Inside the Google algorithm

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Google's algorithm leak, OpenAI content deals, and more tech news from this week. Further reading: Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked Unpacking Google's massive Search documentation leak How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak Google responds to leak: Documentation lacks context Vox Media and The Atlantic sign content deals with OpenAI Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search Apple’s WWDC may include AI-generated emoji and an OpenAI partnership OpenAI CEO Cements Control as He Secures Apple Deal Custom GPTs open for free ChatGPT users OpenAI has a new safety team — it’s run by Sam Altman Why the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest New Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Galaxy Ring details have leaked, courtesy of the FCC The Fitbit Ace LTE is like a Nintendo smartwatch for kids Discord’s turning the focus back to games with a new redesign The business behind Unnecessary Inventions’ millions of followers Welcome to Notepad, a newsletter on Microsoft’s era-defining bets by Tom Warren Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast with massive bass, ultimate vibe. Oh no, we're immediately starting there. Hi, I'm your friend Neelai. Alex Trans is here.

• 1:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who just discovered Arc.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the browser?

• 1:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, nobody told me about it. David definitely has it repeatedly.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Every issue of Installer is like, have you used this browser?

• 1:23Alex Cranz?

  Turns out he's right. Who knew?

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is also here, although is he?

• 1:28David Pierce?

  I just, you say ultimate bass and I just want to leave.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  I just immediately know where we're going.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we're driving that car there so fast. All right, here's what I want to tell you. It's a huge week of news. A bunch of docs about how Google search works leaked and then they were confirmed to be real. I don't want to oversell. This is on the order of how the Facebook algorithm works. Like this is true insight into the Google search algorithm. So you gotta talk about that and the fallout across the web from that.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Google search continues to be bananas. There's a bunch of OpenAI news. I know people want us to talk about Vox Media's deal with OpenAI, which I will to whatever extent that is interesting. Then we got a lightning round.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Unsponsored.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  For now.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Sam.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  But there's one piece of news that I think dominates the week.

• 2:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you definitely think it dominates the week.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  And that is, The Verge has received a review unit of the Sony Field 7 ULT Speaker.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  It's enormous.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  It's, this is a medium sized one.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  If you're not watching this on YouTube, just imagine Neelai pulled a grenade launcher out from underneath.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  I love it so much. It's $3.99 and as many of you know, I think the internet has eras and I think technology has eras. We've talked a lot about the end of the Google search era on the internet, what that might mean, perhaps with the dawn of the AI era. Certainly, we were in the mobile era for quite a long time, the social era. This is the ULT era. And what I mean by that is if the 80s were dominated by MegaBase and the 90s were dominated by MegaBase, I would say that the 20s, the 2000s, 2010s, kind of a stumble through Sony's extra base era.

• 3:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it wasn't pleasant.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  You know, it didn't hit. We're now in what Sony has called the ULT era.

• 3:26Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, I like these handles.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  That's what the button says on it right here, ULT.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  There's a ULT button? Wait, that changes everything.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, I'm just gonna turn this guy on here. It's so big.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  There we go.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  I in fact can't see Neelai through the speaker.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm told that if I hold this play button down for five seconds, we get royalty free demo music. You hear that, YouTube? Royalty free.

• 3:51Alex Cranz?

  And you guys can't see the lights, but they're there.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  There she goes.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Now, I don't know if you can see the amount of the speaker that's currently lit up, but it's, it's both drivers and then on the front, the ULT button is rainbow blinking. And when you push that, you get massive bass ultimate vibe. This is the most important product in technology.

• 4:23David Pierce?

  Do you think if you press the ULT button right now, the podcast would explode?

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Let's find out. We gotta wait for the drop to come back.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  Is this English?

• 4:36Alex Cranz?

  It's Simlish.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there's another song.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God, so much quieter when I push the ULT button.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  Is it just?

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  It just makes little drum hits when you push the ULT. Can you hear that? It's like a timpani.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Like, I'm trying to sell this and it's not going great.

• 5:02Alex Cranz?

  The handles are great. We're turning into QVC or TikTok. This is on our TikTok store right now for $400.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  It won't burn down your house.

• 5:14Alex Cranz?

  That we know of.

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, look, all I'm saying is we went from the mega bass era to the extra bass era, which, again, I think was a failure. I don't.

• 5:23Alex Cranz?

  I mean, the ULT era is not bumping so far.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, the first song is good.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  Extra is not more than mega. And so what happened is in the mega era, everybody went deaf. And so couldn't hear the extra era. So but now we have ultimate, which all the deaf people in their 40s can hear now. So it's back.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  It, look, it has powerful sound with an X-Balance speaker unit and 30 hours of battery life.

• 5:52Alex Cranz?

  If it doesn't make the windows rattle, though, is it really?

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's funny when you try to make a spec sheet for a product that is insane. And you're just, RGB lights next to a bullet point. Look, it's the ULT era. I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life. That's The Vergecast, everybody.

• 6:07David Pierce?

  People have been wondering about when we're going to give a 10 out of 10, and I think it might be happening. It might be time.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  By the way, this is the medium sized one. This is the seven. There's also a 10.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  I cannot wait for that one to arrive. They also sent us two sevens. Chris Walsh just has one in his house, taking it most of his home. All right, there's a lot of news this week. A lot of it is about AI and what it is doing to the internet. If you've been listening to our show or reading The Verge or listening to Decoder or whatever, you know that we've had a thesis for a while now, stretching back into the middle of last year, that the internet was about to get flipped over. Not just by AI, but by search in general, by social platforms falling apart. I don't know if you're aware, they changed the name from Twitter to X. Something's happening.

• 6:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  And one thing that we really wanted to do was pay a lot of attention to what things were like now, so we could properly describe how they changed, which meant we did a lot of SEO coverage last year. Covered the culture of SEO, the community of SEO, why the web looks like an SEO disaster, how Google fights back against SEO. Mia Sato did a lot of that reporting for us. I think I've radicalized her. Like, you make someone care about SEO for eight months, they come out a different person on the other side. But Mia did a great job with that reporting. We had a great feature from Amanda Chicago-Lewis, the SEO community is still mad about, that featured an alligator party. We'll link all this up, you can read it. The point I'm trying to make is, we felt like it was changing. I think that hunch was correct. Right?

• 7:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, Google kind of sucks now. I'm using Coggy.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  So Google sucks now, right? There's other search products, Google's rolling out AI overviews. And then, over the long weekend, a bunch of SEO people discovered that the API documentation for Google Search had been inadvertently made public on GitHub for quite some time. And there were a couple blog posts, one that was just like, here's how I found it, here's who showed it to me, that one's really interesting. And then there's another one that's more of a deep dive into, here's what it says. And then there was a little bit of back and forth about, is this real? Like, can we trust what we're seeing? Because some of what the documentation revealed is that Google has not been telling the whole

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  truth about how search works for a very, very long time. And so some of the headlines in these posts are like, is Google lying to us? And some of the copy in these posts is like, Google has been lying to us. Google was initially just totally dead silent, which is weird. Like, usually we at least get a no comment. But Mia sent a bunch of emails, we sent some texts, hey, is there anything, do you want to deny that this is real? Dead silence. Then yesterday, Wednesday, Google confirmed the leaks, they said this is real. And they said, and they said, we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out of context citation and complete information. Basically, they're saying, yeah, this is real, but it's not super real. It's a lot. David, you have been covering search and how it works and thinking about it.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  You use the most browsers and search engines of anyone I know. There's some real explosive information here, but it's still not clear how much we should take seriously and how much Google is lying. It's just a lot of angry people are suddenly like, oh, this is what I've been angry about.

• 9:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a weird moment because Google Search has always been a black box. Google has very deliberately not revealed how Google Search works and what it cares about, in part because it's so complicated that it's actually a hard borderline impossible thing to sit down and explain to somebody why something is where it is in search results. Like, I don't think any individual person at Google knows the answer to that question. It's just not how the system works anymore. But also because the more Google reveals about how search works, the more tools it is giving people with which to game Google Search, which has been the cat and mouse game they've been playing forever. And so what has been happening is people have been

• 10:14David Pierce?

  asking Google, what is going on? What systems and rankings does Google care about? What can I do to make my stuff rank higher in Google Search? And Google has given a lot of answers that these 2,500 pages of internal API documents say are essentially not true. Like, there are a series of things that Google has in these documents that it has explicitly said out loud it does not consider in search ranking. Are those two statements completely mutually exclusive? No, which is why this gets so weird, right? Like, there are, I forget the exact number, but it was right around 14,000 individual things referenced

• 10:54David Pierce?

  in these pages, which is basically like 14,000 different signals. How those are ranked, which matter more, which matter less, whether they're all even counted, how old this information is, what some of the terms actually mean, very hard to know because a lot of them are terms we've never seen before that Google has been saying for years didn't exist. But what what seems to be true is you don't have a heading In your API for a thing that you don't care about. And so for things that Google has for years said that it doesn't care about. There is now evidence that it is at least a piece of data that Google collects. And one of the wild things is that people who do SEO spend a lot of time testing theories.

• 11:36David Pierce?

  And they've been testing theories and people like the guy who broke the story, Rand Fishkin, have gotten crap from people in the community for running tests and saying things like, oh, it seems like Google search really cares about click through rates. And people at Google saying, no, no, no, no, we don't care about click through rates. You're an idiot. And this overwhelmingly makes it look like Google cares an awful lot about click through rates. And so now we're in this place where I think a big part of what we've been seeing from the SEO community is people who are like, oh, not only has Google not been telling us the truth, they've been lying to our faces and making it like gaslighting us into believing the wrong thing about how Google search works. And it's a weird like existential crisis when that happens.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  And the thing I'll just like try to chain together is we started paying attention to this story last year because we wanted to know what this ecosystem was like. Like we wanted a picture of maybe like the last days of Disco, right? Like here's what it was like before the comet hits. And I thought the comet would be AI or the end of social networks or Google keeping more traffic inside a feature, whatever the comet is. And it kind of feels like the comment is actually just knowing that Google wasn't telling the whole truth, right? Like the headings in these blog posts, like legitimately, there's a trade publication called Search Engine Land that we've been watching a lot of the coverage of this on that site. It's one of the bigger SEO trade publications to exist. And the headings are like, how does SEO move on from here?

