Apple's plot to crush OpenAI

It's public beta season, which means David and Nilay have been upgrading some devices this week. We talk through the good and bad of our early experiences with Siri AI, and what it'll take for next-gen Siri to be a hit. After that, we discuss the real reason Apple decided to sue OpenAI over trade secrets, OpenAI's forthcoming smart speaker, the new Pixel colors, our emoji strategies, Brendan Carr, and much more. Further reading: Apple’s public betas for iOS 27 and more are out now Siri AI makes the Apple Watch finally feel like a wrist computer Siri AI is already changing how I use my iPhone The macOS 27 public beta is worth it just for the Liquid Glass tweaks Apple sues OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware secrets Suno snatched millions of songs from YouTube, Genius, and Deezer Sam Altman didn’t need another lawsuit The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI Another turn in the Apple v. OpenAI dispute. OpenAI has a new statement about Apple’s lawsuit. OnePlus officially gives up on the US and Europe OnePlus is dead in the US. Did it ever have a chance? Samsung shows off ‘brand new shape’ for Z Fold 8 in Spider-Man teaser OpenAI may announce a ChatGPT smart speaker this year OpenAI finally launches hardware… for Codex Pixel Watch 5 leak shows off four different finishes The Pixel colors might rule this year The PS6 sure sounds like a handheld Brendan Carr plans to let broadcast giants dominate the airwaves X admits its broken algorithm made the site feel like a ‘battleground’ States make last-ditch effort to stop the Paramount ‘media behemoth’ Paramount lead trial counsel on state AG suit: This merger is pro-competitive The new cracking face emoji might be an all-timer. Google’s Demis Hassabis says it’s time for a global AI watchdog — led by the US Google and Epic give up fighting — third-party Android app stores are coming next week Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:01:00 Intro 00:02:00 Apple Betas and New Siri 00:08:00 Gemini Car Assistant Fails 00:15:00 Apple Sues OpenAI 00:18:00 Trade Secret Law Explained 00:28:00 Settlement or Long Fight 00:35:00 OpenAI Home Device Doubts 00:42:00 Smartphone Platform Lessons 00:50:00 Pixel Colors and Naming 00:52:00 OnePlus Retreat Explained 00:55:00 Carriers and iPhone Lock In 01:05:00 Brendan Carr Bribery Scandal 01:14:00 Emoji Lightning Round 01:18:00 X Algorithm Rediscovery 01:23:00 Foothills Of Singularity 01:29:00 Paramount Merger Spin 01:33:00 Wrap And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:29Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, a flagship podcast of trade secrets. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Appel's here. Hello, sir.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Hey, how's it going?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  How are you? That was tired. You okay?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  I just, I just had this wave of like, I spent the early part of my career at The Verge explaining patents to everyone through Apple. And it, we're like 15 years in. And I know I'm going to spend the next part of this journey explaining trade secrets to people. It's kind of, we're going to do it.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  But that was that way, like the realization had not occurred to me until just this second. And we're going to emotionally process that together as a family over the next 90 minutes.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  You really had like a literal visceral reaction to the phrase trade secrets just then. That was, that was really great.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  We did copyright. We did patents.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  I know. We're still doing copyright. I don't know if we actually did copyright. We tried to do copyright really hard.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  We've reopened copyright in a meaningful way.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're certainly doing it again. Lots to talk about today. We have a bunch of Apple news. We have Apple versus OpenAI, which happened last week. But we haven't really had a chance to talk about it. Lots to get into there. We have a bunch of gadgets. There's some OnePlus stuff. There's teasers just everywhere for everything. But I think we should start with the Apple betas, which came out this week. I am desperate to know you as America's most steadfast avoider of macOS Tahoe. Have you, have you upgraded? Are we on Golden Gate now?

• 2:55Speaker 03

  It takes a lot for me to upgrade my Macs. They're both production machines. I should upgrade the MacBook Neo, which I bought for no reason. I will do that. I just literally don't ever use that computer. I own it for no reason. It's cute. That's what it is. It's a Tamagotchi that I have.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  It is very charming.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Every now and again, I have to charge it, you know? So the Macs are hard for me because I don't, I don't like screwing with the production setups, especially this Mac, the podcast Mac. We just don't touch that one. I did update the phone, which logically makes no sense because the phone is the thing you take everywhere with you in case of emergency.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I was going to say, not an important device, your smartphone.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, I should have upgraded the Neo first. But I updated the phone. I'm on the Siri beta. It's good. I think some of the animations in iOS 27 can get toned down. There's a lot of flipping around the screen for no reason. I know there are settings.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Siri in particular, it is, it's always doing stuff, the new Siri.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Look at me, like all the time. It's just like, not what I need. Apple always tones that stuff down as they get towards release. So take that with a grain of salt. But it works. And I actually think this screen reading is interesting. I don't know if it's good yet. I know every single person with an Android phone is going to tell you that Gemini could do this forever. And it's vastly more useful. And it is. I agree with all of those things. I just, Apple was so far behind. And then with the power of Google, they have managed to catch up in some meaningful way.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Have you been using it?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I have. I've been using it since the first developer beta, which I do not generally recommend. I've had a really interesting experience with Siri AI in particular, which is that it has felt sort of like all of these new LLM-based smart home systems in that the ceiling of what they can do has gone way up, right? Like David Amel wrote a great piece for us about the new Siri AI and did the thing where, I think his example was basically like, I'm, I'm looking at a Spotify page that I know they're going on tour. Go figure out when they're going on tour and add the ticket sales date to my calendar. And that's, that's like a multi-step AI process that I think is ripped basically directly from a Google demo, which is very funny.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  But it works, like that, that thing works. The ceiling of Siri has gone way up.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  It kind of worked for him. He had to say, he had to say magic words in the right order. David's piece is great, by the way. Also, shout out David's joining us for like six weeks or so.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  While Alison is out on leave. But I heard Trevor read that piece because it is true. The ceiling is higher if you issue the right incantation at the right time and the system understands it in the right way. You can in fact, trigger a multi-step agentic workflow.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Neat. And then if you don't, it's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Right. So ceiling's super high, but basic things that Siri used to do very reliably, so far I have found some of them to be actually substantially less reliable. So like a thing I do all the time. If I'm out walking the dog or in the car or whatever, and I need, I have a reminder or just something I want to write down in such a way that I will get back to it. I use Apple reminders for that all the time. It's just like my inbox of stuff on my phone. So I'm constantly saying like, you know, remind me in three hours to switch the laundry. Though I did this morning, remind me this afternoon to check the dryer vent. Like that's just a thing that happened this morning because I need to check the dryer vents. And that is worse. It is, it is noticeably worse than it was in the past. Because, and we've talked about this many times, right? Like it used to be, all of these systems

