Pod Insights The Vergecast Can a YouTube video really fix your wet phone? About this episode Today on the flagship podcast of the native resonance of your smartphone:
02:32 -The Verge’s David Pierce tries to find out if those YouTube videos promising to remove water from your phone with sounds actually work.
32:42 - Then, David chats with The Verge’s Alex Heath about some AR glasses that are reportedly set to launch from Snap and Meta this fall.
59:16 - Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about competition in the AI industry.
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 13,936 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the native resonance of your smartphone. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in our studio. I mentioned on the show last week that we just got this new studio. If you've been watching on YouTube, you've seen it. I'm very jealous. So I got on the Amtrak, came all the way up, and now I'm sitting in this like chair in the corner that exists for reasons as yet to be figured out. Anyway, I am here because we have podcasting to do. Today on the show, we have a couple of really fun things to talk about. We're going to talk to Alex Heath about this like glut of headsets that is coming up. We're going to get stuff from Meta, we're going to get stuff from Snap. There's been some news about the stuff that we're getting from Meta that's pretty interesting.
0:45 David Pierce? But in general, the VRAR headset craze continues and seems to be unstoppable, and we're going to talk about it. We also have a story that I've been reporting kind of for months now, all based on a YouTube video that claims to get the water out of your phone. I have lots of questions, and we're going to get answers. All of that is coming up in just a second, along with an answer to your questions from the Vergecast hotline. But first, there are lots of microphones in here, and I have to go scream into the mall and see what trouble I can get into. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.
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2:12 David Pierce? Welcome back. So, a few months ago, my family went to a town called Reedville, Virginia. It's this very cute, but very tiny little fishing town with only a few hundred residents. I've no idea why we went there, honestly. I think my mom just found a cool house on Airbnb for pretty cheap and was like, "Sick, house on the river for the weekend." Out behind that Airbnb, there was this little dock that stuck out into the water. And the day after we got there, my nephew went out onto the dock to fish.
2:41 Speaker 04 I was sitting on this little bench they had at the very end of the dock, and I got lazy, so I put my feet up, because I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna relax." And then all of a sudden, my phone, I feel it just slip right out of my pocket and falls right into the water.
2:54 David Pierce? That's Chris, that's my nephew. And his phone is a Samsung Galaxy S24, basically still brand new. So Chris drops his phone.
3:03 Speaker 04 I saw it fall. Like, as soon as it went past the dock, I saw it, and it goes and it starts sinking down. Just down, down, down, and down.
3:14 David Pierce? Did you think about jumping in?
3:16 Speaker 04 Immediately, but then I was like, "That's a bad idea. I'm gonna go run back and tell them what happened, and hopefully it can help me out."
3:20 David Pierce? Chris comes running inside the house, where I'm hanging out with a bunch of our other family members, and tells us what happens. We all immediately jump up, go outside, grab all the nets and stuff we can find, and start scraping through the muck at the bottom of the river, trying to find his phone. And, miracle of miracles, we actually found it. Kayden, my other nephew, grabbed it in a big net and just pulled it up, and there it was. It was kind of amazing. At the end of it all, the phone had probably been underwater for 10, maybe 15 minutes, and when it came up in that net, the screen was actually on. So it seemed like we might have avoided the worst. But still, everyone was worried, right? Wet phones are bad, no matter what the screen is currently doing. And the S24
4:03 David Pierce? did have that warning notification that said water had gotten inside.
4:07 Speaker 04 We brought it inside. I believe we tried, no, we didn't even try to dry it out, because someone brought up an idea that he had, and we tried it out. To where literally what he did, because it was so little water, it was still working properly, he opened up a YouTube video and started playing this weird sound that like, that changed, like, made the speakers do a whole bunch of weird sounds, and like, ended up, I think, pushing out some of the water, or at least loosening it up.
4:30 David Pierce? This is where our story really begins. The somebody in question here is Gabe, a friend who had come with us for the weekend. So we're all standing in the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do for Chris's phone. And Gabe is just like, "Oh, there's this YouTube video that gets all the water out of your speakers." I have been thinking about that YouTube video ever since. And actually, it's not just one video, but a whole genre of them. And they are shockingly popular. There's "Sound to remove water from phone speaker" parentheses, all caps, guaranteed, which has 45 million views. 45 million views! "Water out of speaker sound iPhone" parentheses, 100% fix, 3.9 million views. "165 Hz test tone, pure sine wave, 5 min, remove water from phone, best version", 27 million views.
5:15 David Pierce? On and on and on. Hundreds of millions of views on these videos from all over the place. And the comments, honestly, are the best part. One just says, "I think this is the most important video on YouTube. No matter how many years go through, this vid will just keep getting more views." And another one says, "Damn, we really the elite gang, bringing our phones in the showers." Another one, "At this point, this video is going to show up in my Spotify Wrapped." That one actually made me laugh really hard. "I'm still going to bring my phone in the shower again, so see you guys tomorrow." That's another one. But here's my favorite one. And you actually see a lot of these on these videos. Everyone saying how they dropped theirs in a shower or a pool of water. I dropped mine in cereal. Edit, "Two months later, and I'm back here again, because I did the same thing again."
5:58 David Pierce? Edit two, "Can't believe it's been a year since I've gotten some sort of liquid in my phone. Well, time to reset the counter, because my phone magically landed into my pool." The point is, there are millions of people out here, apparently, just cavalierly taking their phones into the shower, the pool, the rain, whatever, and trusting that a YouTube video will fix it. Before we get too far, I just want to play you a clip from one of these videos. I'm only going to play you a few seconds of it, because it's not, you know, pleasant audio, but just want to give you the idea of what this is doing. So, without further ado, here are the lush sounds of "Sound to remove water from phone charging port" parentheses, "one hour version."
6:48 David Pierce? Like I said, it's not nice to listen to, but it's not really supposed to be. It's supposed to do a job. And ever since that day, trying to fix Chris's phone, I've been wondering if it really works. Because on the one hand, lots of people are using these videos, and clearly their phones keep working, so great. But on the other hand, maybe that's just because our phones have gotten impressively waterproof and generally durable over the years. So the big question is, did we get the water out of Chris's phone? Or did Samsung keep the water from ever getting in? I became obsessed with this question. I had to know. So the first thing I did was reach out to a bunch of phone makers to see what they thought. I didn't get much from Google, or Samsung, or Apple, except for vague responses kind of along the lines of, "Seems like it might theoretically work."
7:33 David Pierce? A few companies did point me to their official support pages for liquid damage and what to do if your phone gets wet. Apple's, for instance, says to tap it gently against your hand with the lightning or USB port facing down, and then leave it in a dry area. That's roughly the advice you'll get from most of these companies. That doesn't answer my question at all. The most compelling piece of evidence I had for my specific question from the very beginning was actually the Apple Watch. It has this feature for swimmers, where you can turn the digital crown to eject water out through the speakers. Some other smartwatches, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch, do something similar. This seems like, in theory, the same sort of idea. But Apple presumably has access to all of the tech inside the watch to do that stuff? So is it the same thing when you just play a video on YouTube?
