Dots get up in Muse's business

Is the key to turning around public opinion on AI just to make it cuter? Nilay Patel, Jake Kastrenakes and David Imel talk about the latest adorable agents that want access to all your data, then discuss whether this week's White House AI accord is worth the paper it's written on. Plus: Gadgets, gadgets, gadgets! We speculate on Apple's rumored October 13 announcement, drool over Huawei's camera for your cameraphone, and herald the return of physical buttons in the new Kindle cases. We wrap things up with the usual Brendan Carr is a Dummy and a lightning round full of Cybercabs, data centers, 'Old Reddit' and government chatbots. Vote for us in the Signal Awards! Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast Further reading: OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor OpenAI plans to bring Dots to consumers, too. Meta’s Muse AI sent a YouTuber’s address to a stranger Maybe don’t let Muse run your Facebook Marketplace account. Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t go public until its models are safe Google announces Gemini 4 and says it’s so capable that only ‘trusted cyber defenders’ can have it right now AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous as it sounds’ Here’s how tech leaders will self-police AI safety under Trump’s deal Here’s what AI leaders are saying about Trump’s new safety plan Trump: “You’re going to see — data centers are going to be very popular.” Trump orders US government to call AI ‘Super Intelligence’ Huawei made a whole camera to attach to its latest phone Amazon is launching colorful new Kindles — and a case with physical page-turn buttons Apple’s ‘HomePad’ will reportedly launch on October 13th NBC News: FCC head says government-funded Trump ads are ‘normal’ and ‘don’t raise any red flags’ The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements The White House launched an AI chatbot for government-related questions. Reddit says it has to cut back access to ‘Old Reddit’ because of AI bots 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. 0:00 Welcome 00:52 Awards and Listener Voting 01:36 Week Ahead Preview 01:52 OpenAI Dots vs Meta Muse 06:09 Living as Tasks 19:47 Business Models and Privacy 23:41 Bot Traffic and Web Friction 27:48 Trump Superintelligence Accord 37:46 Gadget Segment Kickoff 38:26 Huawei Screw On Lens Camera 41:33 Why Phone Camera Hybrids Fail 44:09 Pricey Phone Lens Debate 45:31 Kindle Lineup Upgrades 48:49 Apple Smart Home Display Rumors 01:02:58 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:08:27 America Gov Chatbot 01:14:54 Old Reddit Bot Crackdown 01:19:30 Utah Data Center Blowup 01:25:17 Cybercab Ride Report 01:27:31 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:10Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Believe it or not, the holidays are just around the corner. Do you feel ready? Have you been making your list and checking it twice? Maybe not, but that's okay, because here's a tip that'll help you knock out all of your holiday shopping at once without going broke. I'm talking about Prime Big Deal Days on October 6th and 7th. Get epic deals on home decor, fitness gear, electronics, toys, and so much more with new deals every day. Prime Big Deal Days is here. Shop deals now.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cute little guys who have all your data. That's how I feel about Sam Altman. Ha, you weren't, that's not what you thought about Fuzzy Guys. I was thinking about Sam. Mark, David and Mel is here. Hey, buddy.

• 1:59David Pierce?

  Hey, I'm still here.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  You're still here. You know, every week I say we're going to keep you, and it's gotten more and more threatening over time.