• 6:34Speaker 02

  were essentially a series of really elaborate if then statements. And they didn't work for anything except the things that they worked for. But the things that they worked for, they worked for. And, and so you, you learn to understand the boundaries of the thing. And if it was all I needed to do is turn on my lights, it would turn on my lights. It wouldn't do anything else, but it would turn on the lights. And I think we're, we're doing a little bit of throwing that stuff out in order to do more complicated stuff with Siri also. And so I've, I've found like, I, it, it still seems to set timers fine. That so far has gone very well. But it does things like constantly ask me, did you say this or did you say this? And they haven't yet solved the, it needs to start immediately listening again to get your answer.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  So you have to, I had to dig my phone out and press the button again to make it work. So it's just like all these little things, all the basic interactions of Siri are worse. But the abilities of Siri are vastly better.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Maybe. I mean, I'm going to hit you with the maybe. And we're in the beta and it's like not fair to over judge it. And sure, um, we'll, we'll see what happens in a few months when it comes out for real. I, that replacement of the predictable deterministic system with the vastly potentially more powerful stochastic parrot system.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  You, yeah, you can see those edges everywhere, all the time. I'll give you an example from a totally different product category. We have a Cadillac Vistix, a Cadillac EV, and it had Google Assistant in it. Like the whole thing runs Google built in. There's no CarPlay, which that, the only thing that happens in the Facebook group for this car is someone being like, where's CarPlay? The only thing people talk about. So they replaced Google Assistant with Gemini. And okay, here's my favorite example of this. I could probably write a PhD thesis about this specific button in the car. It doesn't have a physical garage door open and close button. There's not one in the headliner or wherever. It's a button on the screen.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  So it's in, it's in the car software, right?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  You, you push the button on the screen and it opens and closes the garage door. With Google Assistant, I could just say out loud, as we are backing out of the driveway, hey, Google, close the garage door. And this is gold. Until you've been so lazy that as you are literally backing out of the driveway, you are no longer pressing a button. You're just saying, close the garage. You're like, I'm the king of the world. Like I have a Butler now. Like whatever that feeling is, amazing. And I have asked executives at GM, I've asked executives at Google, my Google just went off.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  The garage is already closed, Google. I knew it would happen.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  That took a full like 10 seconds too. We're doing great over here, guys.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Anyway, so I've asked executives at Google, I've asked executives at GM, I asked Dieter, what's happening when I say, close the garage door? Is that Google Assistant going to the cloud? By the way, I asked Dieter just to annoy him. He's like, we don't talk about work, Eli.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  But is that going to Google Assistant in the cloud? Cause Google Home knows about the garage door opener. It's in that. Or is this thing locally pushing the button on the screen? Because what it should do is just push the button on the screen. Okay, they upgraded to Gemini, which theoretically has like an MCP server inside the car. Right? Like when you, when you would tell Gemini to change the, you know, the climate control, it literally pops up a bubble that's like connecting to climate system like.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  It wants you to believe that it's like operating the car.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Now Gemini is like, I don't have permission to that. It's not secure enough. And I'm like, dude, I'm in the car.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I am the security here. Like, we're good.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Like, here I am, I can see the button. Anybody in this car can push that button. They can just reach forward and push that button. But it's definitely going to the cloud. And it's saying, I cannot accept a cloud command to open. And that's just the brittleness. Like, we've replaced a system that should be able to do all the things you're expected to do with a newly architected system that is simulating what it should be able to do, or what it used to be able to do. But actually needs to find all kinds of new pathways to do it. And Siri, the garage door opener example is really stupid because I just can push the button. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. But that experience and then having the new Siri for a few days is exactly the same experience.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Right? The AIs want to tell you they can do anything at all. And they might have the capability. But in reality, the barriers and roadblocks to actually executing are all over the place.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. And in a funny way, it is not all that different from the very beginning, early experience people had with Siri like a generation ago, where there's a set of things that you're like, oh my God, I can't believe it could do that. That is like sincerely moments of that is incredible. And it, like Siri has done for me some personal context stuff where it knows what's on my phone and it can find things in my email and it can find things in, like, I can be like, oh, what's the, what's the door code for the Airbnb I'm staying at this weekend? And it can, it just goes and finds that and tells it to me. And that is incredible. Like, that's a literal thing I did and it worked and it's awesome. But for every one of those, I say, remind me to check the dryer vents.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And it goes, did you say, call the Laura friends? No, I didn't. I super didn't, Siri. Like, what are we doing? And so I think the risk here, as always with Siri, is going to be that people run into the edges without understanding what those edges are. Right? Which is like, when, when all these things first came out, it was pretty easy to understand what it couldn't and couldn't do very quickly. And I actually think in a certain way, the answer to what is this thing good and bad at is vastly more complicated now. In part because it's good at so many more things.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  It's good at so many more things, but it's not predictably good at anything.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  And that's just a weird one. Like, there are, there are examples of this, just again, across ecosystems, where you're like, search my, I'm late turning in the draft of the decoder book. So I asked Siri, like, go find this contract and see how late I am and how much trouble. And it like, did it, you know, like, uh, the answer is I'm not under arrest yet, but everyone is very worried about the timeline. We're gonna get there. Siri didn't say that, by the way. It was just like, you're late. And it's good at that when it can be good at that. Right? When there's like a string of text it can go look for, or it's indexed all the stuff in the right way. And then there's, I, I think Apple's gonna run into this much more than Google does. A bunch of Google AI technology doing weird stuff is par for the course.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Apple shipping this Siri to millions upon millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, and it being rough around the edges is a dangerous zone. And I think that's probably why they waited so long. Yeah. But I, I'm very curious to see how that broad response is, because enough of it is different. And you mentioned, you know, a generation ago with Alexa, people very quickly figured out what it was good at and what it wasn't good at, and they stopped trying to do anything else.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  And I have no idea where that boundary is for this Siri, once, you know, hundreds of millions of people have it.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's gonna be really interesting. And especially given all of the work that's happening with app intents and stuff like, I think more than usual, uh, the fate of Siri AI is going to actually be about developers. Because if Instagram can figure out how to plug into Siri in a way that is predictable and useful in that way, that changes things.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  They never.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I don't know that I have any faith.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Instagram will never do that.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Probably not.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Instagram doesn't have an iPad app.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's okay, fair point. But if, if, if Uber can figure out how to do it in a way that's practical and useful, such that I can say, you know, hey Siri, get me an Uber and it, it works semi reliably. Like, you can start to turn those things on for people in a way that becomes habit-forming really fast. So I'm, I'm actually, I'm still optimistic about what Siri AI could be, but it is, uh, I have been frustrated in the ways that it has actually backtracked in some small ways.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, David's, again, David Amell's piece is great. The thing that jumped out to me, I actually saw David in the office, we talked about it for a minute. App developers on iOS are more excited about this than you would expect, because small app developers know that people never open their apps.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  So their hope is that if by integrating with Siri AI, it will surface their apps more often, they will get more usage and something good will happen.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  That's a really interesting point. That's a good, that's a good theory. I hope that pans out.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Lot of optimism in the ecosystem there.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Indeed. You know where there's not optimism?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  How's that for a segue? In the Apple and OpenAI legal teams these days, um, we should talk about this lawsuit, right? It's, it's a week old. I still feel like we need to talk about it because I'm, I'm still wrapping my head around it. Basically, the short version of this lawsuit is, uh, Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly basically creating an elaborate system by which Apple employees would quit their job and take material confidential information to OpenAI. There are a couple of specific people named in the suit. There are a couple of OpenAI adjacent companies like I/O, Johnny Ive's hardware startup, named in the suit. But the idea is essentially, there are a bunch of people and a bunch of ways in which

• 15:51Speaker 02

  hundreds of Apple employees stole information from Apple and took it to OpenAI. I feel like the caveat here is, this is the first filing in a lawsuit. There will be presumably much time and much discovery over the next period of time. But you and I have both read this lawsuit. What do you, what do you make of what Apple is alleging here?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  This is where I offer you the big sigh. And we talk about trade secret law. The first thing that is absolutely important to say, every single one of these big tech companies has realized that the complaint in the lawsuit is a thing to be written for the general public.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  The audience for this complaint is not the judge, it's not the jury, it's, it's you and me and everybody listening and everybody who might read it and everybody who might write a blog post or do a dramatic reenactment on TikTok. They have all figured out this first step, that the complaint is a narrative and they all need to sell a narrative. The Department of Justice and the Biden administration figured out their antitrust complaint against Apple needed to be a narrative.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  And we have talked to those officials about that specific thing in that specific way, because everybody understands that the technical requirements of the law are irrelevant to the vibes around lawsuits. It's just the way it goes. So Apple wrote this to be read. It is worth reading, it's a fun read. It's, it's a heist movie.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  They lay out the, they lay out how a heist was taking place, in specific with a bunch of characters, Chang Tan, I think is the main character. Mark German at Bloomberg has some reporting that says, even at Apple, he was known for playing Fast and the Loose and the quote is flying too close to the sun.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Which is, which is pretty good. There's other folks in there, there's a guy like literally connected to the servers when he had left Apple and was downloading all this stuff. And then the problem is the story can be whatever the story is, and it is certain that OpenAI will craft a compelling narrative in return when they file their reply. And it'll look something like, Apple was late to AI. And to be late and catch up, they're trying to stop us, the winners. Like, you know what they're gonna say and they're gonna write it all out. So we have to wait for that. And then in the middle of that is the actual technical requirements of the law. And I'll just make another OpenAI comparison. We had Musk versus Altman and that stretched for what, nine, 10 months from the first complaints being filed to a jury trial? And then what happened?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  The statute of limitations had most of the case thrown out.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Right, true.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Right? Like, the technical requirements of the law is actually what won that case for OpenAI in like big, meaningful ways. There's other parts of it where they won on the substance, but it was a statute of limitations got most of the case thrown out. Okay, like this is, we just have to be, put ourselves in this framework.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  The thing that is just like particularly funny to me about this is Apple established the boundaries of copyright law in tech against Microsoft in the 90s and 2000s with like the famous look and feel lawsuit where they tried to copyright the way Mac OS looked and they sued Microsoft for having Windows copy it. They sort of lost and they sort of won, but they mostly lost, right? Like Windows looks like the Mac.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Sure does, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  That's the way it goes. And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, Microsoft paid a bunch of money to Apple and they tossed out all these claims. They said, we're settling this and moving on because this is dumb. Okay, well, a bunch of years later, Samsung made a phone that looked an awful lot like the iPhones and Apple filed a bunch of patent lawsuits against Samsung, against Motorola, everyone except Google, by the way. They did not want to be in a fight with Google over this stuff. They filed lawsuits against the OEMs and they fought those to the death. And at one point, they were kind of losing and Tim Cook was at a code conference and I literally asked him, like from the audience, there's video of me asking him, why are you