8:19 David Pierce? Actually, to be honest, the more I got into this, and the more I researched and tried to figure out how all of this works, the more I realized I don't even understand the basics of what's happening here. So I called up this guy.
8:30 Speaker 05 I'm Eric Freeman, and I'm a Senior Director of Research at Bose.
8:35 David Pierce? In addition to his day job, Eric literally teaches a class to Bose employees about how speakers work. And so I tried to get him to tell me how speakers work. But I'm an idiot, so I made him start at the most basic place possible. Like, what is a speaker? I know what it's for, I know what it does. But if you actually opened up a speaker, what would you see inside?
8:55 Speaker 05 I'm gonna start from the back of kind of a conventional speaker, which is the most common thing that you'll find. It's in, you know, the speakers that are in your Bluetooth speakers or your phone, or even like pro audio equipment. It's all the same technology for the most part. It's just tiny versus huge versus medium size. So if we start from the back, we've got a magnet. And the magnet has some steel parts around it. And the purpose of the steel parts is just to take the magnetic field lines and put them in a really specific location. In that specific location, there's a coil of wire. So you have a coil of wire sitting inside of some magnetic field lines.
9:38 Speaker 05 And it turns out that when you run electrical current through a wire, it behaves like a magnet, it creates a magnetic field. So just like when you play with two magnets, you know, you can stick them together or have them repel each other. You can run current through a wire and have it attract to the permanent magnet or push away from the permanent magnet.
9:59 David Pierce? The long and short of it is this, you're using that magnetic field he's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston shaped thing really, really, really fast. About 20 times per second, all the way to about 20,000 times per second. The long and short of it is this, you're using that magnetic field he's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston shaped thing really, really fast. Somewhere between 20 and 20,000 times a second. And every time you do, it's moving air.
10:25 Speaker 05 So 20 is the low frequency, so the bass. So like, you know, 20 up to, I don't know, 150 or so is generally considered the bass range. And then as the frequency of vibration gets higher, you get into higher tones. So above that is kind of like the vocal range and where a lot of instruments sit. It's called the midrange, like a lot of people are probably familiar with the, there's a bass control, a midrange control and a treble control, right? And as you go higher and higher and get into the thousands and tens of thousands of vibrations per second, that's the treble.
10:57 David Pierce? To change the tone of a sound, you change how fast that little piston is moving back and forth. And to change the volume, you change how much that little piston. piston moves thus the bigger the speaker the more space the piston has to move so the more air it pushes around so the bigger and louder it can be hypothetically Eric told me that if you want to get your speaker to move as much air as aggressively as possible you'd want to generate really low tones at really high volumes
11:24 Speaker 05 the lowest tone that that speaker can reproduce at the loudest level that it can play that will create the most air motion which will push on the water that's trapped inside the phone
11:35 David Pierce? so just super bassy music is just gonna move more air inside of your device than anything else you would think of
11:42 Speaker 05 yes that's right so those YouTube videos if you listen to them it's not like really deep bass because your phone can't go super deep in the bass but it it plays kind of in the low range of where a phone is able to make sound so it uses the range where the phone can move its speaker the most
12:01 David Pierce? so if you have something in your phone you don't want to be in there you play the lowest tones possible as loud as possible lots of air moves really intensely and boom you're done the science kind of tracks when I asked Eric what he thought about my YouTube video question he only really had one addendum to my theory
12:17 Speaker 05 I think the one caveat is you would want to hold your phone so that gravity is your friend right you would want the speaker to be facing down so the water that's trapped near the speaker would go as low as possible and probably like puddle against that little screen and then you play that YouTube track with all that bass in this and the cone starts pumping I imagine what happens is you know with the pressure behind the water it's pushed through the screen and it kind of spits out through the through the screen right and if you do that long enough the water's gonna jump around and jiggle around and eventually most of it's gonna get pushed through the screen and there's probably a little residual amount that just needs to evaporate over time
12:57 David Pierce? Okay, so I'm almost certain an incredibly stupid question. But would the better idea to be to put your phone right in front of or like inside of some much larger, much more powerful speaker? Because if the goal is to push as much air as forcefully as possible, should I do that? Or at this point, am I, I'm putting like an aluminum back in the way and I'm just going to screw up the whole thing?
13:21 Speaker 05 That's a really interesting idea. And I think if you, if you were to stick your phone into a sealed cavity that a big woofer was pumping on, right? And you develop all this pressure, that's going to push air in and out of that screen, for sure. Right? So I think you could get a setup like that to pump the water out. The only danger is that really high pressure could damage the little speaker inside of your phone. So it's much safer to use your own speaker up to the limit of its capability.
13:51 David Pierce? So at this point, I'm convinced that at least theoretically, you can use a YouTube video to get water out of your phone. But I'm still stuck on this idea of whether these videos are a placebo or not. All these people using their phones in the shower or at the pool or whatever, are they actually fixing their phones this way? Or are they and my nephew Chris just really lucky that phones have gotten impressively waterproof over time? The only way to figure this out is just to do some testing. And luckily, I found some folks willing to help. I had first reached out to the team at iFixit when I hit up the phone manufacturers, basically just to ask, does this theoretically make sense to you? I got an email back with a quote from iFixit repairability engineer, Carsten Fraunheim. He also made the connection to the Apple Watch and said, quote, "It's just a specific
14:35 David Pierce? oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grills. Not sure how effective the third-party versions are for phones, since they're probably not ideally tuned. We could test." That is music to my ears, my friend. So not long after that, I got on the phone with Sharam Maktari, the lead teardown technician at iFixit. And he walked me through a theory he'd been developing ever since I sent that first email. Turns out, he'd gone down kind of the same rabbit hole I had.
14:58 Speaker 06 At top of my notes here, and I am absolutely shocked, would never have occurred to me, people are using their phones in the shower?
15:04 David Pierce? Sharam had been wrestling with a question that I hadn't even thought of. If you can remove water from a phone using the speakers, and if Apple already has this feature built into the Apple Watch, why wouldn't it be built into the iPhone?
15:17 Speaker 06 This is definitely not something we should present as fact, but the watches are easier to waterproof. In all of Apple's terminology, they say how they're water resistant and not waterproof, which is technically accurate. It's also been designed and has far fewer and limited cavities and holes in the watches than there are on the phones, which allows them to design to push the water out from those cavities. Whereas on the phone, the speakers are located at the bottom and the top of the phone, which means you can't get cavities like the SIM card slot. It's just not possible to push water out from those cavities. I think that's why they don't include the same feature on the phones. Because it's just, it's not going to work perfectly as it should, or as they would want it to.
16:01 Speaker 06 And they don't want to mislead people into thinking, hey, your phone is waterproof. Again, speculation, and we'll do some testing on that to figure it out.
16:09 David Pierce? Like basically everyone else I had been talking to, Sharam bought the overall theory that speakers can move water. Though he did say it can get screwy if the speakers themselves are actually damaged by the water. And that was just the first of a bunch of new caveats he had.
16:24 Speaker 06 Question of whether fresh water and salt water makes a difference pops up in my mind, which is something I plan to investigate. How long the water's been sitting in your phone is definitely going to make a difference because salt water mineral and salt deposits are going to interfere with the function. Where is it not able to push the water out? From which cavities are we going to have the most trouble? What does the water damage on the inside look like? And does this give people a false sense of confidence in the water resistance capabilities of both phones and watches?