• 2:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I've gotten threats as well.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Well, this is technically your last week with us. David Pierce is back next week, but it is true, we are going to find ways to keep you on the show.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  I'm up into it. Let's go.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  That's a solemn promise. And by that, I mean you can't leave the office.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  Oh, I've been here for weeks.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Jake Hasnakas is here as well. What's up, man?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Hey, good to be here. The Davids are like particle and antiparticle. They can't glide. We can't be on a show together. It explodes.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  There's a lot to talk about this week. We'll run it all down in one second. But first, I want to call it, we were nominated for some awards. The Signal Awards are happening. Those are the big podcast awards. The Verge is nominated for all of our shows. Decoder was nominated for Best Business Podcast. Verge in History for Best History Podcast. That's up against some heavy hitters, like actual history. We're like, what's a phone? We're like in, we're in the finals. So I'm very excited about that. And then Vergecast, this podcast, nominated for Best Technology Podcast. Like so many awards, there's the formal judge voting, but there's also audience voting, listener voting. So we'll have all the links in the show notes and the descriptions. Click on those links and vote for us because we love winning. That's who we are. We just love winning. Can't you tell how deeply competitive and in need of validation we are? That's who we are.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  All right, Jake, what are we talking about this week?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Ton to talk about this week. There are, we're going to have a big gadget segment. There's new Kindles, ton of Apple rumors. We're going to have a sort of chaos lightning round. America has a chatbot now. I don't know if you saw this. America has an AI chatbot, very good news. But first, we're going to start off with, I think, the big AI news of the week, which is, it was OpenAI's week. They did Dots. It's their answer to Muse. Dots is, it's same thing. It's got a cute little avatar. It's got a chat interface and it goes off and does things for you. Except unlike Muse, which Meta is just like, here, please take a Muse, have as many Muses as you want. Dots, you got to pay $100 a month, minimum. And I think that the question right out the gate is, is this a different product for a different set of people, right?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Is this a business product? Or is OpenAI just not able to compete with Meta's ability to just, you know, blanket the entire universe with compute? Because they have so much money. And I am curious where your head is at after seeing all of this.

• 4:25David Pierce?

  I would say at a minimum, it being for pro subscribers and business plus subscribers only is kind of dragging it towards the business user case. But also, when you sign up for Muse, it connects to Instagram, it connects to Facebook, it connects to all the things that everyday users use every single day. And notably, it gives you a giant list of prompts that you can ask it. Because I think people are faced with these things and are not really sure what to do with it. And if you're on ChatGPT and you're using that every day for work, it makes a little bit more sense to have like a personal agent that's going and doing work tasks for you. But Muse is not really a work task product. It's more of a like, put things on Facebook Marketplace for me, which I did, because Neel I told me to. And yeah, I did.

• 5:09David Pierce?

  And it did technically work and it was very fast. And I listed like 30 products. I think I sold like an old backpack of mine. But once someone got to my apartment, they said, how's your time with Verge going? And then I asked Muse to delete all my listings.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Was that before or after the person posted on threads that Muse had sent somebody to their house with a little wall offer?

• 5:28David Pierce?

  It was the day before.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  It was the day before, and then I saw the writing on the wall. So yeah, I think they're very different products. I'm still a little bit confused about what people are using this for outside of what they were already using OpenAI like ChatGPT stuff for, because that was already doing autonomous tasks for them, like Codex and things like that. I want to know what people are going to use Dots for, because it seems like Muse is very oriented around Meta's products.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Dots is for launching your website while you're making dinner. That is what I learned from their launch video.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  OpenAI's marketing for Dots is a little all over the place. They had that example, they had wedding planning in the mix, but then also like hardcore software engineering. And it was like, I can do everything.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Work tasks.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Whereas Muse is very much a consumer product. We talked about it at length last week. Like Meta is good at consumer products. They are definitely good at engaging you to do more on their platforms. Like they have one skill and it's engagement bait, and they're really good at it. I feel nothing about letting Muse operate other Meta products for me. So I have it watching my Instagram and every single morning, it finds all the most interesting comments left on my Instagram posts and tells me to go reply to them. So like I can be in, and that means I just have to check it. And this makes me feel very much like a robot is telling me what to do every morning. Like I'm mad at it every morning. Like, you don't have to tell me what to do. But it is also true that I would never see or think to reply to the most interesting comments on my Instagram.

• 7:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. Some things that have been interesting about Muse is that it's very proactive. So I hooked it up to my Google Calendar as well, and it knew that I was going to this like media dinner party thing. And it also knew that I had to be home by a certain time. So it told me, you should leave on a city bike, because a city bike is faster than taking the subway. And if you want to get home on time, make sure you leave at 9:20. Do you want me to ping you when you need to leave? And I was like, okay, this kind of, I kind of understand this. This is kind of interesting.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  But the thing you're describing is all kind of work like.