• 19:44Speaker 03

  doing this? And he said, I think the patent licensing schemes for 3G standards are a little out of whack and this is how we're going to fix them. And I'm like, you're really doing this to fix patent licensing schemes? And he was like, sure. And it was just like very obviously that like, no, he was just mad and that was cover to fight the fights.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  And they, they fought them to a bitter end, right? The patent on slide to unlock, we, again, we made an entire video of this. You can watch me being a baby at MWC. I walked around to every booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and did slide to unlock on every single Android phone and said, this is how they're getting around the slide to unlock patent.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  And there was technical requirements there and there are technical requirements now, but the ecosystem responded. Samsung paid, what, a billion dollars and essentially got away with it. And if you're Samsung paying a billion dollars to make the Galaxy line of smartphones is totally worth it.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Totally worth it. So Apple filed this massive intellectual property lawsuit. They upset the ecosystem for however long they upset the ecosystem and the end result was there are Android phones. I don't know if you've looked around, there's quite a lot of them.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that turned out okay.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  So, okay, so in the 90s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft based on copyright. I'll point out Windows and Microsoft continue to exist. In the 2000s, 2010s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Samsung based on patent.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Seems worth noting that Samsung and Android continue to exist.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  And here we are in the mid 2020s, we have a massive intellectual property lawsuit against OpenAI based in trade secret now, the third one. It seems a safe bet that AI will continue to exist. I would be 50/50 on whether OpenAI continues to exist.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  That was going to be my next question is, is I think it's obvious this is not existentially terrifying for the AI business. Boy, does it feel like of all of the companies to not want to be at war with at this moment. I mean, frankly, OpenAI is kind of at war with everybody else in some way already.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  All the time.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, this is, OpenAI is permanently making $100 billion deals and also in giant fights with everybody all the time.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  OpenAI keeps, is at war with its own executives. They keep leaving.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. But this is just, this is the last thing OpenAI needs. And I will say, I think one thing that is different about what you just described is Apple has picked a lot of fights about products. This is fundamentally, like so far, unless OpenAI is very close to shipping a thing that looks an awful lot like the iPhone, this is not about products.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  It's about what manufacturing techniques and what Apple has in the pipeline. Sure, it's about products to come. It's about how to make products.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  But I, but I just mean, even if you, if you paint all of this for Apple in the most sort of negative light and you're like, okay, this company feels threatened and they throw a bunch of their lawyers at their threats to try and make them go away in one way or another. This doesn't feel exactly like that to me. I don't, I don't get the sense that Apple is threatened by OpenAI and there's certainly no earth shatteringly fabulous AI device that is sitting there threatening Apple at this moment. Unless, again, there's something currently being manufactured that is going to blow everybody's minds and we just don't know about it yet.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Well, I think that's the whole game here, right? Apple knows that AI might be an input mechanism that creates a new class of products. Certainly Johnny Ive went to go work with OpenAI to create a new class of products based on this new input mechanism. Johnny Ive loves the new input mechanism. He loves the click wheel.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  He really does.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Right. He loves the multi-touch, the, the scroll wheel on the Apple Watch, as we all know, revolutionized the entire world. Everybody loves spinning in a circle on the Apple TV remote. We, I mean, the culture really rotated around that one. But Johnny Ive like loves this. So if you're Apple, you're like, okay, he's hired all of our designers. He's hired a bunch of our best manufacturing people. It's like 400, 500 people that they've taken over there. They know what's in our pipeline and they know our suppliers. They know how we do things. And now they're trying to steal our stuff. We have evidence that at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff, right? We have evidence that at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff. Okay, what are we going to do about that? And you can't file a copyright lawsuit because we don't know what they've taken. It might not be code and they certainly haven't like redeployed the code.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  It isn't a patent because there are no products yet. So there's no patent infringement. They haven't make, to infringe a patent, you have to make user sell something.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  So we haven't done anything yet. There's no patent infringement. You're left with trade secrets and you know, trade secrets are pretty fuzzy. The definition of a trade secret is like, I'm real fuzzy on this. Someone check me with AI. But the trade secret, as far as I remember, is it has to be something with economic value because your competitors don't have it.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  It can't be known. It can't be like public information. And then the really fuzzy one, and I, I'm going to end up having to do so much trade secret. This is where the big sigh came from. I'm going to do so much trade secret research. You have to take reasonable measures to keep it a secret.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  This is all over the lawsuit, by the way. Like those three things are all over the lawsuit.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Those are the three elements of a trade secret.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, a huge amount of this complaint against OpenAI is Apple explaining all of the things it does to try to protect it.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Because it's written for the general public, right? So it has to explain the technical foundation of the law. So it can say, and OpenAI went, went around this stuff.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  And again, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit with Microsoft. It pushed patent law to the limit with Samsung. We're about to be in the middle of Apple pushing trade secret law to the limit. If you worked at Apple and you know how they make the iPhone screen and then you get another job, you can probably help people make an iPhone screen. And if you, particularly if you work not for Apple, but you work for Foxconn in China, there might be some supplier agreement, but I don't know if you've looked around, it turns out Foxconn makes things that look like the iPhone screen for lots of other people now. Because that is the entire Chinese manufacturing ecosystem and supply chain. And there's books about it, right? With Apple and China, is that what Patrick McGee?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  There's literally books about it.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  You can go read it. You're like, this is just going to happen to Apple, whether they sue OpenAI or not. So again, the lawsuit is great to read. I just look at Apple being like, they're going to bring everything to bear to push the cutting edge of trade secret law in their direction. And other big companies that made a lot of money were able to essentially fight them to a draw.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  OpenAI is not a big company. It issues a new memo about needing to focus in calling a code red every six weeks on the dot when another executive leaves.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And its revenue model is totally uncertain. And up until now, the revenue model has been, we're going to compete with Google in search in the consumer market and we're going to put out a bunch of new devices to compete with Apple by hiring Johnny Ive, the guy who made Apple devices what they are, to compete with Apple in the consumer space. And Apple's like, what if we killed you?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  So you, you really think it's that simple? This is, this is Apple essentially trying to kill OpenAI in the cradle?

• 26:52Speaker 03

  I think, well, I think Apple hates anything being stolen. I think they, they're, the things aren't being stolen by Foxconn or an ecosystem of Chinese companies. They're being stolen by an American company that poached its most well-known design executive, who then poached a bunch of other stuff.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  And it is like deep in the DNA of that company to have an emotional response to that. Like over and over, if you take some information out of Apple Park, that is maybe the thing that is most likely to quickly bring the full bear of that company down upon you.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they are absolutely nuts about security. I left my jacket at Apple Park at WWC in one part of the thing and I wanted to just walk from where I was back to the seat I was in. And they're like, we're going to have to send four people with you. And I was like, it's a path. Like I can just see the path.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  And I just left the jacket there. I was like, this is too much production for me to, to find a $15

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Probably the right call.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  denim jacket I bought 10 years ago. And I was like, I just don't want to do this. But that, that's where Apple is. They, I, just to put it in that framework, the merits of the case are not in this complaint. The merits of the case won't be in OpenAI's reply. It'll be in this long process we're about to go through.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  There's also a lot of reaction so far that has said this in, in trade secrets terms is a relatively benign set of trade secrets accusations.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  But is Apple going to turn the heat up all the way and get themselves in front of a jury and be like, we're Apple, the company you love. Here's OpenAI, a company in the AI industry, which all of you hate and which is foundationally built on unauthorized taking of information. And Apple's the company where artists love to show off how they use Macs to make the songs you've always loved the most. Hey, did you know this music video was shot entirely on iPhone?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Look, you know what's going to happen here.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Apple is going to bring the full weight of its cultural capital to bear on OpenAI as a proxy for how much stuff the AI industry has taken from people without compensation or permission. And whether or not it's a benign set of trade secrets, or whether it's the full catalog of YouTube music on behalf of Suno, it, OpenAI is going to stand for all of it in this lawsuit.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Interesting. So would you handicap this as likely to go to ground in a real way? Like, is this, is this the kind of thing somebody writes a check and it all goes away? Or is Apple gunning for, we want to do this in public?

• 29:08Speaker 03

  If OpenAI had a lick of sense, it would write a check and make this go away.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  I, I agree with that.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  But does Apple want a check? Does Apple need a check? Does Apple trust OpenAI to keep the promises it's making as it hands over said check? No. So, and I, and I think OpenAI does not want to write that. They want to prove that they did nothing wrong because probably they also have the same view of this, which is this is just the normal course of business.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Right? We hired a bunch of people and said, what are you working on? What do you know? Do, do, do you know how to make an AI gadget? Cause we don't, right? Uh, and they're gonna, they're gonna want to fight this to the end.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  I mean, to be fair, do you know how to make an AI gadget? Bring us parts from the office to your job interview? Not a normal course of doing business, if that is in fact what happened.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Look, I've, I've been running a small AI hardware startup on the side and I'm not saying I didn't try it.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  I, listen, it's, it's, it's good getting if you can get away with it. You know what I mean?

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Rather unfortunately, I've only talked to people who used to work at Humane. So a bit of a problem. Um, but yeah, I think they're gonna, they're gonna take this one to ground. We're, this is years and it's years and then years of appeal. And whether OpenAI is stable enough or has the finances enough to just absorb it? The way that Samsung could just absorb it and then pay a billion dollars and be like, that was totally worth it. Wide open question.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. This one, I, I suspect we will hear a lot more. We have not, as you said, meaningfully heard a response from OpenAI. Uh, we got a comment from OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pousatieri last week, uh, who said, quote, "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere," which is just the least you can possibly say in a statement to The Verge about this particular issue.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Especially when the, you know, the, the claims and the complaint are like, dude downloaded all the presentations about how to make circuit boards.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  And it's like, well, maybe you did have an interest in other people's.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  You might have some interest. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we're going to come back to this a lot, but for now, let's move on. Cause it's, we, we should talk about gadgets. There's actually an OpenAI gadget worth talking about, so let's get to that. But first let's take a break.