16:58 David Pierce? That last bit there is one of the things I've been wondering about this whole time. It's definitely true that phones are more durable and waterproof than ever, but it might actually be dangerous to trust that fact too much. Your phone might survive a drop in the pool or the toilet or whatever, but you still shouldn't drop your phone in the pool or the toilet or whatever, because lots of other things can go wrong. Phones also wear over time and lose some of that durability and impenetrability. So telling people, "Your phone is waterproof, so go nuts," is actually maybe not a good or helpful or even true thing. Sharam, at the end of our first conversation, had a bunch of ideas for other tests he wanted to do. And he also looped in Chayton Ritter, a master's student
17:40 David Pierce? in electrical engineering who has been working with iFixit. He also had lots of ideas.
17:45 Speaker 07 I may be thinking ahead with like, I don't know, I just want to throw it out there, but a test that we could do is we could get a phone, we could dunk it in a, have you seen a pressure tank, like a diving?
17:53 Speaker 06 Well, we were just talking about that. We need to get one of those for some of the other Ingress test things we had planned.
17:58 Speaker 07 But we could do this for the, the test, you could fill it with a UV reactive liquid, like put some dye in the water, put the phone in there, just dunk it and then take it out, maybe take it apart after, and then shine a light on it to see where you would get water in there. But that means you'd have to have like two phones and then brand new phones you'd have to buy.
18:16 David Pierce? iFixit has tons of phones lying around, but they've all already been opened up. That's iFixit's thing. They're a company based on repairing electronics, so they get things to open them up and figure out how to repair them. And once you've pried a phone apart, you've kind of compromised it. So they just needed new phones to play with if this test was going to really feel like the real world. Luckily, I had a drawer full of phones to play with. I get a lot of phones for various reasons, and sometimes the companies that ship them to us just don't want them back. Often, we'll donate them or find another use for them, but sometimes they just sit around like forever. In this case, I have a box full of new and old phones that have just been moving around with me for years.
18:58 David Pierce? So I decided to donate a few devices to science and put four phones in a box and shipped them to iFixit for Sharam and Chayton to take apart. The four phones, by the way, are not particularly Really representative of anything, just what I had around and available to send. It was a Google Pixel 7 Pro, an iPhone 13, a Google Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1 that I think is from 2018. So some old, some new, some fancy, some less fancy. Just something to get us started. A few weeks later, I got an email from Sharam and Chayton saying they had some answers for me. So we got back on a call.
19:31 Speaker 07 We got the four phones that you sent us. I tested using a UV bath and we made that just by buying some of these. So we got like several UV dyes. The original one we started with didn't work out so well. So we got these like boat sewage tank things to detect leaks if you're in the harbor and they worked amazing. It was, I don't know, do you watch Futurama at all?
19:53 David Pierce? A little bit, yeah.
19:55 Speaker 07 Have you seen the drink Slurm?
19:57 Speaker 08 I'm dying of thirst. Grab my feet and dunk my head in so I can drink. No, that's moronic. Fine, I'll let go and swim around in the Slurm and drink as much as I want.
20:08 Speaker 07 It ended up looking like this and I just thought it was hilarious, but these worked out great.
20:13 David Pierce? In case you haven't watched Futurama, Slurm and this UV bath are both of these kind of toxic spill green looking liquids. And in Chayton's case, the goal was to submerge a phone in the stuff, leave it there for about a minute and then take it out. And if you look at your phone, you can probably guess where liquid is most likely to get in in that process. It's around the power button, the volume keys, the port at the bottom, and the speakers up top and down below. That's where the phone is open and that's where stuff can get in. So the idea was after a minute underwater, Chayton would pick the phone out, gently tap it to get some of the water out, play one of our water ejecting YouTube videos and then leave the phone overnight. This is basically what you'd do if you just dropped your phone in a river, I think, so it felt like a pretty good test. But the Slurm green stuff would leave a trace of wherever it had lingered,
20:59 David Pierce? which they'd then be able to see under a UV light. So you'd know where liquid had managed to get inside the phone and stay there long enough to leave this residue. Anything that came in and then immediately was expelled wouldn't leave much trace. I should say, by the way, that liquid getting inside of your phone isn't by definition the end of the world. There are lots of different ways of water Prove things and plenty of valid, different approaches to keeping the really sensitive bits of your device safe. All these companies will tell you that the main goal is not to keep water out. It's to keep your phone working no matter what happens. But if you can, you should probably try to keep everything out entirely. Because sure, your phone might be safe from a few drops of pure, fresh water getting inside. But oftentimes, that's not what happens in the real world.
21:43 Speaker 07 I would assume if you left your phone a little longer in there, or you weren't as lucky, we wouldn't be in the same situation.
21:50 Speaker 06 Also, we're talking about taking this thing into the shower repeatedly. So one of these days you will take it in and it will fail.
21:57 Speaker 07 Also, you got, I don't know what, what other stuff is in shampoo, but it's probably more conductive than just any liquid like water.
22:04 David Pierce? Right. That's the other part of this is like, very rarely are you getting what amounts to perfectly fresh water inside of your iPhone.
22:10 Speaker 07 At least it'll smell nice after, you know?
22:12 David Pierce? One of Apple's official recommendations, actually, if you get your phone submerged in liquid is to immediately rinse it with tap water. And it includes a picture of just shoving your phone under the kitchen faucet. Samsung also suggests soaking your phone in tap water if something like that happens, which seems wild to think about doing. But that's actually the point. These modern devices do do a lot to keep liquid out. But if something gets in and it's corrosive or otherwise chemically in some way, you're in much more trouble. Anyway, Chetan started showing me all these pictures of the phones that he'd taken with the UV light on. So you're just seeing basically the outline of the phone and these little neon green splotches everywhere that there had been liquid. He started with the iPhone 13.
22:55 Speaker 07 So this is the, the inside of the screen and you can clearly see around this little hole. There's a bunch of residue that was left behind. Now on our speakers here, I was surprised that on the bottom speaker at least, there wasn't as much as I thought there was going to be. And I opened these up, there's a fine mesh in there and that mesh did a really good job of preventing anything from going into the, uh, the speaker cavity itself. It's either like a really fine mesh. It felt like a mesh when I was rubbing a spudger over it or tweezers. But it could just be textured plastic and it did a excellent job at keeping liquid out. And that was for all of the phones.
23:31 David Pierce? Huh. Cause you would think that would be the most natural place for it to be there. So I guess it makes sense that they would pay special attention to it.
23:38 Speaker 07 Mm hmm.
23:39 David Pierce? Jayden did say he was a little surprised to see the iPhone not keep everything out. Since the phone's a bit older, maybe the seal degraded, or maybe it just wasn't a perfect seal in the first place. But like we've been saying, the phone still worked, camera was fine, everything was fine. So maybe it's fine. Google's Pixel 7 Pro was next, and kind of crushed it.
23:57 Speaker 07 So this one was interesting because when I opened it up, there was no liquid inside it at all. It was dry. Like, none of the water, like, the detection stickers were triggered.
