ChatGPT has a Scarlett Johansson problem

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss announcements from Microsoft Build, the OpenAI's trouble with Scarlett Johansson, new Sonos headphones, and more. Further reading: Microsoft’s big bet on building a new type of AI computer Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs https://www.theverge.com › microsoft-surface-pro-pric... Here’s the eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments How does the Microsoft Surface Laptop stack up to the MacBook Air? Microsoft Build 2024: everything announced Windows now has AI-powered copy and paste Microsoft is making File Explorer more powerful with version control and 7z compression Here’s the eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments Microsoft Edge will translate and dub YouTube videos as you’re watching them Microsoft brings out a small language model that can look at pictures Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agents act like virtual employees to automate tasks Microsoft outage took down Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT search features OpenAI is ‘in conversations’ with Scarlett Johansson over the ChatGPT voice that sounds just like her OpenAI pulls its Scarlett Johansson-like voice for ChatGPT Lawyers say OpenAI could be in real trouble with Scarlett Johansson Scarlett Johansson told OpenAI not to use her voice — and she’s not happy they might have anyway OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game OpenAI’s News Corp deal licenses content from WSJ, New York Post, and more OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts The US government is trying to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster The Sonos Ace headphones are here, and they’re damn impressive Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s divisive app redesign here’s an electric salt spoon that adds umami flavor Apple needs to explain that bug that resurfaced deleted photos Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut 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 Verchast, the flagship podcast of computers that remember everything about you, no matter what. It's gonna be great. This is the future. It's been the dream of every person in computing forever, to make sure that the computer never forgets every single thing you looked at ever. What could possibly go wrong? And then talks to you in a slightly sensual way. Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Cranz is here. Hey. A lot of... Just a weird week. Can I tell you what I think the theme of the week is? Sure. It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Oh, that's good.

• 1:41Alex Cranz?

  That's a good...

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of where we are in the tech landscape right now. Is you can make your videos. You can tweet your tweets. And then we're gonna get your products. And the truth is gonna come out, right? Like, that's the cycle that we're in is it's great. It's a super great video. I'm glad you paid all the influencers. I'm gonna put your face computer on my face, man. And then we're gonna know. I'm gonna hold your I'm gonna hold your teenage engineering box. And then we're gonna know.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  I like it because it's one timeline darker than the is this anything timeline? And I feel like we were in the is this anything timeline for a while. And now it's it's getting slightly bleaker.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's probably broken and I don't believe you. We're gonna put AI in Google search and Google search is gonna tell you to put glue in your pizza. Which is a real headline. By the time you are listening to this, I think Kylie will have that headline up. Which is AI previews and Google search are overwhelmingly stupid. Mostly because they're reading Reddit. And Reddit is full of jokes. And people are now like willfully trying to like Google bombing is back.

• 2:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  Because you ask Google, like what mammal has the most bones? Which is something people are doing. And it goes and finds a Reddit joke from five years ago. That's like it's snakes.

• 3:05David Pierce?

  And it makes you realize like the the running joke on the internet is that sarcasm and jokes are very hard to understand. It turns out that like people still better at it than Google, which is real, real bad at it.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Again, the theme of the week. There's some exciting news this week, like legitimately cool news this week. Uh, David, you talked to Tom about everything that happened at Microsoft build in the surface event. Legitimately cool news. If that stuff works, the Mac versus PC race is fully back on. Uh, the processor wars are back on with a new metric. Right? Like they have Microsoft has NPU's now with the Qualcomm chips doing AI. Apple has neural engines. That's all really exciting. Boy, do I want that stuff to work. Right? Like, it's just a week. Do you not feel like open eye this week? We're gonna talk about open eye and Scarlett Johansson. And it's like, yeah, I don't believe you.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  What a weird place to be.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  It is. And it also, you end up in this place of like questioning everybody's intentions all the time too. Like with, with Microsoft, it's like, oh, Windows on ARM, you did it? That's so exciting. Do you remember all the other times that you told me that you did it? That, that's really interesting. And then with all this OpenAI stuff, the, the timelines are weird. Everybody is saying things that don't all make sense simultaneously. And it's just, you get to the point where it's like, does anyone know what they're talking about?

• 4:34David Pierce?

  And it's, it's just very strange. But I, I agree with you. And the Microsoft stuff in particular, I thought was both substantially nerdier and substantially more exciting than I expected it to be. Like, it was a wonky build in like, the best way.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's start there. We, we are going to talk about OpenAI and Skrull's your handsome later. We're gonna have a lightning round, unsponsored.

• 4:55David Pierce?

  For now.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  We gotta start a shoe company that's called unsponsored and then have the lightning round sponsored by unsponsored.

• 5:01David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  If you're a shoe investor, call me.

• 5:04David Pierce?

  Is it all the logos or is it no logos? No. On the shoe? I think it might be all the logos.

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right. You like bring it all the way back around.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's every shoe logo on it. And it's called unsponsored? Please. Like, somebody at mischief is building that right now. They just heard me. You can have that mischief. Enjoy.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  If you sponsor.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm not saying we're a bunch of IP experts on this show. I'm just saying, if you give us cash, we'll give you that idea. Okay, we, let's start with build, because it was an early build. And I think you guys only really scratched the surface with Tom, who was there. Great job covering it. The big news is obviously that the copilot PCs, right? Copilot plus PCs, which have the NPU, which are running on the new Snapdragon X processors. It should be noted that the team that built those processors at Qualcomm is from a company called Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired. Nuvia is a bunch of ex Apple chip designers. You can see how they caught up.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  It's a pretty straight line, right? You're losing to Apple. The Apple chip designers leave. You buy them. So you're competitive with Apple again. We gotta run the benchmarks. We gotta get the things. But Cranz, I mean, you're, you're a chip nerd. Do you, do you buy it right now?

• 6:16Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think it's the Nuvia part of it that makes me kind of cautiously optimistic. And also the fact that laptop makers actually want us to try the laptops.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, that's a big one.

• 6:28Alex Cranz?

  They do not. When it sucks, they're like, you, you, are you sure you want this? And they slow roll you, right? Like they wait a while to get it to you and then you end up having to buy it and review it yourself. And this time they're like, when do you want it? We'll get it to you next week. They're really eager about it and in a way that like surprised me. I took a few briefings on the laptops and I was like, oh, you guys are like pumped. I'm not used to that. And it reminds me a lot of when AMD was like coming back, when it was making its big comeback. What in like 2017, where suddenly people were like, do you care about AMD? Like get excited. And I was like, oh, oh, this is weird. But yeah, the, the, the MPUs is the big, is the big deal here. I think like Microsoft said, if you want to take advantage of the, the most stuff that's going to be in Windows now,

• 7:14Alex Cranz?

  you probably want an MPU in that computer. And NPU's have been around for a while, like Intel's had them. They're, they're called neural processing units. Everybody's been doing it. You know, Apple calls it a neural engine, whatever, but they've all been doing it. And it's basically just another processor to offload those like tasks that generally you would have put on your GPU. Or like major CPU kind of brute force. And now it's like, okay, just for this. And it's like when Intel introduced it a couple of years ago, it was one of those things where you're like, okay, do I care about this? Like, I'm not an AI researcher. Why should I care about this? And that's still kind of a question. Unless now I think the big change is that like Adobe is going to be using it and a lot of these like film processing companies and stuff are doing it. So it's like, okay.

• 8:00Alex Cranz?

  I guess it makes a little more sense now than it did, you know, six years ago. What do you guys feel about that?

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm curious. I mean, a lot of what they announced in Windows is Yeah. fairly interesting. Some of it, I think people had a really strong reaction to like Recall. But some of it is just straightforwardly cool, right? Like you can draw stick figures in Microsoft Paint and it will generate more photorealistic images as you draw. That's cool. That's neat. And that's one of the first examples of like a cool local AI workload beyond the Light Rooms and premieres of the world that I can think of. Because most of the other AI workloads like happen in the cloud. Yeah. Right? You're like, you talk to a chatbot and they happen in the cloud, or you're coding in GitHub and Copilot and GitHub is happening in the cloud.

• 8:51Nilay Patel?

  And now you've got some cool stuff that's happening locally. We should talk about Recall, which is the other big thing that's happening on the NPU.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  But there are not more of those. That I mean, like on like, they're not more of those. There's the other stuff that's like you're playing Minecraft and the computer is watching with you and talking you through how to play Minecraft. But I suspect there's a little bit of hybrid local cloud happening there. I know it's happening with Paint because there are things Paint won't let you generate because of Microsoft's commitment to AI safety, which is weird because if you turn off the AI, you can draw any kind of dongs you want in Paint. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so there is like a little bit of push and pull between the cloud and local, right? And just in terms of safety, which is really interesting to think about, like Google Docs is a cloud application. You can type anything you want in Google Docs.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Word 365 can be expressed as a cloud application. You can type anything you want in Microsoft Word 365. You turn on AI features in Microsoft Paint. It's like you can't draw some stuff. Weird. That's just weird, you know? And like, I suspect we're going to have a long conversation about those kinds of lines for years to come. But that part, just the other part of it where it's like, where is the AI happening? Is it in the cloud or is it here on the machine? It's kind of interesting that Microsoft's answer is very much like both.

• 10:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and I think that's the right answer, right? Again, the where one ends and the other begins is, I think, forever going to be complicated. But everyone I talk to says that the place we have to get to is both because the stuff that you do on device is private and fast in a way that anything that happens off-device just can't be. And I think about like the the translation stuff Microsoft is trying to do. Like, there's a chunk of that, that if you don't do it locally, it's going to suck. Because real-time translation that has to go to the cloud is by definition not real-time translation. It just breaks. And so the thing that they launched where like it, you can be in Edge and it can translate a YouTube video while you're watching the YouTube video.

• 10:57David Pierce?