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  One of the subheadings in their piece where they run the Google statement was, did Google lie to us? That's just a subhead. That's just a straight H2 on their story.

• 13:10David Pierce?

  Which by the way, people do in order to be ranked higher in Google. You put questions people might Google in an H2. I'm serious, right? And that is like. Push this all the way down and it's like, what's inside this document is how the internet works, right? Like, people have built the internet to try to figure out how to game the stuff that is inside these 2,500 pages. And like, you can reverse engineer the internet out of Google's API, which I think is why this feels so huge. Like, your point about the Facebook algorithm that you've been saying all week, like, this is on the order of leaking the Facebook algorithm. Like, it is. And in the way that understanding the Facebook algorithm would essentially help us understand a decade of our online relationships, like, this is the internet in 2,500 pages of, like, weird, inscrutable API calls.

• 13:54Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's hard for people who aren't in the SEO business, or our business, which is kind of the SEO business, to fully wrap their

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  We make websites. If you make a website, you care about this a little bit.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah, we have to, right? Like, it's required. I edit buying guides. I have to care a lot about SEO. And people who don't care about SEO, they, like, I go and I tell my friends, I'm like, this huge document, like, cache of documents dropped. This is huge. And they're like, why are you, what is SEO?

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Elon Musk says, I'm going to open source the Twitter algorithm, and this is front page news. The API calls, or fields, basically, of what data Google collects to run a ranking algorithm, leaks, and it's like us, like, freaking out.

• 14:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  And it's kind of nowhere. And I, like, to David's point, we don't know how these things are ranked.

• 14:42Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  But we do know that Google has said for years, it does not collect some of this data or care about some of this data, and it definitely does. What are you going to do with that? Rand Fishkin, the same person you mentioned, David, has spent a long time saying, it seems like this thing called dwell time is important. So you click through a Google result, you land on a website, you're there for however long, you come back to Google, you go to the next one. That time you spend on the website, he's like, that seems important. And Google has basically said, no. Yep, they're tracking that, too.

• 15:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  The one that I think is the most explosive, which we don't really know how to understand, is click data from Chrome. And it's there somewhere, right? So one thing we know that Google does, which is a little shaky, is when you search for a website, I think the example that came out in one of the antitrust trials was Vogue or Cosmopolitan, or some magazine like that.

• 15:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was one of those, yeah.

• 15:34Nilay Patel?

  And you get the website and right below it in the search result, you get their headings like beauty, fashion, style coverage, Met Gala. Those headings are generated by what people click on in those websites in Chrome.

• 15:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  And Google has forever said it does not use data from Chrome to impact search. And then you look at these API docs, you're like, oh, it's in there. There's data from Chrome. Like, it's potential that Google is actually using that for search. And they have sworn up and down to every regulator, to every SEO professional, to everyone, that these things are not the same. What are you gonna do with that?

• 16:10David Pierce?

  It's such a funny example, too, because, like, of course, Google does that. Like, this, to me, so much of this leak is things that you would obviously assume Google is doing, except that Google has been denying doing it for years, that it turns out, in fact, Google is doing. Like, I'm in the business of knowing which links are good, and I also run a browser in which billions of people click links every day. Like, at some point, you'd be insane not to let one affect the other. You have maybe the best possible data stream, which is the links that people go to and how long they spend there, which is literally, that is all you could ever want to know in search rankings. And so the idea that they are spread apart and not, you know, in any way correlated out

• 16:55David Pierce?

  of the goodness of Google's heart, I think, has always been sort of silly to people. And so, to some extent, it's like, it just confirms what your instincts tell you in a lot of this leak.

• 17:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I keep going back to Neelai earlier. You said this was kind of like a comet hitting, and I feel like it's definitely a comet for the SEO community, but for the rest of us, we've kind of been in more like high waters rising as apocalypse is coming, right? Like, the Google, the Google experience for 90% of people has just been like, okay, the sea levels are rising now. And, and it feels like this was maybe that. Big push in the water. Oh, now it's covering Manhattan's. Dang it.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it it it does feel like the dam is breaking. One of the things that we were talking about when we did our Decoder episode recently about Google Zero was the stuff leaks because people are mad.

• 17:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  And so if you were an SEO operator and you uncovered a bunch of secret data that Google was collecting, you would not tell the SEO community, right? Like, you would you would definitely keep that to yourself. But instead, what's happening is people are mad and they're like, look at all these lies. Or look at what we perceive to be lies.

• 18:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  And there's just a lot of the the ideas that people have had about how Google Search works. One of them is domain authority. So a very funny thing that happens is every year I publish Best Printer 2024 by a Brother Laser Printer. And it goes to the top of the rankings. It goes to the top of the search rankings. One, because I have the right answer, which is used by Brother Laser Printer and never think about it. Two, because I'm the best person to write about printers in world history. No one else has written a better printer post than me. I'm sorry, that's just the truth.

• 18:35Alex Cranz?

  Certainly.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  These two can try. And I don't mean that because there's not better writers than me. I mean, those writers are not wasting their time.

• 18:43David Pierce?

  They have better things to do, right? You are the perfect, the perfect middle of good at your job and also interested in printer posts that has ever existed.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, the whole staff is better at this than me. I just, they won't do it.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. And then everyone tweets it and shares it and people write about it because it's a joke and it's funny and it's at the top of the list. And then the SEO community says things like, The Verge is just taking advantage of their domain authority, which, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's fully what we're doing. And then Google's like, we don't have domain authority. That's not a thing we keep track of. And then you look at the thing and they track something called Site Authority. And it's that dynamic.

• 19:21David Pierce?

  Authority.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. It's just that dynamic, which is like, okay, like, we understand that you don't want people to game search. We have been very critical of SEO firms that game search. Again, Decoder this week is just about people gaming search and putting small businesses out of business.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  But if you're not honest, right, then, and if you deny the things are happening, then the backlash is really strong. The example I keep thinking about is what if every Instagram influencer woke up today and was like, Instagram has been lying to us for a decade? Like, how'd that go for that platform?

• 20:03Alex Cranz?

  Adam Mosseri just like, immediately like, hey, guys.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  He's not making it better.

• 20:07Alex Cranz?

  I'm here with a video on why the lies were worth it.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:11Alex Cranz?

  Now I gotta go to the Met Gala.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, kind of. He's like, my glasses are getting more expensive every day.

• 20:16Alex Cranz?

  And they look fabulous.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  They're very good. Um, what would happen if every YouTuber, I always joke that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how they're not at YouTube? What would happen if every YouTuber was like, they've been lying to us for a decade? That's, that's where Google is landing with the web with these leaks. We're gonna have a lot more coverage of them. Now that we know they're real, we're gonna pull them apart, we're gonna talk to some experts. I have people from other companies in my inbox saying things like, if some of this is real, then Chrome is essentially spyware.

• 20:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds like last week, we were having this whole conversation about Copilot and how everybody was very upset because they felt like Copilot plus PCs, all this stuff that Microsoft is doing is horrible. And it was, it was essentially keyloggers. And it's like, okay, well, now we basically have confirmation that Chrome is a keylogger.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, we, we, right? We, there's like a field.

• 21:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  It's like, if you were to make a spreadsheet and one of the things in spreadsheet would be like, my friend's bank account numbers? And you're like, but I never filled it in.

• 21:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  I just kinda wanted, in case someone told me their bank account number.

• 21:24Alex Cranz?

  Sure, I do that all the time.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, people my friends have gone out with on dates. Like, I, I just keep, maybe. Maybe that's a page I wanna have in my notebook, right?

• 21:34David Pierce?

  Again, I, I would encourage anyone who is alarmed by this to go to your Chrome history. Think about all the cookies that you have. I mean, like, of course it's a key, like, what the hell is a browser if not a keylogger?

• 21:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  Uh, that's literally its job is to know all the links that you've been to and all the things that That you typed inside of them. And I think to some extent, again, I just keep coming back to this idea that like, Google is going to say, okay, we run a search engine. Wouldn't it be cool if we knew all the links people would go to when they weren't on Google? And then somebody on Chrome is like, what if we just built an awesome browser? And they just, it would be the most like, have you met Google thing in history? And to be fair, if any company could accidentally keep those two things apart, it is Google. But like, just strategically, it would be absurd for Google to do this and not actually connect those dots together.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  Again, and I think from some of the antitrust trials, David, you covered some of them. Google's been pretty open, like our engineers wanted a bunch of click data to make the search engine better.

• 22:33David Pierce?

  So we gave Apple $20 billion.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay. Well, a bunch of people run Windows. We don't have to pay Microsoft. We just have to make a browser and put it on there. And now we run the biggest browser in the world and we get all the clicks. Like, that is exactly what you would do.

• 22:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think the thing is that what's different here is that everybody should understand this, right? Like, I understand that Google is reading my emails because I signed up for Gmail in like 2004, 2005. That was part of the deal. You know, it reads my emails to deliver me ads. So I understand that. Most people don't. And a lot of times they have these moments when stuff like this happens where there's like, oh shit, they have so much more information about me than I ever thought they did. And it's just this moment for a lot of people where it's just like, oh, I didn't, I never intellectualized this. I never like fully comprehended how much these companies have about me.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then on the flip side, you have people who are trying to build businesses saying, hey, it looks like you're doing this. And Google's saying, no.

• 23:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And just flat out lying to them in a way that's like, you know, I don't think they, Google has any interest in rebuilding trust with the SEO people.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. Actually, one of the funniest things about this is that is such an antagonistic relationship. I often make the comparison to platforms. Like, I think the web is essentially Google's platform. And certainly a lot of these businesses are building their businesses on the platform known as Google Search, not the web.

• 23:56Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're, they're, they're search dependent businesses. And Google does not have like warm and fuzzy platform creator relationships with these folks. Like Adam Mosseri is like, I'm gonna sit down with creators, like, look at all these great creators.

• 24:10Alex Cranz?

  He's got a great sweater on.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, loves, loves a creator breakfast.

• 24:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like every platform that depends on creators has that relationship that extracts more value than it pays them. That's life and platform world. They, they try to mollify the creators all the time. Google does not try to mollify website owners.

• 24:29David Pierce?

