Pod Insights The Vergecast The race to win AI — and hack iMessage About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss Google Gemini's attempt to compete with ChatGPT, Beeper Mini bringing iMessage to Android, and shakeups in the podcast industry, and much more.
Further reading:
“Welcome to hell, Elon” has now been cited in a Supreme Court brief.
Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4
Google’s Gemini AI model now powers the Bard chatbot
Google’s Gemini AI model is coming to the Pixel 8 Pro — and eventually to Android
Apple joins AI fray with release of model framework
Bing’s GPT-4-powered Deep Search takes its time with AI questions
Getty lawsuit against Stability AI to go to trial in the UK
Beeper Mini brings iMessage to Android
EU officials think iMessage isn’t ‘popular enough’ with businesses to warrant regulation.
Spotify cancels industry-favorite podcast Heavyweight
Spotify’s not going for Pulitzers anymore
Spotify’s CFO and general counsel sold millions of dollars worth of stock the day after the layoff.
Tidal is laying off more than 10 percent of its staff.
Seems like Apple’s iTunes Movies and TV Shows apps for Apple TV really are going away.
Here’s how a bridal photo captured a single person in three poses at once
Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats
Microsoft is investigating a Windows issue that’s renaming printers to HP LaserJet
Motorola Razr 2023 review: not enough of a good thing
Disney Plus and Hulu’s one-app experience is launching in beta
The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill
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
Transcript 16,618 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:11 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Samsung Dex enthusiasts.
1:16 Alex Cranz? And me.
1:17 Nilay Patel? And Alex Krantz. Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Alex Krantz is here.
1:20 Alex Cranz? I'm your... I don't know what Dex is. No, I've used it. I've used it.
1:23 Nilay Patel? You're gonna find out. David Pierce refuses to use Dex. So we've replaced him with Dan Seifert, who's gonna show us his Dex setup today.
1:31 Speaker 05 I'm the Dex defender.
1:33 Nilay Patel? It's coming. Actually, David's just on vacation.
1:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:35 Nilay Patel? But for a moment, you thought that I was so hardcore into Samsung Dex that I clipped my friend from his own show, didn't you?
1:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I would have believed it.
1:45 Nilay Patel? It's like, that's who we are now.
1:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah. You and Dan are both like very passionate Dex defenders.
1:51 Nilay Patel? In different directions.
1:52 Alex Cranz? Totally different directions. That's what's... And David's like, no.
1:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. If you don't have a strong opinion about Samsung Dex, you can't be your pro or con.
2:00 Alex Cranz? I'm forming one right now so I don't get ejected from the room. It's going, it's coming.
2:05 Nilay Patel? David is on a very well-deserved vacation. Dan is filling in for him. Hi, Dan. How you doing?
2:09 Speaker 05 I'm all right. I am not recording through Dex, to be clear. We'll get into it. Not the right tool for the job.
2:15 Nilay Patel? I saw Dan in the office the other day and he goes, "Look at this." And he pulls out what by all accounts looks like a laptop. And we'll, we'll let people look at it in a minute. It's, I mean, it's nuts. And he's got his like phone magneted on the side. And he's like, "It's Dex." And I was like, "That's awesome." And I was like, "You have to come on the Vergecast and talk about it." And the first thing Dan said to me was, "I will not record through this. I don't trust it enough." He's just like, "Nothing mission critical is happening here." Dan, show us your, just frankly absurd Galaxy Fold Samsung Dex laptop setup.
2:48 Speaker 05 I'm gonna try and show it to the camera as best as I can.
2:51 Nilay Patel? But remember, it's a radio show.
2:53 Speaker 05 It's a radio show.
2:53 Nilay Patel? So if you're in your car right now, pull over and close your eyes. And in your mind's eye, imagine what Dan is saying, or alternatively, pull over and watch this on YouTube. Those are your two choices.
3:03 Speaker 05 Yeah. Uh, so this is like, not a new thing, to be clear. Uh, I bought a NexDoc, which is a lapdoc thing. Uh, it's been out for a couple of years. This idea has been out for like, well over a decade. You plug your phone into it. It's a laptop looking thing, but there's no guts inside of it. There's no computer inside of it. It's just a touchscreen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and you plug your phone into it. But what I did was I got this magnetic mount.
3:32 Nilay Patel? It's like a folding MagSafe mount.
3:33 Speaker 05 So I put a MagSafe, if anyone's been following me on any threads or Mastodon, you might've seen that I put a MagSafe ring on the back of my Z Fold. And then I bought this magnetic mount that I stuck to the back of the NexDoc. And so now I've got a Dex setup with my phone on the side. And it's effectively a dual-screen Dex.
3:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
3:55 Speaker 05 That's what I'm calling it.
3:56 Nilay Patel? It's the world's worst Chrome.
3:57 Alex Cranz? Wait, is it a dual-screen or a, a triple-screen? Like, is the Dex?
4:02 Speaker 05 It's dual. See, there's two.
4:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but the the fold, I almost feel like it's a dual screen.
4:07 Nilay Patel? Technically, it's triple screen because the back of the fold has a screen that's not being used.
4:11 Speaker 05 If I could display something on the screen for people sitting across from me at the coffee shop.
4:15 Nilay Patel? I'm actually astonished that Dex doesn't put up a full screen ad on the back of the fold screen. It's like you're witnessing the power of Samsung Dex.
4:23 Speaker 05 Yes, now go buy a fridge. That would be quite wonderful, actually. But no, it's it's it's a dual screen thing. I got my phone on one side. The cool thing about this setup is that you can use the phone as a phone. And so like, that looks like a phone. Then on the other side is the Dex interface.
4:41 Alex Cranz? It is also significantly better than what you were rocking.
4:45 Nilay Patel? It is it is such a vast improvement over my attempt to use Dex. The problem with it is that you still have to use a Galaxy Fold.
4:52 Alex Cranz? You have to buy this fake laptop.
4:54 Speaker 05 I don't have a problem with that, but.
4:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I my I did not enjoy one minute of using the Galaxy Fold. Just the every piece of that just made me and I that's not to say I don't enjoy using Android. I like using Android. The Galaxy Fold is a very particular device.
5:12 Speaker 05 Yes.
5:12 Nilay Patel? With very particular demands, and I just didn't like.
5:15 Speaker 05 It's got a particular set of skills.
5:17 Nilay Patel? We can say that. And the skills are being clunkier than a regular phone.
5:23 Speaker 05 Maybe, but it could do a lot more than a regular phone. I you know, I think like, just to like, back up on the Dex conversation here. I think there are like two things that are appealing about Dex. One is what you've been trying to do, Eli, which is like, I'm going ultra lightweight. I'm just traveling with my phone and I roll into the office.
5:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:40 Speaker 05 Plug into a hotel desk and I have a desktop setup with a keyboard, mouse and a big screen there. That is one dream.
5:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:46 Speaker 05 The other way, the other path that's interesting to me at least, is the setup that I've got here, which is like, you could say, well, you're just carrying around as much as a MacBook Air and a phone anyways. The difference is I don't have to like sync between two different devices here. Everything's running off the phone. All of my data is running off the phone and it's using my phone's internet connection. So what this is doing is essentially giving me a laptop-like experience with integrated cellular that I can't really get through Apple or really through a lot of other parties. So that is like the interesting thing. All that said, both paths can lead to madness and there's a lot of junk involved in either one of them. I just find it pretty fascinating, A, that it works at all, and B, how far it's
6:30 Speaker 05 come since I first experienced Dex way back in like 2018. It is wildly different.
6:35 Alex Cranz? You don't find it fascinating?
6:37 Speaker 05 No, no.
6:38 Alex Cranz? You are delighted by it.
6:39 Speaker 05 I am delighted by gadgets, even if they don't work as well as some other solutions.
6:44 Alex Cranz? I was getting DMs from you about this thing. You were just like, look at it, it works.
6:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's very cool.
6:49 Alex Cranz? It looks cool as hell.
6:50 Nilay Patel? Again, my, the beginning of my Dex journey started by knowing Dan had been Dex-pilled.
6:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but then what happened when you saw that there was like a fake laptop involved?
7:00 Nilay Patel? Well, so first I was like, okay, this is so much closer.
7:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:04 Nilay Patel? To what I thought I wanted.
7:06 Alex Cranz? Right.
7:06 Nilay Patel? And then he showed me the next stock, which is the most aggressively 16 by 9 laptop in the world.
7:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
7:12 Nilay Patel? Like the amount of bezel that is on the bottom of that display.
7:15 Alex Cranz? You can see it from here.
7:17 Speaker 05 It's a good inch below the display of that.
7:19 Nilay Patel? You could make that laptop 4.3 just by reclaiming bezel.
7:23 Speaker 05 Yes.
7:23 Nilay Patel? It's a lot of bezel. And then it's still Dex, which is clunky and.
7:29 Alex Cranz? What if you left the laptop at work?
7:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, what if I just had a desk with a laptop on it that I left here, like I used to do in the before time? That's where we're going.
7:40 Alex Cranz? But see, if someone steals this one, they're not going to get important Neelai secrets.
7:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, you can't log into it if there's no phone.
7:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's just the fake laptop.
7:48 Nilay Patel? Look, I know it's the dream is that you just walk around with a cool phone.
7:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:54 Nilay Patel? Just plugging it into stuff and having it turn into your thing.
7:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:57 Nilay Patel? That's the dream. We all agree that's the dream.
8:00 Alex Cranz? 100%.
8:00 Nilay Patel? You throw it in a couple of your car, the car lights up and it's your phone.
8:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:04 Nilay Patel? You can sort of get there, but you have to experience CarPlay for better or worse.
8:08 Alex Cranz? It's great.
8:09 Nilay Patel? You come to the office, you throw it on a magnetic charger, like a pad, screen lights up, you're doing all your stuff. Everyone knows what the dream is.
8:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:19 Nilay Patel? I get emails, but people are like, I feel you on the dream. And then you sit down and you're like, I have to use this Galaxy Fold.
8:27 Nilay Patel? Which again, like the screen, the screen is just like a bubbly, wavy experience.
8:31 Speaker 05 I, I mean, I don't know if it was like your specific one or whatever.
8:35 Alex Cranz? No, yours is too, Dan.
8:36 Speaker 05 I mean, so if you look at mine.
8:39 Alex Cranz? I can see it from here.
8:40 Speaker 05 Five. If you're looking at it off axis, then yeah, you can see that crease and stuff like that. But when you're holding it straight on, you really don't see the crease. And when the screen is on and you're like experiencing content, you don't see the, the crease.
8:54 Alex Cranz? It disappears.
8:55 Speaker 05 It just disappears. Like I've read like a hundred books on it this year.
8:57 Nilay Patel? The pixel fold, which has, I think the better aspect ratio when it's folded.
9:03 Speaker 05 See, I disagree entirely.
9:04 Nilay Patel? Cause I want to use it as a phone a lot of the time. And the galaxy fold does not lend itself to being used as a phone.
9:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
9:10 Nilay Patel? Cause it's too tall and too skinny. So you're always unfolding it. The pixel fold at least folds in that direction and it got a big update this week along with the rest of pixel updates, which we will talk about. There's actual news this week, like quite a lot of it. But we're going to do the first 20 minutes on Dex. Anyway, the pixel fold got an update this week that forces any app to work on its, on its version of a folding display at full screen. Maybe I'll try that, but it doesn't have a Dex mode.