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• 32:53Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. We have just a slew of gadget leaks to talk about, but let's start with this OpenAI gadget. Right? So this, this idea of OpenAI's big hardware play has been looming for a while. They released a device this week for Codex that everybody's like, this is the first OpenAI. It's not. This is like a teeny tiny brand integration with a company called WorkLoud that makes keyboards. I don't want to talk about that. But there was reporting from Bloomberg that the thing coming out first is going to be a no screen, but sensor and camera having smart speaker. That this is going to be OpenAI's big first device, a, a chat GPT thing for presumably your home, but it'll also have a rechargeable battery, smart home controls.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  This thing seems so incredibly unfocused to me. It's like Alexa, but you can pick it up and carry it around and it has a camera on it, but no screen.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  I just want everyone to stop and imagine a team at OpenAI building a full-featured smart home platform.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Listen, Matter has solved all of this for us. It's no problem.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  I just, what, just, just like, what are you doing, man? Google hasn't built a full-featured home platform.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  They've been trying for years. I don't know if anyone has ever looked at the Google Home app.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Sure. I don't even, that thing doesn't even look vibe-coded. A computer would have more coherent and crisp ideas about how to organize that app than whatever it is that Google ships in Google.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  It's really true.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  I, just, I, fine. I, I think based on the constraints of the market, this is the only piece of hardware OpenAI can ship.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Why do you say that?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  We just run down the Meta Glasses problem that we run down every week.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  If you want to have an AI device that is consistently doing things for you that isn't a phone, and I think for a lot of reasons, OpenAI cannot make a phone.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  I think it's going to.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  It's gonna have to.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  I just want to be on record. I think it will make a thing that is, they may not call it a phone, but it will very obviously be a phone.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  A lot of people are about to make phones for that Instagram.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  That's, I'm, I'm, I'll, I'll put, yeah, that's where my stick is. A lot of people are going to back their way into making phones on Instagram and then realize that they've shipped Windows Phone. And then we're all going to see how long it takes for them to realize they shipped Windows Phone.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Um, but if you don't want to ship a phone, you're like, another form factor. You're competing with the fact that people have a phone. You have to be smaller than a phone, which means you need less battery, but you still need connectivity, which means you still need a data plan, which means you still need to run that battery down. You still need to decide what happens locally, or if your device is useless without a connection of any kind, which means you need to put processing and RAM and whatever. Your costs have already begun to skyrocket and now you're OnePlus and you've gone out of business in the United States. It's just, anything that moves is hard for that reason. Especially if you want to put cameras and sensors and all that other stuff on.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Total.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  So of course we're going to take it home, plug it into the wall, absolutely reduce the challenges of mobility. Let whatever processor run as hot as it might need to run so it can do whatever it needs to do locally and have a fixed connection over your wifi to OpenAI servers, which at least now is solved.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Right? The connectivity issue is solved. If your wifi goes down, everyone knows nothing works. Right? But I'm on a plane, my device is useless, unacceptable.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  All right. Now we've made an Alexa. Right? We've made an Alexa device or a HomePod or whatever. And then you've got to build the ecosystem around it that does all the other stuff around it, including the smart home ecosystem, because of course you want to turn off the lights and play music, which are the number one and number two things people do on these devices.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Oh, set a timer and unclear if ChatGPT can reliably count to 100, let alone set a timer that operates consistently. So here we go. Yeah. Like this is the only solution. And whether or not the ChatGPT platform is being built to work in this environment and these constraints and solve these problems, or whether they are totally focused on writing code and revamping the entire Mac app to be focused on writing code and whatever healthcare initiative they're doing. This is a lot of spaghetti to throw at the wall.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  And there's no chance that any OpenAI engineer has been tasked with, build a full-featured smart home platform that can compete with Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa and Home Assistant, which will be every nerd's fallback for this and is happy about it. Right? And if you're an OpenAI engineer and you're like, I work at the hottest startup on earth. And they're like, make the lights turn on off, uh, go deal with the Matter implementation. Like, I quit. Like, I'm going to go work in Anthropic like everybody else.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I think this existing next to what they've been doing to the ChatGPT app is super fascinating to me because the, the new ChatGPT app, the, the so-called super app is trash. Everybody hates it. It's poorly designed. It doesn't run well. It took a native app and made it a non-native app. Like, it sucks. It is universally disliked as an attempt to put all of these things together. Yet again, OpenAI demonstrating it has lots of ability to make very good frontier models and absolutely no product sense. Like this company just cannot figure out how to put this technology in front of people in a way that they like. The only thing it has done is copy Claude a couple of times. Claude code worked and they said, oh, we'll do Codex and that worked.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Like there, there's just not a lot of evidence that this company knows how to figure out these new kinds of things that you're talking about. But the thing that is so interesting about that app is it kind of deprecates chat. It is, it is very Codex-centric, the new ChatGPT app.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  And the idea that they're, they're leaning into, okay, we think our technology is for tools. Right? This is not a thing to hang out with. We're, we're getting past the, it's novel to talk to a chatbot phase and that just burns money anyway. Let's give enterprises enterprise tools. That is clearly the business for this company. That's the business for all of these companies, at least for now and possibly forever. So then to put that next to this, the only thing I can think of is like, we talk a lot about New York versus California. Right? I think if you are in or near the OpenAI offices, it might be very possible to convince yourself that a lot of people do just want to sit and talk to their agents all day.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  That like, this is a, this is a thing that is running rampant around startups all over Silicon Valley. The idea of that being something mainstream enough to be a really sort of meaningful hardware play seems dead wrong to me.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, it, it's the same as Siri. It's brittle.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  So if, if your whole idea is like a beautiful piece of hardware and it will have great far-field microphones and whatever we're going to do with the battery, make it portable around your house. And then the core technology in the backend is ChatGPT is there.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Well, everyone already knows how that thing is gonna work. Like, I don't, I don't have to describe it to you. It's gonna be broken in very specific ways. And then when you're like, why'd you do that? It's like, oh, my God, you're so right. You know, like.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  That's a great point. Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Right, like, you can just put your phone on the table and have this experience today.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yes. That we have, we have these things. Everybody who is like, oh, it's an Alexa. We have Alexas. People have this experience. We have a decade of this experience. And people play music and they set timers. And I think what, what even Google and Amazon have run into over the last 12 months is the idea that we're gonna plug an LLM into it and suddenly unlock vast new kinds of consumer behavior is not happening. It's just not happening. It's, it's actually slightly worse at turning on the lights. It can answer more complicated questions. That's great. So as a, as a sort of simple information retrieval tool, great, fine. Chat GPT is not gonna win that particular game. It's also less sophisticated in its hardware than Google

• 40:53Speaker 02

  because Google's been at this a longer time. So like, what race is there to win? Unless you assume there is this giant group of people out there who desperately want an easier way to talk to ChatGPT all day. And I just don't think that exists.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Well, they do, but they think it's their girlfriend. Kevin Roos, come on down. So I'm sorry, buddy. We are, we are friends. I'm just, you know, he knows I tell this joke. I mean, may, maybe everyone's gonna think we're being overly cynical. I'm confident we'll get those notes from people who think we're being overly cynical. That cynicism is probably born of the fact that we started The Verge at the dawn of the smartphone revolution. And the questions about this new class of devices are exactly the same questions about new smartphone platforms and new operating systems, but maybe with slightly different applications. So when the Juju tablet came out.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Remember the Juju tablet?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  The Crunch pad?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  No one remembers this stuff. It ran a thing called Fusion OS. And it was gonna be a, gonna be a revolution. And, boy, did that cause a lot of problems for us as gadget reviewers, including one threatened lawsuit. And we would say, are you gonna build an email client? Is your email client gonna be as good as Gmail? Right? Because I'm not gonna switch away from Gmail as my email provider.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  And Google made native apps for the other phones. Is your email client gonna be as good as Google's native client? Because they're not gonna ship a client for your dumb idea. And then these products would die. And you would run into, are you gonna build an email client? It suddenly becomes this like defining question for a new generation of smartphones. Okay, are you gonna, are you gonna have Instagram? Hate it or love it, not having Instagram killed Windows phone. People would get those phones and they would say, there's this app I want. And it wouldn't be there.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  And Microsoft spent a lot of money on app developers. They tried to bribe what at the time was known as Facebook into making an Instagram client. And they just didn't do it. They had no interest in this. And then nobody wanted a Windows phone. Palm Pre, like down the line, right? Like, all these things killed new smartphone platforms over and over and over again because they could not meet the table stakes. I'm telling you, for this class of devices, can you turn the lights on in the kitchen?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Is gonna be table stakes. Can you, do you have a Spotify app? Do you have a Spotify integration that reliably works?

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  And if I don't have Spotify, do you have Apple Music? And if I don't have Apple Music, do you have YouTube Music? And if I am an insane person, do you have Tidal? Are you playing Tidal losslessly? I have a Sono system. Can you play Tidal over my Sono system? Because you're an all-powerful AGI robot and all these devices are on my network and you have my credentials. And I expect you to just do it. And the answer in every case is gonna be, no one at OpenAI wants to work on these problems.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't think that's fair.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  I don't think anybody wants to work on these problems. I think they wanna work on.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  True, but.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  AGI. I think they wanna work on healthcare, like.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Sure. But it is also true that like, that some of those things already exist. MCP solves some of those problems. Some of ChatGPT's own, you know, integrations solve that problem. Like, will, will your ChatGPT smart speaker be able to connect to Spotify? I'm so confident the answer to that will be yes. Will it do a good job of?

• 44:15Speaker 03

  I'm not confident Google Home can connect to Spotify.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Well, so this is what I was gonna say is, if you connect to Spotify, is Spotify gonna want that to be ChatGPT talking to the Spotify database? Or is it gonna be ChatGPT talking to the Spotify chatbot that talks to the Spotify? Like, is this product going to work well?