  No. Because, I mean, at this point, the, the internet is reliant on Google and what Google says is, hey, run our ads on your site and you can have some money. Does that seem good? But what I think is so interesting about this is like the, the YouTube, the sort of social platform example is really interesting because what those companies by and large have done is be inscrutable on purpose, right? Like, you, you look at Adam Mosseri responding to people who are like, why didn't my post do numbers? Why is this one working and this one not working? And they never really answer the question except to say, you know, do good work and, and keep posting and whatever. And so what you see is like, the people who are successful on these platforms are the ones who are constantly running experiments in public.

• 25:12David Pierce?

  Like, do you remember Mr. Beast's whole thing where he was like, if I have my mouth open in the thumbnail, it gets more clicks? Like YouTube didn't tell him that. These are the experiments he's running in public. What Google has done that is so wild is it's, it's as if Neil Mohan called Mr. Beast and said, shut your mouth, it doesn't help.

• 25:29David Pierce?

  And instead, so it's like, okay, it's one thing to not be told the rules of the game and figure them out for yourself. I actually think that relationship is like odd, but fine, right? And it's like, here, here is a, a black box. It's your job to figure it out. That is sort of the internet we live on. But for Google to have spent this long denying the existence of what people are finding on their own and sort of making people question what they're finding with their own two hands in front of their own two eyes is just wild. And again, we should say there is a lot about how all of this works that we still don't know. I think a lot of it is going to start to come out very fast because there are a lot of people who do these experiments who are now armed with a tremendous amount of new data.

• 26:11David Pierce?

  And so I think we're going to learn a lot about how Google works really, really quickly now. But it's just, it just feels so weird to hear the people who do this for a living be like, yeah, I've been asking these questions and being publicly lied to about how my job works for a decade. That just feels crazy.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Also, we should note there are pending antitrust lawsuits against Google and lots and lots of regulators around the world who have been asking the same questions and getting the same kind of answers.

• 26:36David Pierce?

  Well, which is another place a lot of this information is coming from, by the way. Like, there was this thing called NavBoost that came up a bunch in the API, which talks a lot about how click-through rate and the stuff you're talking about, like the long and short clicks, whether you come back very quickly from a search result or stay on the page a while. All of that is part of a system Google has called NavBoost that came up in the antitrust trial and made some noise where it's like, okay, this is actually overriding a lot of our other rankings is what you do once you interact with a search result. And that is very different from what Google has told people.

• 27:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, actually, my favorite part of all this, my favorite thing, because it's such a good name. Let's be honest. How do you get me? You give something an adorable name. Google has spent years positioning search as a utility, right? Not as a business that they run, but as the water or electricity of the internet. It's just a neutral utility. You just use it. And we don't have any ideas about it. It's just we set the robots to crawl the internet and they- They're just a baby. Yeah, they just find the stuff and they show it to you. And when you try to cover search as anything other than a utility, the attitude from Google is like, why would you do that? We want to teach people how search works. And we're like, no, there's like a culture of search, like the same way that there's a culture of TikTok, right?

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  And that's been a disconnect, but they have done that on purpose, right? Because if you treat something like a utility or a neutral algorithm or just the right answer that the Google brilliance of PageRank has discovered across the web, then maybe you don't poke at it too much. And inside these documents, we find things like NavBoost as part of a system that is called Twitters.

• 28:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. Twitters.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  And the way to think about it is like the big Google algorithm is like the backend. And right before it displays you a result, the Twitters show up and they twiddle the result. We just twiddle the little- And so NavBoost is a Twittler. It's like categorized as a Twittler. It's like, we went and found some other stuff and we're just gonna shuffle that around a little bit. And there's a bunch of those. And like lots of Google's systems are built as Twitters. So they have plausible deniability that the core search ranking algorithm doesn't take these factors in. But right before they show them to you-

• 28:51Alex Cranz?

  Just a little twiddle.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Twiddlers, baby. And it's like, ah, I'm not that stupid. You know, it's like, it's one system that displays a search result at the end. Where it happens, like, I don't think they can run around being like, we were always telling the truth.

• 29:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  It's just these twiddlers are out of control.

• 29:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:08Alex Cranz?

  They have no control over it. They're just a baby. I, it's, it's my favorite thing that everybody does now when they screw up. They just go, I'm just a baby. I don't know.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  It's my first day running search.

• 29:18Alex Cranz?

  Who could say? You're over yourselves.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, we are gonna learn a lot more about this. I, we often try not to oversell things. I'm just telling you, the, the web, the people who make the web are aflame because of these documents. Because they do make Google seem, if not outright a liar, as though they have been socially engineering a community of people who make things into not believing what they see, as David is saying. And I think the backlash there is going to be ferocious.

• 29:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  Especially as search traffic declines, especially as user behavior changes around AI, especially as the AI results continue to tell people to eat glue. Like, it's not, there's not a lot of trust left in this ecosystem. And it's, it's, to me, it's weird that there's not more coverage of it. It's not as sexy as the Facebook algorithm or Elon saying isn't open source the Twitter algorithm. But like David said, this is the architecture of the internet.

• 30:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it is because, that's why it's so hard for people. It is so ingrained in how most people function that it's shocking to them to a point where it's like, I, I can't even process this, I have to go.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Alex Cranz?

  Like, most people, I don't think, fully grasp how much the Google, the Google. And most people don't fully grasp how much Google affects their online experience. They just don't. They know it, they see it and everything, but it's just like, just gloss over it. And now it's like, oh, we're having to actually reckon with this and think about this.

• 30:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's why I always like to talk about cooking websites. Uh, because if you want the, if you want the single... Cleanest example of how Google changes the way a webpage works, go read a recipe site. You will see everything you need to see. You will see the H2s, which Google wants because there are going to be questions that people might be Googling. You're going to see the jump to recipe thing, but then you're also going to see 2,000 words of nonsense about their lives because you have to actually stay on the page a long time in order for Google to believe that that's a successful search. They want images. That's very important to Google. Like every single pixel of that page, right down to how the recipe is structured, is made for Google. And anyone who runs a food blog will tell you that the fundamental tension is like, I did this because I like food and I actually work for Google. And

• 31:26David Pierce?

  that feels crappy to a lot of people.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  And now Google's going to take that stuff and show the recipes to people in AI.

• 31:31David Pierce?

  Right. But I do think, one more thought on this that I've been seeing a lot of increasingly in the SEO world, and I think is a really interesting like internet question is, one way to read a lot of what we've seen in these leaks is that SEO is dead and no longer will work. Like there, I copied this one paragraph out from the thing that Rand wrote. He said, "Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever, SEO savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search measurable forms of popularity, and established domains that searchers already know and click. From 1998 to 2018 or so, one could reasonably start a powerful marketing flywheel with SEO for Google. In 2024, I don't think that's

• 32:13David Pierce?

  realistic, at least not on the English language web in competitive sectors." Like, there is a real defeatism to the idea that Google cares a lot about the sites that already exist, the places people already go, what has been going on for a long time, and the idea that you can come and be new and good and smart and people will find you because that's how Google works is a dying theory.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I ask this question to a lot of just media people. Website CEOs and decoder. I asked this question to Sundar. Why would anyone make a website? You're a new creator. We're, we're all gonna quit our jobs at AOL. Which you should do. Can't recommend it enough. Best decision I've ever made.

• 32:54Alex Cranz?

  I don't plan on doing it.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  You should go get a job at AOL just to quit.

• 32:57Alex Cranz?

  Just to quit.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  But that's, you know, that's how we founded The Verge. We all worked at Engadget, just 2010, 2011. We had this idea for The Verge. We all quit. We're not gonna start anything. We started a website, like a big desktop website. We didn't even have a mobile site. We started a big hairy desktop website with like forums and features and all this stuff. And then the mobile web came and we shrunk down the thing and whatever. But it was never a question that we would start anything but a website. There were 12 of us. We had a big idea. We wanted to do a thing. What we were gonna do was start a website. I think if you get to that place in 2024, maybe some people are gonna start a Substack. I don't think they think of those things as websites. Those are newsletters or independent newsletter and ghost or whatever.

• 33:41Nilay Patel?

  Mostly what they're gonna do is start YouTube channels and TikTok channels.

• 33:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the, the only people I see who are kinda doing that sort of thing, like, right? Leaving their jobs, whatever, and being like, I'm gonna start a website. Are already established brands, right?

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  Like the folks who are over at Kotaku, 404, who are from Vice. These folks just said, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna start a new thing. And I, they all take that model from Deadspin that became Defector.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  And, and that works, but that is...

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  You have to have an audience already.

• 34:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that worked because they have that audience, right? Like, most people don't have that audience and don't have that scale. And I think Casey's written about that a lot of like, he has to work to get Platformer out. He has to like really put in the effort. Because scale is hard. And it's much, much harder now because of Google.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I, those sites are all great. I don't think they, like 404 is on ghost.

• 34:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Right, so they're, they're taking advantage of some, some infrastructure for newsletter that exists that lets them be a different kind of thing. But the idea that, like, we coded our website from scratch.

• 34:40Alex Cranz?

  We wouldn't do that.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna like build a product that is a website. Um, I didn't do it.

• 34:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you know, you wouldn't do that in 2024.

• 34:47Nilay Patel?

  We, it was just not a good investment in 2024 for the reason David is saying.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  And there's, you know, many things have changed in the past 13 years. But the idea that... The new creators on the internet will not go to the open web, but instead will go to a closed video platform, I think is very dangerous. And I don't know the right answer to get people back to making open searchable web properties if the biggest search engine is like, screw it, like Hearst, we'll just, everyone can go read dot dash Meredith. Like whatever, you know, like, maybe that's the right outcome and maybe that's just the closing of the web. But I, again, the reason we started covering it last year is because I was like, oh, the comment's coming. And the more we covered it, we're like, oh, the comment's coming, like, we should capture this moment.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  And it feels like, again, I thought the comment would be, I thought, I did not expect it to be like, everyone is this mad. And it just feels like, we'll, we'll see how it goes. We're going to cover a lot more of it. I think the other browser makers, regulators, there's just a flood of negative emotion about how Google has behaved that it might, it feels like it's coming to a head.

• 35:56Alex Cranz?

  I do have one question for you guys, especially you, David, because you use a lot of different search engines. Are any of them good? Like, do any of them, when you go and you search something, actually give you those unique results that used to be like, ooh, yeah, now I know what I'm doing on this, this search engine?