  Very cool in theory, awful with a half-second delay. Yeah. It's the sort of thing that I think is is that tuning that they're going to have to do to get those two pieces right is actually like the whole ballgame. Yeah. But I think it's very cool that Microsoft is is deep in this idea of we're going to start on your device. And I think that's smart and right.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  And I think the other interesting part there is obviously we're, you know, we're barreling towards WWDC where we expect Apple to announce many, many similar kinds of things, or at least a similar kind of focus on AI. Microsoft has the big AI part. They've got Azure and the big OpenAI relationship, and they are integrating all this stuff. And they have their own models that they're running at all sorts of scales. And so they're, I think they're able to just like take more shots across Windows and devices and their suite of applications that runs everywhere. And that to me, that to me is like the interesting part. Like, there isn't another company that kind of has all the pieces. Whether Microsoft can execute, whether it can deliver finished applications that people

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  like to use, whether it can make people interested in Windows, like consumers interested in Windows outside of a gaming context again.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  I think it's broken and I don't believe you like that's that's where I'm at. You know, it's like you gotta, we have to get the machines. It's interesting. Alex, you're saying that the companies are excited, but there's a lot of investment in like Intel chips in the world and x86 applications. And that transition is going to be slow, not fast. I think they did say, they did say something about emulation, right?

• 12:28Alex Cranz?

  Intel chips have had NPU's in them for a very long time. They introduced a couple of years ago. So the big difference is now Copilot has like kind of a minimum amount of what your NPU should be able to process. So the deal is that before, you know, an NPU would do it like, what 18 tops or something, which is like trillion operations per second. So, so it would do like 18 and now they're saying, okay, it has to be 40, it has to be 45. And, and that was one of the things like Apple was bringing up tops in their M4 presentation back with the iPad where they were like, we can do 30, 38 tops. And you're like, cool. What does that mean?

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  This is great.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  And then Microsoft was like, you gotta do 40. And we're like,

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  I love it.

• 13:10Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 13:10David Pierce?

  Topson's gonna do megapixels in my favorite possible way. This rules.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  We're back to like the megahertz wars.

• 13:17Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be super goofy, but they're like,

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  Wars are here.

• 13:21Alex Cranz?

  They're really leaning on that because I guess you'd need, they like, they're saying, you know, a lot of the stuff that's, that's coming to Windows will work. Okay. On older Windows PCs, but like, you're really going to need those, the, the neural processors.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  Well, but also importantly, also your computer will be good. Which is not a small thing, right? The idea of all of these things like Alex, you said this before, like if you're an AI researcher, it's a, it's a nice to have, but it is going to in other ways make your computer worse. And the promise that Microsoft came out with, with the Copilot plus PCs is these computers are going to be fast. They're going to do AI stuff. They're going to have long battery life. And they're going to be good computers. And that is not a small thing in the Windows world right now, in which you've kind of had to choose one or two of those three things for a really long time. And especially with this Qualcomm stuff, if they can get the battery life there to the point where AI is not

• 14:19David Pierce?

  like, you don't have to buy an AI computer, the way you buy a gaming computer and you like make a bunch of sacrifices in exchange for this one thing you want to work really well. If they can actually have solved these three things together.

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  That to me is where the stuff gets really powerful. And then when and then you get the whole scale of Microsoft and the fact that it has the App Store and the browser and the OS and the models and the cloud service. Like that's when that becomes really powerful. If and only if the devices don't suck. And maybe possibly the devices don't suck.

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  Well, if they don't suck and they're they're affordable enough, right? Like, most people are spending $700 on a laptop. And most of these laptops are in the $1,200 range, which is intentional. They're they're meant to go after the MacBook Air because MacBook Airs sell a lot better than everybody else's laptops.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. And what's interesting is, you know, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, talked to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal, notable for a Czech expat, Joanna Stern, I might add.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  And basically it was like, yeah, we're going to beat the MacBook Air. Youssef Mehdi, who is Executive Vice President of Microsoft, basically is like a MacBook Air with an M3. These computers will beat those by 50% on Cinebench. So they are making huge performance claims on these PCs. They're also thin and light. There's some question, I think John Gruber raised about whether they have fans as though people care.

• 15:38Alex Cranz?

  They do. Some of them have fans.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  Some of them are going to have fans.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Fine. But MacBooks have thermal throttling issues, particularly the air, right? They slowed, they do slow down. So if you want to run these computers really hard with AI workloads, which are essentially on a GPU-like piece of the processor, make it hot. But we're expecting good battery life. I and then the list of

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  the list of manufacturers here is Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, Asus. Microsoft obviously has a Surface Pro and the Surface. That's the suite, right? There isn't.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  How, Alex, you've been taking the briefings. How are they differentiating these? It's just like, are you a Dell fanboy or a Asus fanboy?

• 16:19Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah, kind of like everybody's, everybody's bringing up their own thing. I took an HP briefing and they rebranded their whole thing, right? Because you had like the HP Spectre and the HP Pavilion and the HP, something you've never heard of, like, like, it was just a mess. And they redid their whole portfolio into the Elite Book and the the Pro Book for for corporates or corporate stuff. And then the Omni Book, which is for the rest of us. And the Omni Book is like, I got to play around with one. It was really nice. Didn't get to benchmark it or anything like that. So again, we're going to have to wait and see. But it was like, it was a nice laptop. It felt like.

• 16:58Alex Cranz?

  Exciting and good in a way. It felt kind of like my iPad Pro with the, the thing on it. The, the, the magic keyboard, only lighter and better.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  The, the Surface Keyboard looks awesome, right? Cause it's totally wireless.

• 17:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, that's always kind of the way, right? Like, Microsoft has done this before where they go and they say, "All you OEMs, you're gonna have to like swarm around this. It's gonna be the netbook or, or touch computers or whatever, but you're gonna have to start making these." They were just like, "Yeah, you gotta, you gotta touch the screen, right?" And, and in this case, this is the swarm around the dumbest name alive. But, but they recognize Apple's coming for us. You know, everybody, to your, your point, Neela, you say this all the time. The computer is no longer about the rest of the computer. It's about the, the browser. And, and Microsoft has to compete with that. Like, that is a very, that is an existential crisis for Microsoft, right? If everybody just says, "Okay, I just need a Chromebook or whatever, or my phone."

• 17:52Alex Cranz?

  That's bad for them. So that, that's why they've put all this AI in. That's why they're really like, glomming on to this trend at the moment. And I don't know, the, these things will be really interesting. I'm really curious to see how fast they are because Qualcomm's made these promises before, but this time they've got like this whole new team behind it, which like HP was like, "Well, you know," because I was like, "What's different this time? You guys have released some real dog shit."

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  It's probably broken and I don't believe you.

• 18:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And if you was like, "Well, it's a new team over there." So like, we're feeling confident. And I was like, "Okay, well, that's, that's different." I mean, but we'll see, right? You just kind of have to, to hold your breath.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Look, this is the thing about tech coverage and I, I feel like we have said this many, many times, but this is like a new era. And we just need to repeat ourselves. Eventually the product ship. And then there's no hiding. And there's only two kinds of coverage in the world where the truth just outs. It's sports where one team wins and another team loses. And it's tech where you can hold the thing in your hand and it's, it works or it doesn't.

• 18:58Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  And like, a lot of things have not worked recently. We are on an all time run of things not working. And a lot of the reason that things don't work is the underlying AI models are not reliable, which is something Alex, you have been pointing out now, uh, for a couple of weeks. You were making these huge bets and like, it's like betting on a toddler.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  Like, are you gonna, are you gonna stand up for a long time? Or you're just gonna tip over? Like, let's build a business around you.

• 19:28Alex Cranz?

  What was interesting was like, some of the AI stuff that Microsoft was doing is stuff that we've already seen before, right? Like, like HP and a lot of these companies said, okay, you're gonna buy one of these AI PCs. What the hell does that actually mean practically? And in HP's case, they were like, we've slapped it, we've like, thrown in the chat GPT prompt window. So you can talk to chat GPT 3.5 on an HP computer. And I was like, cool, I don't, I don't care about that.

• 19:52David Pierce?

  That's not the answer.

• 19:53Alex Cranz?

  That's not the answer.

• 19:54David Pierce?

  That is so definitively not the answer.

• 19:56Alex Cranz?

  But then the other thing they were doing was they were like, okay, well, you can also like, we, we can learn more about the computer to better optimize it. And that's something that we've seen from Nvidia has been doing that for years now with DLSS. And so it's like, okay, well, that's actually useful and like, a use of AI that I've seen in practice and seen at work. So I could almost get excited about that.

• 20:17David Pierce?

  I also think that's where Recall comes in and is actually really important to this whole thing. Because what I think Microsoft did well, both at the Surface event on Monday and at Build on Tuesday, is give people examples of what AI can do on their computer. And, and the answer is not a chatbot that you could find at a website. Like, that isn't, that's nothing. You have accomplished nothing if that's what you've done. But what Microsoft said is they, and it was a lot of little things in spots, right? Where they're like, AI copy and paste, copy in one language, paste in another. Like, it's, you, you kind of have to do a million of those in order to make this case. But I think Recall was the big swing where it was like, okay, here is one genuinely new thing you can do on an AI PC

• 21:00David Pierce?

  that you couldn't before that is better because of AI. And like, in the whole AI world, we are severely lacking in that type of thing. And I feel like the, whether Recall is any good, whether people want it, what we do with the privacy implications, all that aside, just the fact that Microsoft is like, we, we found a new thing we can do now because of this, felt really good to me. That was like, okay, you understand what this is actually for, which is things. Like, it is, it's for doing things. It's not for talking to a chatbot I can talk to in a web browser. It's not for a bunch of random nonsense that doesn't help anybody. Like, it's, it's for things.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day Newsletter, has been consistently pointing out that the AI industry has to talk about AGI and destroying the world to make their extremely boring demos have stakes.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  That's very true. Like, you have to be like, it can see in orange, this will lead to the end of the world. Like, you just find, you know? But you're right, that Microsoft laid out a particular vision of computing, which is, you're using a computer all day, what if you could then interact with a computer in a way that remembered all of the things you were doing and that became your companion? And we should get into the reaction and the reality of that and how it might work and the privacy implications. I think all those things are really important. I just want to spend one second on Adela saying this is one of the two dreams people have had for a long time in the keynote, because he's not wrong. Right?

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  The idea that you live your life on the computer and all the things you do on your computer comprise your experiences and it would be cool if the computer could help you sort those out is, in fact, a dream. Yeah, yes. And it requires like one bit of a philosophical shift, which is, I think, most people think about that dream in terms of just like walking around the world. Like, what if you had an ambient computer or the AR glasses and you were just like asking questions and your, your sort of IRL experiences were that thing? And Microsoft has been like, all right, we're like, holons aside, like, actually, you live your life on the screen. So we can just build the thing on the, on the screen and then we'll get to your eyes later.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  We'll put the computer on your face at a later time. What about the computer that's in front of your face? What if we made that do the thing that everyone wants? And that is a leap. It's actually kind of an interesting leap that Microsoft took first in this way, that whereas everyone else has been chasing these glasses. And I just like, it should be, I think noting that he called it one of the two dreams everyone had. And I think people are like, is that the dream? And it's like, oh, actually, we've been talking about air glasses for like a decade. And this is just that, but just digitally.

