but I will say RetroArch in particular being on the Apple TV. It's like a native Apple TV app.

• 1:23:14Alex Cranz?

  And it just.

• 1:23:14David Pierce?

  Native is strong.

• 1:23:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15David Pierce?

  The it's, but it exists on the Apple TV.

• 1:23:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18David Pierce?

  Uh, and some of the others work with like AirPlay and stuff and are starting to be pretty good. But the Apple TV as a like retro console thing is going to be a big deal.

• 1:23:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you can just do it now. Retro, like there's gonna be a lot more that will probably be much more user friendly, but RetroArch is, is, is the big one. You can just go play it now and that's dope.

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  I keep, I keep thinking about something David said a couple of weeks ago, which was all of this regulatory stuff was really like hard to understand. And then the emulators happened and now everyone gets it. Yep. A little bit of regulatory pressure opened up the application model on the app. And it's like, oh, everyone wants this.

• 1:23:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, particularly for the Apple TV. Apple has insisted that you like do its dumb stuff and has not won. Like that product has not won and it's by far the smallest install base. It has the least, like the idea that everyone's going to be playing games on the Apple TV actually did not come true. And now it's like, oh shit, everyone's gonna be playing games on their Apple TV.

• 1:24:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, I have never wanted to actually hook up a, a controller to an Apple TV before today. Like every other time they'd be like, you want to play this game on your Apple TV? No.

• 1:24:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24Alex Cranz?

  Don't ask me that. I'm not gonna lie to you. Like, no. And now I'm like, okay, I, I want to do that. I want to play Chrono Trigger on my TV.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  Um, I think I, I honestly think the emulator stuff is just the biggest indictment of Apple's and like closed fistedness that you can get. Cause it's like the second you let people do good stuff, they're like more excited about these products than they have been all the time.

• 1:24:46Nilay Patel?

  I have two in my lightning round. One of them is just telling David to talk about his iPad reviews, which I know you already talked about earlier this week, but I wasn't here. So I just, it feels like the everyone landed in exactly the same place, which is, boy, I hope W W C involves an iPad OS update.

• 1:25:04David Pierce?

  So yes and no. The conversation around this has actually been really interesting because the, most of the reviews, including mine, basically say that. Like it is a, I, I actually worried I was going overboard gushing about the hardware. There were others who went much further, like the, with the iPad Pro in particular, like it is, it is a spectacular piece of engineering and design. But the question forever is like, what is this thing actually for? And I think what has come true this week is there's been a subset of people who are like, yeah, this thing needs to be more like a Mac. Let me run Mac apps, open it up, let me do whatever I want. Like, give me a Mac in this body and I will be happy. And then there's a much

• 1:25:45David Pierce?

  different set of people who are louder than I thought, who are like, no, this is, that is not the point. I like, maybe I want a touchscreen Mac. We'll have that conversation separately, but the iPad is supposed to be different. And one of the things I said in my review is that like, after talking to people at Apple and about the iPad, and I've just been covering this a long time, like Apple's running theory is that it can do like, whatever the opposite of death by a thousand cuts is, that like, rather than have sort of one big thing that makes the iPad for everybody, it can have one that is for you, Neelai, and one that is for you, Alex, and one that is for me, David, and we'll all buy iPads and we'll use them differently. And that that for Apple is like the ideal outcome. And

• 1:26:26David Pierce?

  there are a lot of people for whom that idea is like really compelling and really romantic. Those people tend to be people who have that specific thing in the iPad already, people who love the pencil, or people who like, do the insane architect thing of like, holding up the iPad and walking around the table to show somebody your designs, which I'm not convinced is real.

• 1:26:45Nilay Patel?

  We got an email from someone who, I don't remember the email specifically, but they're either, they are an interior designer, or their, their partner's an interior designer, and they're like, We just run the iPad to the ground like every day.

• 1:26:56David Pierce?

  It's a thing.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  It's a great, great.