24:07 David Pierce? The Pixel 3, though? Not so good.
24:10 Speaker 07 This is the front. You can, you know, obviously, there's a big green mark here on the, on the upper speaker and microphone, and then you can see the corners of the display, too.
24:19 David Pierce? So that's like you're gonna see a drop of water underneath your screen, basically.
24:23 Speaker 07 Yeah. I have the device here. It's not very visible when I'm holding it now, but if I sort of tilt it, I can kind of see something. And when I turned it on, it wasn't as, I mean, if you really looked, you could detect it, but it was sort of hard to see. But regardless, there's liquid in your display, and that's not a good thing.
24:42 David Pierce? There was lots of residue all around the Pixel 3, actually. In the SIM card slot and the USB-C port, and lots of other places you just don't want liquid to be. It didn't seem like any of it had gotten so deep as to totally destroy the phone, except maybe that bit in the display, but it's not great either way. And the Nokia was even worse. There was residue around the battery and the screen. There was actually corrosion on the USB port, and the liquid detection sticker inside had triggered, which is usually bad news for your warranty. The other phones, though, didn't trigger that sticker, even the ones that got a little liquid inside. Thought that was really interesting. Again, there are plenty of reasons for the differences here. Maybe the phone's just not that sealed in the first place, or maybe it degraded over time, maybe it got banged up in shipping, I don't know.
25:27 David Pierce? Jayden and Sharam both kept saying that they wanted to do more testing, to test a phone the day it comes out, and then test another model of the same phone six months, or a year, or two years later, to see how things change over time. It's a really cool idea, and I hope they do it, but it requires a lot of phones, and it gets really expensive really fast. But for my purposes, we're getting somewhere. While he was testing the phones, Jayden also took These super close up, slow motion videos of each phone as he played the YouTube video. And you can actually see them working. In almost every one of them, the sound starts, the phone starts buzzing. And immediately you get this burst of water coming out of the speaker grill. It's like the tiniest little water fountain you've ever seen.
26:06 David Pierce? The effect slows down pretty fast, but that initial whoosh of air really does fire some water out of the speakers.
26:17 David Pierce? The water comes out of both the top speaker and the bottom one, which in Chayton's tests were also the two places water was most likely to get in in the first place. It's literally like spitting water out as it plays that video. But as Chayton found, it doesn't get everything out.
26:32 Speaker 07 I wonder if like, once it got in there, because that mesh does a really good job of keeping stuff out. If, if a little bit did get in, it's, you know, it's just going to keep it in there as well, too.
26:42 David Pierce? This is actually a pretty good summation of the situation here. So recent phones, especially high end ones, have in fact gotten really good at keeping liquid out. Your phone may not be completely waterproof forever in all situations. But frankly, there's a good chance you can drop it in the river and it'll come out working okay. But if liquid does get in, it can be tricky to get back out because it has to go back through that same nearly impenetrable seal that it had to go through to get into your phone in the first place. But can playing a video on YouTube help? I think so, at least a little. You can shake or tap the phone to get some liquid out and see that when it's wet. And playing a video like these does seem to generate some more powerful and forceful motion to get the droplets moving.
27:26 David Pierce? There's just no denying the evidence of those drops flying out when you play the video and the phone starts vibrating. But it seems like it's only going to help in spots near the speaker. It's just not moving enough air to like push everything around the phone and out of the various holes. Those grills at the bottom and top are the easiest place for liquid to get in and thus the easiest place to push them out. They also happen to be right next to the speakers. And what happens, it seems, is that after that first bit of liquid is initially ejected out, what's left ends up just kind of getting sloshed around as the speaker keeps moving. So yes, a YouTube video might help a little, but it won't solve all of your problems.
28:04 Speaker 07 I'd say they kind of agree. It can't hurt, like, but I don't see it being end-all, be-all fix, or a way to pull all the liquid out.
28:11 David Pierce? There are lots of good tips out there for getting liquid out of your phone, many of which boil down to the same thing. Try to get air moving with your mouth, or a fan, or canned air, but don't do it so aggressively that you might break something inside of the device. Put it in rice, sure. Use the silica beads, fine. There are a million strategies out there, and many of them work, at least a little. But Chayton and Sharam both offered the same advice, which is frankly, pretty simple and pretty good advice. Don't take your phone in the shower. It might survive. You might play the video after you get out, and it might be okay. But next time, it might not. Every time your phone gets wet in any way, you are tempting fate. And eventually, one time you're gonna do this, and the liquid damage gods are not going to care how quickly you managed to get the YouTube app open.
28:56 David Pierce? But look, I'll just level with you. After going through this whole process and learning all of this about how speakers work, I bookmarked one of these videos. And just the other day, I spilled like two-thirds of a can of seltzer right over top of my phone, immediately shook it out, tapped it, played the video, and my phone still works. I don't think my phone still works because I played that video, but it certainly didn't hurt, and it might have helped at least a little bit. It's all about getting air moving, you know what I mean? I'm sure I'll be back in those comments before too long, next time I spill some seltzer.
29:33 David Pierce? Alright, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about headsets. We'll be right back.
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31:15 David Pierce? All right, we're back. So I was gonna start this segment by saying it's almost gadget season, because you know, it's the end of August and usually it happens to be Labor Day and then it happens to be gadget season. That's how it usually works. But right now, we are in the middle of gadget season. Samsung did its thing early. Google did its thing early. We're barreling towards an Apple event. AI stuff is everywhere. It is firmly gadget season. And I think what we're actually about to start is headset season. There's been some reporting that Meta and Snap and others are about to launch headsets. And we're getting to a place where we've been doing this VR and AR thing long enough that I think we can start to ask questions about what we're doing here,
32:00 David Pierce? about how far off this tech really is and about what these companies can do now that works. The Verge's Alex Heath has been reporting on all of this. Both on the site and in his excellent newsletter, Command Line, which you should absolutely subscribe to. So I figured we'd bring him on and just try to talk through all of it. Alex, hello.
32:18 Speaker 11 Hi.
32:19 David Pierce? So I want to talk about Snap and I want to talk about Meta. And I think we should talk about Snap because I think we're only going to talk a little bit about Snap. And then we're going to talk a lot about Meta. But basically you reported both of these companies are going to launch big, new headsets. Kind of within what we think like a couple of weeks of each other in September. Okay, within a week of each other. So it's going to be, it's going to be a thing. I want to start with Snap because for years, my like sneakiest hot take about the tech industry was that Snap was way further ahead in all of this AR stuff than people realized. And that at some point it was, it was going to just release the thing and nobody would have seen it coming. It sounds very much like all these years later, we are still not there. This might not be that thing. What are we doing here?
33:03 David Pierce? What is, what is Snap up to with spectacles? Like, what is your sense of what's going on inside of Snap as they think about this hardware thing that they've been working on all this time?