• 44:32Speaker 03

  And is any of that gonna generate enough revenue to be worthwhile to OpenAI, a company that is lighting money on fire every single day and has no plans to stop?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, this, this is my thing is I think on an ongoing basis, ChatGPT technology continues to get better. Like, GPT Live, the new voice model, which will presumably be behind this, is quite good. It, it is, it, it takes turns more naturally. It's more natural to talk to. It doesn't sort of interrupt you and let you interrupt it in weird ways. Like, it, it feels better to talk to. I think the idea that that is enough just falls on its face as soon as you put this device in my house. For all the reasons that you're talking about. Because it needs to do things. These things, it's like, like, I, I feel like all I talk about with AI is how many things like give great demo and are bad products. And, and this is the kind of thing that, yes, there are people

• 45:25Speaker 02

  who just enjoy talking to ChatGPT as an end unto itself. I am, I am on record as thinking that is bad for everyone and the world and society. But I understand that those people exist. And those people will probably get great utility out of having a thing they can just sort of yammer away to as they walk around the living room. Fine. That is tiny next to the number of people who need this thing to do something. And they will need it to, in fact, to do lots of things. And they will expect it to do lots of things. And I just, I, I'm with you in the sense that I have a hard time seeing how that happens.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  And, and consumers have no economic incentive to overcome failure.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Regular people in their homes, they ask Alexa to do something. They can't do it, then they will never ask it again. They will, they will give up. And they did. Like, we have the data. We, we have the experience. They just gave up on Alexa in meaningful ways outside of timers and music. Okay.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  In the enterprise context, you keep saying AI is business software. In the enterprise context, there's tons of incentive to overcome failure. We were watching a TikTok clip today. Like, ad agencies are like, we're gonna automate all of our meta ad spend with Claude MCP servers. And like, maybe that didn't work for a while. It certainly works now. And that is true. Like, the internet is automated in massive ways with AI. Businesses are getting automated because the incentive to overcome the failure and the rocky starts and they keep plugging at it. Everyone can see the efficiency gain. Everyone can see the business results. There's a lot of incentive to overcome the failure. A regular person is like, I spent how much money on this weird OpenAI HomePod?

• 47:05Speaker 03

  And it doesn't work? I'm just never gonna use it again.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Right? And like, I, they've got a, this is the Johnny I problem. It's gotta do exactly what it says on the tin in a little bit more in a way that's delightful. And AI is maybe not, never gonna be predictable enough to actually pull that off.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And the, the physical limitations of something like a smart speaker makes that hard. Like, genuine kudos to everyone involved if they can figure out how to add that hardware turn that makes it delightful in the way that you're talking about.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Oh, it's supposed to have some mechanical thing that like smiles at you. This is the other part of the German report.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  That ain't it, buddy. I gotta tell you, that ain't it.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Some mechanical, it's unclear what it is, but there's some part of it that moves in response to you to like make it have emotions.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  No, thank you. ChatGPT doesn't have emotions. Never, ever, ever, ever.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Hold, a lot of people disagree with you on that one, my friend.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  They're wrong. Let's move on.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Claude loves me. What are you talking about? All right, no one else does, but Claude does. It thinks all of my ideas are great. And I've been, you know, you're right to call that out.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  I've been looking at this the wrong way. Let's start from, let's start from the basics. Honestly, here's what I recommend. All right, let's move on. That's enough AI gadgets for one day.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Wait, can I say one more thing? I had Claude write an email to the, my solar panel installer. So I think that went wrong. And I read it and I was like, they will come to my house and tear the solar panels down before they address what happens in this email.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Yep, that sounds great. Yeah, that's sometime we should talk about the AI tools that write email drafts and the deeply terrifying things they have taught me about myself. But that's for another day. Two more gadget things we should talk about. One, very quick, have you looked at the Pixel colors? The pixels, as they always do, have leaked to absolute death.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  There's a bunch of new Pixel phone colors in particular. You, I feel like, have never really been a phone color guy.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  No, I've got an orange iPhone. It's just in a gray case.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, you're like, I feel like in general, you're like-

• 49:11Speaker 03

  This was the only one worth buying this year.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. I mean, I bought the green one, which is also terrific. But the orange, the oranges on the Pro was fabulous. But I just want you to look at these Pixel colors and tell me if they do anything for you.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Oh, I like this pink a lot.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, Google's really going for it this year. There's a, there's a pink, there are a couple of shades of green-

• 49:30Speaker 03

  It's hibiscus.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  It's green, it's pink. There's a green, there's a black, there's a, there's a light blue that's, or like a greenish blue that's called fog that I quite like.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  I can't, you should say all these names.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  There's olive, there's fog, frost, canyon, which is also known as dune.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Pistachio.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I wrote a story recently about the Google Home speaker. And I got a request from a comms person at Google who, in this particular case, I won't name, who asked me to change the reference where I called it red to its official name, which is berry. And I said, no, thank you, I will not do that, because it's red. It's not, berry is not a color, red is a color.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Berries do come in a variety of colors.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure do. But stupid names aside, these colors look great.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  They do look great.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Like, I'm into this. I think a pink phone genuinely might really happen. I'm psyched about that.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  This is finally the thing that will make you switch to a Pixel 11.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  This gives, was it the Nexus 5 that came in that rad, red color?

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like orangy red. We had so many arguments in the office about whether it was orange or red. And if I remember correctly, Josh Popowski was very much, it's red, and I was very much, it's orange.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  I think I would, if memory serves, I would be on team red on that one.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  But either way, that phone was hot, and this one kind of looks like it has the same thing going for it.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  It's got some vibe, I like it.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  But the other actual news we should talk about on this front is the OnePlus news from this week. OnePlus essentially announced that it is, it is done attempting to sell phones in the US and Europe. And actually, there's been some reporting that this is just the beginning, that OnePlus is in the process of pulling out of everywhere except for China. We've been covering this company for the entirety of its existence, and there was a time at which OnePlus seemed like it had a shot to be a really powerful upstart brand in the phone market. And it just never quite happened. What do you, what do you make of this complete sort of retreat from OnePlus right now?

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Well, Juan, I think you have been calling out the end of cheap devices because of Armageddon for months now.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  True, yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  And it is hard to see how this is anything but one culmination of Armageddon. Right, OnePlus could not compete at the high end, it was not making flagship devices, it was, it was part of like a larger company that makes a bunch of phones.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  It's part of Oppo, and it's like, has always sort of pretended that it's not part of Oppo.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  But is very much part of Oppo, yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Right, but it, that whole company was like, one tick under the flagships.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Right, and I'm confident we're gonna have a bunch of Android fans telling me that it actually made flag, but it, you know-

• 52:12Speaker 02

  They called themselves flagship killers. Like, that was the idea, that they, they could do just as well for less money. And I think when it's just as well for the same amount of money, it probably doesn't work anymore.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  And you don't have the brand, and you're not spending, you know, billions of dollars on computational photography at the bleeding edge, like, right, you've got problems structurally, and the market never really broke itself down in a way that would support a cheaper player.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  True.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Like, the smartphone market was either you're spending very little money or a lot of money, or you're buying a one-year-old phone for a medium amount of money, but the sort of like mid-range Android phone has always just been hard.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Yes, kind of forever. That is, no one has ever really successfully pulled that off.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, there are a lot of mid-range Android phones, and every now and again, we review whatever Samsung, Alpha, or Ace, or whatever they're called, and like, like, here's the state of the middle, but the reality is, most people want to buy the highest-end one, or they want to buy the cheapest one.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  And you can just see that play out over and over again. So I think this company just was always fighting a fight it couldn't win, because it was never going to attract an iPhone switcher, at least in the United States. Like, that is just the hardest thing in the world to do. Samsung and Google cannot do it.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  And if you're in the middle, the Pixel exists, and Google will happily sell you one. All of the Samsung mid-range phones exist, and every carrier will be like, do you want this for free? Here you go. And then you're at least in whatever ecosystem there, or you want to spend the most amount of money. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna differentiate?

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Right. Do you think carriers are largely to blame here? Because I think a thing we talk about a lot, and an email we get a lot when we talk about the phone market, is that the US way of buying phones is kind of unlike anywhere else in the world. And I think if you rewind back to the beginning of the OnePlus story, a big part of what it was doing was betting that it could upset that, right? That rather than having most of your phone experience to be walk into a store, update your contract, trade in your old phone and get a new phone, which is how most people get their phones, and it changes the way that phones are subsidized, it changes the way that we pay for them, it changes the, what it feels like to pay for a phone, because you're not putting down your credit card for $1,200 at a time. But that there was this idea 10 years ago, that that was gonna go away, and actually,

• 54:26Speaker 02

  more and more people were gonna start to buy their phones on Amazon, and that you could build a direct-to-consumer phone brand in the United States. And that 100% has not happened, in any meaningful way at all. And do you think the carriers have just found ways over and over to kill anyone who was trying to do that thing?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  I think the carriers have found that, and then Apple has found that.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Apple doesn't want you switching. Apple will happily just send you a notification that's like, it's time to upgrade to the iPhone 18. Right, like, here we go, your eSIM will transfer seamlessly. And if you want to transfer it to an Android phone, you've got to light a candle and do incantations.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  We will systematically ruin your life, David Pierce.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Have you ever tried to do it? Have you ever tried to turn off iMessage? It requires human sacrifice.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  So it's some big combination of that. I, you know, carriers are rational, I'm saying rational, and no one will believe me, but carriers have rational economic incentives to make things as easy and cheap as possible. And taking you from an iPhone to the next iPhone requires almost no customer service on their part.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Taking you from an iPhone to a OnePlus phone is a bunch of angry phone calls, and maybe a return, and then maybe a switch to an iPhone, and that's all just costs that layers up. They don't care. Like, they're like, have you ever wanted to experience even slower 5G? Experience the power of AT&T. Like, that's all they care about. So I, I think, yes, like, the carriers have a chokehold on the market, Apple has a chokehold on the market, there's no incentive to change, and making a phone that, on the edges, has slightly different options and widgets in Oxygen OS compared to Samsung Galaxy OS compared to iOS, like, no consumer cares about that stuff.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Or at least not, not at the rates they need to, if you're not so much cheaper.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Right. So I'm thinking about this in context of what we were just talking about with OpenAI being one of the companies that is probably going to make something that, you know, looks and feels and smells like a phone. This kind of suggests that if you're not, frankly, Apple, or Samsung, or one of the three or four biggest companies in the world with enough money to brute force your way into this, that the phone market in the US is essentially, is essentially sewn up. There's just no room for anybody else.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Well, so it depends on what company you're talking about. If SpaceX buys T-Mobile and Starlink makes a phone.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Right, and that phone has Instagram. Because quite honestly, Elon Musk is a creeper, and I think he's gonna want Instagram on that phone.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Buying a carrier, yes, is a shortcut to getting your phone into a carrier store.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Sure, but like-