9:35 Speaker 05 No, you can't plug the pixel fold into anything. It doesn't have video out at all.
9:39 Nilay Patel? Like, come on, turn it into a Chromebook. Let's do this. First party Dex.
9:42 Alex Cranz? What if you just like slap it into the back of one?
9:44 Nilay Patel? Podcast of requesting Google make Dex.
9:49 Alex Cranz? Do it, Google.
9:50 Nilay Patel? All right. That's, that, that's one thing. So the, the Dex experiments continue apace. I don't recommend them, but if you have strong opinions about Dex, we want to hear from you. Two, and I just want to mention this before we begin. There's a big Supreme Court case about the social media moderation laws that were passed in Texas and Florida, which by, I'm just going to tell you, they're blatantly unconstitutional.
10:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:12 Nilay Patel? There's pure violations of the first amendment. They are government state regulations, but they're at the Supreme Court. Supreme Court's going to, whatever. Amicus briefs are being filed in these cases. One is by public knowledge, which we.
10:24 Alex Cranz? Those are like supporting briefs.
10:25 Nilay Patel? The supporting briefs, not from the parties, it's just people with strong opinions filing briefs to the Supreme Court. So you look at the dockets, a bunch of people are filing them. Public knowledge, which is an organization that we have talked to a lot, folks from public knowledge you have encountered on the verge many, many times. John Bergmeyer, public knowledge, you have probably encountered in our stories or our podcasts in the past. He sent me an email today. He's like, you're in our brief. And they cited, welcome to hell, Elon.
10:48 Alex Cranz? Yes.
10:49 Nilay Patel? In a Supreme Court brief today, uh, which means it's welcome to hell Elon is now part of our government's history. Like it's just, it's in, it's in the docket on a pivotal First Amendment case.
11:01 Alex Cranz? Um, when do you think like law students are gonna start having to read, it's required reading for them?
11:06 Nilay Patel? When my mom read this, she, she didn't even call me. She was so upset at the number of F bombs in the story that she called my sister. And my sister had to call me to call my mother, who then said, why did you use such language?
11:22 Nilay Patel? Now Clarence Thomas is gonna read that shit. And I just, I'm just, I'm just, anything can happen. That's my message to the youth of America. Any, anything can, can happen. Uh, but I'm, I'm actually, the, these cases are, are big deals. What's inside of it is do social networks have the right to moderate their networks? Do they have their own First Amendment rights? To make choices on their networks? I think the answer has to be yes. It doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on. The answer has to be yes. Because that way you can get things like subreddits.
11:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
11:51 Nilay Patel? And you need things like subreddits. You need, maybe you need something like X that is moderated in one very specific way and something that is different and to let people decide. So that's the heart of this case, but it is just very funny to me.
12:04 Alex Cranz? I think it's great. I'm very excited for you.
12:06 Nilay Patel? I'm just, again, I, I just hope Clarence Thomas. I described the Supreme Court in this piece as a group of uncool weirdos.
12:13 Alex Cranz? I mean, I think most of them will read that and be like, fair.
12:17 Nilay Patel? I hope so.
12:18 Alex Cranz? Most of them, not to Clarence Thomas.
12:19 Nilay Patel? I can go through the nine and be like, who will, who will see themselves and who will, like Alito is gonna be pissed. Like Alito's like, look at these Jordans. I'm cool as shit.
12:28 Alex Cranz? Kagan's gonna be like, I get it. Understood.
12:32 Nilay Patel? If anyone can AI generate for me a photograph of Samuel Alito pointing at his Jordans saying, I'm cool as shit. I'm not sure what we'll do with it, but I will accept it.
12:42 Alex Cranz? Just into your heart. Just happy to experience it.
12:46 Nilay Patel? Samuel Alito and the black Jordans. Okay. There is a lot of news this week. Let's start with Google. We, we've already been talking about Google. Big news this week. They launched Gemini. It's the new AI model. They've been talking about it for a while. They started talking about it. Even when they launched Bard the first time, even at, uh, I O, they were saying, we have this new model called Gemini that they've been doing demos of it. It is finally here. It is obviously meant to be the big step change competitor to ChatGPT, in particular GPT-4.
13:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:15 Nilay Patel? Uh, David talked to Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, the head of AI over there. They're, they keep talking about benchmarks, which I, I would like to get your opinions on. We've reviewed many products. There's, there's an importance of benchmarks in the world. I don't know what an AI model benchmark is, but they talked about it a lot.
13:37 Alex Cranz? They talked about it a lot.
13:38 Nilay Patel? Thirty out of thirty-two benchmarks, Gemini beats GPT-4.
13:42 Speaker 05 That's like a gamer's nexus number of benchmarks to run.
13:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't know, man. So we should talk about that, what that means, and if that is a useful measure for us, as we can figure out, like how all of us should evaluate different AI systems, but that is their claim, thirty out of thirty-two. Sam Altman, you're back. Guess what? You got fired again. I don't know. Sundar told David that eventually Gemini will be integrated into search, its ad products in a Chrome, like this is the thing they're gonna build on. It's in Bard, you can play with Bard. I want to talk about Bard in a minute. And then the main, the main, main thing about Gemini is that it is multimodal from the jump.
14:20 Alex Cranz? Right.
14:21 Nilay Patel? So it understands video and audio, it can spit some of that stuff out. There's a really fun video that Google released, where a person is drawing a picture of a duck, and it just sort of figures out that it's looking at a duck. Cool.
14:33 Alex Cranz? That's cool as hell.
14:34 Nilay Patel? Uh, I would, I would posit that hot dog, not hot dog, again, remains the baseline framework to understand the entire AI industry. Uh, it's, that's a duck.
14:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:44 Nilay Patel? You know what I mean? It's a duck. Uh, so it's cool. It's like fun to play with. It's cool. The addition of multimodal capabilities is what really happened this year in AI. That was a big step change. Uh, and then obviously Google has new chips. It's more efficient. They're excited about all of it.
14:59 Alex Cranz? The multimodal stuff, that's not actually live for, for most people. That's only like for...
15:06 Alex Cranz? Like businesses, right?
15:07 Speaker 05 So these are the, these are the three models.
15:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 05 So there's Gemini Nano, which runs only on a Pixel Eight Pro.
15:13 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
15:13 Speaker 05 And Google's very excited about this. Now, now the phone is the best phone for AI, da, da, da, da, da.
15:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:18 Speaker 05 Um, so it's only on Pixel Eight Pro is Gemini Nano. That's the smallest version of the new model. It can run on the Pixel Eight's tensor processing, all that stuff. Then there's Gemini Pro, which is what you can go use in Bard today.
15:30 Alex Cranz? Right.
15:31 Speaker 05 And then there's Gemini Ultra, which is not out yet.
15:33 Alex Cranz? Okay. And but that's the one like, because the pro version is still just in Bard. Like, that's the only way we can currently access it. And Bard is still just text based.
15:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, the, the pro version is still a chat bot type of thing where you type in, it gives you typed responses back. And Ultra is the one that involves vision and pictures and video and stuff like that. And you're right, Alex, that is like the difference now. And so we can't really experience the multimodal aspect of this just yet. Ultra is coming out next year, according to Google, and it will most likely be used for the more enterprise applications that are the higher demand, higher intensity stuff.
16:11 Alex Cranz? Well, that's the part that like, Google is the most excited about, like, over and over again. Besides that and the benchmarks, they're like, yeah, it's really fast. And you do all this stuff, but you can't see any of it yet.
16:20 Speaker 05 It's, it's the new thing, right? Like, like the, the chat interface we've had all year with Chat GPT four and, and the others as well as Bard. So like, a better chat interface is great, appreciate it. But like, the new thing is the multimodal thing. So that's understandable why Google is most excited about that. That is like the thing that if you want to put your on your like predicting hat, like a robot is going to use a multimodal LLM AI interface in order to navigate the world. So like, that's like the exciting futury stuff. So like, I get it.
16:48 Nilay Patel? And that's basically what Demis said in our piece. You can see how we would get to robotics with a model like Gemini, or at least they can see it. What we can see is Google Bard.
16:58 Alex Cranz? Right.
16:58 Nilay Patel? But you can see how a robot looking at something would be able to make some interpretations of it, spit out some new commands and go.
17:06 Nilay Patel? So that this brings me back to like, how do we evaluate this stuff? I've been thinking about this a lot.
17:09 Alex Cranz? You've been playing with it a whole lot, too.
17:11 Nilay Patel? It's I'm addicted to playing with Bard. Because there's nothing funnier than asking a Google product how it will impact search. You know, it's like it's they got to dance around it. So I think playing with Bard is really interesting. I think the connection that Bard has, or lack of connection that Bard has to the Google search generative experience is really interesting. So Bard is supposed to be a pretty self-contained experience.
17:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
17:35 Nilay Patel? You open the chatbot, you ask it for stuff, it can summarize things for you. It can watch a YouTube video for you. Again, huge problems with that idea. Like, if the robot's watching the YouTube video for you, does the YouTube creator receive any money? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think Google knows the answer to that question.
17:51 Alex Cranz? Cliff Notes knows the answer.
17:53 Nilay Patel? Maybe. So I've been playing with Bard a lot. So far Bard just has confidently hallucinated at me, left and right.
17:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:00 Nilay Patel? I asked it why a Google executive would be upset at The Verge. I won't name names this time, you can go look at my threads, suppose. And it like made a list of answers and then it confidently hallucinated, complete with a link to YouTube.
18:13 Alex Cranz? Yes.
18:14 Nilay Patel? A Vergecast interview that has never occurred.
18:18 Nilay Patel? It just took us to the Vergecast channel page.
18:20 Alex Cranz? Oh, thank you for the promotion, Bard.
18:23 Nilay Patel? Great. But that, to me, is so nuts. And then I asked, why did you do this?
18:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:29 Nilay Patel? And it apologized to me. Like, I'm very sorry, I misinterpreted some facts, I assumed this had happened. I read some like titles of other Vergecast, which random, like not even relevant, like even in the realm of relevance. And it's like, but it turns out on further examination, like, this didn't happen. And I was like, why do you do this? And I was like, I'm every day I'm getting better.
18:51 Alex Cranz? That's how I what I say whenever I like file a really bad blog and I get hard edits. I'm like, don't, like, I'm working on it. Every day I get better.
18:58 Nilay Patel? I didn't I didn't read the source material. I'm very sorry.
19:01 Alex Cranz? I'm very sorry.
19:02 Nilay Patel? We put that up against 30 out of 32 benchmarks. And it's like, wait, there's only one benchmark, right?
19:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:09 Nilay Patel? Does it lie to you? All the time. Can you trust what it says?
19:14 Alex Cranz? I don't think they're benchmarking that.
19:15 Nilay Patel? It appears not. I think they're benchmarking things like, can it do math?
19:19 Alex Cranz? Right. Because a lot of benchmarks seem to be around coding. And so there was a ton of coding benchmarks. And that's really where it sounded like Google is the most excited about it is it's going to put a whole lot of coders out of jobs because it can do it as well or better.