• 23:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, but once Microsoft is the company that actually like lives in the real world, unlike everybody else.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're not just showing some weird concept videos of like the Microsoft Ken.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Whatever that is, or the, what was it? The Papyrus, what was that thing called? The Courier.

• 24:03David Pierce?

  Oh, the Courier. R I P, the Courier. They probably made a thing called the Papyrus at one point.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure.

• 24:09Alex Cranz?

  They will soon if they haven't.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you an early story about Neil Patel's experience as a copyright infringement? Uh, you don't, nobody remembers the Ken. This is like a thing that happened to a small number of us on the internet. Uh, but Microsoft in the early iPhone days, instead of releasing a smartphone, released a teen focused feature phone called the Microsoft Ken. This is real. There was a Ken one and a Ken two. They were banana, like, I don't know why they did this. Uh, and they were not smartphones. They were legitimately feature phones that could like send MSN messages. And their marketing campaign was like beautiful, young people in hip art districts of cities like skateboarding, talking on their feature phones. And I remixed their ads, uh, to the song Too Drunk to Fuck by the Dead Kennedys.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  And Microsoft immediately had YouTube take them down.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, I'm like, that would just be a great TikTok now. Like, no one even asked this question now. Anyway, if you're out there, do your thing, TikTok. Uh, the Ken, by the way, we gave them horrible reviews before they even came out. Microsoft canceled them. This is a real victory of the Engadget days. Uh, well, I don't know what we're talking about. Anyway, no, the products are real. That's what we're talking about, not the Microsoft Ken. Uh, the products are real. You can like use it. And then the reaction to them is, I don't trust this at all. It's probably broken. I don't believe you.

• 25:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah, the reaction to recall in particular was surprising to me because like I edited our story on it. And I was like, this is cool. I'm really excited about this. Like, didn't think of the privacy stuff at all because I operate under the assumption if someone physically has your computer, then you're boned. Like, like you're screwed. If someone has your computer, you're done.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  It's the same word.

• 25:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They're the same. Uh, just in case people didn't understand what bone what means. I want to make sure our entire audience understands.

• 25:58Alex Cranz?

  But I just didn't care. I was like, okay, cool. This is, this is really neat and, and I'm excited for my computer to be a better archive of things because that's what I use a computer for.

• 26:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Alex Cranz?

  And then a friend was like, have you heard about how pissed people are about recall? And I was like, why? And they're like, because it records everything you do. And I was like, that's literally what a computer does.

• 26:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Alex Cranz?

  That's like the point of them.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  History tab of your browser. I was just about to say, this is one of my favorite things to do to people is like, people don't understand the extent to which this stuff is already being recorded. Like, go look at the cache files on your computer for what happens in all the apps on your computer. Like, they, they already know. But I think, Krantz, to your point, the, the thing about privacy, there are real interesting privacy implications here about like, what happens if somebody gets hold of this? What if there are there going to be new kinds of malware that can get onto my computer and chase this stuff down? Like, the stakes that go up slightly. But I, I do think part of the reaction was just reminding people of how much these devices already know. Yeah. The, the, just the thing where it's like, I'm, I'm doing all of the stuff on here.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  Like, this is, in a very real way, my life. And just the fact that that's being collected somewhere feels gross to be reminded of. Like, even though sort of intellectually I understand that that's already the case, it's, it's like when you realize that your ISP has access to every website that you go to on your phone, even if you're on like, incognito, like, no, like Verizon still knows.

• 27:27Alex Cranz?

  Hi Verizon.

• 27:27David Pierce?

  It's still there. Like, it's just, people hate being reminded of that. And it is just such an unavoidable fact of being alive right now, that it is how it is, that I think it, every time it comes up again, you're made to feel sort of powerless and helpless against this like incredible tide of all these electronics that know too much about me.

• 27:45Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think it's also the fact that it's got, it's, it's using AI, right? Like, like, that's a big part of it. And people are having this weird moment, especially this week. And we're going to talk about it more with like, what's going on with Scarlett Johansson later. But people are just having this sudden visceral reaction to AI. And so this thing was, who's like, yes, computers archive all your data. They have done that since the beginning of time. This is just more efficient at it. They were like, that might have gone over a little easier if they hadn't also said, and we're going to use AI to do it all. Because even though the AI, everything is happening according to Microsoft, you know, security researchers will do their thing. Everything is happening on the computer. It is not going into the cloud. None of this is being shared anywhere. The it's using the MPU to like process this stuff. All of it's happening there.

• 28:29Alex Cranz?

  So theoretically, it is no different than just using your computer as normal. Only now, if a bad person gets a hold of your computer, they're gonna have a little easier time recovering everything you do. That's it. But that you put AI in there and people are like, burn it to the ground.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  Well, the whole road of that is so fascinating to me because I was talking to Dan Sroker, the CEO of this company called Rewind, which has been doing a third-party version of this on Macs for the last, I think, year or so now. It's another one that it uses basically like screen recording and your device audio to pull out a lot of this same information. And they actually just launched a new version that syncs in the cloud because the overwhelming feedback from people was either hell no or hell yes. The hell no people you're never gonna get. And what the hell yes people wanted was for all of this to be available to them in more places. And so it's like, we're actually in this bonkers divide where there is a set of people who like, as soon as you present them the beginning of the road are like, absolutely

• 29:30David Pierce?

  not. And just like, nope, their way out of this whole technological transition. And then there are a bunch of people for whom the privacy stuff is actually going to be a hindrance.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:40David Pierce?

  More than anything else. And there are going to be people who are like, well, why can't I access everything that I did on my other computer from my work computer? And then Microsoft is going to be in this horrible position of being like, well, we have to do the less private thing because it's actually what our users want. And it is just, it just like exacerbates that divide further and further. And it just, I don't know, it just feels crazy to me. Like, the Rewind folks were like, I don't know what you want from us. We tried to do it as private as we could, and the people who used it didn't want that anymore.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  So there's two things about that that I think are fascinating. And they are expressed sort of in very tangible ways, then I think in very esoteric ways. So the very tangible way, I did the thing when I interviewed Sundar, where I handed him my phone to look at Google search results. And we ran that clip. The clip is like doing bonkers on TikTok.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  In the clip, as a joke, I say to Sundar Pichai, don't dig through my phone. Like of all the things you were ever going to say to a CEO, like a billionaire CEO of one of the largest He's just pulling up pics of Max. Literally like, who am I? Of course I said, like, I couldn't resist it, you know? Uh, but it was just a joke. It's just like a way to be human when you hand someone your phone. And the people in the comments are like, he already knows everything.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, why would you tell him not to dig through your phone? Like, he's, he's the CEO of Google. Like, if you want, he can just, he can already dig through your phone. And I think that's nihilism, right? Like, there's an element of nihilism there, which is like, it's already over. Like, you might as well embrace it and be excited about it. And then there's an element of nihilism that's like, well, I can't stop it. I'm gonna live off the grid for the rest of my life. And that's one thing. The, the more esoteric thing that I think about all the time is as more and more of these companies get more and more into AI content generation, the thing that they are promising, the people who pay the money, which is in large part advertisers, uh, is that they will make auto-generated ads on their platforms. So like, Google will make auto-generated AI-created ads on YouTube.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Meta will do it on Instagram. TikTok will do it on TikTok. TikTok actually announced AI-generated ads this week, uh, and Mia Sato is writing with them. Um, you're gonna get to a place where you get extremely well-targeted custom content. And the people who are like, Facebook is listening to me, are gonna lose their minds. Yes. Right? Like, the idea that you have privacy then is like, out the window. Like, right now, people think Facebook is listening to them because it can target you based on your Wi-Fi networks. Which is the simplest thing. It's like, knows what IP address you're on. It knows that your friends have been on that IP address. And it'll like, serve some ads across based on interest targeting.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  It's not smart. It's not stupid. It's like, somewhere in the middle, you know? Like, it's a pretty blunt instrument. But people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them. You're gonna get to a place where it knows a whole lot about you. And then it knows that you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend that you talked to about vacations in Mexico. And then it delivers you a video of you in Mexico?

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 32:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, people are gonna lose their minds. And then I think that, well, I don't have any privacy anyway. I might as well just give the cloud provider of recall or rewind everything. I think that might actually change in a dramatic way very quickly at that point.

• 32:57David Pierce?

  Maybe. Like, it really does seem like either, either the pendulum is going to swing aggressively at some point soon, or the pendulum is just going to, like, burst through the side.

• 33:08Alex Cranz?

  No, no, you know what's gonna happen?

• 33:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style, just like launch through the ceiling and be gone.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, one thing.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, what's gonna happen to the privacy pendulum? They could go into space.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  One thing I will note, you mentioned that the ISPs can see everything. Like, you would think that there would be a federal privacy bill, which there is not. Uh, one of the first things that the Republican Congress in Trump's first term did, literally one of the first things, was they threw out a privacy bill that would have kept your data private from ISPs.

• 33:46David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  It was just like, hey, we're here, what should we do? We should make it so AT&T can read all your shit. Like, immediate. It was an outrage. Uh, and we, we have just not fixed that in years.

• 33:59Alex Cranz?

  I, I, I tend to feel like that, that tension is only gonna be resolved when Congress actually knows what a computer is, how it works, how to, like, use it, like, when they finally-

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, here's what a computer is. It is, uh, uh, it's an AI-powered device. If you say the right words, we'll bang you.

• 34:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  And I think Congress will react to that idea very badly.

• 34:23Alex Cranz?

  But it will also, if you say the wrong words, share all the photos of you banging it to your enemies.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  If you wanna get something done in this United States Congress, it's blackmail and booty. Those are your choices.

• 34:34David Pierce?

  That's real.

• 34:36Alex Cranz?