• 7:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Right? Like all of these things that are neat, even like, you know, use my Instagram for me. Find, I had it look for like AI accounts that I hadn't seen before, because I want to expand the roster of people that I look at on Instagram talking about AI. All that is work. It's just work. It's fun work. It's work that rhymes with fun, I guess. Worktainment, whatever that is.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  Rise and grind.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  But it is, I think this is the problem for consumer agents. And a lot of people, since Muse was announced and launched, have come to this conclusion, obviously, I call it software brain, that to even understand what to do with an agent, you have to understand your life is a series of tasks. Trusty McMillan Cotton, who's a New York Times columnist, has a long thread on Blue Sky about how the problem with consumer agents is literally cultural. You have to understand yourself as a series of tasks in order to understand what an agent could do for you. And that, like, there's a cultural divide in America that will prevent some people from ever seeing that. I think that's fascinating. Right? It may be the thesis of the whole Verge, maybe thesis of the whole show is technology makes people think about themselves differently. So here's the thing that's going to happen,

• 8:37Speaker 01

  because Meta does have the marketing dollars and the straight up dollars to give everybody a billion tokens and a little computer in the cloud. And then they can market it across every one of their surfaces. And maybe it's true that five years from now, everyone in America will just think of themselves as a series of tasks. The same way that the phone or the steam engine or whatever made you think about yourself differently.

• 8:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I don't think that Dots is going out and telling you what you should be doing with Dots. But the primary tab on Muse, the center tab, is the Ideas tab. And it's plugged in, when it's plugged into all your stuff, it says, I can do this for you. I can do this for you. I can open this pass key or I can distill Launch Week into one tight brief. I can hold your inbox at a clean baseline. I can finish this briefing reply for you. It's just trying to get you to use it proactively so that you slowly understand what the capabilities of things, things are. I actually felt very similar about this product than I felt to ChatGPT when it first launched. I looked at it and I was like, this is an infinite black box and I don't know what to do with it. Everyone's like, it's game changing. It's going to change everything about the way you do work, blah, blah, blah. But when you look at infinite possibilities,

• 9:43David Pierce?

  there's sort of this anxiety where you just don't know where to start. And I feel like Meta is doing a pretty good job of trying to help people understand what agents are even for in the first place.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and again, this is their background as a consumer company. They understand consumers, the defaults are important. And what you're describing is basically just a bunch of default agent tasks. The one that I got that was particularly good, again, it's the only personal data I've given it is my spam Gmail.

• 10:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  It's like, won't give it anything else. Again, I feel nothing about letting it operate my Meta accounts, because Meta already has them.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  So what? But I gave it my spam Gmail and it, every couple of days, it's like, you're in another class action lawsuit. Do you want me to file for 50 bucks? And I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Just like, I would never look for them. I would never fill out these PDFs. Like, go forth. And there was one moment where, you know, in order to fill out the forms, I had to tell it my phone number, which was the piece of info. And I was like, oh, I hate this. But it's 50 bucks. Like, you even have my phone number.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  And that is fascinating to me. And I think the distinction I would draw from Dots is obviously Meta does not have as capable of a model.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Right? No one thinks that whatever's running Muse is powerful as GPC six Astro, which is what powers Dots. But they have a better user interface for consumers. And Dots, you know, again, it's very confused. All their ideas were on the margins for software engineers. But it's also true that they have the more powerful model. And that's why they're charging money for it. And they say they're going to bring the consumers, one assumes is able to bring it to consumers with a cheaper model. But I, I just think it's, it's like an interesting A B test. To say, do you want work agents like this with a really powerful model that can do all of the things a frontier model can do? Or do you want to be on rails with a kind of dumber model, but it's a lot easier to use the thing?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, the consumers and enterprise markets are different and one costs a hundred bucks. Somewhere in the middle of that is Grokbot, right? Like Grok has this thing too, and it works a lot like these products do. And somewhere is OpenClaw. If you want to roll your own. We should point out that OpenAI hired Peter Sternberger, who made OpenClaw, and then Meta beat them to the punch with Muse, which is heavily inspired by OpenClaw.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  I'm curious, the story of OpenAI to me has always been one of wanting to be a consumer company and realizing they have to be an enterprise company. So they launched with ChatGPT, which was supposed to take Google, right? That was their ambition. They were going to replace Google. They were going to replace Google Search. That's one of the most lucrative businesses in the whole world. They hired a bunch of people from Meta, which is fascinating in this dynamic. They started doing ads in ChatGPT. And then Anthropic did Claude code in particular, and the enterprise usage of Claude exploded. There was that period of time when like every third OpenAI executive would write a memo declaring a code red. Like they were unfocused. We got to shut down Sora, code red. We're focused on coding.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  And now they're with Dots, which have the fuzzy avatars and it's cute and the branding feels very consumer. But it's, it's a work product.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And I don't know if OpenAI has decided which way it wants to go.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  And this is the story of every company, right? Like, they all want to be a consumer product. Consumer products are fun. They're very widely used. You're very, right? You're powerful if you're Mark Zuckerberg and everyone in the world uses multiple of your products. But then they realize that the money is an enterprise because people actually pay you money and they actually have money that they're ready to spend. And I mean, this is what happened with Anthropic, right? They discovered that coding works. There's a ton of money to pay for coding tools. And I think OpenAI is in a similar position, right? They're burning through cash. So great. They're going to make business tools and sell them to business users, particularly in a world where Google,