• 36:13David Pierce?

  Um, yes and no. Coggi, which is the one you mentioned, which is also what I use, it's 10 bucks a month, it's excellent. I cannot recommend it enough. Paying for a search engine feels ridiculous, but it's worth it. Has a thing that it calls Small Web, where it actually deliberately built a like crowdsourced database of sites that aren't The Verge and aren't like big mainstream news sites, the kind that dominate search results, but are like people's blogs and little alternative news sites and local newspapers and all the kinds of cool stuff. And you can, you can toggle the search just to that. And I think the, the sort of big omnibus search is never coming back from what it is now. It's, you, it's just interface changes, really.

• 36:57David Pierce?

  Like, I think Coggi's stuff is better than Google, but mostly just because it's a nicer thing to use than Google is at this moment.

• 37:03Alex Cranz?

  Especially in Arc.

• 37:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, but where we are now is like the the only solution is going to be to artificially decide which part of the web you want to look at because all of the signals for the rest of the web are are starting to break away from that like find and explore new things vibe because that's harder to do and harder to measure than oh people generally believe that Neelai is right about which printer to buy and that's actually like a pretty easy thing for a search engine to believe and send you to over and over again.

• 37:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  And we will continue ruthlessly using our domain authority.

• 37:42Alex Cranz?

  We will.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  To break Big Printer. David, I can't remember who it was you who said this, or Casey might have said it to me in passing, we used to think of surfing the web as a fun thing to do and all of Google's messaging at I O was let Google do the Googling for you.

• 37:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  Which makes it seem like work and it's like, no, this is how I wasted time. Do you know how much I didn't pay attention in law school because I was just browsing the web? Like that's a it's weird that we've made the web this unpleasant and the platforms figured it out and hopefully we can get some of that back. I don't know if we can. We're going to keep running a website. We're not. We do have a TikTok for as long as TikTok. All right, we're going to keep using our domain authority to crush Big Printer.

• 38:23Alex Cranz?

  Hell, yes.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  Just ruthless ruthless domain authority abuse. But that's our mission here at The Bridge. We got to take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's lightning round one, according to our rundown, the AI lightning round. So there's a bunch of W W C rumors about what's going to happen with OpenAI. They've apparently inked their deal. Google had a bad week last week. We should talk about that more. Google GPTs are open now with OpenAI store. There's a lot, but I know people want us to talk about our press release. Vox Media's press release, which is that, like many media companies, Vox Media signed a content and technology deal with OpenAI. The Atlantic had one on the same day. It was like Vox Media, Atlantic, we're in the headlines together. I know, David, you run, you interview me.

• 40:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, so, okay. I think the, the big question to me is both, how do we feel as people who work at a company with a deal like this? And what is this? What does all this mean about the media in general? So I think like we, we just had a conversation earlier with a bunch of the folks in our newsroom, talking about this stuff. And, and I think I want to know for you as somebody who runs a newsroom, you didn't make this deal. You, I assume, will at some point see the contract because you'd like yelling about contracts.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's the thing you do from time to time. I sincerely doubt that is true. I'll do my best. It is more likely that I will see someone else's contract before I see our own companies.

• 41:16David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting. That's a, that's a fun reporting tactic. Can I, can I bully my boss before I can bully somebody else?

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Our company is very good at being like, no, you can't just report on our own company. Other companies like, here's the stuff like, that's just the way of being a reporter.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. But so I am curious for you as like a newsroom leader, how you even think through what a deal like this means?

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  Sure. We do a lot of disclosures on this show, famously, I think. I've had journalism professors talk to me about the fact that our disclosures are a running joke with the audience. Like, we want to be really transparent about where information comes from, reasons to not trust us if you don't want to trust us. Like, my goal is always to just empower the audience with information. That's the top level. So like, if you're listening to this and you've listened to the show, that's why we do disclosures. That's why they're a joke. Like, I want, the only currency we have as a news organization is trust. So we're trying to, that's why we have the background policy, right? All the spokespeople have to use their names when they talk to us,

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  because we don't want to pretend we know something that they just told us. If Google or Apple or Microsoft or whoever wants to talk to us and get some information on our pages, they need to be accountable for it, not us. And that's just trust. That's just, who are you going to trust? Where does a trust go? Who do you have to trust for, to believe the story? So that's the top level. Right next to that, which I think the audience doesn't see as much, because why would you? Is our newsroom has to not think about it. Like, that's actually what independence is, right? Is not, I know that our company has a deal or an investor, and I'm just gonna, like, I'm gonna think about it as I write the story. The goal is, they don't think about it at all,

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  and we just go do the reporting and we publish what is true, or what we believe, or what we think people should know, right? And that, that, in any traditional newsroom, that's what is called the firewall. Right. So we do stuff, our sales team, there's advertising over there. We just came back from an ad break.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, like in that

• 43:30David Pierce?

  But we don't know what the ads are. I don't know what ads just played.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  I get so many emails about the crypto ads. I don't know, man. I think crypto is stupid shit. Like, what do you want me to do? Like, that's that team. And if we open the door and start telling that team what to do, the danger, and this is a danger that is proven out over and over again in newsrooms around the world. If we open the door and start telling them what to do, they're like, hey, that door is open. We're gonna start telling you what to do. So we just keep the door closed. This is why you have the firewall. It works in both directions. So for me, and I understand OpenAI in particular is a pretty shady company. I feel like our entire episode last week was like, this company is pretty shady. We're gonna talk about I was like, I'm just waiting.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  Whatever.

• 44:12Nilay Patel?

  Fine. But like, that's the commercial side of our company. And I understand, like, I've talked to a lot of media executives. Like, I'm running around and covering Google Zero. I've been talking to a lot of media people lately. And I can talk about that bigger question, David, of like, are these good deals? Are these like a good idea broadly? Because I think, I've done some reporting, I have some thoughts about that. But the thing that, like, when our press release went out, like, no, we're not gonna change our cover of OpenAI. Yes, I think when it's appropriate, we'll disclose it. It's not like a... Like Comcast is an investor in our company.

• 44:44David Pierce?

  Right.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, we disclose it every time we whisper about Comcast, because they're an investor. This is a licensing deal. Like, we have a lot of those across our company. I don't want to just get into a situation where I'm like, disclosure, Yahoo licenses an RSS feed of the dodo. Like, what do you... Like, I think that door can get too open. We can overread it. First cast would go a little long. It would go a little long. And I want to preserve our independence. And what independence really means to me is, yes, we'll disclose it. Yes, we'll earn everyone's trust. But I would prefer it if we were just covering OpenAI without thinking about it. And so that's, that's the balance I'm trying to strike. I'm open to people's thoughts about how much you need from us to continue having that trust.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  But it is, in many ways, like, more of a normal deal than people are expecting. Right? Like, when When we did a Netflix show, I think there was less outcry, but like I was the producer of a disclosure, I made a Netflix show.

• 45:43David Pierce?

  Every time.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  You should watch, you should watch a Netflix show.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  David and I are gonna make one just so that we.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  That was like way messier, right? Like I'm going to meetings at Netflix about our show that I was not allowed to talk about until our show was made. So I want to make sure we like find the right balance. And I understand there's just a lot of feelings about AI and OpenAI in particular. But like, at the end of the day, the goal for all of these media companies is to just get some control back out of a situation that felt out of control.

• 46:14David Pierce?

  And what situation is that?

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, they took everything anyway.

• 46:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's the situation. And we can talk about that broadly. I just want to separate the two things. Like, our newsroom is independent. OpenAI did not buy any control of our newsroom. We will be very honest with everybody when we think the disclosure could affect how you perceive one of our stories. And I think that, you know, around copyright law, like that makes sense to me. We're gonna write a story about the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. That is a great place for disclosure. OpenAI launches a new GPT feature. Like, I don't know. You tell me. Maybe we need to do that every time. But like, I don't want to over read it as though to make it seem like we're doing something we're not.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  So that's it. That's like my top line. Like, we will have a disclosure. I love a disclosure. Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. I'm in a Netflix show.

• 47:05David Pierce?

  Disclosure, Alex Cranz is the last remaining Paramount Plus subscriber.

• 47:09Alex Cranz?

  It's true. Hi.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Look, this is our brand, and we're gonna do them. I just, the thing that I am trying to be careful about is separating how people feel about these deals broadly, and what it means for our newsroom.

• 47:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  And what it means for our newsroom is the status quo. Like, it is not changing. We are gonna operate without fear or favor. And again, my goal is to earn everyone's trust by being as transparent as we can be. And I just want to make sure that. We're not so transparent that we actually go in a full circle and no one believes us. So like, you tell me where you think the line is. I'm open to the feedback. I asked for it from our staff today. I'm asking for it from the audience today. But the the main thing is not changing, which is I want, I would prefer it if our reporters were not worried about an opening ideal or thinking about it. And we just covered the company like we have been for a long time.

• 48:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. And this is the thing we should say, like, a thing I've learned about the media business over the years is that it's very unusual in the sense that like that tension you're describing between the work that we do and where the money comes from is like good and healthy and should always exist. And our editorial and sales teams should always like hate each other a little bit. It's like a useful thing. But also, like, we have tech company ads all over our website. Like, that is, that is, it's, it's a not dissimilar thing. And it is, it is just something you have to navigate and get comfortable with. And like, people always like sending us the stuff where I will make a Vergecast about how terrible Facebook is right before a Facebook ad. Like, it's my favorite thing. It's so fun. But I do want to talk about the broader piece of this because I think the, I think you're right

• 48:46David Pierce?

  that the reaction I saw out there was less like, you know.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, can I say one more thing?

• 48:52David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  We're not going to start publishing a bunch of AI content. Who, hello?

• 48:57Alex Cranz?

  I think people see partnership and they're like, AI content?

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm the only person who has put AI content on their website. Both posts were about printers.

• 49:05Alex Cranz?

  You disclosed.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  I wish you people would get madder at me about it and make that post go even more viral. No one will do it.

• 49:12David Pierce?