  So honestly, this is a great thing, right? Like, like, I think this tension has been there for a very long time. And, and I think you're right that we are coming to a point where, like, something's gonna have to give. These companies, like Microsoft, are really pushing for, for stuff that is just completely counter to what we understand of privacy and security and what we want. And the only way that's gonna change is if- Someone else says, hey, you can't do that.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the recall stuff is really interesting. I think it's to your point, David, it can't see what you're doing on your phone. Right. So this promise that you have this companion is sort of living your digital life with you, except for what you do on your phone. That's weird, right? And then you get into, should this be a cloud service? Are you running a background app on an Android phone? Like, Apple's not gonna let them do it, right?

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Maybe Apple does it on its own on iOS in a couple of weeks. Like, we're, they're gonna have to bridge that gap, I think, for this to be truly successful. But then there's the piece where, yeah, we're gonna have to hold them accountable to this thing being totally local. And a bunch of other AI stuff on this device is hybridized, right? Like, the paint example is hybridized. Like, I don't know. And that's why I don't want to seem overly skeptical. I really, I can see the jump that Microsoft made from AR glasses are too hard. We have a bunch of AI. We can basically do AR, AR on Windows. Like, AR is not the right word, but like this sort of augmented experience in Windows for your digital life.

• 36:02Alex Cranz?

  Multimodal, you mean?

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, there's something there. Copilot's like almost exactly the right word. Right? Like, you're just doing stuff on a computer and you're asking questions about the experiences you're having. A lot of people have thought that would happen first in glasses on your face. And Microsoft is like, what if it happens on the screen in front of, like, great.

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  I just want to point out, you said copilot is the right word. Where do you stand on copilot plus PCs?

• 36:26David Pierce?

  Awful, awful, awful, awful. Even, even Microsoft has trouble saying the phrase copilot plus PCs. Like, if you go back and watch, there are a bunch of people who clearly practice very hard, who still occasionally struggle to say the phrase copilot plus PCs. It's terrible.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:46David Pierce?

  Cool product, bad name.

• 36:48Alex Cranz?

  I just want to figure out.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  They're never gonna get it, right?

• 36:50Alex Cranz?

  Why didn't they just call them AI PCs? Like, did HP?

• 36:53David Pierce?

  Copilot PCs. The hell is the plus doing there? Copilot, it's not a streaming service.

• 37:00David Pierce?

  What are we doing here?

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, do any of these features on Windows have a monthly fee?

• 37:04Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't think so.

• 37:05David Pierce?

  Not as far as we know, I don't think. Some of it requires an OpenAI API key, which you have to pay for. Like, some of the, some of the copy and paste stuff you can only do if you have the, I think the like GPT-4 key or something. But most of this stuff seems like it's going to come baked into Windows, which itself is rapidly becoming a subscription service. So I think that's where you end up getting charged for it is like as a Microsoft's 365 thing, rather than a specific AI thing.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  I do love the mental image of like, three to five years from now, the extremely cheap Acer PC in a Walmart with like the dented cardboard sign. It's like, copy and paste in multiple languages. And it's just like, sitting in Racine, Wisconsin. And everyone's like, why? And that costs a monthly fee. And they're like, why aren't these computers selling? Like, that's gonna be great for everybody. We should take a break. That's just build.

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  There's more. There's yet more AI news this week. We'll come back, we'll talk about Scarlett Johansson. It's really what we're gonna do here on the first cast. We'll be right back.

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• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. There are two things I forgot to say about Build. One of which was the only reason I wanted to talk about Build. So I'll get to it. The second, though, I should just point out in the scheme of It's probably broken, I don't believe you. There was a Microsoft Services outage that took down Copilot, ChatGPT Search, and DuckDuckGo.

• 40:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  Because it relies on the Bing index. Well, Bing and ChatGPT Search are the same. Yeah, right. There's like a Bing, there was like a Bing outage, like the Bing API went down and everything else next to it went down.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  It's like when AWS goes down and all of a sudden all the apps that everyone uses just disappear off the internet. Like, it's, it's, it's nice to be reminded that the internet basically only exists in like four places.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not, I'm sure the Bing team was like, people noticed Bing was down.

• 40:28Alex Cranz?

  Just because DuckDuckGo was down.

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  So that's good. The second thing I want to note, and again, I think this is the most important news of the week, is yes, many of the traditional PC companies announced Copilot Plus PCs, including Samsung. And if you have been tracking Samsung, you will know that Samsung recently instituted six-day work weeks for its executives to quote, "inject a sense of crisis into the company." They did not institute six-day work weeks for their engineers or for the executives. You get a bunch of executives working on Saturdays. You get crazy ideas. Which I have taken to calling Saturday Samsung.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  So Samsung's co-pilot PC, this is a real thing. So if you buy the new Galaxy Book 4 Edge, by the way, there's no space between book and four, but a space between four and edge. All right.

• 41:24David Pierce?

  Do you realize that the name of that is the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge Co-Pilot Plus PC? That makes me want to throw things.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying you had the extra day on Saturday, you could have gotten rid of a couple of words. All right. But the, the people at Samsung, in their quest to inject a sense of crisis into the company, have decided that their, their single best idea is to just give away TVs.

• 41:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  So the previous one of these we covered, the previous iteration of Saturday Samsung was that if you bought a Frame TV, you've got another TV, which is perfect. If you buy a Galaxy Book 4 Edge, again, there's no space between book and four, but a space between four and edge, a Galaxy Book 4 Edge Co-Pilot Plus PC, you do receive a 50-inch Crystal UHD 4K TV.

• 42:15David Pierce?

  Sick.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is the plan.

• 42:18Alex Cranz?

  What's the MSRP on that?

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  It's $379. They're, they're, they're just throwing you a $380 TV. I'm sure it looks like absolute trash. I'm sure it's the same panel as a Frame TV.

• 42:27Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Just a single LED backlight, just shining gray in the dark.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  But I just love that Samsung, they've, they've got all the executives in there on Saturday. Just how are we gonna, it's a crisis, you guys. How are we gonna, how are we gonna bring the stock price back up? And they're like, here's what we're gonna do. Everybody gets a 50-inch TV.

• 42:49David Pierce?

  Well, you know that before that, somebody was like, what if we made them cheaper? It's like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 42:55Alex Cranz?

  No, just get rid of them.

• 42:56David Pierce?

  We're gonna go more, we're gonna go the other way, but you also get a television.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna find the $380 of margin in every other product. And you know what everybody loves is a free garbage 50-inch TV. If you buy a TV, you get another TV. You buy a Chromebook, you get a TV. You buy, you buy our brand new state-of-the-art Co-Pilot Plus laptop, free TV. That's, that'll do it. So you're considering a Surface? Does a Surface come with a free TV?

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  This, it's great. I cannot, this year of Saturdays is gonna be amazing. Okay. Sorry. I just, literally I said to David and Alex before we started the show, the only thing I wanted to talk about was Saturday Samsung, and we forgot. It's my fault.

• 43:40Alex Cranz?

  Just excited.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  It's, I could keep going another hour on Saturday Samsung. All right. We should talk about OpenAI, who I would say did not have as successful of a week in AI as Microsoft. Is, that's fair, right? Even other Microsoft's big partner, Sam Altman was on stage at Build. But I, I would, I would characterize OpenAI as weak as a duffin' it.

• 44:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:05David Pierce?

  Uh, own goal was a phrase I heard used a lot.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:09David Pierce?

  And it really is like a record week for don't tweet as advice to give on the internet. Really, one of the all time, what if you just didn't tweet moments from Sam Altman this week?

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's run through it. It's, it's not a complicated story. It is getting more and more complicated as more people talk, which is bad. That is a bad sign. If a seemingly simple story starts to get more and more complicated, uh, lawyers are gonna get money. I will remind you, uh, what, what my contracts professor in law school used to say, Stuart McCauley, why did this case get filed? And we'd all say some idealistic first year law school bullshit. And he would say, no, the lawyers wanted a BMW.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  A lot of lawyers are getting BMWs at the end of this rainbow.

• 44:55Alex Cranz?

  Scarlett Johansson's lawyer is gonna be driving a really nice car.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  He already bought, he's like, I'm good.

• 45:00Alex Cranz?

  He bought it from Disney.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Alex Cranz?

  He's getting another one.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  BMW.

• 45:03Alex Cranz?

  He's getting a Rivian this time.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  He's like, just put a standing tab at the BMW dealership.

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  Just whatever M is coming out next, just give me one of those. Although I've heard the X M is not great. Anyway, um, okay, so here's the, the basic rundown. They announced GPT-4O, which in classic, I think it's broken, I don't believe you, appears to hallucinate more than GPT-4. Great. Uh, but the, the headline feature of 4O is it's multimodal. O is for Omni. It can look at stuff. It can talk to you. You can talk to it. And it has these, because it's multimodal, a lot of the demos are people chatting to it. And then OpenAI had these voices. They already had them. One of them was called Sky, which was a woman.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  But because of these demos, which were very voice heavy and very personality driven, because that's the other big feature of 4.0, a lot of people noticed that the Sky voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson and that Sky in particular made a lot of people feel flirtatious. Right, Alex?

• 46:09Alex Cranz?

  I think that's an accurate assessment of things. People got a little horny for Sky there.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a lot of people thought they could bang an iPad last week.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was uncomfortable for everyone.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  That's just, I mean, I don't know how else to characterize the way people feel about AI right now, except an awful lot of people want to bang an iPad. It's fine. You know, it's like some people want to give all their privacy away to a cloud. Other people, they have a particular dream. Okay, that's fine.

• 46:33David Pierce?

  That was the other dream Sachin Adella was talking about.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  It's your number two. Yeah. What if you could tag an iPad? All right. So there's a lot of conversation about this voice, whether it sounds like Scarlett Johansson or not. And there's like a reasonable debate. Some people are like, absolutely not. Some people like it does. People have asked OpenAI executives very directly. Our own Kylie Robinson asked Miriam Ravi directly and she said, no, it was not our intention. No thought of this whatsoever. And then Sam Altman tweets the word "her," which is the movie from Spike Jonze that stars Scarlett Johansson.

• 47:09Alex Cranz?

  Which he says is one of his favorite movies of all time and an inspiration.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Great. So now he's undone his poor executive who was saying this was not the point. And then a very strange thing happens. OpenAI sort of out of nowhere publishes a blog post. It's like, here's how we selected our voices. That's a weird time to do it. And they, it's just a very anodyne corporate blog post. It's like, we had a process, we did casting directors, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then they had our Mia David, our AI reporter Mia David, talk to one of their executives to go through it. They would not say that, no, they pulled it first.