33:11 Speaker 11 Yeah, since I've been reporting on this since, gosh, many years, I've felt the same way. Like, when is this finally going to arrive? And it keeps getting pushed out. Snap and Meta are both showing these air glasses off that they've been working on, but they're essentially glorified prototypes. And Snap is repeating its playbook from 2021 where it released, I say released in quotes, because it showed AR spectacles. And when we say that, it's, you know, displays inside the lenses where you can see virtual objects on the real world. It showed those off and pitched it as kind of a dev kit for its lens creators. And I got to try them, journalists got to try them, but Snap never sold them.
33:53 Speaker 11 And they're, they waffled a bit on whether they would sell the version they're about to announce in September, the fifth generation, which I'm told is, you know, it's, it's a meaningful upgrade, but it's more of a, like an S type iPhone model. It's more of just a better, faster version of the design that they released in 2021.
34:11 David Pierce? Which would be something.
34:12 Speaker 11 Yeah.
34:12 David Pierce? Like the one, the one we saw a couple of years ago was very cool. I got it in the most incredibly controlled demo.
34:19 Speaker 11 Yeah.
34:19 David Pierce? And it overheated like. Every 10 minutes. But when it worked, it was it was cool. Like the tech was fairly primitive, but pretty good.
34:26 Speaker 11 There's a lot of good ideas in there, is what I remember. And when, you know, I kept thinking, wow, like when they finally fixed the bugs here and the battery life and the display quality and the weight, like the ideas in the interface and how you use this thing really are compelling. It's just really hindered by the tech. And I would say that's actually been the story of AR glasses since Snap and Meta both started working on them around, you know, in earnest around 2017, 2016, 2018 is that the tech just hasn't been ready for the vision of what these companies think these glasses can do. And yes, in the same way that Snap invented a lot of social media concepts like stories and ephemeral messaging that we
35:06 Speaker 11 use today in Meta's apps, they have been very early to eyewear with spectacles and smart glasses. And now Meta feels like it's starting to take that narrative away from them. And I think they're hoping that especially by going out, you know, a week before Zuckerberg is going to show off his glasses, their prototype will wow people and kind of remind everyone that they were actually first and they're still moving ahead here. But again, like they aren't selling these things, so they're glorified prototypes.
35:33 David Pierce? Yeah, do you think it even matters? Even if Snap comes out and says, you know, we've gone an order of magnitude ahead in technology. These things are super cool, really exciting. What was it you said they're not even planning to make 10,000 of them? It's like, it's a science project, like it is just a science project. And like, I wonder at some point why Snap is going to continue to release these things. Like, what is spectacles doing for Snap at this point in time?
35:58 Speaker 11 That's a very good question and one that a lot of people inside Snap aren't even sure about, to be perfectly honest. I mean, this is Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the two co-founders, baby. This hardware division, they're spending a lot of money still on it. And Snap as a business has just not been doing well. They've really struggled to scale their advertising business and build a sustainable, profitable ads business on top of their, you know, messaging app, which I should note is bigger than ever. They have, I believe it's over 800 million users globally. Snap as a as a social Network is doing well. It's just that it's business as not.
36:33 David Pierce? Right.
36:34 Speaker 11 And so investors are looking at their investment in hardware and going, do you really have the leash and the ability to compete here in such a capital intensive space? Where Meta is investing billions and billions of dollars into AR. And Snap is really the David to the Goliath here. And that's been their story in social media. And I think Evan Spiegel, the CEO thinks that they have a shot even in hardware. But I have become very skeptical, especially in the last few years, that Snap can be a meaningful player here. I mean, my read from just talking to company insiders is that they want to have a seat at the table for what
37:13 Speaker 11 Spiegel and Zuckerberg both agree could be the next major platform shift, which is us using smart glasses and AR glasses to augment how we use our phones and to eventually shift usage away from phones to wearables. That has been the narrative that has been spun by both of them, like I said, for eight years now. It still feels far away. I think it's getting closer, but it's still not on the near horizon. And the question is whether Snap has the leash to survive that long while Meta is investing so much.
37:44 David Pierce? It does seem very clear that Snap thought this would all be ready much sooner than it turns out it's actually going to be ready. And that's not just that, that's everybody. Right. Like that is the whole industry. It's like, I think back to when all the Lyft's and Ubers and everybody were telling us that by 2020, everybody would be taking robotaxis, right? Like, it's, it's just the timeline of all of this, just everybody turned out to be wrong.
38:05 Speaker 11 You know, it's, it's funny you said robotaxis, though, because I was thinking about that. I was in Phoenix last weekend and I was seeing all the Waymos on the street there. And they're starting to pop up here where I live in LA. I see them in SF every time I go up there. And you know, thinking about, yeah, how long we had to deal with companies saying that self-driving was right around the corner. And all of a sudden, it's kind of here, right? Waymo is doing hundreds of thousands of rides. I think AR may be a similar story. I think, yes, they've been saying it for a long time and it's easy to feel like, oh, like, you know, it's just another year of. Prototypes and vaporware and it's no closer. But I do feel like it's getting closer. I think it may be a thing where we really don't see it at meaningful scale,
38:49 Speaker 11 meeting millions of units a year until towards the end of this decade, like 2028 ish is I think when Meta especially expects it to hit. But I'm expecting these to be good demos, spectacles and Meta's classes. And it wasn't here for a really long time until all of a sudden it was.
39:06 David Pierce? That's actually a good segue to Meta because I think if there is going to be a company in the immediate future that is able to just sort of one day drop it on us, it seems like it's going to be Meta. Everything we're hearing out of Apple is that Apple's ability to make something that is very good and affordable is a long way out. Snap, I think we're both sort of slowly giving up on. It feels like if, if there is a company that is going to figure this out in a like all of a sudden it's mainstream kind of way, it's probably going to be Meta. And my God, would I not have bet on that five years ago. But it feels like, it feels like here we are, and especially the, the Ray-Ban glasses have been so successful. And it feels like that has shifted Meta's thinking about how to sequence some of this stuff in some ways. Like what's your sense of what we're going to see at Connect in a couple of weeks?
39:51 Speaker 11 Yeah, you're right that Ray-Ban has shifted their view a little bit here because these last Ray-Ban smart glasses, which I have, I don't know if you've used them, the version two.
40:00 David Pierce? Yeah, I have a pair. They're awesome. I use them all the time.
40:02 Speaker 11 They're quite good. And it's the first Meta hardware product I see normal people using and talking about. And they've been very pleasantly surprised with how well it's done. And what they're going to show at Connect is separate from the Ray-Ban line. I'm expecting updated Ray-Ban stuff, but nothing meaningful. But really what the big AR glasses thing is this project they've been working on since 2018 called Orion. And they have put billions of dollars into this product. I actually don't think it's a stretch to say they have maybe invested Snap's entire market cap as a public company into this one pair of glasses, like trying to invent new metals, new battery technology, to try to make a pair of semi lightweight, they're not going to be lightweight.
40:45 Speaker 11 They're about four X the weight of regular glasses, but still that's a meaningful upgrade from like the early Magic Leap demos.
40:51 David Pierce? And like the Vision Pro or the Quest, like it's much closer to glasses than those things.