19:34 Alex Cranz? And then not a lot of conversation about the hallucinations, which for me and you, and I think most people is like, that's what I actually care about. Like, I'm happy it can do Python really, really well, but I need to know if it's going to lie to me and destroy the world. Or just lie to me and, and, and keep showing me fake Vergecast videos.
19:51 Nilay Patel? I'm going to read you the, some of the benchmarks.
19:53 Alex Cranz? Okay.
19:54 Nilay Patel? Okay. There's MMLU, which is Massive Multitask Language Understanding.
19:58 Alex Cranz? Oh.
19:58 Nilay Patel? It scores a 90% compared to GPT-4's 86%.
20:01 Alex Cranz? Ooh.
20:02 Nilay Patel? That means something to you.
20:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:04 Nilay Patel? There's Big Bench Hard.
20:07 Nilay Patel? That's what that's called.
20:10 Nilay Patel? These, that's a reasoning one.
20:11 Speaker 05 That's the one we put on the gaming laptops. Big Bench Hard.
20:15 Nilay Patel? It's a diverse set of challenging tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. Gemini did 83 point, Gemini Ultra, mind you, 83.6%. GPT-4 is 83.1. There's something called Drop, which is reading comprehension, 82.4 for Gemini Ultra, 80.9 for GPT-4. I swear to God, this isn't a blog post that Google published. There's a reasoning benchmark for AI systems called Hella Swag.
20:40 Speaker 05 All of these sound like the, like, skills comprehension tests my kids go through in elementary school, where they take the state tests and they're like, are you at grade level? Are you above grade level? Are you behind grade level?
20:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:51 Speaker 05 That's what all of these.
20:52 Nilay Patel? Are you at Hella Swag?
20:54 Speaker 05 What is your Hella Swag level? Are you at, are you at acceptable Hella Swag? Are you Hella, Hella Swag? Are you just swag?
21:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Gemini is just swag. 87.8, 95.3 Hella Swag score for GPT-4.
21:08 Alex Cranz? Let's go.
21:09 Nilay Patel? I would remind you again, the GPT-4 is made by a company that is in pure turmoil.
21:15 Nilay Patel? Fired and rehired a CEO in a matter of days.
21:17 Alex Cranz? But it's swag.
21:18 Nilay Patel? It's super swag. There's some other ones. There's math ones. GSM 8K, 94.4% for Gemini, 92.0. So you can just read these. They're all in Google's blog posts. We'll link to it. My point is, you look at this and with a benchmark test for a gaming laptop.
21:39 Nilay Patel? I can draw some conclusions about, I don't know, how fast the laptop is.
21:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:44 Nilay Patel? How well it will play Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
21:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so well.
21:48 Speaker 05 A game people love to play.
21:49 Alex Cranz? The best.
21:50 Nilay Patel? People love it when we benchmark Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Nobody loves anything more than when we benchmark Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But those things are related to what you might do.
22:01 Alex Cranz? Right.
22:01 Nilay Patel? And I'm just reading these benchmarks for Gemini, and I understand why Google's proud of them. Yes, it is true. On 30 out of 32, the number in their column is blue. And on 2 of 32, the number in GPT's column is blue. That, great, you won. It doesn't mean anything to me yet. And then in actually using the product, I find myself saying, well, if I can't trust it, it doesn't matter.
22:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, it reminds me of the battery benchmark testing.
22:31 Alex Cranz? Yes, I was about to say the same.
22:33 Speaker 05 Manufacturers do rundown benchmark tests. All of them do this on laptops, mobile devices, whatever, whether they're Apple, HP, Dell, whoever. And they will come out saying 22 hours of video playback time, which means nothing when my laptop dies in five hours of me using it.
22:48 Alex Cranz? Well, because you look at it and you see there's usually an asterisk and it's like, we've turned off the wifi. We've turned off the Bluetooth. We've turned off the Soul. Like, yeah, the screen might not even be on, but we did it. And it's the same thing here where it is actually really, really hard to test a battery because there are so many variables. And in the same way, there are so many variables with hallucination. So it's like, it's really hard. They can't even figure out how to make something to test if it's hallucinating. How are they going to make a benchmark to test if it's hallucinating?
23:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, I think it is fascinating that they have a benchmark for understranding infographics. I think that's cool. Someone had to come up with that benchmark.
23:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:29 Nilay Patel? And someone had to point out that Gemini Ultra. Gets an 80.3 on that benchmark.
23:34 Alex Cranz? Nailed it.
23:35 Nilay Patel? Whereas the GPT-4 gets 75.1. We can talk about the actual product. I'm focused on this because I think there's a tendency with all tech products to try to find some objective measure that will say that Apple is definitively better than Microsoft or whatever it is. Windows drools.
23:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:53 Nilay Patel? Look at this benchmark, like we live in it. And I'm just trying to apply that instinctively to being shown some benchmarks. And I'm like, but I don't.
24:03 Alex Cranz? I think it's so hard to do with AI because AI is like, especially large language models, so nebulous. It is so vast, right? Like, like the amount of stuff it's ingesting and then that it can like recreate is enormous.
24:16 Nilay Patel? We are very close to being like, I'm going to measure Gemini's skull and tell you how smart it is.
24:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:21 Nilay Patel? Right, like it's, it's like.
24:22 Alex Cranz? Right there. It's like, oh, do we want to do that?
24:26 Nilay Patel? So there's just some weirdness here. But at the same time, knowing that one of these is good or worse at decoding infographics. I shared a post with Andrew Moreno, our engineer, the other day, where someone was uploading all of the manuals to old Roland synthesizers.
24:44 Alex Cranz? That would be something you too would talk about.
24:46 Nilay Patel? Asking it how to make the sounds on Cure records. And it would just read the manual because those manuals are impenetrable.
24:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:52 Nilay Patel? And it would just like spit out some settings for various songs. That is the coolest shit in the entire world.
24:58 Speaker 05 Were they accurate, though?
24:59 Nilay Patel? I don't know. It was just a threads post about somebody who was excited.
25:02 Alex Cranz? Cool.
25:02 Nilay Patel? But it's like, I'm certain it got closer than if you were just ice cold reading the manual, right? Especially a manual that that that's impenetrable.
25:11 Speaker 05 I mean, if it gave you some like Depeche Mode settings when you asked for the cure, that would not be very good, right?
25:16 Nilay Patel? I mean, that would cause a holy war. Let's be very careful.
25:19 Speaker 05 That's my point.
25:21 Nilay Patel? But I, there's just some of that, which I think is so cool that these tools can do. And I don't know how to evaluate a company telling me, I don't know how to make the connection between the benchmarks are better. And the capabilities are better.
25:36 Alex Cranz? I think it's because it's really, it's hard for them to do. So they're like, okay, well, I can lean on benchmarks because this is like something I can actually say. I don't have to just be like, doesn't it feel nicer? Which you get a lot of times with gadgets. They always are like, give me those, the subjective things. And largely with, with AI, it is largely subjective. Like, okay, yeah, it's cool that it can do Python and stuff better. But the, the big stuff, the stuff that most people are going to be using it for is all that, the subjective stuff. And you can't test that? Like, it feels like you more have to do like a research project. Like, it's more like anthropology or something, I feel like, than it is like mathematics and computations.
26:16 Nilay Patel? Right. Do these models have different personalities?
26:18 Alex Cranz? Right.
26:19 Nilay Patel? Do they, are they better at different things? So their cultures are different? Like, you do start to get into some very deep questions about the nature of intelligence. And then you're like, someone asked it if I was handsome and it's like, mm.
26:32 Nilay Patel? It like literally said like beauty is in the eye of the holder. And I was like, well, you got a little bit of personality there.
26:39 Alex Cranz? All right. I see how it is. Damn.
26:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's like his contributions are vast, but I, no, no.
26:47 Nilay Patel? So anyway, people should play with it. I'm curious what people think of it. There is obviously, the future of Google's business is here. Right? The future of the search business, which is the cash cow for Google, is sitting right in this product. And I still don't know how that's going to work. And I don't know if Google yet knows how it's going to work.
27:07 Alex Cranz? How is it working in the Pixel? I haven't tried the Pixel version yet. And I'm just curious, like.
27:11 Nilay Patel? So the Pixel A Pro is only, there's two things today. It's auto summarization in the recorder app and smart reply in the G-Board keyboard are now Gemini Nano.
27:19 Alex Cranz? Okay.
27:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:21 Alex Cranz? I mean.
27:22 Nilay Patel? And you can really feel that 29th benchmark.
27:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:25 Nilay Patel? When you're using smart reply in the Pixel A keyboard. I mean, look, those are, auto reply, autocomplete, that stuff is really important.
27:32 Alex Cranz? Mm-hmm. That's, that is true. Like.
27:34 Nilay Patel? The AI stuff they've been doing in their recorder app is neat. And like for, you know.
27:38 Alex Cranz? A lot of our reporters like it. Like, like a lot of our reporters are like, oh yeah, I'll use a Pixel phone to just record because I don't have to worry about all the variety, wide variety of transcription services that cost a lot of money and also use AI.
27:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:51 Alex Cranz? So you can just do it that way. That like, that's genuinely useful, but. For a very small group of people, I'd imagine.
27:57 Nilay Patel? Google is always thinking about the
27:59 Alex Cranz? The journalists.
27:59 Nilay Patel? Hardworking journalists in the world when they make
28:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
28:01 Nilay Patel? The pixel features. But if you're recording a meeting and it summarizes the meeting for you and that gets meaningfully better.
28:06 Alex Cranz? That's fair.
28:06 Nilay Patel? That's great. And if that happens locally, you're not sending your enterprise work product off to a cloud service, that's good for you.
28:14 Alex Cranz? Going to do all my CES briefings this way.
28:16 Nilay Patel? Just like throw the phone down, be like, talk to this robot.
28:19 Alex Cranz? Let's go.
28:20 Nilay Patel? It'll summarize what you have to say for me.
28:23 Nilay Patel? Anyway, but that, so that's the big news of the week. Like, this is the future of Google. You can just go play with Bard. It's neat. There's other AI news this week. So Bing, dear sweet Bing, announced something called Deep Search. So the Bing has always been, I can't believe I'm going to say this. We started with Dex and I'm going to go to Bing. There's always been one really fascinating part of the Bing search product as it relates to GPT-4.
28:49 Alex Cranz? I just want to sit with that sentence for a minute.
28:52 Nilay Patel? It's, they've been doing, I don't know if it has been good, or it's worked, or it's taken one point of market share. But they've always been doing something really interesting, which they call search orchestration. Now what it's going to do is take that one step farther. It's going to read your search query. Microsoft's example is how do point systems work in Japan? It's going to figure out all the things that could mean, and it's going to go search for those things and lace them together. So you can figure out if you mean credit card point system, or weird social credit systems, or whatever it is. And it's going to lace those together. So it'll take more time, but it's actually sort of like expanding your query for you.
29:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
29:28 Nilay Patel? And doing a bigger, deeper search of the web, which I think is fascinating.
29:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I feel like, you know, looking at it and seeing what they did there, I think that's a great example of the loyalty programs. Because it is something huge. It is nebulous. And if you don't have like the card, the points guy or whatever for, for your region, that is genuinely useful. You want that, that summary and, and like, that's hard to do on your own.
29:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:52 Alex Cranz? You can, but it's obnoxious.
29:54 Nilay Patel? So what's really fascinating to me about this is that If you will remember when ChatGPT launched and Bing launched, there was that explosion of interest in prompt engineering.
30:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:05 Nilay Patel? And we had lots of conversations with people, lots of executives around Decoder, saying prompt engineering is just a thing that's going to happen in the middle. There needs to be other.
30:13 Alex Cranz? Well, Joanna Stern just did that great piece on on prompt engineering.
30:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and everyone, there's this theory that that's like a local, it's like a flash in the pan moment.
30:21 Alex Cranz? Yes.
30:22 Nilay Patel? And then you look at what Deep Search is doing, and it is mechanically taking your query to the Bing search engine and rewriting it to be a longer prompt. So it takes how do point systems work in Japan, and it rewrites the prompt to Bing as provide an explanation for how various loyalty card programs work in Japan, including the benefits, requirements, limitations, and then it goes on. It's like a full paragraph long prompt. And you see that Microsoft has learned that it it should just automate prompt engineering for you. And that's how it should constantly talk to the LLMs.
30:54 Speaker 05 It's another job claimed by AI.
30:56 Alex Cranz? Created and claimed in the same year.
31:00 Nilay Patel? And you know, now that we know more about particularly how Bing works, like the huge meta prompt that it feeds into GPT is crazy. That's just the one that killed Sydney, basically, and killed the personality and puts the guide rails is just a meta prompt that is appended to your query. And so I don't know if that's how Google is managing Bard. I don't like that's how they all work, but this is very much how Microsoft is starting to manage Bing, which is fascinating.
31:31 Alex Cranz? It's hysterical.
31:32 Nilay Patel? And this of this deep search tool is just like kind of an extension of that.
31:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Well, I appreciate that it's it's pretty candid about it. I'm curious, like, in practice, how often it's going to show you that whole search prompt, so that eventually you you can figure that out and be like, OK, well, so I just do a whole paragraph now instead of being like, tell me how to fix it. Which is probably useful for people. I mean, I would do that. I don't know. I'm sure most people would just be like, tell me how to fix it because that's faster and easier.
31:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So but the race to to to your point.
32:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
32:01 Nilay Patel? The race to just answer the question continues apace. And I think for Google, the Gemini stuff is exciting. It shows they're in the game. They're they're excited about it very obviously. Sundar, you know, did a press tour, the whole thing. But how they turn that into money is still a huge open question.
32:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
32:18 Nilay Patel? And I just don't know the answer. But if the end result is you ask the L M a question and just tells you the answer, whether it's going through this like secondary prompt engineering exercise or not, or it's passing the hell of swag test.
32:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
32:29 Nilay Patel? Or whatever it's doing. They got to put ads in there somewhere. They got to. They got to make some money. I have seen some people say they think that Gemini Ultra will be a subscription product. The way that G P T four is a subscription product, G P T three point five is not.
32:44 Alex Cranz? Or how Grok is a subscription product.
32:46 Nilay Patel? All right. Grok also launched this week.
32:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
32:49 Nilay Patel? Don't. It's fine. Last two little bits of A I news. Let me take a break. Apple also made some A I news this week, which is the first time Apple has made any A I news, really.
33:00 Alex Cranz? Baby steps.
33:00 Nilay Patel? Baby steps. They released a new model framework called M L X that allows you to run various kinds of models and various coding languages like PyTorch on their chips. Using their memory architecture ideas.
33:14 Alex Cranz? I bet that was an internal tool that they're like, it's good enough. We can now make it public. Because that's been a big deal at Apple is they don't want to actually use all the other A I tools, but they want their own A I tools.
33:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
33:25 Alex Cranz? So they've been having like, how do we build our own Bard and Gemini and.
33:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
33:31 Alex Cranz? Why are these names all?
33:32 Nilay Patel? Well, and Apple is also leaning more into the open source world.
33:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:36 Nilay Patel? So if you are, if you, you know, you're open source researcher, you want to use Meta's Llama, which is open source, you want to run an Apple silicon, you now have a framework to do that that Apple is providing and supporting. Will that get you anywhere? Like, I don't know.
33:49 Alex Cranz? I'm curious to see how well the silicon handles it because just how different all the different architectures handle A I. And it's particularly like, that stuff is like. The Apple silicon is very specifically built for a specific type of processing. And it's good at the other stuff. We've seen how good it is with video. And I'm just really curious if that translates as like GPU kind of translates.
34:10 Nilay Patel? I think you're right. Like, Apple has very particular GPU ideas.
34:12 Alex Cranz? Yes.
34:13 Nilay Patel? But they also have very particular neural engine ideas.
34:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:16 Nilay Patel? And we we've just never seen anyone attack that part of their chip to go head to head with like an Nvidia.
34:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because all they have to do is is say like, yeah, it it opens your phone real fast. It's really good at it and it's super smart. And it's like, cool. I have no way to ever test any Apple product. That's why we do this.
34:32 Nilay Patel? Here's what you do. You run Shadow of the Tomb.
34:33 Alex Cranz? I was like, that's why we got Shadows of the Tomb, it's the only thing that works. The only way to test an Apple product.
34:39 Nilay Patel? Okay. And the last little piece of AI news, I would just remind everyone again and again and again. These companies are running rampant with copyrighted information to train their systems. No one knows if it's legal. They are insistent that they are. But all of them, all of this money, coin flip, fair use lawsuit, could take it all down. It is just true. It's it's a total coin flip. You might have some opinions. I have some opinions. Our company has some opinions. Sundar Pichai has some opinions. I know Sachin Della has some opinion. I've asked all of them. And they're like, yeah, the legal process will have to pay up. Getty's lawsuit, Getty Images lawsuit against Stability AI is now going going to trial in the UK. And they obviously have sued here too.
35:23 Nilay Patel? While in the UK, different than the law in the United States. This is just a gigantic time bomb in the middle of the AI boom. Is that no one knows that this training data is fair use. Again, I I have an opinion. I think it is probably not. And I am not that person. That's not how it came up at all. That's not that it was a surprising opinion for me. But the idea that you can just take all of this stuff, just hoover it up, and somehow create billions of dollars of value for your users out of it.
35:52 Alex Cranz? That seems wrong.
35:53 Nilay Patel? Without any any return, just on its face. It seems like you're going to go to a court with that argument and something there is going to happen that you cannot predict.
36:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:02 Nilay Patel? Weird. Just weird. And so we'll see. I don't know. I don't know. The courts are not predictable.
36:07 Alex Cranz? We're all gonna get like 50 cents for our tweets.
36:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's what's gonna happen.
36:11 Alex Cranz? Sorry, here's your 50 cents. We used your tweets.
36:13 Nilay Patel? Google has to send you a penny every time anybody uses Park.
36:16 Alex Cranz? Man, those fanfic writers are gonna make bank.
36:19 Nilay Patel? And the lawsuits are just gonna keep happening because in particular, in this country, fair use is not a precedent-setting decision. Every single fair use case evaluated on its merits de novo. Like, it's supposed to be case by case. It's in the law. So you can just keep filing the lawsuits until something else happens.
36:36 Alex Cranz? Could somebody just make a law at some point?
36:38 Nilay Patel? One would hope. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the state of our government.
36:44 Alex Cranz? Just fix it.
36:45 Nilay Patel? Doesn't seem...
36:47 Alex Cranz? One day.
36:47 Nilay Patel? Doesn't seem likely.
36:48 Alex Cranz? One day.
36:49 Nilay Patel? George Santos is on Cameo. That's the state of our government.
36:52 Alex Cranz? He's not in the government anymore.
36:53 Nilay Patel? Well, he's on Cameo.
36:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah, just good pivot.
36:57 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta take a break. I'm gonna sign up for Cameo. We'll be right back.
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38:08 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. All right, we're off the AI benchmark news.
38:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:12 Nilay Patel? Now it's time for hacks.
38:14 Alex Cranz? Hacks and snacks.
38:14 Nilay Patel? And freaks with a P H. Actually, a pretty important. What would you call it, Dan? A workaround?
38:22 Speaker 05 Uh, reverse engineering workaround.
38:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
38:25 Alex Cranz? But there's like.
38:26 Speaker 05 Solution.
38:26 Alex Cranz? There's some spoofing happening there, too, right?
38:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, okay.
38:30 Alex Cranz? Let's get into it, sorry.
38:31 Nilay Patel? So Beeper, which is a longstanding iMessage workaround that for years, basically, until just recently, involved you signing into your iCloud account on a Mac Mini in the cloud as a relay service. Now has reverse engineered iMessage and they say they can do it natively. Dan, what's going on here?
38:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, so it's a fascinating story. As Neelai just said, you know, Beeper's been around for a while. But over this summer, a developer posted proof of concept to GitHub that they had reverse engineered the iMessage protocol and was able to send messages directly from basically any device, Linux, Windows, Android, to Apple's iMessage servers without having to use a relay server. And when Beeper found out about this, Beeper, who is headed by former Pebbles CEO, Eric Michikowski.
39:26 Nilay Patel? Pebbles, a smartwatch company.
39:27 Speaker 05 Pebbles, a smartwatch. Yes, you do have to clarify, there are like eight failed Pebbles now. Don't name your future company Pebbles, that's all. My advice to anyone. He reached out to this developer, contracted with him. Turns out it's a 16-year-old high school kid.
39:41 Nilay Patel? Yes.
39:41 Speaker 05 Hires him part-time to develop this into a full-fledged app. So now what we have today is a new app called, they're calling it Beeper Mini for now. It is an iMessage client for Android and it is exactly what that says. It is, you install it on your Android phone. You don't even have to sign in with an Apple ID. It talks to Apple servers, takes your phone number and turns it into a blue bubble. On iOS devices or Macs, whoever you're messaging. And it does it all locally without a server, relay server involved. And the way that they kind of reverse engineered it is a fascinating process. I strongly recommend going to check out Snazzy Hughes video on it because he explains step by step. And frankly, it's above my head how it all works.
40:26 Speaker 05 But they end up spoofing serial numbers of real Apple devices, which is a technique that's been around for a long time in the Hackintosh world. And in other applications in order to get Apple software to run on things that maybe Apple doesn't formally approve. Apple's kind of just always ignored it and left it alone. But they're using this now to basically spoof iMessage onto Android and allow you to be having completely, you know, full, fully supported for the most part, blue bubble conversations on an Android phone. And it's fascinating because it works incredibly well.
41:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because you've used it, Jake, I know who wrote the piece has been using it and you really like it.
41:05 Speaker 05 I think it's great. Like I switched my SIM fully from an iPhone to an Android phone. And nobody noticed, like nothing skipped a beat. Like I am still a blue bubble to all of the iPhone contacts I've ever had. And now I can message with RCS in Google Messages app to Android users. And I like, don't get left out of group messages. I don't get missed notifications on reactions. I, if I wanted to send voice messages, I could, like all of those features are supported. It's just fascinating.
41:37 Alex Cranz? When somebody says congratulations, do you also now get the balloons?
41:40 Speaker 05 So you don't get the iMessage reactions, I think that's called. You don't have that. I believe they said they are working on that. They are working on actually integrating FaceTime somehow, which I don't know how they're going to do. And the one thing that they don't ever anticipate ever being able to support are the iMessage apps and games, which.