• 57:07Speaker 02

  OnePlus probably could have bought T-Mobile, and that might have worked. I don't know.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  But like, it's that, it's, I don't think, if, this is just a prediction, there's not gonna be a device that has an AI-based input mechanism so powerful and compelling that it overcomes a phone.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Right. And the, the whole giant ecosystem of apps and accessories and carriers and everything that comes with phone now, that whole system is so mature now.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Yes, we're agreeing. Like, I'm saying phone to wrap all of that.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  Right, like, you, you want to plug the weird Bluetooth dongle into the seat back of the thing, because you have AirPods, because they work best with your iPhone? Boy, is that a whole ecosystem that OpenAI's gadget has to overcome.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Right, like, is OpenAI's gadget gonna work as well with your AirPods? Is everything else? Well, then you've got to get new headphones, and maybe they won't work as well with your Delta seat-back Bluetooth dongle. Like, you've got to break everything. And phones were able to break everything. Right, famously, BlackBerry realized that the iPhone was competing with laptops, not BlackBerry, and they, they were dead. Right, like, they, they knew what the problem was. And OpenAI still has to compete with the iPhone, OnePlus still has to compete with the iPhone. And I don't mean just the iPhone, I mean, the very concept of the mature flagship smartphone with a whole ass ecosystem all the way around it. Samsung has one of those, Google, to some extent, has one of those, or obviously, big players in China that have fully mature ecosystems that include cars in China.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Right, like, you want to ship an AI gadget, you're like, well, my car also runs the same operating system as my phone in China.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, how are people going to navigate to where they're going on my AI gadget?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I, I think this is just one, one part of this is Armageddon, you can't be so much cheaper that it's sustainable. And the other part of it is, boy, what are, what are we taking sales away from?

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. We should take a break here, but I think the thing you just said, that you have to break everything, is such a clarifying reason that the entire AI industry is acting the way that it is. Because that, that is the stakes, and that is the wall you have to climb to do the thing that they are all promising they will do in order to change everything about how we do everything.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  But it's not the wall you have to climb in enterprise, in business software.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Right, that's a much smaller wall.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  That's why they're all running towards it.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. All right, let's take one more break, and then when we're getting back, we'll do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 59:34Speaker 04

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• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. We somehow can't stop doing this stupid thing. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Is it gonna happen?

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  A lot there.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  So the backstory to this, if you didn't listen to last week's episode is Ryan Muller sent in a Brendan Carr is a dummy theme. Neil, I was very rude to him because it sounded like this was the build to a drop and there was no drop. Ryan resubmitted a drop and Travis, our producer.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  That was the drop.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Travis agreed that we need to play the whole thing.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  I mean, that was quite a drop.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Ryan's back. I think Ryan has righted the ship here. We're okay now.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Some real elements of Prince's bat dance in there. I want to just call that out.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Quite a drop.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  There was, yeah, there was something. I'm feeling things right now. What did Brendan do this week, Neil?

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  I'm still coming down. Honestly.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  This is all so much more than Brendan deserves. But it's okay. We do it. We do it for for ourselves and for each other.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  I'm gonna be so paranoid tomorrow. Okay. So you understand what I'm talking about? Uh, okay. He did a lot of dumb stuff this week. Let's start with the basics.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  You know, is it dumb to take bribes as a public official, David?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Generally, yes. This is a trick question? Okay.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right. Brendan took what amounts to $125,000 bribe. There's no other way to say it. So Paramount and CBS were merging as part of that whole family dynamic. This needed to pass FCC review because CBS owns a bunch of broadcast stations. And during all this, both Brendan and another FCC commissioner, Olivia Trustee, who's also a Republican, accepted tickets to various galas at the Kennedy Center. Olivia Trustee's tickets gifted to her by Paramount were worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica. Brendan's private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives, $125,000 ticket. So that's a quarter million, quarter million dollars.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  This is all happening as they're, in theory, debating whether to let this merger happen.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  So in normal times, just the fact that Brendan is there in the skybox would be a huge scandal.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Just for $0, just his existence in the room with this man at this time. Huge scandal. And and yet, here we are.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  If you'll remember, there was like a scandal when like Clinton got a haircut on like the tarmac of Air Force One. Like it doesn't, you know, like there's like, yeah, there was a time when the appearance of a conflict of interest would be a scandal, even if no such conflict existed.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  And by the way, that's the standard for most public officials and lawyers. When you take the bar exam and you have to do the the professional ethics exam, the the thing that you learn is anything that creates the appearance of a conflict of interest is against the rules because the appearance is what undermines trust in the system. That is gone broadly over the past decade. And now the standard from the Trump administration and Trump family is we're telling you we're doing bribes, so that's okay. It's all out in the open. I mean, you literally hear them say this all the time.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's all out in the open, so it's fine. And so here Brendan is taking a quarter million dollars in tickets from companies whose activities he directly oversees, whose mergers he can approve. And it's fine because he's doing it all in the open. And basically every ethics expert that talked to ProPublica was like, he should recuse himself from all these decisions because there's no way he can maintain the appearance of impartiality.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Of course not.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  There's a lawyer they quoted, an ethics lawyer from the White House Treasury Department and the SEC during the presidencies of H W Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And she goes, this is shocking. Pretty disturbing. That's what I would say. I don't understand what they were thinking.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  This is somebody who would know, I would say. Is about as qualified as you could possibly be on this particular subject.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the obviously Paramount, Warner Brothers murder is still under review. There's a antitrust review that will come to that. There that's, there's more of that to come.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  But here Brendan just took bribes because he's a dummy and he doesn't understand that taking bribes creates the appearance, if not the actual conflict of interest from which he is supposed to accuse himself for.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't think that gives Brendan enough credit. I think he might know those things. He just doesn't care one teeny tiny bit.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Again, the standard has moved from the appearance of a conflict to what if we did bribes out in the open? What if you brought Brendan coin? It's that's where we are. Okay. The other thing, which is worth talking about because we have brought up a bunch, is the FCC is fast coming up on a vote, which may or may not be illegal unto itself, about whether individual companies can own more than 39% of broadcast licenses in an area, which is a rule enshrined by Congress. Brendan thinks he can just overcome with a vote.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  He wrote an op ed in Breitbart of all places. And I just want to call it out because.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  When Breitbart is the number one publication that will accept your op ed, things have gone awry.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board hates him, so they wouldn't take it. And you're and then you're just kind of running the New York Post. That doesn't seem right. And you end up in Breitbart.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  And his argument here is the cap basically prevents anyone from owning so many TV stations that you can broadcast programming to more than 39% of households. This worked when this was all about local broadcasters employing local journalists, but I will restore trust to the news by letting single companies own all kinds of broadcast stations, more than 39% because then they'll be able to compete with streaming.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  I'm gonna make Sinclair so powerful it can take on YouTube is.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  I Brendan Carr am going to make Sinclair so powerful that that competition will reign.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  See what I mean? This is the argument. I'm just gonna read it. Today, the broadcast cap is not protecting local broadcasters, is preventing them from gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy. It's doing the opposite of what the FCC intended. I don't know if you have looked around. No one can compete with YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. In fact, on this show, we've talked about Netflix beginning to panic and turn itself into YouTube because these things have massive scale and the cost structures of those platforms are utterly dependent on an army of teenagers working for free, something that all of us are forced to ignore every time we talk about these businesses.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Because if you pointed out, everyone gets really squirrely about the fact that they're probably doomed in the long run because they have to pay to make things. You can make the broadcasters as big as you want. You can have one guy own every broadcast station in the country.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  And we're rapidly heading that direction. It appears.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  They still have to pay the news anchors.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  And probably what they're gonna do is stop paying them and have AI read you the local news. And that still won't restore trust in the news and that still won't let them compete with YouTube, which again enjoys the greatest business model in world history, which is having an army of teenagers make everything for free.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  I find myself in this segment from time to time, trying to sort of piece a bunch of Brendan Carr logic together. And it makes my head spin because you can't possibly hold all of these ideas in your head at the same time. And I have come to realize that, oh, he doesn't. He holds no ideas in his head at any time.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  There's only one idea in his head, which is toting up to power and and using the government's ability to restrain speech or consolidate speech to his own advantage. And I'm telling you, all of this is a trial balloon for regulating speech on the internet. He is finding the ways for to use the FCC's power or grow the FCC's power. In this case, casting a vote that will override a provision in a law passed by Congress in order to say, I have more authority over the speech that is transmitted to you. And his argument here, when it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the countries.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  What is the mechanism that letting a monopoly run by private equity own more TV stations will create more jobs for local reporters? Can you draw a line from one thing to the next thing?