• 47:46David Pierce?

  They pulled it before they explained it.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay. So it's like a very normal corporate and I blog post. Then they pull the voice. Like almost immediately after that, they pull the voice.

• 47:59David Pierce?

  Sky.

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  And say, based on concerns we've heard, we're pulling this voice. Which is interesting because there's only one person's concern that matters. And she is a very powerful actress in Hollywood who is married to the head writer of Saturday Night.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  So wait, can I, can I, can I just pause you on that moment? I, I, I'm curious if you guys had the same reaction that I did in that moment, which is obviously Scarlett Johansson is mad.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 48:25David Pierce?

  Right there. I just couldn't think of any other, because this happened on Sunday night or like overnight into Monday morning.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  I, I could not imagine a world in which they pulled this voice and put up this long blog post, which essentially amounted to one of those like, my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt. One of those moments. And we were, we were covering this thing like, okay. They were, they say they're just trying to allay confusion. Like I couldn't think of another plausible reason other than Scarlett is yelling.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 49:00David Pierce?

  Right? Like, was that your reaction?

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  It's the only thing that could be happening here.

• 49:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Then they called Mia David, one of our reporters, and so we have an interview with our executive. They would not tell Mia the timeline. The only question is, did Scarlett call you and then you pulled the voice?

• 49:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  Legitimately the only question here. And they're like, we heard these concerns. We want to get out. We pulled the voice. And they just like, wouldn't say the timeline. Weird. So we run the story. They said, here's a headline. Our headline is like pretty anodyne, right? It's also just like more open AI talking. We pulled this voice out of concerns. Here's, here's some more color on that. Except they won't say what the timeline is.

• 49:40Nilay Patel?

  Hours later, Scarlett Johansson has a statement out, first to Bobby Allen at NPR, and then widely to everyone that says, basically, like, Sam Altman called me to be the voice of ChatGPT, and I said, no. And then, you know, several weeks later, I'm listening to these demos, and it sounds like my voice. I lawyered up, and I want to know exactly how this happened.

• 50:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, he called her like, two days before the launch. Like, he called her initially, his, her timeline that she outlines is like, they chatted a while ago about it. And she thought about it, and then she said, no, I don't want to do the voice. And he's like, cool. Didn't hear from him for a while. Two days before the demo, Sam Altman calls her and is like, hey, you reconsidered? And she's like, no, I don't want to do it. And he's like, cool.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  And then she hears a voice that sounds like her.

• 50:26David Pierce?

  Yep. That was a perfect Sam Altman impression, by the way, Alex. Like, I know you've been working on that for a while. It was really good.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  It sounded like it was in all lowercase.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Then there's just one last piece of reporting from Natasha Tiku, another former Verge reporter at the Washington Post. She has talked to the agent of the voice actress that OpenAI cast for the Sky voice. Both the actress and the agent wished her to remain anonymous. I have a lot of feelings about that, but they wished her to remain anonymous. And she's seen some documents that lay out a version of the timeline that says OpenAI actually recorded all this, and never said to this actress, sound like Scarlett Johansson. So maybe there's some blurriness here. There's some old case law in the mix here. We, you know, we did a story, we talked to some lawyers. There's a very famous case with Tom Waits, who has a very distinctive voice. By the way, Heath Ledger was basically doing Tom Waits' impression in The Dark Knight, which is very funny. But that's the voice. Like, if you think about Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, like, Tom Waits has this very distinctive

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  voice. There's a very famous commercial where they asked the singer to sound like Tom Waits. Tom Waits sued, won. There are other cases like this where people's likeness get used without their permission. My favorite one of this is Vanna White v. Samsung. Maybe the best of these cases that exists. Samsung ran a commercial that looked like Wheel of Fortune, where a robot was turning the letters. And Vanna White said, that robot is me. And one. Wow.

• 51:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. She's not like a monopoly.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  It is. With all of the cases I ever read in law school, I was like, this is why I came here. Vanna White vs. Samsung Electronics. So there's like a lot of these weird cases, like you are not allowed to trade, in particular in New York and California, which is where most of the celebrities are. The state law does not allow you to trade an license to celebrities to sell your products. That's just a thing. We have not gotten to, we cloned a voice using another actress and everyone got confused. That's new. That's a new problem for our court system that I'm very much looking forward to seeing litigated. But, but we're in this place where we've expanded the boundary of what you can take. Right? And the AI companies are really just taking a lot of stuff without

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  asking for a lot of permission. And I think this one with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Altman in this completely insane timeline that is getting complicated the more anyone talks is, I think, really, you know, we talked about in the earlier segment, people have really, really, like antagonistic feelings towards AI because it feels like it's taking stuff from us. And a famous actress who was in a bunch of Marvel movies, she's not the right adversary for.

• 53:05Alex Cranz?

  Who sued Disney.

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  Who sued Disney, right? Like, I don't know, man.

• 53:10Alex Cranz?

  That's not the person you want to like mess with. Yeah, I was just kind of gobsmacked by this because, you know, I think like Lake Bell plays, does a really good Scarlett Johansson impression on an animated show where she's playing Black Widow. And it's, she sounds a lot like her. It's great. But also she's playing Black Widow. And, and, and there's, there's a whole, there's like agreements in place and that's why it's allowed. This is, she, this person sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. And then Sam Altman tweeted her, clearly referencing this. He's talked about how much affection he has for that voice, for that concept. It's just like, oh, you really just kept walking into rakes on this one, dude.

• 53:53Alex Cranz?

  Like, just, just stop. Stand still for a moment. Because, yeah, they probably did hire this woman. And she probably didn't know that she sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. Or that that's why they hired her, right?

• 54:06David Pierce?

  Like, there are so many weird twists and turns of all of this, right? Because then there's the question of, was this voice made to sound like Samantha from her? Or does it sound like Scarlett Johansson? And is there a distinction between those two things? And is that meaningful? And how much do people associate the voice of Samantha and the role of Samantha with Scarlett Johansson? That's just like, all of this is unprecedented in such bizarre ways. But the thing that keeps jumping out to me is that the immediate response was that, of course, OpenAI is wrong. Because of course, OpenAI would have just gone and ingested the movie and used that. I mean, we've seen the technology now that you can use five minutes of somebody's voice

• 54:49David Pierce?

  and spit out a pretty passable version of that voice. Like, just the immediate assumption that that's what OpenAI did was either find a person and tell them to do a Scarlett Johansson impression, or screw all that, just train your model on Samantha in her and call it a day. That, like, this company has so aggressively lost the benefit of the doubt. It made me think of the iPad Crush commercial in the same way. That it's just like, this is a company that people do not trust. And people think the worst of now and believe that their intentions are bad. And I think the thing with the OpenAI thing is I think the answer is probably some weird middle sketchy thing. And it seems like the OpenAI version of the story is that OpenAI ran a pretty normal process.

• 55:32David Pierce?

  And then Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, just like weird went rogue and started calling Scarlett Johansson. And now there are all these things out there about how Sam just desperately wants to be famous and it's making him make mistakes. And like, we've gone in all of these weird directions.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait, hold on, can I just say, I hate it when companies pretend their CEOs are idiots.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  Totally fair.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  Sam Altman is a billionaire. He is the founder of OpenAI. He is so much in charge of OpenAI that when the board of OpenAI fired him for being reckless and manipulative, the employees all staged a reverse coup and brought him back.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  That's real.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, yeah, that's a real thing that happened just a little bit ago.

• 56:16David Pierce?

  Couple of months ago.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  The board of directors was like, we don't trust Sam Altman and fired him. And he got his way back in the company. He has a new board of directors. And now a bunch of employees are quitting because OpenAI is generally abandoning its like, safety culture. And he's doing this reckless stuff. And I just don't buy it that the company is like, yeah, we are running responsibly. There's just this hothead that we reverse cooed back into the CEO role that we can't control.

• 56:41Alex Cranz?

  Like, you can't, like, like, it's just a full, like, lie on their part to be like, we have no control over him. It's like, well, he runs the company.

• 56:49David Pierce?

  So I agree with that. And yet, I also find it absolutely plausible that the billionaire CEO who is kind of feeling himself would call Scarlett Johansson on the side and try to get her.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, no, if I had a billion dollars and I was like, my robot can plausibly make Kevin Reese think that it's in love with him, like, I would call Scarlett Johansson.

• 57:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, and you don't tell the people. You don't tell these people who are doing the casting process, who then you are happy to throw to the wolves after the fact. But, like, the, the bones of that version of the story do not seem implausible to me at all. But it also doesn't matter. He's the CEO of the company. It doesn't matter.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. The part where they ultimately shipped the voice that sounded like her in every sense of that word. And he knew about it. And those were the demos. And I'm confident that he watched every second of those demos.

• 57:37David Pierce?

  He was in the.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  And then tweeted the word "her."

• 57:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Those are his choices.

• 57:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. He tweeted the word "her." Like, it's so hard to undo that.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  By the way, your question about whether it's the movie "Her" or Scarlett Johansson, I will offer you. The 1995 case Metro Goldwyn-Mayer v. American Honda Company, where Honda made an ad for the Civic Del Sol that looked a little bit too much like a James Bond movie and lost to MGM. Yes. It was, it was not James Bond. Too good a commercial. It was a guy in a suit jumping out, you know, I don't remember the Civic Del Sol. Not a high watermark in Civic design, but it was a Civic with a top that you could like take off. And so the ad was like, he's driving, James, a James Bond like character is driving a Honda Civic. Very plausible. And he blows the top off and jumps out of the car and does some James Bond stuff. And MGM said that that is James Bond. You made James Bond.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Wow. You can't have it. And they won. Yes. That's so dumb. I'm excited for us to go to court against OpenAI and say, you're a robot. The precedent by which we are suing you is MGM versus American. Have you seen the Civic Del Sol judge? MGM, by the way, also now owned by Amazon. Just one of those things. Just a weird moment in time. Because again, most of these cases took place in New York and California ages ago. Most of them are about pretty normal ads. Right? Like, that's why you appropriate a celebrity's likeness to try to sell something.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  Those days are over. Like TikTok is full of weird deep fake celebrities and just like pure copyright infringement. The number of companies, right now, if you run a regular company and you want to buy a regular ad and you're like, I'd like to use Taylor Swift to sell my towels. You can't. But that's too expensive. If you're a super shady distributor of Alibaba towels and you're on TikTok, it's all Taylor Swift all day long. Deep fakes, baby. It's crazy. And like, there's a gap here that's happening where the law has absolutely not caught up to reality. Because most of these cases are about big ad agencies and big companies with big budgets running ads, right? I don't know that we're just gonna, we're just in for a moment of chaos because the

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  reality of what's happening on the ground is people do not care about the law, particularly IP law, and the big companies, Google, OpenAI, they are, the next generation of their technology is just founded on taken stuff, which is why OpenAI does not have the benefit of the doubt. Everyone believes they took whatever they want. And if they wanted to, they would just make a clone of Scarlett Johansson's voice. Whether or not they cast an actress who sounded just like her, it doesn't matter because if the technology exists for them to just do it, and no one thinks they have the control to not do it. Weird.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  A weird moment for them.