41:58 Alex Cranz? Oh, no.
41:59 Speaker 05 Sorry. Big loss.
42:00 Nilay Patel? Oh, no. Not iMessage apps and games.
42:02 Speaker 05 The iMessage experience that most people think about. On their iPhones is now fully replicated on Android.
42:09 Nilay Patel? What happens if you have a mixed group of some Android phones, some Beeper Mini and some iPhones?
42:16 Speaker 05 So the Beeper Mini is going to act as an iMessage in that and the iPhones are going to act as an iMessage in that. And everything's just going to fall back to SMS. And so that would go through your SMS app, probably Google Messages on your Android phone. Because it's just going to be an SMS conversation.
42:29 Alex Cranz? When you text someone, are you getting the texts both to your Beeper app and to the regular text app?
42:34 Speaker 05 No.
42:35 Alex Cranz? Oh, that's cool.
42:35 Speaker 05 If you are iMessaging someone, that's either the app can like tell if you're talking to an iMessage client. And so it just, your iMessage conversation stays entirely within Beeper Mini. If someone sends you a text message, it will come through your text message number through Google Messages.
42:53 Alex Cranz? So, well, I was thinking like the example Neil I had where he was like, okay, what happens if you've got a Beeper person? And an Android person and an iMessage person, then where does that message? Like it goes to the Beeper app because?
43:06 Nilay Patel? No, it goes to SMS. It falls back to?
43:09 Speaker 05 You, in that scenario, you, the Beeper Mini user are using SMS.
43:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
43:14 Speaker 05 And so the like, the annoying part of this is that you now have two apps for messaging. You have your iMessage app and you have your Google Messages app. And Beeper's plan is to, the original Beeper app was like, kind of like an all in one message service. So it integrated all of your message services. Beeper Mini is strictly iMessage for now. Their plan is to integrate all of those other plugins into the Beeper Mini app, eventually drop the mini name. And sunset the old app is the ultimate plan. But for today, you're using two apps.
43:42 Nilay Patel? And the claim here, which I think is important, we don't know if it's true. But the claim is that Apple can't stop it without completely rebuilding the iMessage protocol.
43:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:51 Alex Cranz? I'm really curious. I think because I keep getting stuck on the spoofing part of this. Like with Hackintages, I used to, I built a lot of Hackintages when I was younger. I love it. It's a fairly small community. So it was like, okay, Apple, we were all like,
44:04 Nilay Patel? The police are coming now.
44:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:05 Nilay Patel? You understand that Craig Gregory was listening to this. He just called the police.
44:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah. My poor dog's getting arrested as we speak at home.
44:13 Alex Cranz? But, but it was, it was super easy to do. It was a lot of fun, but it was also understood that like, it's a very small community. So it wasn't really a big deal. And it wasn't like a bunch of money was exchanging hands. You weren't being like, build me a Hackintosh. Cause as soon as you did that, Apple came down you on like,
44:27 Speaker 05 Well, so the difference there is with Hackintoshes is usually you have to go acquire Apple's software and install it on a device. And there's no real legal way to get that software. If you're getting like, OS 10 Leopard or whatever.
44:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
44:43 Speaker 05 Without getting it from Apple and Apple's not going to give it to you if you don't have a Mac. So you have to like, basically torrent it.
44:48 Alex Cranz? Well, that's why we all, like everybody I knew who did it had a Mac. We just wanted to also have a tiny Dell Latitude.
44:55 Nilay Patel? Can I, can I tell you a story from my youth?
44:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:58 Nilay Patel? So there was a company in Florida called CyStar. Do you remember this?
45:01 Alex Cranz? Yes, I do.
45:02 Nilay Patel? Uh, and it was like two kids and they figured out how to build Macintoshes and they did an early, like internet marketing campaign where like, take down the man, run OS 10 on your CyStar. We can do it. And they had all these like, I would call them Reddit caliber legal theories.
45:18 Alex Cranz? Yes.
45:18 Nilay Patel? About how it would be legal and how they would defeat Apple in court. And they would, you know, I had a CyStar, reviewed a CyStar for NGadget. It was just a PC.
45:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:28 Nilay Patel? It was, I was like, I was like, what am I supposed to review here? Like it's just a noisy ass tower PC that like sometimes boots up into OS 10.
45:37 Alex Cranz? That's what I used to build.
45:38 Nilay Patel? And sometimes does nothing. It was exciting, but they had all these theories. They're like, if you owned a copy of the operating system, you weren't committing copyright infringement or breaching the contract.
45:50 Alex Cranz? That's what we would all say in the, it was like Tony Mac 86X forum or whatever. We'd all be like, oh yeah, yeah, we're, we're fine because we already own it. Like I went out and I had, I had the physical copy of each DVD for the OS that you could have until they stopped distributing them. And we were like, we got this. But we also generally, unlike CyStar, weren't charging for it.
46:12 Nilay Patel? No, CyStar was like charging money.
46:13 Alex Cranz? And got bought.
46:15 Nilay Patel? This is like folk copyright.
46:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
46:17 Nilay Patel? Like, you've convinced yourself that if you just buy the CD, you can make, you can send as many MP3s to your friends as you want.
46:24 Alex Cranz? It was same thing with torrenters. They're always like, no, no, we're fine.
46:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and it is all just like, you're, you are concocting like a moral argument that somewhere some money has changed hands.
46:35 Alex Cranz? Clarence Thomas will ignore.
46:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's, who knows what's gonna happen, man. But, but the end of my CyStar story is they, they pitched themselves a bunch, and they, you know, they were compelling. They were like, young kids, had started a business, they were taking on the man, they'd gotten all this attention. And some like local Florida alt weekly wrote this piece about how they were taking on Apple and who knew what happened. And so I wrote it up and I got it, I was like, I can't believe they conned. I called, I called it a puff piece. I was like, a big puff piece about CyStar, like fun look at these guys, but they're doomed. And the reporter, and I was like a baby blogger.
47:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
47:12 Nilay Patel? The reporter wrote me just like the most hammer email. Like, how dare you? I would never write a puff piece. These are valid issues. And I was like, I don't know how to break this to you. Like, this company is not gonna make like five minutes. And sure enough, Apple sued them and they went away.
47:29 Alex Cranz? Immediately.
47:29 Nilay Patel? And I was like, that was crazy. But it was, it was all based on this argument that like, if you did one right thing once, then you could do the wrong thing as many times as you wanted. And I think the difference with Beeper is they're not using any of Apple's code.
47:45 Alex Cranz? Right.
47:45 Nilay Patel? They're not, they're just sending Apple a number.
47:48 Alex Cranz? Right.
47:49 Nilay Patel? That happens to be a serial number.
47:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, and the, the, you know, reverse engineering is legal and protected. Like, that is like a valid thing to do. It's particular, particularly when it comes to enabling interoperability, which is like the whole hinging thing here, enables interoperability for iMessage on Android devices.
48:09 Nilay Patel? There is another law that could get in their way. Like it's there. It's always lurking in the background. It's like one of the worst laws in the books. It's the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that says if you wrongfully gain access to a system, that is a criminal penalty.
48:26 Alex Cranz? Well, this was how all the BIOS is they would reverse engineer the BIOS back in the 80s. And you're like, had to be in a different room from the people reverse engineering it, right?
48:34 Speaker 05 This is, uh, Cranz, this is a plot point of, uh, Hall and Catch Fire.
48:38 Alex Cranz? It is a plot point, but it's also true. It really happened. That's why it was such a good plot point.
48:43 Speaker 05 One of the best shows ever made, uh, but it is a whole plot line of it. It's very cool.
48:47 Alex Cranz? I remember being really excited. I was like, they're doing it. They're doing BIOS law.
48:51 Speaker 05 But you know, again, it's a, the, the technical side of this is really kind of above my head. But Quinn over at Snazzy Q in his breakdown video and he like, he installs the open source code on a Linux laptop and connects to the protocol and like, does the thing, uh, as it works to show what it's doing behind the like, polished app that you see on Android. And it's really quite fascinating. Uh, he makes a point that spoofing the serial numbers does have a number of legitimate use cases. And there's no way for Apple to know whether this serial number that you are sending them is the 2015 iMac 21.5 inch model that it was originally, or it's your Android phone.
49:34 Speaker 05 Apple can't tell that. So if Apple were to like, turn that off, it would break a lot of things for legitimate users. So that's kind of where the, the rub is.
49:44 Nilay Patel? But because the code is public, because the activity is public, Apple could certainly sue Beeper and say, you are improperly accessing the iMessage servers that you are not supposed to have access to. And there is a long line of cases, like everything in America have total coin flip outcomes. Once you hit the Supreme Court, right? Like, uh, AT&T won a case and the characters involved in the case are somewhat unsavory. But AT&T won a case for someone who was just hitting the AT&T website to do lookups over and over again. And that was a CFAA case. LinkedIn just lost a case to an analytics company called Hi-Q that was scraping the LinkedIn database. And it's like, well, that seems wrong when an IQ one.
50:26 Nilay Patel? The Supreme Court just took another case where a police officer improperly did a lookup. Like someone paid him money to use the police database to do lookup.
50:33 Alex Cranz? No, no.
50:33 Nilay Patel? But he had, he was authorized to use the database. He just did it in an unapproved way and like you just like if there's a server on the internet and you talk to it and it tells you something, there's a million different ways to parse out whether that is legal or not legal.
50:47 Alex Cranz? So does, how big is Beeper's legal fund, I think is the real question we need to be asking.
50:51 Nilay Patel? Here's, there's a couple of questions. Right next to this, the EU decided this week that Apple did not have to treat iMessage as a platform that has to be interoperable, like Meta has with WhatsApp.
51:03 Alex Cranz? Did they decide or they just leaned in? I thought they just leaned in that direction.
51:06 Nilay Patel? They've signaled.
51:06 Alex Cranz? Signaled, yeah.
51:08 Nilay Patel? European politics, there's a lot of signaling, posturing.
51:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:10 Nilay Patel? You rotate a piece of cheese.
51:12 Alex Cranz? And everybody's like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
51:14 Nilay Patel? Oh, the brie has turned to the left. iMessage will not be a gatekeeper service. Like, that's like, it seems like that's not gonna happen. That is almost certainly because Apple agreed to adopt RCS.
51:26 Alex Cranz? Right.
51:26 Nilay Patel? Right, which was the gambit. And I think we all saw that as the trade, like, there's the threat of this big interop regulation, or they could do RCS and say, look, it's interoperable this way. Great, they did it. So that's sort of the background here. Like, Apple's gonna say, look, there's an interoperable way, it's coming, we're gonna use it. Maybe only four people ever use Beeper. And the, or maybe they just, Apple's pretty litigious, maybe they just send a threat to this company and say, stop it. But the need to stop it, or Apple's desire to stop it, is going to cause problems.
51:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:55 Nilay Patel? Because they don't actually have the RCS implementation yet. And so to say, we're gonna keep people locked out of our service while we work on this other thing. I think it's just gonna be, and it's an indie developer that's really well-liked. It got a lot of press because a lot of Android people in this country really wanna send iMessages and they're gonna pay Beeper $2 a month, or whatever it is, to do it. They should have solved this problem a million years ago. They should have found a way to do this on their terms a million years ago, because now they're doing it on the terms of the European Union, and somewhat improbably, on the terms of Eric Hosky and Beeper Mini, which is just weird.