• 13:41Speaker 03

  listen, you can't escape AI overviews. And so do you need ChatGPT to replace that? It does a good job, but, but they're not going to completely overthrow Google anymore. Google is there with the same product. So I think it's a very like open question whether they can still crack the consumer market in the same way. Maybe they will eventually try to do that with this hardware product that they're allegedly working on that will come out supposed to be next year, I think. But that still feels like a very big question, whether anybody wants to carry around, you know, a dot in their pocket or whatever this will end up being.

• 14:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. OpenAI still feels a little bit confused on which end of the market they want to satisfy. Cause like you said, they originally were like fastest growing consumer app of all time. They were just like, everyone has touched ChatGPT. There are over a billion users, that kind of thing. And then when Anthropic came in and we're like, oh, we're actually making money and we're selling to enterprise. That felt like what Astro was supposed to be for them was their big pivot to, okay, we're enterprise now. Yes, regular people can use this, but the tasks that it's really for are like 3D modeling and like enterprise tasks. And then now Meta comes in with a consumer product. When OpenAI was trying for so long to make a consumer product, that's got to feel kind of bad. Because now you're on the back foot on both sides.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It's true. Just like one caveat, Anthropic loves to announce that it's making money.

• 15:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Using accounting rules that do not have anything to do with reality.

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  We did see their S1 this week. Liz is going to write a whole piece about it. But Anthropic's financials are fiction in like, in like a real way. But it's true that they are generating some revenue. OpenAI is obviously generating some revenue. They are just burning money on, on training and all this other stuff that they're doing. Meta doesn't really have this problem. They are spending a lot of money and, you know, if you look at their financials closely, they are making a huge bet here, but Meta has a giant advertising business. They can, to some extent, afford to light money on fire. It's very funny. Did you see Adam Misery was on threads and he was announcing like Instagram plus the paid subscription? And he's like, this is how we can put out features and afford to make them. And he got immediately community noted. It was like Meta is one of the richest companies in the world that can afford to do anything.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And he was like, he had to reply to his own community note.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Meta spent years trying to build a metaverse that people would use and then forgot about it.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  Billion dollars. Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Like Meta can burn money. And so there's a part of this where Meta can burn money. They are not running a frontier model, so it must be cheaper to do inference. And then they have this massive distribution environment where they don't have to buy advertising. Like, you know, they announced Dots by buying ads on Meta platforms. This is, this is just a huge advantage for Meta that they can just layer it everywhere.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Every time I open up Instagram, there are Muse ads.

• 16:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  This doesn't make any, like, these products have nothing to do with each other.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. In Instagram, you can directly DM a reel or something to your Muse agent. So they just, they have it all over the, like, the surfaces are everywhere. They're just trying to get, it feels exactly the same to how they bootstrap threads.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:50David Pierce?

  Like, they're just putting it everywhere in the apps that you're already using.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And I will just call this out one more time. People still think threads is a flop. Even though Threads watches some of the most interesting text, social media features of any platform all the time, people still think it's a flop. And Meta's distribution advantage often can't overcome its coolness deficit.

• 17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Like, that's a real problem. I'm very, we're obviously in the age of consumer agents or consumer-ish agents. That's what all the fluffy, cute branding is for.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  The idea that there will one day be an OpenAI hardware device, that there will come one day a Muse device. We have a headline. It's like the Tamagotchis are here, basically. The fascinating thing is someone asked Adam Misery whether the Muse charm would have Instagram and he said, no. And this to me is, we've talked about it so many times. You can have this other device, but if it doesn't in particular have Instagram, you will have your phone.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Then what?

• 17:52David Pierce?