  We will only use AI to ruin our domain authority in Google search.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure we're going to end up building some, like, there's one thing that all of us want, which is we would like better alt text on our images to make them more accessible, to make the site more accessible. We would like our site to be better for screen readers. Right now, it's a lot of very manual work. If we can use some of these tools to make that better, make our site more accessible, that's a great outcome, right? I don't know if that's gonna work. Right now, our creative team tells me like, this alt text is not good enough.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  AI, everybody, it's just not good enough yet. But if we can start to build that stuff, that's great. So there is that part of it, which I think is interesting. I don't know what that looks like. I haven't talked to our product team about any of that stuff yet. But the other part where the verge is just the verge, that's going to remain exactly the same today as it was yesterday.

• 50:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay. Let's talk about the broader side of this because I think there are, there are two pieces of the should media companies be making deals like this with OpenAI? Question that I find very interesting. We should talk about both of them. The first is, haven't you idiots learned your lesson from making these deals with companies like Facebook? And Google and everybody else who promised you money to save journalism? And in fact, forced you to do a bunch of stuff, pulled out the rug and kind of screwed up the industry. The second is, aren't you guys? Don't you realize that AI is out to put all of you out of jobs? And just take your information, use it in training data and then get rid of you. Why are you ushering in the journalism apocalypse? And I think to some extent, those are like two versions of the same question.

• 50:46David Pierce?

  But I think are like the big picture things going on here. Like, are we contributing to our own downfall? Or are we chasing money at the expense of doing anything that is smart or long term thinking?

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the media industry never does anything.

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the media industry is not known for really good businesses.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  This is mostly a vanity project.

• 51:07David Pierce?

  A thing we have talked a lot about on this show is that we, the media industry as a whole, probably should have spent more time over the last decade, building Facebook competitors than making Facebook videos. And I think like, my hope is we have learned that lesson. And that the next minute of the journalism industry will be learning that lesson and executing on it. Which is, I think, part of why we're so excited about the Fediverse. Because it's a thing that opens up possibilities for new kinds of media products.

• 51:36David Pierce?

  Is there a fear that OpenAI and the like AI search engine stuff that is inevitably coming is just the next pivot to video and everybody falls for it and gives up on building new things for five more years?

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Okay, so here's I just I'm going to bracket our company because they did not talk to you, which is like, that's the firewall.

• 52:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  But Nick Thompson, who is the CEO of the Atlantic, has published a bunch about why the Atlantic did the deal. He made a video about it. You can go watch on LinkedIn. Nick used to be the editor in chief of Wired. David used to work for Nick.

• 52:13David Pierce?

  I did. I love Nick.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  Nick knows. He knows.

• 52:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, he gets it.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  I Nick and I are friends. He knows. He understands what he's doing. Axel Springer has signed one of these deals. The Financial Times has signed one of these deals. A lot of these companies are signing these deals. My understanding of the deals from the reporting, not from the digging around our company, but from the reporting is twofold. One, we just spent a whole bunch of time talking about Google. Google is a fair use argument, right? We're going to come and index all of your information. We're going to show it to people. In return, you'll get traffic. And everyone said, it's a little, little squeaky, but okay. And then Google won a bunch of cases against different media organizations that did not like this idea.

• 52:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  We're going to index every book in the world and show it to people. And the book publishers are like, no, you're stealing our stuff. And Google won that case. Google, we're going to index all the images on the internet. A bunch of porn publishers said, no, that's, we don't want you to do that. And they were not the most sympathetic defendants in the world. Google won that case. Google said, we're going to put every episode of South Park on YouTube. And Viacom said, no. And then they started posting episodes of South Park to YouTube on their own. And they lost that case. That was not a great legal strategy, but that's what they did.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  But that all of Google, that whole platform dynamic was, we're going to take your stuff and we're going to pay you and we'll get something. We'll get you'll pay you an exposure.

• 53:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  And that look around. So I think, I think a lot of the reaction right now is, well, we cannot let that happen again. We need some rules. I think a problem for all these companies is that OpenAI and Google and whoever else, Anthropic.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Perplexity, you name it. They've all taken it anyway.

• 53:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  They have it. Llama scraped on the internet. Every Facebook video we've ever made is in Llama.

• 54:05Alex Cranz?

  OpenAI built a tool to scrape YouTube for more data. Like, that's just how it's done. Yeah. I think, you know, Abyssin, our own company, I know nothing about the deal beyond.

• 54:17Nilay Patel?

  We don't have to keep saying it.

• 54:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  We have one. There it is. There's your disclosure. Vox Media has a content and technology deal with OpenAI.

• 54:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think you're right, where it's like, it is a thing of, everybody, it's already been taken. It's already gone. Everybody, it's, the cat is out of the bag, right? Genie's out of the bottle, whatever euphemism you want to use there. It's happened. And now it's, okay, what do we put a price on that? And a lot of these companies, we're starting to hear more about the price there. We're starting to hear what it is. And that might not end up being the right price, right? Like, these deals might not be the right deals, but they are deals. They are money where there wasn't money.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  I think a really interesting thing is how do you set the right price? What is the value? They've already trained on it. What is deal for now? One of the things that has come out about these deals, which are all, from what I understand, they're all basically the same structure. I think the News Corp deal is like $250 million over five or 10 years, right? Most of the other deals are $10 million over five to 10 years, something like that. I think it's five.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  The main thing that has come out about them is that they govern how much can be displayed, how the information is displayed, how it's attributed, what links are in it. And you look at that, and what I see is honestly a reaction to Google, which has gone from, we're linking to your stuff, to we're going to cut out your stuff and put it in featured snippets, to we're going to have our AI rewrite whatever and just show you the answer and never send you a click.

• 55:43Alex Cranz?

  And then you'll eat glue.

• 55:44David Pierce?

  And there's nothing you can do about it because we're indexing your website every single day.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. And there's nothing you can do about it because there's no contract. Right? So what I have heard and what I see is like that control, and I think Nick, again, Nick Thompson, that former editor of Wired, who knows, has been public about this in his announcement in Atlantic. That control is the thing. Because if you go beyond that, you don't have to go invent some copyright.

• 56:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  Argument, you have a breach of contract claim. And that's much easier to litigate. The other thing that I see happening all over the industry, and we made an entire Decoder episode with Sarah Zhang and I, about how all of AI rests on a totally shaky copyright fair use argument that could blow up at any moment.

• 56:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  Like OpenAI, your business could blow up at any moment because you have weird ideas about copyright law. No one can afford to litigate these ideas. So, the New York Times sued OpenAI, somewhat famously. They've spent a million dollars on a lawsuit so far. Public company, we just know the answer. To get nothing. They haven't, they haven't achieved an outcome yet. They've just done.

• 56:45Alex Cranz?

  And they could lose.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  And they could lose. So that's a coin flip. New York Times, big public company, they run a very successful video game service. Maybe the most successful online game service of all is the New York Times. The word hole is paying the bills for this lawsuit. Most media companies do not have just some cash cow cooking website or gaming service to fund a lawsuit about their journalism. And so I think they're all looking at the Times lawsuit. They're saying, well, this is going to take five years. This is going to take 10 years, it might go to Supreme Court, they might lose. Hopefully, the Times wins. If they win, our contracts will expire right around then and we'll renegotiate with the strength of this copyright precedent. And if they lose, we'll just re-up our deal.

• 57:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  And I, I see that playing out as most media companies cannot afford to go litigate these deals. And importantly, no one can afford to sue Google.

• 57:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, Google's got infinite money.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  And I, I know everyone's talking about OpenAI and whatever, just disclosure, OpenAI has a content technology of Vox Media. I would just, we just spent that whole first segment about Google, which is the thing. It's the 800-pound gorilla. Everyone on the web operates in the universe of Google, including OpenAI, right? OpenAI has made Google dance to a Byron Dales quote. But they're still it. Like, Google's the big profitable, ultra-high-margin company.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  And OpenAI doesn't make a dollar, as far as I understand, right? They're still losing money. So you just, there's a, there's a difference there in how these companies are perceiving their antagonists. And I think they can get OpenAI to come to the table. And eventually, what they're going to do is they're going to go to Google and they're going to say, pay us. Your competitor is paying us. Our traffic is dropping. If it continues to drop, we're going to let, we're going to pull the plug on you indexing our website. And I don't know how long that's going to take. Maybe it'll never happen because the threats are effective. But you just see, that's where the trend line is headed.

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  And then you'll see, you'll only get the URL for buy this one printer Neil Mitchell recommends.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  I'll sell you one link, Google. But that's, that's like broadly how I see the, the dynamic of this playing out is the copyright, I care a lot about copyright law. The copyright argument is so uncertain on both sides of the coin, that people are trying to buy some certainty so that they have leverage to go negotiate against the real power in the ecosystem.

• 59:05David Pierce?

  That makes logical sense to me. I also think it might be wildly optimistic about who is actually going to extract anything from Google.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  I like our media executives. I think they're brilliant. It should be clear, I think Nick is very smart. Most media executives are not like A players.

• 59:23David Pierce?

  Even the thesis is good, right? Like I, I buy the thesis as far as it goes. I just think there is not a lot of evidence that says anyone can pick a fight with Google and win. Because we are in this, I mean, like you, you keep harping about Google Zero, like when that happens and people have nothing to lose by picking that fight with Google, they might start to pick that fight with Google. Right now, if I just say, you can't crawl my website anymore, overwhelmingly, I go straight out of business.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  Yep. That's what I mean. That's, this is what I'm saying, like the trend lines.

• 1:00:00David Pierce?

  Right. But that trend is so slow. It's so, so slow.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  It's slow and it isn't slow. I think for some publishers, it's, it's super slow. For others, it's not, right?