• 1:00:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I, at least from what I've heard so far the last couple of days, I'm curious if y'all have heard anything different, is that this, there's no indication so far that Scarlett Johansson is actually going to like take real legal action here. She put out that one statement and we don't know what's gonna happen next, but that if she did, this would have a real chance of going somewhere and being pretty important and precedent-setting, in terms of like, it just feels like in so many ways we're itching for like the one weird AI lawsuit and like, maybe it's the New York Times one, but it would be frankly, a lot like wilder and weirder and more fun if it was Scarlett Johansson.

• 1:01:10Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think they're probably kind of different cases. Like they're, they're targeting different things, but they get to the same thrust of things, which is, can you just take shit?

• 1:01:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, like what are you allowed to do in the name of AI?

• 1:01:22Alex Cranz?

  Ultimately, it's, can you just do stuff?

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. I mean, like if I do it with a computer, it's fine, right? It's like, that's the answer. And there, look, there are very meaningful differences between what you can do at a computer and what you can do in real life. Like, for example, Alex, if I came to your house and took one of your Blu-rays away, I, that would be a crime for many reasons. One, it would just a crime against our friendship, you know?

• 1:01:43Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  But importantly, you would not have the Blu-ray anymore. Whereas if I came to your house and copied a file off your Plex server and left, I think you'd be like, one, our friendship has strengthened. You would also have the original copy, your very legal copy of whatever content.

• 1:01:59Alex Cranz?

  I would have the Blu-ray still in my closet. Yes, that's correct.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this is like a meaningful thing in copyright law, whereas, you know, it was all, it's all founded on physical scarcity. It has not translated to the world of like digital very well. On the other hand, I can just do whatever I want because it's a computer is not a workable strategy either. You know, like there's some middle ground here that no one has ever really thought through. And I think that AI conversations, yeah, this is a conversation I had with Sundar, like, do you feel great about OpenAI training on YouTube? Okay, the web doesn't feel that way about you. And he was like, that's weird, you know, like, everyone has to wrestle with those two ideas at the same time. While we're saying, hey, some of this technology is like really cool. Like you want some of this technology.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Some of this stuff is really great for people who have, who are differently abled, right? Like, who, how are we going to solve these problems? And Alex, I think you're definitely right that like the training law, the training lawsuit is a copyright lawsuit. And this other stuff is like a likeness lawsuit, a right of publicity lawsuit. There are different bodies of law that are very hard to distinguish for normal people. Normal people can't tell you they're venturing a copyright and a trademark and a patent, right? Like, this is even more esoteric than that. And on top of it, sort of the inherent nature of it is that these are celebrities. Like you can't, you don't have a right of publicity, you don't have publicity. Right? And like all of the law is built around celebrity.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  And so you're just going to get a sequence of people, of plaintiffs, who are just the most sympathetic because they are going to be celebrities.

• 1:03:36Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  And at some point, you know, like, we did an episode, Sarah, John and I did an episode of Decoder where we talked about the copyright law. And like, that feels like a time bomb waiting to go off. Something's going to happen with copyright law and training data. It, it is inevitable that one of those cases goes the wrong way because there's so many of them now. It feels inevitable that particularly is, these companies want to trade on famous voices.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Even if it's not this case, I don't know, man, like Kevin Hart is gonna be like, "That sounds too much like me." It's like, sue Amazon. Like, it's like, one of those kinds of things is gonna happen.

• 1:04:10David Pierce?

  I mean, it's the music thing, right? Like, it's all of the copyright trolls coming after anyone who writes a song with power chords in guitars now. Like, we're gonna do that again at a crazy scale.

• 1:04:23Alex Cranz?

  I feel it's a little, almost simpler than that, because it's kind of straightforward in that if Amazon had gone and released an Alexa voice that was Kevin Hart, and it wasn't actually Kevin Hart, he would have sued. But Amazon went and said, "Hey, Kevin Hart," or Samuel L. Jackson, or whoever, "Do you want to be a voice?" "No."

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  But they have done that. Samuel L. Jackson is a voice on Alexa.

• 1:04:44Alex Cranz?

  They paid him. And so, like, I think in this case, there's a lot of precedent of, like, everybody else knew how to do this business. And OpenAI was like, "Yolo."

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, I don't know what's wrong with me that I had to immediately think of it, that I had to quickly think of a very distinctive voice, and my mind went immediately to Kevin Hart.

• 1:05:03Alex Cranz?

  I wasn't gonna comment on it, but I was gonna comment on it to you later in Slack.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a very distinctive voice. I just don't, I just don't know.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  I often think of you as the Kevin Hart of the Vergecast, so that...

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  It's time to take a break, David.

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  And we'll see if you're back when we get back for the lightning round.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Weird time. It's kind of broken, and I don't know if I believe you. We'll be right back.

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• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  We're back. It's time for the lightning round. Sponsored by Kevin Hart.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  Kevin, if you're listening, you can send your lawyers at us and we'll just ask you to sponsor the lightning round. That would be great content, actually. I'm confident you can afford it, Kevin. Two people on totally different planets, me and Kevin Hart's lawyer.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Sir, you've been lying about Kevin Hart sponsoring your podcast and me saying, would you like to? Let's make it true.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  These lies can be real between me and you.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  It's beautiful. Dreams do come true.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, lightning round. We got to start with this one. It's maybe the most important lightning round item. The United States government, the Department of Justice, has sued Ticketmaster, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. They want to break it up. This has been a long time coming, I would say.

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  This is Taylor Swift's lawsuit. It feels fully like Taylor Swift's lawsuit. Yeah, it really is.

• 1:07:57David Pierce?

  And this has been, I think, kind of in the wind ever since the merger happened. I mean, in 2010, right, was when the merger was. And even then, if I remember right, there was real, this should not be allowed, energy.

• 1:08:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this was fully, if you want to ever make the case that Barack Obama was kind of like a bad president. His competition policy, where he just like let this stuff slide, like his DOJ and his FTC just let this stuff slide all over the place. Uh, like full Reagan, like this is the core of that argument. Like, when people make it, like Obama presided over the great recession and all this other stuff in recovery. Part of it was, we are just gonna let these mergers slide to bring the economy back. And now we're on the other side of it. You can also blame Ronald Reagan. I prefer to blame Ronald Reagan. We made an entire decoder video blaming Ronald Reagan for Ticketmaster. Uh, you can watch that video.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but basically, the heart of the argument is Ticketmaster, Live Nation owns, uh, ticket sales, obviously promotion, artist management. They own all the venues, they own 60 of the top 100 venues in the United States. And so you just have this vertically integrated monopoly. And if an artist tries to screw with it, Ticketmaster crushes them. Um, which means prices go up because there's no competition.

• 1:09:10David Pierce?

  It's actually, in a very funny way, it is sort of perfect textbook monopoly stuff. Like, the allegations are so simple to understand. I actually encourage people to go read the lawsuit because it really is like, if you want to understand what a monopoly looks like, it is what these allegations say. Live Nation and Ticketmaster does, which is own everything and just use that to beat the hell out of anybody who tries to own anything and come at you. And like, the threats that they are alleged to make against artists and venues who don't work with them. The ways that they like raise fees to keep everybody out and like self-deal to each other, like it's, it is pure monopoly stuff. If all of these allegations are true.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  And at the end of it, at the very bottom of it, yep, prices are high, but service quality is low. Right? Like, they don't have to invest in the ticketing platform or the app or the website. Because who cares?

• 1:10:01David Pierce?

  Right. Which is why Ticketmaster broke.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is why there's a crush of demand for Taylor Swift tickets, even after she told them there will be a crush of demand. Can you handle it? And it still crashed and they didn't have to do anything. Because there's, where are you gonna go, Taylor? And I think once the United States government is like, where are you gonna go, Taylor? She doesn't have choice.

• 1:10:21David Pierce?

  If Taylor Swift doesn't have options, there's a monopoly happening here.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, then then maybe we'll do something. But anyway, you can go read the lawsuit. And like I said, we'll we'll drop the link. We made a long decoder about the whole buildup of this with a lot of great interviews in it. It was one of our, when it was, it was a pot, you know, we do two episodes now. It was a pilot of our explainer episode. So it was a fun one. All right. That was my, we got to say that one. Alex, what's your lightning round?

• 1:10:43Alex Cranz?

  Salt spoon.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  Totally different move.

• 1:10:47Alex Cranz?

  Totally, totally different. I actually have two. And I feel this one is almost more important. That's not true.

• 1:10:52David Pierce?

  Spoon is the new Mad Max movie, right? Yeah, that's what that's called. Okay.

• 1:10:55Alex Cranz?

  It's exactly what it's called. But I know we've done, we've talked before on the Vergecast about how you can like, use electricity to make people taste things a little differently. Andrew Marino did a really good podcast, Vergecast on it. Somebody else was like, what if we put those electrodes into a spoon? And so we could take things that aren't salty and make them more salty. And as someone who grew up low sodium because of their mom, hell, yes. I am so excited for this. I didn't know what salt tasted like until I was like 16. Like, this is incredible. I'm so excited. But they're only, they're only selling like 200 of them.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  And it doesn't work if you have like heart problems, which if you, most people on low sodium diets, that's why they're on them. It doesn't work if you're like pregnant. So a lot of the people who might want to be on low sodium diets, this won't actually work for, but it's a salt spoon and that's cool.

• 1:11:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When I read this, I thought it was a spoon that just dumped salt.

• 1:11:55Alex Cranz?

  No, that's, I've got one of those in my, my kitchen right now.