52:31 Alex Cranz? It's a delight.
52:32 Nilay Patel? And this is a 16-year-old kid who reverse engineered a protocol in his, like, spare time. Like, that's a weird place for the richest company in the world to be.
52:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Go after that 16-year-old kid.
52:43 Nilay Patel? This is the thing. You wanna file the CFA lawsuit against a 16-year-old kid for reverse engineering? Think, like, you're the bad guy. That's just straight up, you're the bad guy.
52:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I mean, that's what Sony did, right? With the, I think it was the PS3?
52:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah, this is the legend of Geo, of George Hots.
52:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Like, don't, maybe don't do that.
52:59 Nilay Patel? Well, the George Hots did work at Twitter for five minutes.
53:04 Nilay Patel? All right, so that's that. Uh, other big piece of news you should talk about this week. It seems like podcast industry is in turmoil. Spotify just had layoffs. They're canceling really popular shows, including a show that won Pulitzer Prize. They canceled Heavyweight. The title laid off 10% of its staff. It just seems like, in general, podcasts, they had the big tech moment where all the money from the big tech companies, particularly Spotify, rushed in.
53:28 Alex Cranz? Yes.
53:29 Nilay Patel? And now the tide has come back up.
53:30 Alex Cranz? It's like Spotify rushed in with zero plan. And then when the gravy train, like, did not continue.
53:38 Nilay Patel? The plan was celebrities.
53:40 Alex Cranz? The plan was own this entire industry as quickly as possible. Like, grow so fast, so big, that nobody can stop us and we're a tidal wave. And then, like, we'll be supported by all our ad dollars. And the ad dollars are like, no, we're not going to support you that much.
53:54 Nilay Patel? And they bought an ad tech company?
53:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
53:56 Nilay Patel? And they wanted to do dynamic insertion of ads?
53:58 Alex Cranz? Because they were trying to own the whole ad tech industry side of Spotify.
54:00 Nilay Patel? Disclosure, our ads are served by Spotify's ad tech platform, Megaphone.
54:05 Alex Cranz? Disclosure, we're a podcast.
54:08 Nilay Patel? I don't even know what I'm disclosing there. Like, someone uploads this to this thing and we use it. It's great. Someone else runs the ads. But it's true. There's your disclosure. The whole story to me is, they thought they could take a big, rich, open ecosystem and turn it into a very closed one.
54:23 Alex Cranz? Yes.
54:24 Nilay Patel? You could turn Spotify in the open podcasting ecosystem into something that looked a lot more like YouTube. And I think it just didn't work.
54:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I 100% agree. I think they failed, like, and we all kind of knew this. Remember, Ashley came on, Ashley Carmen, now at Bloomberg, broke a lot of this stuff about Spotify.
54:39 Nilay Patel? Notable traitor, Ashley Carmen.
54:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah, horrible traitor. But came on this very podcast, like, what, two years ago, talking about this. And we were all like, ooh, this doesn't sound like it's going to work for Spotify. It feels like they're just ignoring everything else about this and why this is a bad idea. It feels like we were all right. High five, all of us, two years ago. Yes!
54:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, obviously, they've held on to Joe Rogan. Uh, his deal is up for renewal, we have been told. So we're tracking that.
55:05 Alex Cranz? Did not hold on to Prince Harry and Meghan.
55:07 Nilay Patel? Meghan and Harry didn't make it. Uh, you know, there's something interesting there. You know, the tech industry loves to talk about going direct.
55:13 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:14 Nilay Patel? Like, loves to talk about going direct. You don't need these journalists at Pepsi. And it's like, if you go direct and you have nothing to say, no one will listen to you, and you will have gone direct to no one, which is truly the Harry and Meghan story.
55:27 Nilay Patel? They're out of things to say.
55:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they did the book. We were all like, thank you. This is actually all we wanted from you. We just wanted the tea.
55:33 Nilay Patel? And I'm not even someone who, like, I'm Indian American. My people have fled the British twice. Like, we just get out, and I do not care about any of this. But it's like, even the people I know who do care, and we have them on our staff, Lizzy Potter and Sarah Jogg love some royal family drama, and they're like, whatever, we're done with this. And like, that to me is, you need some tension to tell a good story.
55:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:57 Nilay Patel? And like, that's, you buy a bunch of the celebrities directly, you're not gonna have any tension. Every celebrity podcast is like a celebrity and then someone else just needling them.
56:06 Alex Cranz? Or there's, the new trend now is it's the D-list celebrities that were on the shows with the really big folks. They all get together and then talk trash about the big folks.
56:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:16 Alex Cranz? And then sometimes talk about like, how they slept with the entire cast. And you're like, a lot of Disney Channel.
56:25 Alex Cranz? Like, don't get into the podcast scene, guys. There's so many like Disney Channel tell-alls.
56:30 Nilay Patel? Before we, before we go that way.
56:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we won't do that. It's wild, though. That's the new trend for celebrity podcasts.
56:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah. All of that seems like it didn't work, just to be clear. Spotify burned millions of dollars on this. They torched Gimlet, which was a darling, it was failing as a company. Obviously, they sold to Spotify for tons and tons of money that they had no plan themselves to gain, because they were failing as a company. So, good, good on them, but it also broke Gimlet, it broke Reply All, it broke the culture of that company. At some point, like, the mergers are just bad, the acquisitions are just bad. And I think this feels like, they bought Gimlet, they bought Parcast, they bought Anchor, they bought Megaphone, and they had no plan to munge them all to, they bought The Ringer.
57:14 Alex Cranz? Yep.
57:14 Nilay Patel? And the plan to munge them all together, seems like it just failed.
57:18 Alex Cranz? Yes.
57:19 Nilay Patel? But the stock is up, and they turn their first ever profit. And it's like, is that all that matters?
57:24 Alex Cranz? Well, if you, if you like money, yeah.
57:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I think, I think we're, I don't think podcasts are going anywhere. You can see some of them are still growing. You can see money is flowing to some categories in them. But it, it feels like we're returning to a much more sustainable place to grow the podcast industry.
57:40 Alex Cranz? It was very unsustainable for a while, and now it's gonna be like, we're only gonna support podcasts where people actually say something interesting.
57:48 Nilay Patel? Maybe.
57:48 Alex Cranz? And, and also Joe Rogan.
57:51 Nilay Patel? And the other thing Spotify and all the other big podcast players are doing is they're focusing on chat shows, influencer, you know, the solo podcasts where the influencers just rant at the screen, but it looks like a podcast.
58:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
58:05 Nilay Patel? A deeply fast, like, that's a media PhD.
58:07 Alex Cranz? That's gonna be my spinoff.
58:08 Nilay Patel? If there are any media PhD, any media studies students that are pursuing a media studies PhD, I would read your dissertation on the one-person podcast where they just talk the whole time.
58:21 Alex Cranz? What do they do?
58:22 Nilay Patel? I just, I like to talk.
58:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
58:26 Nilay Patel? I do, I love it.
58:27 Speaker 05 That's, that's the AM radio model, right? Like, that was the Rush Limbaugh model, it was the Alex Jones model, just talk to the microphone for three hours straight.
58:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm just dying to know, in podcasting, to do that on your own, and then to, like, close your laptop lid and be like...
58:44 Alex Cranz? I did it. Good job.
58:47 Nilay Patel? There's something in there about, like, that personality making that kind of content with that kind of distribution that I promise you is a PhD thesis.
58:55 Alex Cranz? I'd read it.
58:55 Nilay Patel? Like, there's some feedback loop in there that I just want to know more about.
58:59 Alex Cranz? Just send it to Neil, I send it to all of us, honestly, I want to read that, too.
59:02 Nilay Patel? Well, do it, go get your PhD. That's what I'm telling you, that's a good use of money. And then title, obviously, obviously laying off, it's, again, another Jack Dorsey brilliantly managed company.
59:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
59:13 Nilay Patel? Love it.
59:13 Alex Cranz? It had Beyonce for a while.
59:15 Nilay Patel? It did. And then last piece of little media news, and we'll take a break, Apple is munging together its iTunes movies and TV shows app into the proper Apple TV TV app, so now we have to use it.
59:27 Alex Cranz? And it was already sort of done that way.
59:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:29 Alex Cranz? So it's just like, they're just like cleaning up the crumbs. Like, the people who haven't really touched their workflow in 20 years are gonna be like, oh, no, how am I gonna, like, watch my old Aquaman episodes from 2006? That sucks for them, but also the rest of us have been living now, where you just use the one app.
59:48 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:49 Alex Cranz? I'm judging people.
59:50 Nilay Patel? Plex, here is the way you mean it's Plex, Alex's Plex app.
59:54 Alex Cranz? It's the Apple TV app.
59:56 Nilay Patel? Sure. By the way, there was a piece of news this week, very distressing, Sony is just deleting TV shows that people bought on our PlayStation accounts.
1:00:03 Alex Cranz? We're gonna talk about it later.
1:00:04 Nilay Patel? We'll take a break, we'll be back, we'll talk about that.
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1:01:13 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Sliding around time. Tell us about the Sony thing.
1:01:16 Alex Cranz? Earlier this week, a lot of PlayStation users noticed that they were just getting banned out of the blue. Like not, a lot of people say, "I'm getting banned. I don't know what happened." And you're like, "No, you do." This wasn't the case. They were just like totally outright banned. They didn't know what was happening. It was a whole lot of people, which was the other part of this. And so Jay Peters and Tom Warren looked into it and eventually Sony was like, "Oops, our bad." And just slowly has been giving everybody their account access back. And it was all just an accident. It was just like a bug and they screwed up. But it also just immediately reminded everyone, particularly when paired with the fact that Sony also recently said, "Okay, a lot of this content you purchased from Discovery Plus, you will not have access to it anymore. We've changed some of our licensing."
1:02:00 Alex Cranz? It's just like a big reminder that you don't own anything you buy digitally.
1:02:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:02:05 Alex Cranz? You don't own any of it. It's not yours. It's all licenses. It's all fake ownership. And Sony just accidentally reminded their entire, like, customers base, which is not what you want to do when you're highly dependent on all of them buying shit on your stores.
1:02:23 Nilay Patel? They just radicalized a lot of people into buying that disk drive.
1:02:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, which is...
1:02:26 Nilay Patel? Maybe this is all a plot to get people to buy an external disk drive.
1:02:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're just trying to like move those disk drives. I'm like, "All right, you're losing it all."
1:02:33 Nilay Patel? Someone open the closet, like, "We have a lot of Blu-ray drives." Way more than we thought, you guys.
1:02:39 Alex Cranz? All right, pull the Disco Plus stuff. Let's go. We got this.
1:02:42 Nilay Patel? Dr. Pimple Popper's out of here. We gotta move these drives.
1:02:46 Alex Cranz? But Jay wrote a really great piece, just kind of lamenting it, and he's absolutely right. Don't, like, if you really want to own something and you want to own it for a long time, don't just buy the digital version. And a lot of times you can just go buy a DVD or a Blu-ray and get the digital version. Then you have both for the same amount of money and...