• 1:00:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  But if you're, if you're seeing shakiness in your Google results and you're seeing AI overviews and you're like, maybe Google Zero is real, or you're a midsize publisher. Right, which are not getting these deals right now. It's all the big publishers are getting these deals. But somewhere down the road, the mid-sized publishers, I assume, will get the deal. Or we offer a deal, or go ask for a deal, who knows? At some point, right, the trend line of our Google traffic is going down. Our investment in caring about you is no longer worth it. And they're paying us money. Like, I, I, I just, that is, it's a destabilizing factor in all these conversations where there have never been destabilizing factors for about a decade. Yeah. And so we'll just see, like,

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  the last time this happens, this is the negative argument. I'll give everyone the negative argument. David wrote about this. He wrote about Google AMP at the beginning of last year, because I was like, we gotta start with what Google has done to the web. Google did AMP because Facebook showed up and said, do instant articles and put all of your articles directly into our platform. And they'll load really fast, something native on the web, and we'll send a shitload of audience to them. And Google freaked out and did AMP, and then all the publishers had to do AMP. And this was a disaster. Just broadly, all the way around, a disaster. And then Facebook was like, we hate news. And they're like, actually, what we hate is text. All of you make videos. And we pivoted to video. This equal growing disaster. AMP turned out to be a huge mess and you couldn't do anything good. It actually spread misinformation because all the websites look the same. I could go on about this for days and days and days.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Google is there again. Yep. They're afraid of something. And so like, the ripple effect of that, I think, is interesting. And I think what most of the publishers that I've talked to, what they're interested in is, can we make them not copy and start articles with AMP? But copy payments for search? Because that's what they all want. One thing we haven't talked a lot about on the show is a bill in the United States called the JCPA, the Journalism Competition Preservation Act. It's funny, you would think that the publishers could all get together and, and do, and say, we're gonna pull our content from Google Search. They have a lot of leverage. If they do it all together, you got a lot of leverage. What's left? They can't, because that would be collusion under the antitrust laws. Yep.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  Which is incredible. So the JCPA is, I think it's a Klobuchar bill that would create an exemption for publishers to bargain with large platforms like over a billion in revenue, one of those numbers that like makes it Google and Facebook.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  It's one of those ways of saying Google and Facebook without saying Google and Facebook. It would create an exception to antitrust law so that they could bargain as a unit against large platforms.

• 1:02:45Alex Cranz?

  Or they could just like rule that Google has built a monopoly.

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's, there's just a lot of these ideas floating around about how you equalize the bargaining power.

• 1:02:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I, that's, I just see the bigger picture, which is the raw deal is real. Like people got burned super hard by the raw deal of the platforms, most of which were, we'll give you some money with no contract that says where the money will come from, the Facebook news partnerships or the Google news initiatives, or it was make a thing for us that we want, Facebook video, or it was we're going to take your stuff for free and pay you an exposure, which is Google search. And I, what I see now is we have a contract.

• 1:03:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? We're just not doing this again. You're, you're going to pay us money, we're going to tell you what you can take, and if you don't pay us enough money, we'll see you, and if you take too much, we'll see you. And that has a little bit of teeth. I don't know if it'll work. Again, I know a lot of media executives, Alex used to work for some of the worst media executives.

• 1:03:47Alex Cranz?

  I sure.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  It's not like, they're not all, this is not an industry that can see the long game, and it's an industry that's under pressure, so it might be making mistakes. But I, I see the difference here. I don't know if these are good ideas. I don't know if they feel great, right? Like there's a lot of the response yesterday into all these other deals is do these feel great? No. But I, I think I can identify the differences, and I think at least what I see is, well, they took the shit anyway. Like some money is better than no money.

• 1:04:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  And a lot of the deal for a long time was no money.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  That's definitely where I'm sitting. It's like, some money is better than no money. But also, one, I want to just point out, this is a lightning round. And we've been on Neil's lightning.

• 1:04:31Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 1:04:32Alex Cranz?

  For a while. And so I want to take over for my lightning round.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 1:04:36Alex Cranz?

  Which is also about OpenAI.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Of course it is.

• 1:04:39Alex Cranz?

  Because I called it. I just, back when, when OpenAI, there was the coup. A bunch of the board members were like, we, we don't like Sam, we're firing him. Everybody gathered around Sam was like, no, you were baby, we love you, come back. He's now back in charge, more powerful than ever. Right? Like, that's, that's, that's the reporting allegedly, like, information just said, OpenAI CEO cements control. So like, that's happening.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  They started, they fired all the safety people, or pushed them out.

• 1:05:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they fired all the safety people.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  And he's the head of the safety committee.

• 1:05:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, woo, that's, that's a choice, Sam. But Helen Tonner, who was one of those board members who, who voted to have him kicked off, kicked out and then left because he won, was on a podcast this week and was like, yeah, we just didn't trust him.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Alex Cranz?

  Like, he, he just was so consistently not telling us the truth. We, we just lost all trust in him. And that is really, really interesting to think about as he does cement more power, as he does get more powerful, as he does put himself in charge of safety at the company. And all of those people who were in charge of safety have left. And as that company is still technically run by a nonprofit, that's whole job is to protect us all from AI, like, oh buddy.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  That's not working for you.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm actually, I'm curious, it's been, like, this Scarlett Johansson situation has not, there has been no new pieces of information. It's been pretty quiet on that front.

• 1:06:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  That's not going to just end.

• 1:06:11Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? It ends with a settlement, or a statement, or an apology.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, she's going to do a partnership with OpenAI as well, like.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  She has some great ideas for all text.

• 1:06:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  But like the backlash to AI in general, but I'll give you this little data point.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a real gap in how people feel about the thing and then what people are doing. We've never gotten so many sort of like unhappy notes about a decoder episode is when we had the CEO of Adobe on. We had some happy ones too. People want to hear from that guy. He doesn't give a lot of interviews. I asked him what he thought a photo was. He doesn't know. But then we got a lot of people were like, screw this guy.

• 1:06:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  We just don't like Adobe. We don't like AI. Like they're ruining everything. His comments about AI are offensive. Weird, weird, right?

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  There's real backlash to AI.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  There's some negativity. One thing he told me in that episode was generative fill is used as much as layers. They launched this tool and it is used on the order of layers in photo, which is basically people open the app.

• 1:07:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's how you get layers. You open the app.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  You open the app and then like people use it. And so there's a real gap. And I think Sam kind of embodies the gap.

• 1:07:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. Which is he's just the face of, boy, we're not being very careful with this. He's the face of, I can do whatever I want because I'm so.

• 1:07:35Alex Cranz?

  Someone's gonna call him the bad boy of AI soon. I'm sorry.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  No, there's nothing about his demeanor that supports bad boy. I'm sorry. It's just not.

• 1:07:44Alex Cranz?

  It's coming. Don't worry.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  It's not gonna happen. I'm sorry. There are much better contenders for bad boy than Sam Altman.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  But like he's the face of that gap.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Which is actually the revealed behavior of many people is that the tools are useful. They can be helpful. People like them. Like I'm the nation's foremost hand wringer of what is a photo and I definitely used generative eraser in Lightroom yesterday. For a family photo that I shared with no one.

• 1:08:15Alex Cranz?

  I would use it all the time.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  A I D noise in Lightroom, I think, is magic. I've talked about it. It has recontextualized how I think about some of my old cameras.

• 1:08:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we were talking about this earlier today, where I think a lot of people don't realize how many of the tools we actually use are already A I, right? Like, Grammarly is using some sort of A I. Photoshop is all A I. And if you've been using Photoshop for the last 10 years, you've been using A I.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's in their summer.

• 1:08:42Alex Cranz?

  But I think you're right where it's Sam Altman has become the kind of this center point and everybody's talking about him and they're talking about specifically.

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  Because they don't trust him.

• 1:08:51Alex Cranz?

  They don't trust him and they don't trust the kind of A I he's doing, which is a very specific kind, right? It's taking over your search. It's providing just easy generative content in a way that most A I tools that people use have a very specific purpose and are used for very specific things. And he's built the lie bot.

• 1:09:09Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, OpenAI, this incredibly Byzantine corporate structure was all meant to box in the bad things.

• 1:09:17Alex Cranz?

  To box in the lie bot and keep the lie bot.

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  And like, keep it safe. And he's torn all that down.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  And now OpenAI, instead of being this weird nonprofit with a profit center that supports the nonprofit, is, feels like just Sam Altman's company.

• 1:09:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's called OpenAI. Like, I would just, I would just point out, like, their whole thing was being the good guys for so, so, so long. And they made it so far on big promises of being the good guys and then just, like, on a dime, turned and went the other way.

• 1:09:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the second the money showed up.

• 1:09:48David Pierce?

  It's really wild how fast this has happened.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. G P T 3.5 hit. They're like, oh, people like this. We're evil now.

• 1:09:56Alex Cranz?

  Just, they just put on their little evil helmets.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  So the interesting thing is, they don't, again, they don't have any revenue, right? Like, this company is not wildly profitable. They might be on a path to it. They make all this noise about.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Revenue is not important. You've been covering tech too long to know that, to not realize that revenue is not important. As long as people will keep giving you money, you don't need revenue.

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  Which is why I think they make all this noise about A G I all the time, right? They're like, we're, we built the future.

• 1:10:22David Pierce?

  People will keep giving you money.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  The number one, the funniest, the G P T apps are at now, right?

• 1:10:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  To everybody. And I was just looking at the top one in lifestyles, an astrology app. And I was like, oh, this is actually a perfect use case for A I.

• 1:10:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, you'd be like, I'll just make some shit up about your future.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should talk about that. So WWDC is coming up. There was some reporting this week that Apple has made the deal to sign with OpenAI, that OpenAI will power the stuff. Interestingly, there's some back and forth about whether it will run locally on the phone, which should match Apple's privacy promises, or go up to the cloud, which is fascinating, because

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  More powerful.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  More powerful, but where will it run? There's some reporting, I think Mark Gurman in Bloomberg reported that they're going to put M2 ultras, or M3 ultras in a data center and have a virtual black box

• 1:11:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:11:12Nilay Patel?

  For privacy.

• 1:11:13Alex Cranz?

  That that works out every time.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Who knows?

• 1:11:16David Pierce?

  It gives real like beeper running Mac minis on your behalf vibes.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then you've got OpenAI in the mix, which is like, where is this model going to run? Can it run on the M2 Ultra, M3 Ultra, or whatever?

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  I mean, no, you can't fit the thing on your phone. I'm very confident that you cannot run GPT-4O on your phone locally.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, but can you port it to ARM? Like, this thing right now runs on Nvidia H100s.

• 1:11:39David Pierce?

  A lot of them. Like, a lot of them.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  And you know what two companies hate each other with the fury of a thousand burning suns is Nvidia and Apple?

• 1:11:50David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:51Alex Cranz?

  But they're also two of the best people at making processors that can handle AI stuff.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Except for GPUs. One of them is really good.

• 1:11:58Alex Cranz?