40:55 Speaker 11 Very chunky Clark Kent looking glasses that do holograms, let you virtually, you know, conference with people, integrate with Meta's other apps. So having some 2D elements from other apps brought into there. And it's a prototype. It's not something they're going to be selling. They're making even fewer of them than Snap's spectacles. They cost a lot of money. I mean, both the new spectacles and the Orion glasses cost thousands of dollars to make per unit. So this is very like out there tech that, you know, leaders at Meta have told me it's prohibitively expensive to do this as a mainstream product. Meta hoped, Zuckerberg hoped that Orion was going to be their first consumer air glasses product. They made the call about two years ago to make
41:37 Speaker 11 it a glorified prototype that they just showed to the world. And I think they're doing that because even though they don't have the same business pressure as Snap, they need to justify what they're doing here because this AR program has cost a lot of money. And I think everyone looks at Quest and goes, oh, like it's all VR. They had a lot of people working on these glasses and they're separate from Ray-Ban, but I think you will see the Ray-Ban stuff that they're doing and Orion converge in the coming years. And they'll approach it from different angles, but they'll have the kind of lower tech, cheaper smart glasses without high-end displays and then the high-end display glasses and then those they hope will emerge towards the end of this decade.
42:19 Speaker 11 But this is a big like moment in terms of just saying like, we have something that works even though in a highly controlled demo and we're not selling it, but here it is. And here's like a marker of where we are in the progression of this technology. And I'm expecting Orion to be the most advanced, you know, pair of air glasses that that I will have tried. That doesn't mean it's a good product, right? But it probably will mean it's a good demo. And I think that's all Meta hopes for. Yeah, the context of this moment is really interesting to me because I feel like if you rewind
42:49 David Pierce? What, a little over a year now? Meta like front ran the Vision Pro, trying to basically get its thing out there before Apple did, because there was this perception that Apple was going to come out and just instantly upend the market and change everything and be the only name anybody cared about in this space. That obviously did not happen. Like, I think you and I were on this show about a year ago, talking about how that might happen. And Meta was afraid and everybody was nervous about what Apple would do when it entered this market. I think if anything, Apple has actually made it harder on everybody else because the Vision Pro has not, it hasn't done anything. Like, I don't know that I'd call it a failure. It's just like a nothing. Like, no one, no one talks about the Vision Pro. It's just not there. It doesn't exist in the world.
43:30 David Pierce? So, and now Meta has this hit in the Ray-Ban glasses. Mark Zuckerberg has been on like the, the PR 180 of a lifetime. So it feels like the, the context for this company coming into this moment like could not be more different than I think Meta would have expected a year ago. And so to, to some extent, I wonder if this is going to feel like Meta just sort of flexing on them much more so than being like, "Look, we're still in the game. We're trying to be cool." It's just going to be like Mark with a bunch of gold chains on, just being like, "This cool thing I built."
44:02 Speaker 11 I guarantee you there will be some chains, but I, I don't know, man. I see that, but I also just look at what they're announcing and it's not a product, right? So we are still on the like demo phase of AR glasses. And I feel like we've been stuck in that since the first Magic Leap. And it doesn't feel like this year will move us out of that phase. It feels like we're still stuck there. And it's hard to like, you know, I'm expecting to try Orion and the new spectacles. And it's hard to feel about, how do I write about these? Because it's kind of vaporware in a sense, right? It's not something that someone can buy and take home with them. So what is the point? And, you know, I think each, you know, company Snap and Meta has slightly different reasons for doing it.
44:45 Speaker 11 But I think they both just want to say, "Look, we're still in this fight. We're still in this race." And we think there is a, you know, pot at the end of the rainbow here. And the, it keeps getting pushed further and further out. But here's what we've got. And you know, I should note like Orion, I think will be also different because Meta has invested a lot in this wristband. They're going to have the pairs with it that essentially allows you to control it with your thoughts. It's EMG technology. It's not mind reading, but they bought a startup called Control Labs that we've covered a lot here on The Verge years ago to do this. And they've been working on some really novel input technology for wearables that I'm really interested in, even beyond the actual displays.
45:30 Speaker 11 So that's something to watch as well. And then the AI piece, I think Meta has meaningfully accelerated on in the last year. I don't know. Have you used the the visual AI in the Ray-Bans yet?
45:41 David Pierce? In bits and pieces. Yeah, it's really cool. It's it feels it feels kind of sticky most of the time when I use it, but it is. It is good.
45:48 Speaker 11 It works like half the time for me, right? It still hallucinates. It still makes things up, but it's fast. And it's made me realize like, oh, like a visual chat GPT like AI in my glasses that understands the world around me is just a killer feature. And when it works at scale, will make me use my phone less and I don't even need displays for that. And I think Meta has seen that in the last six months, even with how kind of rudimentary it is now and said, wow, like we need to lean into this. And they have, I think, just better tech in this regard than Snap. And I think for wearable glasses to take off, really, we've we've seen now in the last year that you need that AI piece.
46:28 Speaker 11 And I think that's something Meta will also keep leaning into very heavily at Connect and after that.
46:35 David Pierce? It makes sense. So I understand, I think, most of the motivation for why Snap needs to talk about this stuff and kind of remind people that it's in the game. And still matters and get people to build for its platform. And like, I like, I get that from Snap's side. For Meta, I don't know that I get it quite as much because Meta is is doing very well in AI, which are, if you're an investor, is the only thing anybody cares about. If anything, everybody views all this other stuff as a diversion. So to keep doing this stuff basically out of the public view of Wall Street seems like it sort of makes sense. Also, like, things are going well at Meta. So coming out and being like, look, we have this cool thing that we can't ship, but isn't it so cool? It just doesn't seem like it gains the company all that much. But I guess to your point, if they've been doing this now for six years,
47:20 David Pierce? like literally, maybe it's just for team morale, you eventually have to show the people what you're working on. Like, maybe it really is just that simple.
47:26 Speaker 11 I think that's a huge piece of it. And, you know, people don't like working on hardware that never ships. And I think that was actually a big motivation with the Vision Pro finally launching. I think just after so many years, you've got to have something to show. And yeah, I think Meta being on its front foot versus its back foot this year means that, you know, they feel better about doing this. But I think, you know, to your earlier point about like, what's the motivation? Snap and Meta's, you know, big picture motivation is actually very similar, which is that they both grew their businesses under the thumb of Apple and Google and mobile phone app store control. And if there is going to be a coming hardware shift where people use wearables, at least as much as phones, if not more,
48:11 Speaker 11 they want to have a seat at the table and they want to control their own destiny. And Zuckerberg especially has been very clear about this in interviews with me and others, that this is a huge motivating factor. I mean, he's been kind of Apple public enemy number one for a while now. And, you know, I don't think that if Apple, you know, finally releases Air glasses in the coming years, like, I don't think it's a given to assume that they would let Meta's apps on there. And I don't think Meta thinks it's given that they would do that. And so if you are maybe going to get boxed out in future hardware shifts, you know, you better play to win and you better have your own hardware. And that's the motivation, but the question is, is that the right bet? And is this actually going to be hardware that normal people want to use in the coming years?
48:56 Speaker 11 And I think the jury's definitely out on that.
48:59 David Pierce? Yeah, that tracks. But I, but I do think, I mean, to your point, if this is the sort of thing that is going to happen, what's the phrase, slowly and then all at once?