• 1:11:58David Pierce?

  That's just called a spoon.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, but that's just a real CES local news gadget, you know?

• 1:12:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  Like here's a spoon that precisely delivers, no, this one just shocks you into believing there's salt, a different approach.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  I love that for them. And it's from the people who do like soy sauce. It's Kiran.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  So they know salt.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  They should make a sriracha spoon.

• 1:12:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  They should just continue electrocuting my brain into flavor.

• 1:12:23Alex Cranz?

  Just trick my brain constantly, please.

• 1:12:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dave, what you got?

• 1:12:28David Pierce?

  Um, I, we have to talk about Humane, right?

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:12:32David Pierce?

  Everyone's, everyone's favorite startup. There was a Bloomberg report this week that Humane is now looking for a buyer. And I believe the price it's looking for is somewhere between 750 million and a billion dollars. Also was in that story that the company has raised 230 million dollars.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  So it wants a 4X valuation?

• 1:12:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  At the top end.

• 1:12:53David Pierce?

  And I would remind you that it is, it's, it's that Humane. It is, it's the one, it's the one we've talked about. It's not a different like B to B Humane that is very successful.

• 1:13:04David Pierce?

  Truly bold strategy to come out and say, I'm not surprised this company is looking for a buyer. Right? Like, I think the, the thing you hope for with your first product is that it gets you money to get to the second product. And then the second product is the one where you start to win and that's where you go. Like, that's the strategy. But if you flop on the first one and holy God, does it look like they flopped on the first one? It's very hard to get out of that. So I'm not shocked that Humane is looking for a way out. I think A, it's going to have a lot of trouble finding a buyer because this company is not full of people who are like beloved in the tech industry, I would say. And

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  At the top.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, at the top, like Imran Chowdhury in particular, I would say, left Apple not beloved by people still at Apple.

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  That's about as much as I can report on that, but that, I, I feel pretty good saying that.

• 1:13:57David Pierce?

  The rest of it is just, it is truly wild for this company to come out and say, we think we should get 4X, what we've raised. And everyone who works here should get rich because of this terrible product that we've made.

• 1:14:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so two things. One, it's probably broken and I don't believe you. Real theme. I'm just telling you.

• 1:14:18David Pierce?

  Well, that one's definitely broken.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's super broken and I don't believe you like. I'm just saying, we caught a lot of heat for being mean at the TED Talk. Here we are. Second, let's go through the list, right? So Apple is out. They're not going to pay them the money. And I concur with your reporting and that is also about as much as I can say.

• 1:14:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  But like, if you're out in the mix, it's just out there. That's just information. Apple's not going to buy this company. Especially because their entire pitch was we're going to obsolete the iPhone.

• 1:14:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't seem like the sort of thing Apple's going to invest in.

• 1:14:50David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  Apple has the Apple Watch. They're gonna be fine. They have Siri, which is a little shaky here, but they got the Apple. Google, no, right? That feels like a no. They're still struggling to integrate Fitbit.

• 1:15:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, Google has more hardware, both like more hardware chops and more hardware issues than it can deal with.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. Google, for example, I'll just do this. They just merged Android and the Pixel team under Rick Osterloh, who formerly ran the Pixel team. And all of hardware, and now he runs all the platforms too. So Rick has to like, keep Samsung happy. Right? Like he's, he now manages the whole ecosystem, which is really interesting. Right? But can you, and he's got to figure out the rest of Fitbit, which is still messy from what I understand from V. You can't just like throw a bunch of ex Apple designers out there. Right. Running not your AI platform.

• 1:15:46David Pierce?

  Right. And a big part of what Humane, I suspect, is trying to sell is the operating system. Right? Like they've always said, we are not just about the AI pin. Like they're, they want to be a platform. And this is a pitch you hear from everybody, but I suspect if you're going to pay anything like the price that they want, you think you're buying what has the potential to be a winning platform, not a bunch of hardware engineers. Like Google doesn't actually need more hardware engineers at this moment in time.

• 1:16:11Alex Cranz?

  Is it not just them trying to be like, everybody's really hot for AI right now? We shipped an AI thing by our AI thing.

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  But their AI thing is OpenAI.

• 1:16:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but Samsung's got Saturdays.

• 1:16:27David Pierce?

  If they wanted to do that, they should have sold four months ago. Right? Like if you're just trying to capitalize, you sell before you ship and not after.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Alex Cranz?

  Well, unless you're greedy and you think you actually like.

• 1:16:39Nilay Patel?

  Or they thought they were gonna win.

• 1:16:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they thought they were gonna win.

• 1:16:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is fine. Companies are allowed to work hard. Like, there's. How do I put this? There's no lack of sincerity in the humane ecosystem, right?

• 1:16:52David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  That's, there might be some confusion, some delusion, but not.

• 1:16:57David Pierce?

  But they're not kidding.

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  But not insincere, right?

• 1:16:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Google's out, right? I think Google's out just because the stuff runs on OpenAI's stack and Google doesn't run that. And they don't need more complication. Google, if anything, is trying to streamline, right? Microsoft is interesting. Microsoft runs a bunch of OpenAI stuff. They don't have mobile, right? There's lots of rumors. I think Satya Nadella is smarter than this. That's frankly just my, my belief there. I don't think, I don't think he's like, yeah, we'll take a flyer on this nonsense. He's, they're winning. He's like, I'm gonna take on the MacBook Air.

• 1:17:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Nilay Patel?

  That I would, but if of all the possibles, Microsoft at the top, I just think Nadella is smarter than this distraction. Samsung loves bad unfocused ideas.

• 1:17:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're in the mix. Love goofy hardware, a bunch of executives sitting around on Saturdays with nothing to do except do M and A deals.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna see that, that, that story on Saturday and be like, got it.

• 1:17:54David Pierce?

  Can you imagine the humane team just being given Bali?

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57David Pierce?

  Bali.

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  Go figure out Bali.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this, now the laser projector rolls around. Huh? Is that, is that something?

• 1:18:07David Pierce?

  I could actually see it. And Samsung, like, smart things is always an interesting version of that. Samsung actually is.

• 1:18:12Nilay Patel?

  Is. The humane man running smart things is like a pure nightmare. Just a pure absolute nightmare.

• 1:18:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed. But Samsung is, has a history of actually following through on pretty big acquisitions in a way that I think could be interesting. I suspect the humane team would not be psyched about working for Samsung. But that is maybe the funniest possible outcome.

• 1:18:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm just stuck on Samsung as a history of falling. Have you used smart things, sir?

• 1:18:46David Pierce?

  It's it's still there.

• 1:18:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true. It's there.

• 1:18:48David Pierce?

  It's it's around.

• 1:18:50Nilay Patel?

  For as much as much as I talk about the Frame TV, the the people who run the services are the boxy people because Samsung bought them a lot of that.

• 1:18:58David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boxy.

• 1:19:01David Pierce?

  R I P.

• 1:19:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying this is great. I'm just saying it's it's true that Samsung buys things and then the people continue working there.

• 1:19:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  All right. So LG, I think, is the same, right? If LG gets a whiff. Right. But yeah, Samsung's ahead because they're in the office on Saturday. But if LG gets a whiff that Samsung might do it, LG might buy it. LG famously bought WebOS, so a history of betting on doomed platforms and then turning them into television operating systems. You could see the humane.

• 1:19:34David Pierce?

  Cosmos.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  What if your TV had a laser projector and it projected under your hand? Pretty good. Amazon feels like a hard no. Right? That company is is bringing it's like getting smaller, not bigger.

• 1:19:49Alex Cranz?

  Panos is running all of hardware now.

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Panos is there.

• 1:19:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Panos is there, like.

• 1:19:54Nilay Patel?

  Panos Panay is in charge of Amazon Devices and Services.

• 1:19:58Alex Cranz?

  He's not going to go and be like, yeah, let's let's buy that and integrate that into Amazon's tech stack.

• 1:20:04David Pierce?

  If your question was which of these companies is most likely to ship something that resembles the AI pin in the next three years? I think it might be Amazon.

• 1:20:13Alex Cranz?

  I would agree.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  But I don't think Amazon would get to that point by acquiring Humane.

• 1:20:19Nilay Patel?

  No, my question is who will spend a billion dollars on Humane?

• 1:20:24David Pierce?

  The answer to that is like Steve Mnuchin or something like.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  Truth Social now runs the AI.

• 1:20:30David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying my list is Samsung, LG, if Sam, if they get a whiff of Saturday Samsung. And then like distant 5,000th place, third, Microsoft.

• 1:20:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's probably right.

• 1:20:46Nilay Patel?

  Who else has a billion dollars? Costco. Walmart. I was thinking like to be we're gonna Oracle. Be who? Who thought about buying Tik Tok but would buy humane instead?

• 1:20:55David Pierce?

  It'll it'll end up being like Verizon or Comcast, who's just like really excited about a new there. They're gonna be like, this is your TV remote.

• 1:21:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04David Pierce?

  On your lapel and everybody's gonna be like, no.

• 1:21:06Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna the idea of the humane design team bringing that energy to launching like the next FiOS remote.

• 1:21:18Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:21:19Alex Cranz?

  That's compelling.

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  It's like onstage at Ted being like, you can turn the volume up and down.

• 1:21:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do want to know, though, by the way, if if you're listening and you have an idea of a company that either might or should buy humane, tell us.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  Exxon.

• 1:21:34David Pierce?

  Vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866 verge 11. I genuinely want to know because I bet there is an interesting match or two that we're not thinking of.

• 1:21:43Alex Cranz?

  Ford.

• 1:21:44David Pierce?

  To know what they are.

• 1:21:45Alex Cranz?

  Ford.

• 1:21:45David Pierce?

  Ford. There you go. Drive your car with your oh, no, it's gonna be it's gonna be Elon Musk and it's gonna be Grok and it's just gonna be the Grok hardware.

• 1:21:54Alex Cranz?

  Don't summon that.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

  Rough. All right.

• 1:21:57Alex Cranz?

  Grok.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  We'll see what happens. Again, it's just a Bloomberg report. Humane itself has not said anything, but I strongly suspect they need to get out the game. I also suspect Rabbit's gonna end up in the same spot very soon.

• 1:22:08Alex Cranz?