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  No, the actual answer we know for sure would be precisely 180 degrees the opposite of what he's describing.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Yes. More programming will be nationalized.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Completely decorporatize all of this. That's the answer. And in fact, he's going to just happily create the opposite of what he says he's about to create.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  Anyway, you can, the comment periods and all these things are open, the votes are open, these are, this is your government, you can talk to it, he hasn't, can't stop you yet. I encourage you to leave the comments, I encourage you to tell Brendan, one bribes are bad, and two, overcoming these rules and not looking at the real problem, which is massive consolidation across all of our media, a little short sighted. He's a dummy and he won't get it, and it's in his own interest to never get it. But Brendan, if you want to come and actually make an argument in a real journalistic forum, not the op-ed pages of brightpart.com, you're welcome to come on this show, you're welcome to come on Decoder. We can call Rupert and see if he'll let us duke it out in the editorial pages of Wall Street Journal.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Fun.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  The only place where Rupert Murdoch and I are on the same side. At least when it comes to this, very little else, but when it comes to this. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast for the podcast.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  So I have a lightning round item, which is that I have an emoji I need to tell you about. And I'm actually curious, before we get into this, do you have a sort of all-purpose emoji that is like how you react to most things?

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Okay, I have two, but they're rude.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Okay. Perfect.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Okay. I use green checkmark a lot, which is just the rudest emoji.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  It is, that's very...

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Yep. Yep. Inscribed.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  That's like a thumbs up, but ruder.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  I switched from the thumbs up to green checkmark, and I, every time I send it, I start laughing because it is...

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Putting a period at the end of your text message energy using the green, oh, I don't like that at all.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  This has come to an end. That's a, that's a signal that I'm trying to send, and I send it without any remorse.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Okay. That is actually a pretty good case, because a thing that is very hard to do is to say, this conversation is over. Like, we have accomplished all of our goals, I love you, I hope you're great, let's not talk anymore. It's very hard to do. The green checkmark gets it done.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying. Check. And then you just turn off your video and you're gone. See what I did there? It's amazing. Works every time.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  That's really good.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's that. And then melting face is just the classic.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  You gotta go melting face.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is probably the single most communicative emoji that exists. Mine is the raise hands. I use the raise hands emoji for everything.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  That's pretty good.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Raised hands is got it. Raised hands is thanks. Raised hands is awesome. Raised hands just accomplishes many of my goals. But there's a new one called cracked face, that I think is going to potentially replace a lot of emojis for a lot of people. So Unicode put out a bunch of new emojis as they want to do. The emoji making process is sort of fascinating, we'll go into that another time, but there, one of the new emojis is called cracking face, and it is precisely what it sounds like. It's a, it's a yellow smiling face with a sort of gentle smile, it's like the slightly smiling face emoji, but it is cracking all over. And I think that can mean just about anything you would like it to mean.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  I look at cracking face as a perfect replacement for melting face, which is like, oh god, everything is terrible. Cracking face is also kind of like, ah! Cracking face could also mean, it could replace the skull dead emoji. This is a very good, very powerful, all-purpose emoji that I'm really excited about.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  I would say, as our company goes through what can only be described as a divorce, I would have used cracking face almost every single day this week.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes. It just, to me, this cracking face is just kind of a, it's all too much emoji.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  That's just like, I can't even, in an emoji, is the cracked face, and I'm pretty excited about it.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Also, if you look at our quick post and then you accidentally click on cracking face, it zooms out at you as the picture expand, and then you can do it one more time to zoom again. And it's, it's pretty good as a thing that's just sort of coming at you.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It looks a little like the thing from the Fantastic Four, if anyone, if that does references to anybody. There are a bunch of new emoji coming, there's, there's a butterfly, there are some sideways thumbs, which is also a very funny conversation under possibility. There's a pickle, because that's great. There's a meteor, there's a bunch of stuff, but I just, cracking face emoji, I think is about to revolutionize the way I text message, and I'm very excited about it.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  So very importantly, are these the Unicode standard emojis? Are these Apples? Are they Googles? A lot going on here.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are Unicode emojis, which means they will inevitably be sort of weirdly bastardized in many ways. I in particular look forward to what the blobby Android cracking face looks like. Samsung will do some weird stuff with it. It's gonna be strange, but I think it's, it's gonna do the job. I'm pretty excited about it. It's another reason I like raised hands, by the way. Everybody, everybody does the same thing with raised hands. We're all good with it.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  You can't misinterpret green checkmark.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Nope. This person hates me and is finished with me. It's the only possible takeaway.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  I understand what you're saying and do not wish to receive any further information.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  It's pretty good. All right, what's your next lightning round?

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  It feels like we have another new segment coming called Nikita Beer is Going Through It. So Nikita Beer is the head of product at X, the everything app.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  In which I do all of my banking.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Well, obviously. All of my DMs, too.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Who doesn't?

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  It was last week or the week before, he posted, hey, we, we did this experiment and we realized if we take all of the influencers out of the platform, people like it more and use it more.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Precisely, yes.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Which is a thing that everybody knows.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Yep. And they did the other study that found that all of the video on the platform was stolen. Great. Great, great stuff going on on X.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  So this week, they realized that not showing your post to the people who follow you is bad, and post and showing you just exclusively rage bait made people unhappy.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Who could have seen that coming?

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  We're rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your post to people who follow you back. We noticed this data was missing from the algo, and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don't recognize.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  What a surprise!

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Well said.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  Twitter hasn't been around for over a decade, no one who worked at Twitter ever had this insight before.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  Well, so this is what's so funny. There is a longstanding truism about a lot of these social algorithms is that the strongest signal you can have is if you and I follow each other.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Like, it signifies so many positives about our interests, about our relationship, about the overlap between us, like, you and I being mutuals is such a powerful signal, and X was just like, ah, who cares?

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they, I mean, first of all, they fired everybody, so everybody who knew how anything worked is gone from Twitter, which is now X, the everything app.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  The phrase, we noticed this data was missing from the algo, is very funny.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Deeply, deeply hilarious.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  No one has looked in four years, and now we finally looked.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  There are like entire teams at Twitter that were like entirely focused on this. They threw, they fired them all, they reset the algorithm, and they realized purely prioritizing engagement led you to bad outcomes. And then in particular, with X, the everything app, you know, that you can pay to be verified and have a rev share, letting those people run wild to make as much money as they want resulted in a site that was bad and overrun by Nazis, and now Nikita Beer, every week, is slowly rolling it back. He's slowly rediscovering things that people who worked at Twitter for ages and ages knew. Again, I will point out, I will say this as many times as we need to say this, criticism of the current administration at X is in no way praise for the people who ran Twitter,

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  who mostly failed and ran a bad company, so bad, in fact, that Elon Musk could show up and say, can I pay some money for it? And the board of directors had no response. They're like, well, that's better than anything we can think of, and they walked away.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  So again, criticism of the Elon administration in no way praise for the previous administration, but I do know a lot of people worked at Twitter thinking about how to make the site feel good in order to drive growth. X made it feel bad, and their, their business has essentially collapsed. And we know this because it's part of SpaceX now, and SpaceX is a public company, and we could read it in the S1 filings.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  It's very good. When we talked about Nikita last week, we got a couple of emails from people who, I would say in, in not quite as many words accused him of being kind of a product grifter. This is a guy who has sort of invented and sold the same company a couple of times and is now doing this job at X. Clearly very skilled at a, at a certain kind of product making, does not seem to be having a super good time at his new, very, very visible job at X.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Well, he's got the same problem as anybody who works for Trump has, right? So he can be like, I fixed this thing in this obvious way that will make one person unhappy, and that person will tweet at Elon, and Elon will be like, I'm looking into it, and then the fix will go away. And this has happened several times now for Nikita and everyone else's product. The same way that, you know, ICE announced they're not gonna do traffic stops because they're murdering people in the street, and Trump is like, no, I love traffic stops. And now they're back. And like, that's gonna be what keeps happening to X, the everything app? Because anything that makes it harder for lies and racism to travel on the platform affects one guy in negative ways.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Sure does. It's tough out there. Okay, I have, I have...

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  That guy is David Pierce.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is, the X-reach is for me in particular. I almost accidentally tweeted the other day thinking it was threads and had a real sort of terrifying moment. I was like, this is not...

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so throttled on X that I should tweet every day.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Like, I have a fake blue checkmark. There's like a legacy blue checkmark.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  And I can tweet and literally zero people will see it.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Because I don't pay for reach and obviously I, we're us and we criticize like it, they've just turned the knob. There's a knob in Nikita's office labeled Neelai and it's at zero.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  That's kind of nice, actually. It's like keeping a journal.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  There's a part of me that just wants to just start tweeting every day. Like as much as I can. Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  That's pretty good. Um, I have a blog post to tell you about.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  From, um, a new Substacker, apparently, just brand, brand new Substack, um, from Demis Hassabis.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  The Nobel Prize winning CEO of Google DeepMind is now mostly a Substacker. He wrote a blog post this week about basically the, a framework for how to regulate frontier AI models and calling for, you know, collaboration between the government and, and these labs to really make sure we can all handle this responsibly as AGI come. I don't care about any of that. I just need to read you a sentence that is going to cause you emotional pain. Are you ready for this?

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Okay. This is from the first paragraph of this blog post. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity. Does that sound familiar to you, my friend?