49:07 Speaker 11 Yeah.
49:07 David Pierce? Being early is much safer than being late, right? Unless you're Snap and you literally can't afford to have spent all this money. Like Meta, Meta can afford to be early, like literally with dollars afford to be early in a way that I think it seems to be willing to do that.
49:21 Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, look at Waymo and Google and self-driving. You know, they've plowed billions of dollars into Waymo. There's been many years in the last decade where investors and the public are like, what are you doing? Just give up on this. It's never going to work. All of a sudden, it's starting to work. People are getting picked up by Waymos from the airport, you know? They're out in the world working. And now, you know, if it hits, if it really hits and it hits scale and is like the next Uber, but cheaper to run, and this is this huge business benefit to Google. Everyone will forgive the last 10 years of, you know, sinking money into this for no result. And I think AR is a similar story with perhaps an even greater return because, you know, VR is something that's isolating and you wear mostly inside and by yourself.
50:05 Speaker 11 But the idea is that AR glasses are something you wear all day long and take with you. And the time spent in them is huge because you wear, like, if you're me, you wear glasses almost all day. And I think they see that as like a huge potential way to create a new business. And yeah, I just think that I like that you brought up self-driving because I think there's a lot of analogies there.
50:29 David Pierce? Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I do feel like the AR thing is so funny because it's like, it's like the AI story in that the biggest version of the story you can tell is so damn big that you like seem ridiculous if you don't try to chase it in some way, even though the odds of it getting as big as you want, like, it seems to me to be just as likely that everybody says, no, I don't want a screen on my face, thank you, as they do to say, yes, AR glasses forever. But the possibility, if it hits, it's going to hit so big that there, all of these companies are desperately afraid of not chasing that thing.
51:01 Speaker 11 Right. And Meta has the money to be able to make this kind of bet and Snap increasingly does not. And so the question is, who is standing at the end of the next few years here? And who has the ability to keep investing? And I would put my money on Meta right now.
51:15 David Pierce? Yeah, I tend to agree. All right, one more question and then I will let you go. You mentioned these things are super expensive to make, and that's one of the reasons these companies are not selling them. There was also a report from The Information a few days ago that Meta scrapped what I think was supposed to be its really high-end project because they just never Figured out a way to do it at the price that they wanted to. And Mark Zuckerberg has been saying to you and others for forever that price is really important in all of this stuff. And that one of the things Meta has been doing, like he sort of intimated, kind of in as many words. We could have made a thing as good as the Vision Pro, but we chose not to because it would have been too expensive. And I'm curious now, having seen what we saw from the Vision Pro, both in terms of like how good the thing is, but also what it has done in the world.
51:59 David Pierce? What do you make of Meta's kind of ongoing obsession with price? Like, is this, is this the right move, even in the early days of these things, to only want to sell things cheap?
52:07 Speaker 11 You know, I thought it was, but I don't know. I think these things need to be better products before we start really caring about price.
52:15 David Pierce? Well, that's the Apple bet, right? Like, we're going to make the best thing possible, whatever it costs, and then we'll figure out how to make it cheaper.
52:20 Speaker 11 Yeah, and I think Meta has maybe focused and is continuing to focus a little too much on price. But it's not to say that the Quest is not a good product per se, but it's not something that I want to use. Let's put it that way. And I think they have to figure out why people want to strap these things onto their face. And that still has not really been figured out. And price feels kind of secondary because it's like, oh, I have this cheaper thing that you don't know how to use. Well, you still don't know how to use it, so why would you buy it?
52:52 David Pierce? It's an eighth the price and still sort of pointless for you. Do you want it now?
52:55 Speaker 11 Right, but I think long term, it is a iOS versus Android thing all over again. Meta is going to be the cheaper, you know, your margin is my opportunity player here. Whereas Apple will be Apple and have Apple margins and charge a lot of money because they can. And they have a built in, you know, loyalty base of people who will pay anything for a new Apple product. And I don't see that changing. I see Meta cancelling, you know, it's, it's high end kind of Vision Pro competitor is more of a realization that this high end market for. These headsets, and I'm drawing a distinction between these headsets and AR glasses, but headsets at a high end, even with great displays, the market's just not there yet, and the software ecosystem's not there. We've seen that with the Vision Pro in the last year.
53:39 Speaker 11 And for Meta, I think it makes more sense for them to play at the lower end and let Apple have the higher end.
53:45 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, that to me is the lesson of the Ray-Bans, right? That it's like, actually, if you take something that does substantially less, but make it sort of socially workable and make it good, you have something. Like, that to me feels like a much saner starting point for, what are they? They're like 350 bucks, I think?
54:05 Speaker 11 And you can buy them with insurance and, yeah.
54:07 David Pierce? Yeah, and then it was like, take that and start to just add stuff on top of it. Do more stuff with the cameras, do more stuff with like the biometrics you can get. Like, that feels like a path to something very cool, much more directly than like, we made this thing, it costs five grand, how do we make it cost $500? Like, I just don't, that's like several physics miracles away, right? And I think, to me, that's gonna be the thing I'm curious to see is like, this Orion project is six years old, and I wonder, like, now with all of this hindsight, both on how that has gone and what the Ray-Bans thing has done, what the roadmap internally starts to look like at Meta is just gonna be fascinating.
54:44 Speaker 11 Well, I can tell you a little bit before we go, which is just smart glasses with little displays like Google Glass Viewfinder coming out next year from Meta, and then the full-fledged consumer AR glasses, not until at least 2027, maybe 28. And they're hoping to be shipping millions of those by like 2029, 2030. But the Ray-Ban thing is a huge, long-term strategic thing for them, and to the point where they may be investing billions of dollars in the parent company of Ray-Ban.
55:13 David Pierce? Oh, that's right, I forgot about that. God, the Meta being like a part-owner of the glasses company that runs the universe.
55:19 Speaker 11 Yeah, Elsor and Luxottica, which also just bought Supreme, so we may see Supreme-branded Meta glasses, I'm not kidding.
55:26 David Pierce? This is how Mark got his glow up, he's just gonna buy himself into the fashion industry.
55:30 Speaker 11 Yeah, and realizing that glasses are fashion, and you have to lean into that if you want. People to wear smart glasses. And I think it's interesting and a twist of fate because Snap almost did the same thing, almost did a partnership with Luxottica for smart glasses many, many years ago and didn't. And now Meta has struck gold with it. And it's been just fun for me to report on how Snap and Meta keep like crisscrossing each other here. And they're both trying to get to the same destination in very different ways.
56:01 David Pierce? All right. Well, all of this is happening in September, so I suspect we are going to have many chances to check back in. But thank you as always for doing this. Much appreciated.
56:08 Speaker 11 Thanks.
56:09 David Pierce? All right, we got to take a break, then we'll come back. You're the first guest hotline. We're right back.
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57:49 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected] . You can hit me up on threads. I don't know. We're not that hard to reach here at the Vergecast, but we want to hear all of your questions about everything. We're going to do a lot of, I think, buying stuff between now and the end of the year because it's like shopping season. It's upgrade season. Everybody's getting new software. So if you're trying to figure out, should I buy this or that? How do I think about which one I should buy? Is eight gigs of RAM in my laptop really enough? Hit us up. We want to hear all of your questions. This week, we have a question about AI.