  One of them's really good at use. The other one, oh!

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  The other one just took the training wheels off its

• 1:12:02Alex Cranz?

  I can play Crusader Kings on my laptop.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just very curious about how all this will play out, because if you're going to run GPT-4, there's a chance you're running it on a bunch of H100s in a Microsoft data center, which is a real weird place for Apple to be.

• 1:12:18Alex Cranz?

  Well, Gurman's piece this week about about the the deal was also kind of interesting because it seemed to be like they're not going to go full out with all the AI tools. What we're going to see from them at WWDC as far as AI goes is going to be a lot more Adobe-like than Scarlett Johansson voice.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they're gonna chat bot. I think that is the right move.

• 1:12:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:12:40David Pierce?

  Oh, that's so fun. I totally disagree.

• 1:12:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42David Pierce?

  I think they are going to go full hard with Siri. And I think that's the OpenAI play is just take the Siri you can talk to and plug it into GPT-4O and instantly it's the best Siri has ever been. Then how you scale that down to like turning off Bluetooth, which is a thing that I can do on my phone that does not require the internet is becomes a really interesting AI.

• 1:13:09Nilay Patel?

  That's Bixby. You just described like the promise of Bixby.

• 1:13:12David Pierce?

  I mean, what I use Siri for almost exclusively is playing music, adding reminders to the reminders app and setting timers. And none of those things require pinging GPT-4O. They just don't. But I think Apple, like everyone else, is going to have to convince investors that it has a chat bot play in order to survive, not survive, but you know what I mean? It's a Wall Street wants to see that you have some big new fangled idea. And so they're gonna do it because they feel like they have to. All the interesting AI stuff is going to be the like on device stuff. And that's the thing that we're already seeing Apple do well, just by putting AI

• 1:13:55David Pierce?

  features into apps. You're gonna see a lot of it with photos. There's a lot of noise around AI generated emoji. That's the kind of thing you don't really need OpenAI for that actually Apple has been working on for a long time. The, the only reason I can see that you would strike a deal like this with OpenAI is if you want to blow out the like conversational aspect of things.

• 1:14:16Alex Cranz?

  Just lies so much in the face of Apple's security stuff.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, but so does the Google deal. Like.

• 1:14:22Alex Cranz?

  So, so it's, it's true. That's true. But the Google deal, like, we didn't know the terms of the Google deal for years, right? And whereas this was a fairly public deal with OpenAI.

• 1:14:32David Pierce?

  I mean, it's just been better reported on because OpenAI is the leakiest company in the history of the world.

• 1:14:37Alex Cranz?

  Just like, just holes everywhere.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, it's only the M2 Ultra. This is driving me crazy. I kept saying M3 Ultra. They won't, because they're on the M4 now. So I just assumed.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  They just got a lot of M2.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  M2 Ultra is where they stopped with the.

• 1:14:51Alex Cranz?

  They're like, is this as good as an H100? OpenAI, tell us.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple knows that the idea behind is an external perception of the company and they're watching.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  They're watching companies kind of light their brands on fire and not, they're just never gonna do that. They are cautious to the extreme in that way. And I think this, I think this crush ad disaster for them, which was not even about AI. It was an iPad.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Nilay Patel?

  That everyone decided was about AI. I think they saw that and they were like, no, like, we're gonna do some stuff in photos and some stuff in emojis.

• 1:15:31Alex Cranz?

  Well, there's gonna be stuff in search, so.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure, yeah, there's gonna be like some like light dusting. Remember last year where they're like, the keyboard has AI in it now. And it's like, this keyboard is dumb.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's real bad.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like, still pretty bad. They're gonna do that kind of thing.

• 1:15:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  And I think it might be everywhere. They might announce more features, but that last turn where it's like, do you want to bang an iPad?

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if we're gonna get there this time. I think they're very comfortable with the perception that they're quote behind because they're, I think they're watching Google. I think they're watching the reaction to their own advertising and saying this stuff is not ready and the culture around it is too negative. That is just my sense from, you know, just talking to folks. But I don't, I don't know if, I don't know what they're actually gonna announce.

• 1:16:15David Pierce?

  I look forward to, we're gonna be there live and we're doing a podcast in Cupertino. And I am going to spend a lot of time gloating on that show about how right I was. And I'm really looking forward to it.

• 1:16:27Alex Cranz?

  I really hope David's wrong, just so I can gloat. I just, that's it. But I hope you're right for you spiritually, David.

• 1:16:36David Pierce?

  I just, I think if you're worried about the stock price of your company, and I know that they are, you look at what is happening at Microsoft and you say, oh, we need something like that. And what they'll say is they'll make a lot of noise about like, all the stuff you can do inside of apps, and then it will come around too. And also, it wants to be your best friend. Let's hang out.

• 1:17:01Alex Cranz?

  Also, Siri's horny now. Tim Cook will be like, woo!

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine? Just imagine Tim Cook being like, Siri's horny now.

• 1:17:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just flirting with Siri. I'd love it.

• 1:17:15Nilay Patel?

  Kevin Rose's deadly eyes. All right, we gotta, this is, this lightning round has ended up in strange places. But it's been a good one. We'll be right back. We have yet another unsponsored lightning round.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

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• 1:18:01Speaker 02

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• 1:18:30Speaker 06

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• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  How long is this episode now? Four hours? We're going to talk about ourselves more for another hour.

• 1:18:51Alex Cranz?

  Three.

• 1:18:51David Pierce?

  We are currently at 81 minutes.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta bring this to a close. Lightning round style. I'm going to bring up the ULT Power 7 or whatever it's called.

• 1:19:00Alex Cranz?

  Is that your lightning round?

• 1:19:03Alex Cranz?

  It's been more like a lot of lightning this.

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  The Sony logo is slightly holographic.

• 1:19:09Alex Cranz?

  It looks kind of like, oh, you're like, oh, is it lit up? No hologram.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes I remind people that the averger's entire competitive differentiation is that we love gadgets and I'm telling you, this is our entire competitive differentiation.

• 1:19:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we both, we freaked out over it for a minute.

• 1:19:23David Pierce?

  Neela, nobody's going to sponsor the lightning round if you just pick up a speaker and talk about how terrific it is every week. Like, get that money from Sony before you do that, man. Come on.

• 1:19:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how. There's a firewall between editing and sales.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  They keep telling me that there's incoming lightning.

• 1:19:40David Pierce?

  I think all of our sponsors are going to be like a month late being like, remember that time Neela got really weird with our speaker on air? Sony.

• 1:19:49Nilay Patel?

  I wish I knew how.

• 1:19:51Alex Cranz?

  I think Sony will love your lightning round.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  Look, if you're Phil Sony or whoever runs Sony, give us a call. Someone is here to take your call. Mega Bass Ultimate Sound or whatever, Power Vibes, whatever it is. Power Vibes.

• 1:20:07Alex Cranz?

  ULT.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, Crans, I ran you over in the last one, you get the first one.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, um, so it's gonna be a gadget and that Fitbit has a new watch for kids.

• 1:20:18Nilay Patel?

  The Ace.

• 1:20:19Alex Cranz?

  The Ace, the Ace LTE. And is it a way for you to track your children with GPS?

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:20:25Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Do you feel uncomfortable about that? I don't know, I'm not you. If you do, this probably is not an exciting gadget for you. But it seems really cool because it like gamifies fitness in what appears to be a really nice way. Victoria Song went and got to check it out. I've heard from some other people have gotten to check it out and everybody's just like, no, this thing rules and I kind of want one for myself.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:20:45Alex Cranz?

  And like, that's the hallmark of a good ass gadget for kids.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Alex Cranz?

  Like, you can take the band and replace the band and there's like a little Tamagotchi kind of thing in the watch. And so when you replace the band, it'll like change its appearance and stuff. It's sick.

• 1:21:01Nilay Patel?

  All adult fitness trackers are like, let's talk about your VO2 Max. And this one's just like, make the cool little guy go. And like, that's how you get me to do stuff? Come on.

• 1:21:10Alex Cranz?

  Exactly. Like, this thing just kind of rules.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  It's too expensive, though.

• 1:21:15Alex Cranz?

  It is way too expensive. It is $229.95. And...

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  It's also called the Ace LTE, which is like the least cool kid name I've ever heard.

• 1:21:26Alex Cranz?

  It's real bad. And also you need a data plan to get the full richness of it called the Ace Pass.

• 1:21:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  And it is not cheap. It is like $10 a month.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh. That's tough.

• 1:21:41Alex Cranz?

  So.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna stick with just putting an air tag.

• 1:21:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just you can you can alternatively stick an air tag in your child and give them a 20 year old Tamagotchi. And done.

• 1:21:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're not yet. We have not yet hit the let's put an air tag on her.

• 1:21:55Alex Cranz?

  What if you glue the air tag to the Tamagotchi?

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  I see, that's.

• 1:21:58Alex Cranz?

  Or 3D print some sort of case. I bet Sean could do that for you.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, there's there's infinite. This is the the entire Etsy economy is weird AI generated crap and then 3D printed stuff.

• 1:22:08Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:22:09David Pierce?

  And please, you can put your air tag on anything. There is a case for it. If you want to attach your air tag to a thing, you can find a case for it on Etsy.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:22:19David Pierce?

  Uh, I just want to talk about this like slightly weird Discord blog post this week. Uh, the company basically announced it's pivoting back to video games.

• 1:22:30Alex Cranz?

  I didn't know it left.

• 1:22:32David Pierce?

  So this is the thing. So in 2020, when Discord was like really feeling itself and there was noise that Discord was going to be acquired for, I think, like $10 billion, it was it was the the work from home moment. The world was weird. We try not to talk about that period of 2020 very often. Discord like announced that it was going to be more than just a gaming thing, right? It wanted to be a a community app for the future of the world. And Discord actually has like gotten a lot of things about building a community app really right. There are a lot of things about it that are very clever.

• 1:23:05David Pierce?

  I don't think that worked, except that people started planning like crypto and crimes in Discord more.

• 1:23:11Alex Cranz?

  Turns out there's a lot of like shitty communities out there.