1:03:06 Nilay Patel? Look, I'm building a new home theater right now in the new house.
1:03:08 Alex Cranz? Ooh.
1:03:08 Nilay Patel? I'm really thinking about putting a Blu-ray player in it. I don't know why.
1:03:12 Alex Cranz? Do it. I've got one. I use it once a year.
1:03:15 Nilay Patel? I know you do.
1:03:17 Alex Cranz? I plug it into my computer.
1:03:18 Nilay Patel? Use it once a year to rip legal media to your Plex server.
1:03:23 Alex Cranz? You know, it's folk copyright law and we don't need to talk about it too much.
1:03:27 Nilay Patel? I've got a Blu-ray player that's been running Mac OS 9 for a decade.
1:03:32 Nilay Patel? It's great. All right, Dan, what's your lightning round?
1:03:35 Speaker 05 Uh, I got two.
1:03:36 Nilay Patel? Okay.
1:03:37 Speaker 05 Can I do both now?
1:03:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:03:38 Speaker 05 All right. Uh, the first one is, uh, Allison did a review of the Razr, uh, which is not to be confused with the Razr Plus. It is Motorola's budget flip phone. Turns out it's not a very good phone. Uh, I'm just gonna start off by saying that. But what's really fascinating to me about it is, uh, this is priced at 700 bucks and because Motorola discounts things 100% of the time, all the time, uh, you can buy it for $500, which means this is a flip phone with a folding screen for $500, which is kind of like a fascinating thing to me, that we are already at that point of affordability of these kind of flip devices. The cameras aren't great, the processor can be a little slow, the outside screen is not very useful.
1:04:20 Speaker 05 It's not a phone I would recommend anyone buy, but it's pretty cool that like we've gone from, these are all $1,000 or $1,400 to $500 in just a couple of years. Uh, so that was my first, uh, one.
1:04:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's true. And we, we, the second that first Galaxy Fold came out, we're like, oh, the cost curve on this is gonna go bloop.
1:04:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:04:41 Nilay Patel? What's interesting is the technology curve has kind of... Stopped, right? Like, the screens are better, they're more durable. That was the big thing. But they look largely the same.
1:04:52 Alex Cranz? They're still lumpy.
1:04:54 Nilay Patel? Well, there's lumpy, but even just like the way the materials look and feel.
1:04:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, they still are soft kind of plastic. It doesn't feel like hard glass. Yeah.
1:05:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And that was, there was some, there was a lot of talk about bendy glass in the beginning. Do you remember this?
1:05:07 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:05:08 Speaker 05 Ultra thin glass. Yeah.
1:05:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:05:09 Alex Cranz? Where is it?
1:05:11 Speaker 05 Well, there's all in there. It just, the way they work is there's a layer of ultra thin glass. And then on top of that is a soft plastic screen protector, and that's what you touch. And that's what provides that kind of not so great tactile experience.
1:05:24 Nilay Patel? As with most things, technology kind of like make it better and keep the cost the same. Or you can make, keep it the same, keep bringing the cost down. And we are very much on the keep it the same, bring the cost down part of the curve. There's not the step change into the.
1:05:36 Speaker 05 Particularly for the flip designs. The fold designs are still very expensive.
1:05:43 Speaker 05 The OnePlus Open came out earlier this year and that is available for around $1,500. That's kind of like the low price for these folding phones. But the flip phones, and I think it's part of who these are marketed to. Folding phones are marketed to like Uber do everything nerds like me. And then the flip phones are marketed to people who want something a little bit more fashionable, a little bit more compact, discreet. Don't want to spend 10 to 12 hours a day staring at their phone like I do. And want to make it more of like an intentional device. And so they don't need the fastest processor. They don't need the highest end camera system. They don't need the bills and whistles to run decks and things like that. Even though I think Motorola lets you run its version of Dex, which is called Ready For on its flip phones.
1:06:27 Speaker 05 So that's the thing you could do.
1:06:29 Nilay Patel? Hey, I want to see that next doc with a Motorola flip.
1:06:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:06:34 Nilay Patel? Let's do it. Bad camera, slow processor.
1:06:38 Alex Cranz? Great.
1:06:38 Nilay Patel? Okay, you all knew this was going to be my lightning round. You knew it. There is no choice except for this story to be my lightning round item, which is the photo of the woman in the bridal gown.
1:06:50 Alex Cranz? Like I saw it and as soon as the news broke, what, earlier this week? I was like, mm.
1:06:55 Nilay Patel? No, the news broke a couple of weeks ago.
1:06:57 Alex Cranz? Did you? A couple of weeks?
1:06:57 Nilay Patel? And then OpenAI happened and we forgot about it. So this photo, there's a photo of a woman. She's trying on a wedding dress. She's in the bridal shots.
1:07:04 Alex Cranz? One of those.
1:07:05 Nilay Patel? There's mirrors all around her, like you do, so you can see yourself on all the angles. And she's making a different pose in all the mirrors and then in person. She's a British comedian. She posted her Instagram story. She said, this is crazy. I've never had anything like this happen. The immediate theorizing about AI photo composites started happening, smart HDR. She said she went to the Apple Store. Someone, some Apple Store employee told her this was Apple beta testing, a competitor, a best take on Google, which makes no sense. This is all true. This all happened. Right? This is all in her Instagram stories, Instagram posts. Tom Warren, because she's in the UK, Tom Warren reached out to her. I was like, we gotta get the actual photo. We got, then he reached out to her.
1:07:47 Nilay Patel? He got the photo. We were talking about it. Then the opening news broke. Tom is our Microsoft reporter. He and I got very distracted. Very busy. We stopped paying attention to the woman in her wedding dress for a minute. The, the post came back this week. Mm hmm. People saw it again. All the same amount of theorizing that happened. People calling it fake, a publicity stunt, social media. And we had the file and nothing about the file indicates that it's fake. We were, Tom was sent the uncompressed, seemingly unaltered original photo off the iPhone. And we were looking at it. We were trying to figure out, we were like, gone to ask Apple, because it is very odd. Yeah.
1:08:30 Nilay Patel? That she's making three different poses in the mirrors. And so everyone's trying to like, figure this out. Again, a lot of people claiming that it's fake. It turns out, someone else had taken the photo and they had the camera accidentally in panorama mode. Oh, yeah. So it actually did stitch together several frames across to make it panorama. But if you don't move the camera enough and you don't get a wide enough picture, the iPhone does not append the panorama label.
1:08:56 Speaker 05 Yeah. The, the only tell, and I, I think there's a YouTuber, Ifondo, his name is Faruk. He's the one who kind of like popularized or, or, or told the world about this reasoning, how it worked. But the only tell is that the resolution of the final image is not the same as a resolution that is captured by the sensor. And so the photos app does not say panorama because it's not a panorama. View it's too tall and narrow. It's a vertically composed shot. But the pixels are different. And so that is like the tell there that is in panoramic mode. Farouk was able to replicate this very quickly as soon as he figured that out.
1:09:38 Speaker 05 By putting his phone in panoramic mode and like doing a very like another shot just that same way. And was able to replicate it instantly. So it's it's kind of fascinating. What's really fascinating to me is like the stitching is like perfect.
1:09:50 Nilay Patel? Cause the camera isn't moving.
1:09:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I didn't know you could do that. I thought like you, because it always is like move the camera. That's what my phone sounds like to me. But it's always telling me to move the camera. So I'm always like.
1:10:01 Speaker 05 It just tells that Alex, that tells you how well people follow directions on their devices.
1:10:05 Alex Cranz? Can I just ignore that?
1:10:07 Speaker 05 You could just ignore it. Yeah.
1:10:09 Nilay Patel? One, Apple should just label all panorama photos as panoramas. It seems like an easy fix to the solution. But two, the expectation that AI is just gonna munge with reality is everywhere now.
1:10:22 Alex Cranz? Well, I don't think the expectation is the reality is like that. That's the reality of the situation. But like, I think people are still like, because that's why everybody thought it was a fake. Because everybody was like, you're a liar. You did this on purpose. You used Photoshop or panorama or whatever. And it's like, no, she just accidentally did it.
1:10:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:10:38 Alex Cranz? Like.
1:10:39 Nilay Patel? But even if you, even if you think this is the world's greatest publicity stunt.
1:10:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:44 Nilay Patel? Targeted to a very small community.
1:10:45 Alex Cranz? Very small group.
1:10:47 Nilay Patel? It relies on an understanding that AI exists and is doing photo stuff.
1:10:53 Alex Cranz? That's true. That's true.
1:10:55 Nilay Patel? Right. It's not like it's either ghosts in the building. Like, no, it's like, oh, the iPhone cameras AI. Took this completely unbelievable picture and AI generated you. And like, people will believe that that's true. And a lot of people believe that it's true, such that other people were debunking it, like the whole thing. And in the meantime, it was a totally different lane.
1:11:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:16 Nilay Patel? Of photography.
1:11:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because a lot of the theories were around, it was doing that thing where it chooses the best shot of you. And it just happened to assume she was three different people.
1:11:26 Nilay Patel? Right. The mirror had confused from like some sort of like best take.
1:11:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:30 Nilay Patel? But Apple's smartie share does not work like this at all. And even Google best take does not work like this at all. Apple's smartie share stacks seven frames in like half a second. She would have had to move her hands so fast.
1:11:42 Nilay Patel? Like, like totally insanely too fast. Like, that's why I was like, we gotta get the original file. There's no way that an iPhone just generates this, because I was not thinking about panorama mode.
1:11:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:51 Nilay Patel? So it's a Photoshop we, we might have been able to tell. But the thing that got me was she sent it to Tom right away.
1:11:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:57 Nilay Patel? Tom reached out and she was like, here you go. And that, that like, to me, like, you've reported long enough, like, oh, there are some things. Where if there's a hesitation there, it's like, you only can get a compressed one, and you're like.
1:12:09 Alex Cranz? Is this off the record?
1:12:10 Nilay Patel? And then you blame WhatsApp. Like, there's all this stuff that usually happens when you request an original, and she was just like, here you go. Okay, so I was like, alright, there's something here that I don't understand, and the panorama of it is interesting. The, the thing that's truly fascinating to me is that the culture is ready to receive AI fakery as an explanation for anything.
1:12:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:12:29 Nilay Patel? And like, I'm just telling, the what is a photo apocalypse is like, well and truly here. Because you can tell anyone that a photo has been AI faked. And the, the chances of them believing you are just steadily going up.
1:12:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:12:42 Nilay Patel? Even if it doesn't turn out to be the case.
1:12:44 Alex Cranz? That's when, all my photos now are gonna be fakes. You don't know.
1:12:47 Nilay Patel? They already are.
1:12:48 Alex Cranz? They already are. I haven't taken a real photo in 20 years.
1:12:51 Nilay Patel? Alright, I've got a couple other ones just to go through quickly. One, this is maybe my favorite story of the year. Windows has an issue that is just renaming printers to HP LaserJet across the board.
1:13:04 Alex Cranz? It's the only printer you need.
1:13:05 Nilay Patel? It's just very good.
1:13:07 Alex Cranz? It's just advertising.