• 1:26:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I think the, the question then for Apple is like, okay, do you try to find the big mainstreamy thing, which I think the obvious answer is make it more laptop-y or just like open it up so that people can do more stuff on it. Or do you keep just chipping away at this thing like one tiny use case at a time until you've built the magic? And I think like that second approach is way more fun and interesting and leads to something very cool in the long run. We're also 14 years into this and Apple has found two.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And to me, the, the thing that I got as, you know, like on planes all week, basically just like watching people angrily post at each other on the iPad. And I was like, I, these are, these are the same iPad reviews we've been writing for years.

• 1:27:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Nilay Patel?

  It's the same iPad. Like I forgot that I wrote this iPad review in 2013 when the first iPad came out, like the same exact review, running Iowa 7. Like, boy, it'd be cool if I could do stuff with this. And then I wrote a version of that review in 2018. And then David, you wrote a version of that review yesterday. And then I just saw Dieter at the Google event. He's like, I wrote these iPad reviews. Like, Dieter is the one I believe who coined the phrase, it's an iPad. It's like look directly to camera, like it's an iPad and you know exactly what that means. That's us. We did that here. And the thing that gets me about it, the thing that I've, the, the reason I want to talk about it right after emulators is it's Apple's business model that is holding this computer back.

• 1:28:21David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:28:21Nilay Patel?

  It is not the capabilities of the iPad or some idealism or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is Apple's business model is preventing application developers from using the full power of the iPad. The fact that this thing cannot actually run a desktop web browser, they say it's S I plus, it absolutely is not.

• 1:28:40David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:28:40Nilay Patel?

  Nope. It just isn't.

• 1:28:41David Pierce?

  Also, if you go to docs.google.com in the browser on an iPad, it will punt you to the Google Docs app.

• 1:28:49Nilay Patel?

  It's the most miserable experience in the world. So what's really interesting is the Google Docs app. This is, you know, all of our years of reviewing the iPad, we would complain about this and Apple would always be like, who cares? Only journalists use Google Docs. And then they realized the journalists who review the iPad use Google Docs. And so they fixed it by faking the user agent in mobile Safari to tell Google Docs that it's desktop Safari. So you can run the good Google Docs in Safari on the iPad. What they did not do was make mobile Safari good.

• 1:29:15David Pierce?

  Right, or fix it in Chrome or any of the other browsers that you can run on the iPad.

• 1:29:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, and that the reason for that is straightforwardly a business model reason. It's not that the thing isn't powerful enough to run the regular Safari that you can run on a laptop. Right? Yeah, I have an Intel Mac downstairs. I have a 2015 iMac sitting right over there. That is one tenth as powerful as the iPad Pro. It runs regular Safari just fine. It runs Chrome in a way that suggests that I should buy a new computer, but it runs Chrome, right? The reason Apple doesn't allow that to happen on the iPad is because the web is now the most powerful application distribution mechanism that has ever existed.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  It is by far the most popular in the world, and if you bring that to the iPad, the App Store goes away. Because now it's just now you just have a laptop. You have a Chromebook. And Apple's business, a really beautiful Chromebook, and Apple's business will not allow that to happen. And so this product is just absolutely held back by a business decision that maybe it's fair. I don't think, fine, make your business decisions. But we should be honest that this isn't a technical limitation or an idealistic limitation or blah blah. Apple is making a hard business decision about the application models on its products. Regulators are starting to crack that open and people are starting to see, oh, emulators are great. Like, all this other stuff that we could do is great. And the last one to fall, I promise you, is they will put a desktop class browser on the iPad

• 1:30:41Nilay Patel?

  and it will suddenly become 100 times more powerful as a computer. And more and more people will be like, I can just use this all the time. It's not the file system, although I love a file system. It's literally the application environment is completely neutered.

• 1:30:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I think the browser solves a much bigger set of problems than like, you know, x86 interoperability with the old apps that you want to use. Because like, I'm fine, there's going to be a bunch of apps you can never use on the iPad, so be it. The web, there's no good excuse for that to not be one of those things.

• 1:31:14Alex Cranz?

  That doesn't even work anymore because all the laptops are ARM-based.

• 1:31:19David Pierce?