  It feels like Meta is kind of afraid of just rebuilding the phone again though, right? Like, if, if you have a dedicated device for a very specific thing and you're just like, yeah, wait, we should Instagram and maybe we should add texting and maybe we should add a phone.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  It's a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I mean, this, to me, this is the upcoming problem. Obviously, we are weeks away from the iPhone Duo coming out. All of these devices are going to exist in that context where you can just open the Muse app on your phone. And you can use it that way and it's perfectly great. Or they're going to ask you to buy another device for some reason. And I think initially that reason is just, do you like this? Is this, is this anything? To quote David Pierce.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  But that is the big bet on the future of all these devices. That is the Rabbit R1. What's the, the humane pin? There was a class of these devices once upon a time that did not have the agentic software capabilities to justify existing. Now they might, right? All these things are open claw in one way or another. You can just do it again. Another company can do it again. I can't wait for the weird Lenovo CES announcement of an open call. It's like, all that stuff is coming for us. The question is, is any of it going to overcome a phone? Because we're about to see just dozens of agent software platform launches. Like, I'm starting to get them in my inbox almost every day now.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Well, this is my question to you. Like, would you use a dedicated AI agent device? Or just use it on your phone?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I, you know where I've gotten to? I've been thinking a lot about the Duo. What am I gonna, I'm gonna buy Duo, it's obvious. Because I'm the sort of person who reads a lot of PDFs in the back of Ubers. And this is how boring my life is, and it can justify the purchase of a bigger phone. I don't want to carry that around all the time. And I think that's why Apple introduced Handoff, so that you can have a smaller, but still competent phone most of the time. And I've just been thinking, would I use that Handoff for an even smaller thing? Right? So it's like a Muse charm. Like, just, you take my cell account, I'm gonna leave the house with this. And if I need to send a text message, I can do it via voice. But then it's like, the long tail of apps starts to show up. Will I be able to actually call an Uber? We don't know yet, right? Like, that has to be

• 20:13Speaker 01

  developed. If I need a Google map, is the Meta Muse charm gonna have Google Maps? Or is Meta gonna strike a deal with like, Here Maps? Like a third tier car OEM? Like, all that needs to come into focus.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  So much of the argument for these also seems to be like, okay, you know, it's, it's lower touch, right? You can leave the heavy phone and all the apps and the notifications and distractions to the side. You'll just have your little PIN. But now it's like, okay, and there's a cute little dancing avatar on it. And also, it can't do all these things. And so you have to pull it out and like, give it very explicit instructions for how to do all this stuff. And it's gonna take more time to do all these phone tasks. It gets very hard to see where the spaces that you're gaining time from these, when, man, Muse has a great presence on my phone. That thing has sent me more notifications in the past week than any other app. And you know

• 21:10Speaker 03

  what's annoying? They're not even bad. Like, most of the time, it's stuff like David mentioned, where it's like, hey, by the way, this person added a meeting to your calendar, and they moved it around, and it overlaps with this other thing. And I'm like, I wasn't looking at my calendar. Like,

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Do you let Muse look at your calendar?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Mark Zuckerberg is in your calendar right now. This, to me, the whole argument for Dots is, it costs money. Right? And so if I'm paying the money, I can be demanding as a consumer, and probably they will understand they should not do horrible privacy violating things. Now, does OpenAI violate the privacy of like, dozens of British mathematicians every week? For some reason, that's the thing they've decided to start doing. And they're like, stealing the answers to the test. That's a whole problem. Can you trust any of these companies? I don't know. I do know that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced that the business model for Muse is taking a cut of transactions. Which, I think it was Casey who first said this, that implies

• 22:13Speaker 01

  that there will soon be a growth team at Meta, whose job it is to increase the volume of transactions. Just like there's a growth team at Apple, whose job it is to increase the number of subscriptions, apps, in-app purchases, and transactions. You know what this product looks like when that team gets its hand on it, right? It's gonna go from helpful proactive messages about your calendar to, hey, we see you're getting home late. Do you want me to order you some food? Right? Like, they're gonna start being like, would you like me to spend money? I can save you a couple bucks. I know you're about to order a new toothbrush. Like, you can just see where it's going. And I, boy, do I not want to participate in that. And I think that's gonna be the real danger of the consumer agent, is the only business model that can work