• 1:23:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, and not a lot of like Fortune 500 companies running on Discord. So anyway, so the company pivoted back and is now about gaming again, but then made a bunch of small changes that don't really change anything and then said they want to be easier for connecting either before, during, or after playing a game. And I would just point out that's all the time. That's still just everything. So I think I'm just in a strange place where it was like, I forget who it was, but somebody in our Slack was saying like, this is not a message to users. This is a message to investors of like, we get it. It's fine. We're running away from crypto. Please stop doing crimes in Discord. And but I just thought it was very funny. It's like Discord is like, we will remain Discord. Just like, please only only do games here, please?

• 1:23:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Alex Cranz?

  I did learn new things from that blog post. I didn't know you could have Discord on like the PS5.

• 1:24:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Clearly, I don't.

• 1:24:03Nilay Patel?

  It's a web app. Like, ultimately, you can deploy a web app anywhere.

• 1:24:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but like.

• 1:24:08Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes like, what if I deploy this on the PS5? And you're like, why?

• 1:24:12Alex Cranz?

  Because it's got a sick process. Looks cool.

• 1:24:15David Pierce?

  I mean, Discord's a really good chat app. Part of me, which has been had gone more mainstream. And instead of like, the 50 WhatsApp group chats I'm in, I was in a bunch of Discords. Like, I feel like I'd feel cooler. But alas.

• 1:24:28Alex Cranz?

  No, I'm in a couple of a bunch of Discords.

• 1:24:31Nilay Patel?

  You're not enough crimes.

• 1:24:32Alex Cranz?

  You're fine.

• 1:24:33David Pierce?

  I don't do enough crimes.

• 1:24:34Alex Cranz?

  No crimes.

• 1:24:35David Pierce?

  I don't do enough NFTs or crimes.

• 1:24:37Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:24:38Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I'm guessing you're in at least one flex related Discord.

• 1:24:41Alex Cranz?

  I I'm not. But but I did think of the some crimes have definitely happened in some Discords I've seen.

• 1:24:48Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Jason was on Decoder a while ago, basically previewing all this. If you want to listen and talk about it. As I spent a lot of time being like, crimes happen here. And he's like, I need it to stop. Like, more or less. And he said to me, a really interesting stat, he's like, most Discords are like, three people. It's just like, three or four friends hanging out in a Discord. And that's like, the vast majority of Discord activity. And then the big ones are like, for other stuff.

• 1:25:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:25:14Nilay Patel?

  But we talked about why they make games and their app platform and all this stuff. And he's like, we just do that to dog food, like, features for the big games. All right, I'm gonna pick one. I wanted to pick iFixit and Samsung breaking up. And other repair companies are starting to say they can't fix Samsung stuff either. That's boring. What I want to pick is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now hiding likes.

• 1:25:37David Pierce?

  Wait, what? I missed this.

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. So they're not hiding likes. They're hiding who likes something. So you know, people used to go on Twitter and like, like something, you can see all their public likes. They're hiding that. They're hiding replies. They're doing this because bros keep liking porn. Yeah, that's not, that's all the funniest stuff on Twitter.

• 1:25:56Alex Cranz?

  That was the best, like, when Tim, Ted, Tim Cruz, Head Cruz?

• 1:26:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, was like, I love this.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:26:03Alex Cranz?

  There you do.

• 1:26:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it is the funniest sign of a platform in decline that its user base is now so stupid, they don't even have fake accounts to like porn.

• 1:26:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was hearing about, there's, there's apparently some, some male reporters who love to, to like models on Instagram and they don't know that they get the little, the emoji also is shared on threads.

• 1:26:25Alex Cranz?

  So, uh,

• 1:26:26Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:26:26Alex Cranz?

  Be, be thoughtful. If you're gonna be horny, don't be horny on main.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  Look, how do you increase Android phone sales? Buy a burner phone to do horny stuff. All right, are you listening to me, Google?

• 1:26:40Nilay Patel?

  That's what the Pixel is for. Horny stuff. It's pretty good, actually. Buy a burner Pixel.

• 1:26:46Alex Cranz?

  Just for the horny stuff.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  A refurbished Pixel 5 with that beautiful red case. It's, it's available to you. It's just an idea, have to increase your sales. Save your company.

• 1:26:59Nilay Patel?

  Twitter X is saying, um, you soon you'll be able to like without worrying who might see it. We want to encourage people to like more edgy content. And they use the word edgy.

• 1:27:09Alex Cranz?

  Wow. We want you to like your porn more often.

• 1:27:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I'm, if you are the sort of person who describes your own work as edgy, not edgy, like, I don't know, it's like, it's like Sam Altman is the bad boy of it. It's like, he can't be. But he would love it. He would like it so much that he'll never get it.

• 1:27:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Nilay Patel?

  Elon wants Twitter to be edgy so much, he will never have it.

• 1:27:29Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  I just think this is truly one of the funniest changes any social platform has ever made. There's like other reasons, right? Like, I'm, I'm confident Elon wants the weird racists who now populate Twitter to be able to like weird racist posts without seeing it, like,

• 1:27:44Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:27:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's, there's a deep, dark

• 1:27:47Alex Cranz?

  Will you be able to like,

• 1:27:48Nilay Patel?

  There.

• 1:27:49Alex Cranz?

  Go into the likes and look at the likes still?

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  No, other people can't see them.

• 1:27:55Alex Cranz?

  At all.

• 1:27:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. You yourself will be able to see who liked your posts.

• 1:27:59Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  Um, you can see the like counts for posts, like public like counts.

• 1:28:03Alex Cranz?

  Man.

• 1:28:03Nilay Patel?

  But you will not see who liked someone else's post and you will not see others, you will not see what other people.

• 1:28:09Alex Cranz?

  I cannot wait for one of those creators of edgy content to get fed up with their edgy followers and just put them all on.

• 1:28:16Nilay Patel?

  The saddest little black book in the world.

• 1:28:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the saddest little black book. It'll be so good.

• 1:28:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's, I mean, it's truly, deeply, wonderfully hilarious.

• 1:28:25Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:28:25Nilay Patel?

  Platform in decline, just doing the weirdest stuff you can.

• 1:28:28David Pierce?

  I just really like the idea of ultimately doing good, healthy things by removing engagement metrics in the service of making your platform easier to be sketchy on. Like, I think that's great.

• 1:28:41Nilay Patel?

  Twitter is gonna end up, X is gonna end up, I think, as a porn platform. Like, I think they will find a way to subsume OnlyFans because it's the last thing left for them to do.

• 1:28:53David Pierce?

  It's video first now, supposedly.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Linda Iaccarino, she appeared, she had not appeared anyway, anywhere since the Code Conference, from what I understand, um, which went great for her.

• 1:29:04Alex Cranz?

  Can you repeat the question?

• 1:29:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and she appeared and said, X is now a video-first platform for creators. And everyone went, what? You don't make any videos. Elon Musk never makes a video on his video-first platform.

• 1:29:20Alex Cranz?

  But if you want to make horny videos, you can.

• 1:29:22Nilay Patel?

  And secretly like them.

• 1:29:23Alex Cranz?

  Yep. Ted Cruz is just gonna be ecstatic.

• 1:29:26Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm just saying, and we're in a new era of the internet, right? I don't know what's gonna happen to the web, but I know this is the ULT power sound era. And I'm convinced this is the horny burner Android phone era.

• 1:29:39David Pierce?

  For when your urge to like something is irresistible, but you don't want anyone to know.

• 1:29:43Nilay Patel?

  Pixel 6A.

• 1:29:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I just gotta hit that heart.

• 1:29:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, you want them to know, but you don't want anyone else to know.

• 1:29:50Nilay Patel?

  That's actually a great, like, opposite of what happens on iPhone stays on iPhone messaging for Google. When you want them to know, but no one else to know, that Google picks Android.

• 1:30:02Alex Cranz?

  You're just doing Google's job today.

• 1:30:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying, man. I'm trying to help everybody. All right? It's, someone give us some money somehow.

• 1:30:12Nilay Patel?

  Lighting round's available for horny pixel sponsorship. All right, that's it. We're way over time. I appreciate you all. We do want your feedback. I've been very sincere about this. I know people have a lot of feelings. We are here to earn your trust in whatever way that this previous segment earned your trust. Send us a note. You can reach out to us. You can call David at some phone number.

• 1:30:31David Pierce?

  866 VERGE11. Call the hotline.

• 1:30:33Nilay Patel?

  See it? Call us. We'll, we'll answer your questions. Again, we're, we're not trying to hide the ball here at all, but we are trying to go home to our families. So that's it. That's our chest. Rock and roll.

• 1:30:46David Pierce?

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

• 1:31:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex just made a huge discovery on the ULT7, or whatever this thing is called. Tell us what the ports are.

• 1:31:10Alex Cranz?

  Um, okay, we got, we got a light button. We got, we got a battery button with a minus sign for battery care.

• 1:31:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:31:18Alex Cranz?

  Key control. I don't, I don't know music.

• 1:31:20Nilay Patel?

  That's for karaoke.

• 1:31:21Alex Cranz?

  Okay. Echo, guitar. We got a guitar input, right?

• 1:31:26Nilay Patel?

  This thing rules. I don't know.

• 1:31:28Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot going on down there.

• 1:31:30Nilay Patel?

  These are all fully karaoke controls, and then you can play a guitar through it.

• 1:31:33Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 1:31:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what battery minus care does.

• 1:31:37Alex Cranz?

  I really want to know, but probably not today on the Vergecast.

• 1:31:41Nilay Patel?

  Two, three, four, five.

• 1:31:45Nilay Patel?

  Boy, can I, there we go.

• 1:31:47Alex Cranz?

  There we go. It's got some numma numma energy, right?

• 1:31:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, it always starts in the middle, which I really like.

• 1:31:56Nilay Patel?

  I love you.

• 1:31:59Nilay Patel?

  This thing fills me with pure joy.

• 1:32:01Alex Cranz?

  You're so happy.

• 1:32:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, every other tech company is like, we gotta do some AI stuff that the robots are gonna bang you. Like, let's just threaten everyone. And Sony's like, here's what's gonna happen.

• 1:32:13Alex Cranz?

  The bass speakers on the side, really.

• 1:32:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Sony's like, we'll put RGBs in the bass speakers. Also, it's called ULT Power Sound now, and that's our business.

• 1:32:22Alex Cranz?

  It's good shit.

• 1:32:24Speaker 07

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

• 1:32:48Speaker 08

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