  I mean, that's true. Including, including Apple. See how like

• 1:31:22Alex Cranz?

  Like their most powerful laptop processor line is now in the iPad first.

• 1:31:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just saying, like, the, the thing about the iPad, the thing that it's been missing to me from the discourse from the beginning is like, Apple designs every inch of this product. Right. That they are, they make the screen and the input devices and the operating system. And they're like, there's not a thing in this that is not an Apple choice. And this is the thing that they want.

• 1:31:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Nilay Patel?

  Fine. But then you have to be like, Apple chose to limit this this specific way.

• 1:31:54David Pierce?

  And I think there's a version of that trade that is more palatable at, you know, $349 for the 10th gen iPad than it like, I mean, I saw people spending $2,000 and $3,000 on the, and I just like, I think the, the argument that this should be a different device, that it, it, it's meant for different things. It has, it does different things. Well, like, no, at that price, it should do everything well that it is physically capable of doing. And it just can't. And it is, it is like, you're not letting it.

• 1:32:21Alex Cranz?

  Need to fight you on one thing, David. Cause I was one of those people that spent way too much money on an iPad Pro this week.

• 1:32:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:28Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. I got the 11 inch. It's first one I've, that first iPad Pro I've had since the 2018 one. That magic keyboard case, even though it's the new one and it's all much better is horrible. It is, it's so thick. It is so like, as soon as you, you drop that iPad into it, all of the magic of it goes away. And I was like, okay, so it's the exact same as my 2018 iPad, but the screen's better. Like, that was the immediate feeling I had in a really like demoralizing way.

• 1:32:56David Pierce?

  There is something, there is something to that. I mean, it, it doubles the size of the iPad. Like the keyboard at this point, I think is both thicker and heavier than

• 1:33:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05David Pierce?

  the actual iPad, which is bonkers and probably says more about how thin the iPad is than anything else. But also like, if it were a little thinner, it would be floppier. Even then it is, it's just an unsolvable problem.

• 1:33:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, it was the same feeling you get when you use like those inexpensive Chrome, Chromebooks that are convertible Chromebooks or whatever, right? And it's like, okay, what do you want? And like, yes, realistically, having it be feel like a laptop is more satisfying, but also, I hate it.

• 1:33:34Alex Cranz?

  Fix that.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Alex Cranz?

  I miss this. The Surface does it better.

• 1:33:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna play with yours, Al, because I really thought.

• 1:33:40Alex Cranz?

  I'll bring it in for you.

• 1:33:42David Pierce?

  The Surface, having a built-in kickstand, and then all you have to do is attach the keyboard, is the correct way.

• 1:33:47Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:33:48David Pierce?

  I believe that with every fiber of my being.

• 1:33:51Nilay Patel?

  Man. Look, Mac versus PC is back on. Subscribe to Notepad by Tom Warren for all the latest on the newly resurgent Mac versus PC battle. Everything old is new again. That was my lightning round. Well, the other one I was gonna point out is Andy Hawkins wrote a great piece about just like self-driving cars have hit a wall. And I was gonna make the same comparison to AI, which is everyone got really excited about that technology. And then it just didn't do the thing.

• 1:34:16David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:34:16Nilay Patel?

  And I would just caution everyone, like, can they actually do the thing? But you should go read that piece by Andy, because it's very good. I think we're like five hours over.

• 1:34:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, we should go.

• 1:34:24Nilay Patel?

  Should we talk about search for a little bit?

• 1:34:27Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's much more to come on Monday. Again, we have the interview with Sundar. He and I got into it. I like talking to Sundar. I've talked to him once a year for a long time now, basically. He was fire in this one. So stay tuned for that on Monday. And then it says here on Sunday, we're gonna do the five senses of gaming smell and taste. I don't know what that means. I'm very worried about what Liam and David are doing with the Vergecast. But it sounds great.

• 1:34:52Alex Cranz?

  This face on David is just great.

• 1:34:54David Pierce?

  You officially know everything I need you to know. It's gonna be great.

• 1:34:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:35:03David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. 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.

• 1:35:20Speaker 08

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