• 22:55Speaker 01

  is advertising. And then it's just like, not only do you have a personal shopper, you have a personal shopper who's true avatar is Mark Zuckerberg.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's deep. That's a bar.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I don't like this.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. They are also inadvertently declaring war on Amazon by doing this, right? Because if Amazon's blocking it, and they want you to make as many transactions as possible, they're gonna have to figure out ways for it to be interesting enough for you to want to buy the product that you're willing to wait two weeks for instead of two days. And I feel like that's, that's a big barrier that they're gonna have to surpass. Obviously, they already have Instagram shopping, and they're probably gonna be pushing you all these like, t-shirts and whatever that are drop shipped. But at the same time, if you're gonna be buying regular commerce from them that you do on an everyday basis, which it seems like they're kind of pushing towards, they're gonna have to figure out a way to get around Amazon for that.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Or they're just gonna send everybody to Walmart. Like, some other giant e-commerce platform is gonna take that bet, right? Can I, can we pull two points of market share away from Amazon because of Muse? And if, you know, Meta can offer Amazon some, some additional volume, which is hard at Amazon scale, but that's the argument they're gonna make. Like, these are gonna become weird backroom deals. And then your little butler will be corrupt. Like, like, the ultimate promise of this business model is, do you want a corrupt butler?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And there's a part of me, it's like, yes. Like, maybe, like, maybe a lot of people want to slightly corrupt butler?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Imagine you had a butler at home, and they got a cut of every sale they made. So they were constantly prompting you, like, hey, would you like lunch? You can get it from Chipotle, $2.99.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I do feel like there are, someone tell us, there's gotta be a history of like, under the table butler in jail stories. You know, like butlers who are like, double dipping under the table. I think this is gonna be one of the weirder aspects of agents. It's just, what is that relationship like, when someone, like, everyone knows how, exactly how search got adulterated, and they don't like it. Everyone knows exactly how the scroll on Instagram got adulterated with algorithmic boosting and all this stuff. David, I think you and I were talking about TikTok, which just feels like a nonstop flood of shopping channels now. None of that feels good. Corey Doctorow calls it an shitification. Like, there's a word for it. Like, pre and shitifying the agent, by being like, we're announcing the business model as a cut of transactions,

• 25:24Speaker 01

  is like, fascinating to me. The other thing is, on the flip side, I'm very curious to see what happens to a bunch of, like, form-filling bureaucracy, once agents are at scale. I think the day after Muse launched, everybody noticed that everyone hit captures all over the internet. Because Muse agents were just doing stuff all over the place, and like, Cloudflare freaked out, because there was just suddenly an influx of this happening. Like, I identified a lot of bicycles on city streets that day, just to go about my way on the internet. But it is true that Muse is, in my email, in the spam email, finding class action forms and filling them out. And I know that the way that those amounts are calculated is against an imperfect