58:24 Speaker 12 Hi, this is Dan from San Francisco. I've been thinking about the idea of the first mover advantage when it comes to AI and wondering if it's true. Are there recent examples of it actually proving worthwhile as a theory? And does it really matter for AI that some people are ahead right now? Or will a company we've never heard of probably be the winner in the long run? Thanks.
58:48 David Pierce? So this question comes at a really funny time because I just had a long conversation with someone in the tech industry about more or less this question, the question of whether or not the AI industry is going to calcify, right? On the one hand, you have the fact that these things are vastly more expensive all the time to train. These models are super complicated, super humongous. You need a lot of Nvidia chips that are hard to get. Like, it is very, very hard to go from nothing to competitive in the AI world. On the other hand, it feels like it's moving faster than ever. AI is going from meaning one thing to meaning lots of things.
59:29 David Pierce? There are lots of companies with lots of resources that have not started playing this game in this kind of way. So it both feels like there are big players and like nothing has yet been decided. But to the question of first mover advantage, I have two thoughts on this. One is that I think pretty clearly there was some first mover advantage. When ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022, that changed the industry, right? Like, you really cannot overstate the extent to which There is a tech industry before the launch of ChatGPT and there is a tech industry after the launch of ChatGPT. Right or wrong, correct or incorrect, the thing that happened when ChatGPT came out and a hundred million people
1:00:10 David Pierce? used it and went, oh my God, this is the future, changed everything, right? And all of these companies had to scramble to keep up. Google basically completely changed its company around AI. Microsoft started spinning up lots of new things. It had some advantage just by virtue of its existing relationship with OpenAI. All these other companies that had been working on AI stuff kind of in the background as a research project over the years. Like AI is not a new thing, but AI as a consumer product is new. And ChatGPT, which I feel like I've said this a million times, but OpenAI did not understand the extent to which this is going to be a hit consumer product. So it was not ready for this either. But we've gotten to the point now where OpenAI is the biggest name in AI and it's not close.
1:00:55 David Pierce? I think you can have interesting arguments about who's tech is the best and who's best positioned and whatever. But OpenAI is a household name and that is because of ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a household name. GPT as a thing is a household name. People use that term like they do ATM. It's nuts. I hate that we've allowed this to happen, but here we are. We just use GPT in conversation. So I think to one extent, OpenAI bought itself a lot of time and a lot of reputation and a lot of runway by being first. It was also better than pretty much everything else that came out right after, both because it went first and because it was just better. OpenAI had very good tech. They've been working on this for a long time. ChatGPT was well ahead of everybody else.
1:01:38 David Pierce? I don't think that's that true anymore. It feels like for really the last, I don't know, year, but especially over the last six months, every couple of weeks, some company has released a new model that they claim is, you know, a step better than all of the other models, right? You have OpenAI doing it with all the GPTs. Anthropic is doing it with the various versions of Claude. Google is doing it with Gemini. Meta is doing it with Llama. There's this incredible arms race as these models get bigger, they get faster, they get more. Efficient, they get cheaper for developers to use, they get cheaper for the companies to run. So you, we have this incredible sort of leapfrogging game happening between all of these companies. On the one hand, that kind of negates the first mover advantage, right?
1:02:20 David Pierce? You can argue Anthropic was late to this game, but I think it's caught up in a really big way. I hear a lot of people talking about Claude, which is Anthropic's model, kind of its version of ChatGPT, being better and more fun to use and more useful than ChatGPT. And Gemini, I think because of the way that it's integrated with other Google services, has some huge advantages. What Microsoft is doing with Copilot, which is kind of associated with, but not the same as OpenAI's stuff, is also the same, right? So you have these companies that have other huge advantages, which is basically they can attach AI to their products that is going to make it easy for them to catch up.
1:02:58 David Pierce? The flip side is that as these models get bigger and as they get more complicated and as they get more impressive, the cost to build one just goes through the roof. Like, these things are so unbelievably expensive to train. Forget about running them and the cost every time somebody queries it and you have to actually process their information through this trained model. The cost of training these models is so, so, so high and not going to go down, right? The only way these things get better is if they get bigger and they do more. And for these kind of catch-all models, it's just going to be a few companies that can do it. I don't think that's that different from what we've seen before. I mean, think about like cloud resources, right? You have AWS, you have Microsoft Azure and you have Google Cloud.
1:03:42 David Pierce? Other companies can be in that game, but you have to have unbelievable amounts of resources to have the amount of computing power, just the number of data centers, the number of employees, what it takes to really operate a global cloud network just isn't available to most companies. And the same is going to be true with these like behemoth AI models. But if you believe, and I do believe, that AI is not ultimately going to just be about these behemoth, like do everything models, there's going to be lots of room for other people to get in, right? So one metaphor says AI is like cloud services and there are going to be a bunch of huge companies. Companies and then a bunch of little companies that do specific things, right? If you need ultra-secure cloud services, you might not use one of those big ones. You might use a small firm, but those are kind of niche things.
1:04:27 David Pierce? There's another version of it that is like the internet, right? And you have a bunch of big companies that do big things. Facebook is kind of all things to all people in the same way that maybe ChatGPT is. But there's also tons of smaller and different and more specific things. And if you think about AI in those terms, we're just at the very beginning of a huge culture shift that doesn't actually depend all that much on the models that companies like OpenAI are generating. As this stuff gets more open source, there's going to be more access for this stuff. I think we're starting to see some of these models get commoditized to the point where having the biggest newest model is only going to be useful for some things and that most people will be perfectly happy with the local models that are able to run faster and locally on your computer
1:05:11 David Pierce? or the simple models that can run on lower-end hardware that run on TVs and things like that. So what you're looking at, instead of a race to the top for these most impressive models, you're looking at just this kind of incredible splintering around the whole industry. And if that's what's going to happen, there won't be a first mover advantage in the same way that there wasn't a first mover advantage like being the first website on the internet. It's cool. It comes with some upsides. It might give you a lead, but the thing that there is out there is way too big for any one company to win anyway. I think it could go either way. And I think right now, if you're OpenAI, you have so much cachet and so much upside.
1:05:51 David Pierce? And the fact that Sam Altman is like the face of AI as a thing is really useful to OpenAI. And we'll keep propelling OpenAI at the top of this industry and getting media coverage and getting developer interest and all this stuff for a long time. But if AI is not just for companies giving you models that you can do everything on, but is actually as big as everybody says, it's too big for any one company to be in charge of. I know that's not really an answer. It's a little bit of both. There is a first mover advantage, but I think it's going to get away from everybody. And I also think it's too complicated for that. I hope that helps. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. Thank you to everybody, by the way, who has called and messaged and emailed with your
1:06:36 David Pierce? productivity systems after hearing the episode on Sunday. That has been super fun to see. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or an AI model to sell me, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. And like I said, buying advice. If you have buying thoughts, hit us up. We want to hear it all. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Por. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday with Alex and Eli to talk about who even knows, some gadgets, some AI news, Telegram. It's just a crazy week. We'll get into all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
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