1:13:08 Nilay Patel? It's like, will AI kill us all, or will the HP Smart app worm its way under literally every computer on the planet? And like, begin taking out centrifuges.
1:13:18 Alex Cranz? And buying ink.
1:13:21 Nilay Patel? Like, the problem isn't paper clips, the problem is ink cartridges. Uh, so Microsoft says it's looking into it, it's Windows 10, 11, printers are being randomly renamed to HP LaserJet. Uh, some issues related to printer configurations are being observed on Windows devices which have access to the store. It's just very good.
1:13:37 Alex Cranz? It's so good.
1:13:38 Nilay Patel? Uh, everyone just has the HP Smart app now, your printer is an HP LaserJet, and that's, you're gonna like it.
1:13:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Uh, we, we do say buy a laser printer, but we usually say brother, not.
1:13:49 Nilay Patel? Official statement, most printers are being named as HP LaserJet M101 dash M106. The icons might also be changed.
1:13:58 Alex Cranz? Oh, it's so good.
1:14:00 Nilay Patel? It's very good. Uh, then, uh, just real quickly, we are gonna cover Epic v. Google in much more detail on the Wednesday show. Sean Hollister will be on the show, he's been in the courtroom. But, this is really important for this case. Google has gotten itself into an enormous amount of trouble with this judge for deleting records throughout this case.
1:14:19 Alex Cranz? Ooh, that's a no-no.
1:14:20 Nilay Patel? Like, an enormous amount of trouble, the judge is furious. Last Friday, he said he would investigate Google personally for, quote, "intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence." He called it "a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice." And he said, "I'm gonna get to the bottom of who is responsible on my own, outside this trial."
1:14:39 Alex Cranz? Yo.
1:14:40 Nilay Patel? I don't know what kinda...
1:14:42 Alex Cranz? I, like, I've been in, I've been in enough companies that are, that are, like, getting lawsuits and stuff when you're told to retain all your records, that you just never think to not. You're just like, "Yeah, my mess is gonna be out there."
1:14:54 Nilay Patel? And Sundar was asking, like, "Can I set this chat to auto-delete?" They were deleting stuff left and right. They admitted in court that they were just deleting stuff. At one point, the judge called in Google's general counsel and made him answer to why these policies are, he's furious about this. "That's great, I will investigate this on my own outside this trial," is a very funny threat. Like, he's gonna get a magnifying glass and start walking around.
1:15:16 Alex Cranz? Takes his robes off?
1:15:17 Nilay Patel? He's, he's puts on a leather jacket.
1:15:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah. A little fedora, and he's like, "Let's go."
1:15:20 Nilay Patel? He's like a 70s bad cop. You know? It's gonna be...
1:15:24 Alex Cranz? Driving his old-ass car.
1:15:26 Nilay Patel? Exactly. He's like, he's got a muscle, he's got a GTO and a magnifying glass, he's like, "Where are the records?" Uh, I don't know what that will lead to. But importantly, he has told the jury, not that they have to, but they may infer wrongdoing on the part of Google if there's a question that the missing records would have answered.
1:15:47 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:15:48 Nilay Patel? Right? So he's, and that's like a pretty loaded suggestion.
1:15:51 Alex Cranz? It was like that? I mean, it's like, well, that's fair, but also, ooh, that's bad for Google.
1:15:56 Nilay Patel? Right. So the, the idea here is that the, the jury is gonna consider, and it really, it really seems like Google might lose this case. In a way that maybe at the end of Apple... You know, I still think Epic walked away with one important, just the way the legal system works, they want a bunch of stuff and they want to appeal, whatever. But Apple was like, we just run our business and that's it. Google, there's all this evidence and there's a bunch of deleted evidence, all this stuff. It really seems like Epic mounted a much stronger case with Google.
1:16:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:16:24 Nilay Patel? And now the jury is being sent and they are allowed to infer whatever Google was hiding was bad, which is just a big deal. It might come to nothing, it might not come to nothing. It's just worth noting, the judge is furious. Like, this is the shadiest thing Google has done and the judge is furious about it and he has told the jury about it.
1:16:43 Alex Cranz? It's gonna make all the appeals really messy, because I just assume they will all be appealed, whatever the decision is.
1:16:49 Nilay Patel? Oh, whatever the decision is appealed. It all just, what you appeal is the law.
1:16:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:16:53 Nilay Patel? So the facts remain the facts and so...
1:16:56 Alex Cranz? And this is why you don't delete your records, right?
1:17:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:17:01 Alex Cranz? Because this will happen.
1:17:02 Nilay Patel? Right. But an appeals court does not get to go back and say, the jury's finding a fact was wrong.
1:17:09 Alex Cranz? Right.
1:17:09 Nilay Patel? They get to say that the law is wrong and we should change the law or like this other thing. So that's a little, it's a little law school-y, technical.
1:17:16 Alex Cranz? I see it, I see it.
1:17:18 Nilay Patel? But so here, the inference of the jury was, you might appeal, this was a wrong inference to give the jury or whatever. But he didn't. He didn't instruct them to think one way or another. He said they were just allowed to, which is a very important instruction. Anyway, I would just say the Epic v. Google case, we're gonna talk about it much more with Sean on Wednesday. Get into it. But that was the one that stuck out to me this week. It's like, there's something there. All right. And then the last one, I just want to call out, Allison Johnson, second call for her today, has a big piece as part of our infrastructure package about just 5G and the fact that it hasn't paid off for anyone. And she basically listened to all the big carriers' earnings calls and how they're
1:17:59 Nilay Patel? talking about their investments, what the investors want. There's nothing there. Like, it's basically like they might compete with fixed broadband. So instead of having whatever ISP you have, you might get a 5G fixed wireless device. They seem excited about that. They're excited about enterprise customers buying fixed 5G networks, which is hard, because you gotta have an enterprise sales team, which many of them don't. And then, they can do what Verizon is calling pricing actions.
1:18:26 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
1:18:27 Nilay Patel? Which means one thing.
1:18:29 Alex Cranz? Hate it.
1:18:29 Nilay Patel? The action is turning the price up. That's the action you can take.
1:18:35 Alex Cranz? You know what we can do. You got faster internet. Now you pay $100 more. Enjoy.
1:18:40 Nilay Patel? I will remind everyone, we actually got a note this week about Project Gen 5 SIS. The ill-fated attempt to turn Dish Network into a mobile carrier.
1:18:48 Alex Cranz? Still technically it.
1:18:50 Nilay Patel? They have it. They've, I believe, Allison points this out, they've technically hit their coverage goals, but they've done it by leasing space on AT&T and T-Mobile's network. So they have not actually built a nationwide wireless network.
1:19:05 Alex Cranz? It's just Mitchell.
1:19:06 Nilay Patel? It's just Mitchell. He's out there on the trail, our own wonderful Mitchell Clark, who tried desperately to use Project Gen 5 SIS. This whole thing was a boondoggle.
1:19:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:19:17 Nilay Patel? It costs a lot of money, it put all these carriers in debt, it consolidated us down from four to three, well, three in Project Gen 5 SIS, and now we're doing pricing actions. Like, we should just see it for what it is. You should read Allison's piece, we'll link to it. It is great. It is very clear-eyed and direct about what has happened, in a way that is not just me ranting and raving. It makes the argument really well. It's good. You should read it, send it to all your friends.
1:19:40 Alex Cranz? And LenaCon.
1:19:41 Nilay Patel? And then whatever carrier you have, switch to another one. That's my advice. That's my end-of-the-year advice for Vergecast listeners. Whatever you have, just switch to another one. Make them all feel it. Be like, why is this happening?
1:19:52 Alex Cranz? Oh, just do the churn.
1:19:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah, just churn them up.
1:19:54 Alex Cranz? Churn moment. It's a churn moment. Let's do it.
1:19:58 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, we just gotta create the appearance of some competition.
1:20:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. I really am excited to go to AT&T. I'm not.
1:20:06 Nilay Patel? No, I mean, I'm just thinking about this advice that seems hard.
1:20:09 Alex Cranz? You're like, no, don't actually do that.
1:20:11 Nilay Patel? Just do whatever feels right in your heart. That's the Vergecast, everybody. That's my message. It's holiday season. Whatever's in your heart, do it. Oh, speaking of the holidays, by the way.
1:20:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:20:19 Nilay Patel? Holiday spectacular coming up again. We've done HDMI. We've done Bluetooth.
1:20:26 Alex Cranz? Failed at Jeopardy.
1:20:27 Nilay Patel? We did not do a good job with Bluetooth Jeopardy. This year, by just popular demand, just wave of demand, the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular is USBC. We've got the guests lined up, we got the ideas, we got the Plug Fest coming, and we're gonna do another game show this year because Andrew insists that we do a game show. I believe it's The Price is Right. Are we allowed to say that?
1:20:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we're allowed to say it's a game show that is not, it's not The Price is Right.
1:20:59 Alex Cranz? I don't have a giant wheel.
1:21:03 Nilay Patel? We're gonna up the ante this year. All of us are gonna be playing for one of you, a Vergecast listener, and whoever wins gets a big bag of swag. So here's what we need from you. Call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. That's 866-837-4311. Tell us your name and your favorite USB gadget. We'll put all the names in a hat, we'll pick them out, we'll play, we'll do it.
1:21:28 Alex Cranz? We're gonna compete for you.
1:21:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'll represent you, Alex will represent someone else.
1:21:32 Alex Cranz? I'm so sorry.
1:21:33 Nilay Patel? And then whoever wins gets a big bag of Verge merch.
1:21:36 Alex Cranz? I'm actually doing a lot of USB research right now.
1:21:38 Nilay Patel? Actually, this just says some Verge merch. So whoever, some Verge merch. Could be a small bag.
1:21:44 Alex Cranz? Depends on how bad your person does.
1:21:45 Speaker 05 I've seen the merch. The merch is good. It's quality merch, so it'll be a good price.
1:21:51 Alex Cranz? Are you prepping to help your listener?
1:21:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:21:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I'm reading all up. I'm gonna know some specs.
1:21:59 Nilay Patel? Oh, boy.
1:21:59 Alex Cranz? I'm gonna know what ohms mean.
1:22:02 Nilay Patel? All right. She's got it.
1:22:05 Alex Cranz? I'm ready. Let's go. I got you.
1:22:07 Nilay Patel? Alex is gonna do some high school level electrical research. It's gonna be amazing. No, that's it. That's coming up, the USB C Holiday Spectacular, one of our silliest yearly traditions, back and forth to USB C. Tell us your favorite USB C gadget, 866-VERGE11. We'll pick some people, we'll play for them. The winner gets some merch. Sounds pretty good. Call the number. That's it. That's the Vergecast Rock and Roll.
1:22:37 Speaker 06 And that's a wrap for 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. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.
1:23:09 Speaker 07 New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.
1:23:40 Speaker 08 Looking for a simple way to thank your clients or recognize employees for a job well done? A Starbucks card is more than a gift. It's a pick-me-up, a break in their day, and a reminder that you appreciate them. Whether you're shopping for digital or physical cards in bulk, Starbucks cards are the perfect gift to brighten anyone's day. Share the joy of coffee and connection when you give the gift of Starbucks. Shop Starbucks cards in bulk now at starbuckscardb2b.com.
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