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  That's his line. That's his move.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  This is a thing now. He said this at I O. You had what I can only call just a full on crash out about it. And then he decided that was a, that was a bar. I should keep using that.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  So we're, we're doing the foothills of the singularity now. This is, this is a thing, Neelai.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  So is the singularity a mountain? Foothills implies that we're like among the, the, the mountain, right? We're among the foothills.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Right. Cause the foothills were already going up a little bit, right? But there's, there's more to come.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  I'm asking this because a, a phrase the AI researchers love to use right now is hill climbing.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Like we had Mustafa Suleyman from Microsoft on Decoder and he, I was like, are we getting there? And he's like, well, we're seeing the hill climbing. And so I wonder if Demis is like, well, that must mean we're in the foothills.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Hmm. We're climbing the hill to get to the mountain.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  We're, we're doing hill climbing. Hill climbing has a definition. I'm sure all the AI people are going to tell me exactly what it is. I'm just saying, I think one word led to another word.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  And now we're just saying it over and over again.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  But like-

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  But the, the implication here, by the way, is that the singularity is nigh.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  And that we should regulate AI before it kills us all, which is doomerism. And it is just Google can't do doomerism the same way anthropic can do doomerism. Like they don't, I don't think they have the credibility to do doomerism. Like if Google woke up tomorrow and was like, we're afraid we're going to kill everyone.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  That would have a very different valence than like anthropic's whole deal. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  The, the don't be evil company becomes the don't kill everyone company.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  And everyone would be like, but, but you run YouTube. Like, what are you gonna, should you stop?

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  Should you stop the internet economy for a minute before you kill us all? Whereas anthropic is like, fable is so powerful that we, we stopped it. Like, everyone's like, cool. Like, can Claude still do stuff? And they're like, yeah, because that's our only business.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. There is some of that energy in this blog post that is, it's basically like, please regulate us because we don't know how and we won't. And yeah, we, we need you to tell us what is and isn't okay so that we don't have to figure that out for ourselves. Uh, because we are in the foothills of the singularity.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  Again, which it just really implies they're going to kill us all. I can't-

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Really does.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  There's, and by the way, Google will not really tell you what the singularity is. Like I've asked Sundar Pichai and he's like, Dennis and I argue about that all the time. And like, did you come to a conclusion? You can go watch that interview. It was, it was, it's unclear.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  Mustafa is like, there's a difference between AGI and the singularity and superintelligence. You can watch him try to parse that. Unclear what it means to be in the foothills of the singularity.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  And also-

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  Seems bad.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Just this week, a researcher at DeepMind published a lengthy essay being like, every promise that Google made when they bought DeepMind to not do military applications is gone, is wiped out. And in the middle of this essay, which we will link to, he says, the LLMs still hallucinate and are still brittle in knowable ways. And it's not clear if we're going to get from here to there.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  That's not the foothills of the singularity.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  And in fact, the truth of whether or not the LLMs can actually get there, whether all of this hill climbing will result in a model that remembers things in a meaningful way and doesn't just have like huge context windows up for grabs.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Completely up for grabs. And I, I still think the answer is no. I've been wrong about sort of like general progress, so I will take it, but I, I still think language is not intelligence. And LLMs talking to themselves at rapid rates is not just going to horsepower intelligence into being.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about this, that we've, we've been hearing these AI companies for so long, talk about essentially linear progress, right? That it's like, the, the graph has gone like this. And as long as it keeps going like this forever and ever and ever, we're going to hit these unbelievable things. And I think

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  frankly, the, the graph has gone like this longer than either you or I would have predicted a couple of years ago. That still does not in any way suggest that we're due for another century of that kind of progress.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  Look, I know a lot of people who talk a lot. They don't get smarter.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  That's, in fact, we get dumber generally as this podcast goes along. Uh, speaking of which, do you have one more you want to do before we get out of here?

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Uh, very quickly, I just want to play this clip. We, we mentioned Paramount earlier. The states now have sued, a bunch of states have sued Paramount to block the Warner merger. Uh, their lead trial counsel was on CNBC. I, I just want to play this clip. Uh, this is Jeffrey Kessler, the lead trial counselor for Paramount Skydance, responding to the lawsuit from 12 state attorneys general, uh, saying that this would be anti-competitive.

• 1:26:38Speaker 08

  This is an antitrust case. To stop a merger, the merger has to be anti-competitive. This merger is pro-competitive. Anybody who knows the entertainment industry knows it is in deep trouble. Linear television is in deep trouble because of streaming and because of court cutting. Theatrical is in deep trouble because of the advent of streaming and what it has done. This merger is designed to make a stronger linear television company, to make a stronger theatrical producer,

• 1:27:20Speaker 08

  and to create a true competitor in streaming that can go toe to toe with a Netflix or a Disney or a Prime.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  All right, David. I'm just dying for you to react to that.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, this, this is the same argument as we should make Sinclair very powerful so it can take on YouTube.

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  It's interesting that Brendan Carr was in David Ellison's box for a quarter million dollars, huh?

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, like, you, you and I have spent a lot of time over the years, you, you more than me, railing it against all of the times that somebody has acquired Time Warner in order to go compete in one way or another. And they end up laying off a bunch of people and it always fails. This is, we have tried this thing. Like, even if the logic of what he just said held, and it doesn't, to be super clear, we've literally run that theory to ground over and over and over and over and over under every, under every Republican administration we've ever had in this country. We have done that many times and it never works. We're going to take two shitty companies and it's going to make one great company is literally not how it works.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  I do just want to focus on the things he said were in decline. So first he's like, everything's fucked. Right? That's his, he's like, this is pro-competitive. I just want to point out, no one's watching linear television and no one's going to the movie theater, which is true. Whether or not you're going to go see The Odyssey or not, it's like true that no one's going to the movie theater, right? Certainly you're not watching linear television. You're watching us probably on YouTube. This is the problem. We deliver our content to YouTube for effectively free. The army of teenagers is just looming over all of this.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  And no one can say it. He didn't say YouTube and TikTok, right? He said Netflix and Disney and Prime. But the problem is that TikTok doesn't pay anyone for the content on their platform. And people like it better than the garbage on Paramount Plus. What are you going to do with that? You're going to buy Batman? Is Batman going to fix it?

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  It, this is, it's so nonsense because no one can just say the thing that is killing them out loud. Instagram doesn't pay for content.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  So our business model is F'd because they pay high rates. And I would like more artists and filmmakers and, uh, the people who play the violin in the background of the Christopher Nolan movies. I want all of those people to get paid lots and lots of money to make art. But none of these companies can look at the, the problem that they have, which is their competitors, their actual competitors. The apps on your phone that you actually open do not pay for content. And none of them have an answer to it, except we should buy more stuff.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  Because that will fix linear television.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  Right. We're going to make our costs go way up and that's how we'll compete.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  Just to be a hundred percent on the nose, that was Quibi's argument.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Oh, it was. What if we spent way more money, really genuinely was Quibi's argument?

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  If we spent more money on the content and you could see it on your phone.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Man, justice for Quibi.

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  They were right and also the wrongest.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  I know. But at least Quibi deserved one outrageously overpriced merger before it all fell apart. You know what I mean? Like, if you're, if you're going to make all those arguments, you deserve to be acquired for some stupid amount of money before it all collapses. Yes, exactly. And then let it all collapse in the way-

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  By the way, it's not, we keep saying Time Warner. It's, it's Warner Brothers Discovery now.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  It is now. It's still Time Warner.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  As I call it WB Disco.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  It's pretty good. That's what they should have called it, to be honest. All right, we should get out of here. Eli, what's on Decoder this week?

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  So today, as we record on Thursday, everyone should listen to it. It's the CTO of Proton, Bart Butler. We talked a lot about privacy and building encrypted versions of docs and fighting the EU government. It's really good.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Proton's a fascinating company.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  Super fascinating company. Really enjoyed that conversation. Pushed a lot on the edges of where trust actually comes from. If you're interested in like, Apple encryption and all those fights, this episode is like, in the weeds of it, because he doesn't work at Apple, he works at Proton. He has a way different view, but the problems are all exactly the same. So go listen to that one. And then on Monday, we have Jill Lepore, who is a superstar, talking about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which is like, verge, strike zone.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Does this suggest you've read the book? Is it as good as I assume it is?

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  It is very dense. It's very good. If you're, if it's the sort of thing that speaks to you, it's very good. But it's very much like, if you try to run the country by just measuring everyone and doing opinion polls and like, make it autonomous, like, if you're just like, yeah, we'll just like, measure and do the middle, you like, lose what makes the country good. And it's so, it's basically a book about measuring and what measuring can't tell you, which is like, total verge strike zone. It's great.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  I love that. That's gonna be fun. Version History, the season finale, is this Sunday. It's about the clapper. It is as much fun as we've ever had making an episode of Version History. Also, you and I spent a bunch of this week recording Version History. We've got a whole new season in the can. I think it's the most fun we've ever had doing this show, and we made some very good episodes. So please go subscribe to that. We're like, dangerously close to 10,000 subscribers on our still very new YouTube channel. So please, I beg of you, go subscribe to Version History on YouTube with every single one of your bot accounts. That's all I require.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  I think that's it. That's all the, that's all the stuff I have, right?

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  There's so much stuff.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  There's so much stuff. There's a lot going on.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  We're gonna buy Warner Brothers Discovery, and that will let us finally compete with Prime, a company which is owned by Amazon and utterly subsidized by Amazon.

• 1:33:00Speaker 02

  Version History Brothers Discovery is coming.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  A streaming service that flippantly made a movie about Melania Trump in order to get preferential treatment for its giant e-commerce operation. What are we doing?

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  It's really fun to just say the whole sentence. You know what I mean? In addition to subscribing to the Version History YouTube channel, the other thing you should do is subscribe to The Verge. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one, and Version History, and Decoder. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of dumb things that Brandon Carr does. Everything. Theverge.com/subscribe. Go subscribe. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, you wanna know what emoji you should use to be as cruel to people as Eli is, send us an email, [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Tharchuk, and Aaron Lucassio. We will see you next week. Eli?

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  Green checkmark.

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