  All right, I gotta do one more. I gotta do one more. Apple, uh, you know, sometimes you get photos on your phone and you're like, that's that's a terrible photo. You can delete it or you're like, oh, that's too spicy to keep here in case my mom sees my photos and you delete it. And there was an unfortunate bug where those photos just popped back up into people's things into their phones and Apple said nothing, but they corrected it just with the latest OS update. So you should no longer have reappearing nudes or whatever else. And Apple has said nothing about that, too.

• 1:22:44Nilay Patel?

  It's weird to confirm a bug like this by issuing an iOS update and then saying nothing else.

• 1:22:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they were like, old. My understanding is it's like, not just, oh, a photo you deleted last night. It's like.

• 1:22:58David Pierce?

  People are getting like years old photos, right?

• 1:23:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So so that's that's terrifying. But at the same time, with recall, I would have loved that. So I don't know where I stand on this, but I do stand on like, yeah, if I delete something, I generally want it. Deleted.

• 1:23:14Nilay Patel?

  Do you believe it's deleted? Right?

• 1:23:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't believe it's deleted. I want to know where that data goes when I make a choice about it. And I think that's the difference between recall and this like recall, you will know where the theoretically where the data goes. Once the security researchers actually figure that out. This we don't know. Big caveat.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is weird. I think, you know, we are part of our job is holding big companies accountable. And it is truly irresponsible for Apple to not say why this happened and what they did to fix it. There's a bunch of people on Reddit who love to argue with me on threads, who are like, we figured it out and you're overhyping this. And it doesn't matter because we didn't cause the bug. We didn't fix the bug. It's great that you have a theory about why it happened. The theory sound wonderfully plausible. I love it. I don't know what happened. Right. There's, there's one party that knows what happened and they, they should be accountable for their mistake because this is a big mistake. And it's weird that we give them a pass.

• 1:24:11Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:24:11Nilay Patel?

  And so, you know, we can't force them to, all we can do is send emails. That's, that's the sheriff Neil has got Mime Stream and he pushes that button every day.

• 1:24:22Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's all we can do. And we just can tell you, they have not responded to any of our emails or any of our phone calls about this. And I think that's fundamentally irresponsible. Because you're, you're playing with people's, like, some of the most personal data exists. Um, yeah, hopefully they say something soon. If not, I'll just keep sending emails. What else is there to do?

• 1:24:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Nilay Patel?

  In my administration, they would go straight to jail. Vote for tell. Uh, last one, I'm actually excited. The Sonos Ace headphones are out. Shout out to Chris Welch, who covers every square inch of the Sonos beat, to the point where I think Sonos, like the Sonos Reddit, like waits for Chris to come around and then like Sonos itself is just like, oh no, Chris is here. Um, it's great. He's, he scooped the headphones, obviously. They look great. They're like a cross between like the Sony vibe and AirPods Max vibe. The $450 is expensive. The headline feature is if you're watching TV on a Sonos soundbar, you can push a button and the audio will come to your headphones.

• 1:25:23Nilay Patel?

  I want this to be compelling to me and it's not my use case for these things.

• 1:25:28Alex Cranz?

  I think that's a really compelling if you are married and you live in a small home and you want to stay up late playing video games or you want to stay up late watching TV.

• 1:25:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, Nilay in his cavernous mansion wouldn't.

• 1:25:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Nilay, your house is just too big to fully appreciate.

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  But how often you need to, no, it's not, it's the real time switching that I understand that sometimes you want to watch TV and listen to headphones. I got you.

• 1:25:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  But the part where you're like, well, I started with the soundbar.

• 1:25:57Alex Cranz?

  Because they walk out of the room, they say, I'm going to bed and now you're just like, boop, yeah.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, I can see it. But that's a headline feature. By the way, that feature oddly is iOS only right now, soon coming to Android. Weird. Special audio, APTX, if you have Android as well, no high res anywhere else. No, it's Bluetooth everywhere, except if you're doing the weird TV thing. Probably for battery life. And then obviously this all comes on the heels of the disastrous app launch, which Sonos won't come out and say, but it feels very obvious that they set the timing of the headphone launch. They needed the app for the headphones and so then the app came out before it was ready.

• 1:26:41Nilay Patel?

  If any other sequence of events occurred to make the app come out before it was ready, I would be shocked. I wish Sonos would just say it like, Chris, talk to Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos. And he was like, well, the app was just ready. And it's like, why don't you just say we put out the app because the headphones are coming out? That would be fine. Or give people a choice. Don't update the app yet.

• 1:27:01David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. Ship it as if you buy the headphones, here's the new version of our app. It's going to be rolled out to everybody before long. Like that's, it's not a hard sequence of events to do. But instead Sonos was like, oh, this doesn't have queue management, which is what everyone wants. Let's ship it anyway.

• 1:27:18Nilay Patel?

  So I don't, actually I have no problems with this app. I'm the only person in America who has no problems with this app. And because we don't use the queue, we use playlists, our playlists are in Spotify and Apple Music. And so like, whatever.

• 1:27:32David Pierce?

  I just don't use the Sonos app.

• 1:27:34Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 1:27:34Nilay Patel?

  That's what I mean. Like Becky just uses AirPlay.

• 1:27:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Nilay Patel?

  For our Sonos. But it's fine. It is a little bit faster. I know other people have wild problems like Casey Newton is like, I can't even set the volume on my speakers anymore.

• 1:27:48David Pierce?

  It's really bad if you have a local music collection that you care about a lot too, which is like, and Chris and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that like, those are the core Sonos people and have been for two decades. And Sonos just continues to try to drive them away in very strange ways.

• 1:28:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03David Pierce?

  The headphones look sick though.

• 1:28:05Alex Cranz?

  Cause there's six of them.

• 1:28:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. This is the classic story. The company is chasing the bigger consumer market where the money is and the growth is. And then you've got these like very passionate users who are like, my entire life is one button app from 2004. And we are the people in the red.

• 1:28:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, like you, there's, there's a dynamic there that I'm, as a person who redesigned our website, I'm aware of the people who are mad.

• 1:28:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Alex Cranz?

  They've released apps before, concurrently. They had, they had the two versions of the last one.

• 1:28:34Nilay Patel?

  No, that was a disaster.

• 1:28:35Alex Cranz?

  It was horrible, but they had two.

• 1:28:37Nilay Patel?

  No, that's a disaster. Like Sonos now.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  Sonos is just bad at apps.

• 1:28:40Nilay Patel?

  Patrick has been on the show a bunch of times. We've talked to him about a lot of things, everything from spatial audio and like, how they design speakers all the way to like antitrust, like, like he's been on the show. They have mismanaged in particular, these apps and what the apps do and how the apps work. Like the S1 to S2 transition disaster. The Sonos like, we're going to trade in your old speakers ever. And then like, we're going to break the old ones and they undid it. That was bad. Like, there's this thing that they're in particular not good at.

• 1:29:14Alex Cranz?

  Which is wild, cause that's.

• 1:29:15Nilay Patel?

  They should get better at it.

• 1:29:16Alex Cranz?

  The magic of Sonos is, is how it works with all your stuff and it just talks to each other. It's supposed to be super smart and yet the app continues to be kind of dumb.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And again, I, I have not had, because I don't use some of these features, like what was it? Timers and alarm clocks are broken in this app. And the idea that I would set my alarm clock using the Sonos app is just what? But like if you are the person

• 1:29:39David Pierce?

  But a lot of people do, yeah.

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you're the person who's alarm clock broke, like you are mad.

• 1:29:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Nilay Patel?

  That's a problem, right? Like, you should find a way to be like, okay, these core features, there's some of these core features where people just like build their lives, like alarm clocks are, people build their lives around it, but you have to respect it. And like, in this case, I think Sona says they've gotten more and more consumer. They've sort of like gotten away from it and they should just recalibrate that a little bit. That's that I have like 9,000 Sona speakers, like I'm trapped in this ecosystem. What are you gonna do? It's fine. Uh, all right. I think that's it.

• 1:30:16Nilay Patel?

  That's it. David, do you have another one?

• 1:30:17David Pierce?

  Nope, that's it.

• 1:30:19Nilay Patel?

  We're done. We gotta wrap this.

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  Spotify has a font.

• 1:30:22Nilay Patel?

  Spotify has a font.

• 1:30:23David Pierce?

  That's all, that's I have, I have, that's all the information I have for you.

• 1:30:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they might, Amazon might make you pay for Alexa once they add AI to it. It's like that's kind of stuff.

• 1:30:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Nilay Patel?

  The big thing is that I'm gonna go try to call Scarlett Johansson now. And see if she will voice Verge's AI.

• 1:30:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Nilay Patel?

  As revenge.

• 1:30:40Alex Cranz?

  Do you like AI calling Jost to call her?

• 1:30:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say, uh, a friend of mine was like, Google should just take this voice now. They should just pay her whatever amount of money she wants now.

• 1:30:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Nilay Patel?

  If there's like an arms race for celebrity AI voices, I would be, that would be very entertaining. All right, that's it. Also, my voice is available for cheaper than Scarlett Johansson's. In case you're wondering, it's hard to reproduce.

• 1:31:03David Pierce?

  Is she the most expensive? Like who do you, is it, is it like, I feel like it's either like Scarlett Johansson or Ryan Reynolds. This is a whole other hour of the Vergecast we could do.

• 1:31:10Nilay Patel?

  No way.

• 1:31:11David Pierce?

  In terms of like, no, James Earl Jones.

• 1:31:13Alex Cranz?

  James Earl Jones? Mufasa and Darth Vader.

• 1:31:16David Pierce?

  It's important to everyone that I remind you that Alex Cranz is 66 years old. And if you've never heard of any of those words that she just said, don't worry.

• 1:31:24Alex Cranz?

  Name all know who that is.

• 1:31:26Nilay Patel?

  I mean, aren't there, there's like, Amazon, hasn't Amazon set the mark? I guess the rates are going higher, but

• 1:31:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Nilay Patel?

  This is a thing that exists. You can just buy other voices from Amazon, right?

• 1:31:35Alex Cranz?

  Yep. You can.

• 1:31:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, send us your notes with who you think the most expensive voice would be. I don't wanna, I don't, we'll read, we'll read your ideas.

• 1:31:44Alex Cranz?

  Everyone's gonna agree with it.

• 1:31:45Nilay Patel?

  It's [email protected].

• 1:31:47David Pierce?

  Yes, guys.

• 1:31:47Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:31:53David 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.

• 1:32:11Speaker 07

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

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