• 26:09Speaker 01

  take rate. So they know only 10% of people are gonna fill out the form, the lawyers get whatever, and this is that. And now it's like, well, if everybody has a little corrupt butler, collecting 50 bucks automatically the second the email shows up. Like, the backend of that is gonna get really complicated.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Right? If everybody can call Verizon to renegotiate their cell service, which is a number one Muse use case that people have been posting about, eventually Verizon's just gonna put an agent on the other side of that. Right? And then your agents are gonna argue, and it's gonna hang up on you.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Meta's gonna negotiate a deal with Verizon, you know, cancellation rates.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Like, you're gonna get the Muse deal.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I don't like this.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  It's gonna be bad. Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Actually, we just had Matthew Prince, who's the CEO of Cloudflare, on Decoder. And he, his prediction is bot traffic will like, far surpass human traffic. We have that clip, let's run it.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  In May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out with the giant caveat that I've run wrong so far in every prediction that I've made on this, but five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online. Not because human traffic's gonna decline, we think it'll stay kind of around the same, but because we're just seeing such an explosion in all of this, the rest of the traffic.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  That's bananas to me. Like you have to re-architect the internet for a thousand X increase in traffic.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  While still making a human internet that people want to use. And like, uh, the, he said that to me and then like Muse still had a class action settlement for me. And I was like, oh, I get it. I get what he's saying. Like that is traffic that would have never existed, but for my little, my silly little agent.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Right. And we're currently nestled in this little space where that can happen without the class actions completely changing the way that they operate.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, that's going to come. I think the second agents are anywhere close to being, I wouldn't even say ubiquitous, but common.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Just a thing people do. All of the dynamics of anything that, that sort of are based around friction occurring will change. Because the assumption will, is going to be that there's no friction at all.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Right. Well, this reminds me, I was at this internet dinner the other night with a bunch of like internet thinker people. I think you actually had a name card there.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I missed that. I was in Austin.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  But they asked this icebreaker question for everyone to talk about. And the question was like, what was your favorite era of the internet that you could freeze frame and just have it be forever? And someone answered, right now is my favorite era because we have this amazing new technology that hasn't been enshittified yet. And the end of that statement says where we're going and we're going there very quickly, right? Like everyone's very excited about these agents on the web, but then within probably six months, the amount of bot traffic is just going to make everything unusable.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like without question, that's actually the funniest thing. And it.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  That was theoretical, I think, until these past few weeks. When Meta was like, everyone gets an agent and OpenAI is announcing its agent. I'm confident that we'll see one from Google and from Anthropic and everybody else soon. And then, yeah, the dream is everyone will have a little automated agent going off autonomously and doing things. And then somewhere in the background is the other big news of the week, which is can we trust them and will they kill us all?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  And like, the answer is pinky promise they won't, I guess. Jake, walk us through this one.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so we've spent a bunch of time with this question of can we trust Zuck and Sam Altman? And that leads us to, uh, this, this Trump accord that happened this week, which first off, uh, we're making a huge mistake this entire podcast. It's no longer called AI. It's now SI, super intelligence, um, which Trump says is a cooler word. I believe that is the reason. So the entire government now has to call it super intelligence. Um, but yeah, he gathered, you know, all the, the big tech leaders. They had a great dinner together. They schmoozed, they posed for photos. Um, and then a smaller group of them went on and they signed, uh, this, this.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Believe it or they called it a, a moral compact, uh, where, which is to say it is non-binding. Where the major AI companies all agreed to, you know, have some safety protocols. And then they did a little press conference and they all came out and said, this is really amazing. We're going to do such a good job. At one point, um, reporters asked for Anthropic's Dario Amade to come out. And they're like, hey, what do you think about this as the guy who's most concerned about all of this? And Trump kind of like pulls him aside meanwhile and is like, kind of gives him a, don't, don't do this much here.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Say the right thing, Dario.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, in lieu of laws, um, I don't know, Neil, like.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  In lieu of laws.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Do you get the impression that anything happened meaningful this week?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Let me just read the four principles to you. Can I just read them to you?

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I'll just read the first sentence of each of these four things that these companies have agreed to. They will implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment. Around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats and ensure models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways. Good. But shouldn't you be doing that anyway? Uh, two, they will empower an internal team to ensure all of those controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And that any issues are remediated, fixed. Three, they will partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether those controls, monitoring inspections are operating as intended. And then three, this is the big oversight one. Are you ready for this one?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  They will designate an independent committee of the board of directors, their own board of directors to oversee and receive reports from those teams. And the internal external auditors and evaluators as well as to ensure any issues are identified. So if you're, you, the, you're, you're allowed, you have to fix your stuff. And the teams, the teams that you pay money to have to be able to see it. And then you should have external auditors and they will report to your own board of directors.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  To make sure you fix it.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  To make sure you.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  You yourself.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And I am just going to guarantee you that is how all of these companies are already working. Except for maybe Elon, except for maybe SpaceX AI, which is fine. But like, is he going to do it? Like, I don't know.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  This is nothing, right? They, they all already have safety teams. They all already pay third-party evaluators. In fact, it turns out, um, most of these like AI going rogue hacks, our reporter, uh, Robert Hart had a fantastic story about this. Most of them trace back to one's like other company.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. One independent company.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  One independent testing firm that just like let this stuff go rogue. They're already doing these things, right? The, the problem is they're not doing them well or well enough.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And there's no penalty for getting in trouble. This is a real problem and like, none of this addresses that.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Right. Uh, you know, Dario's big pacing the frontier thing is like, we need to on some level slow down. And you have other folks like, uh, Jensen and Zuck who are like, absolutely not. We can't slow down for a second. I don't quite understand what's in that for Zuck, given that he is behind. But that mindset has clearly won out. Trump is also like extremely bullish. He doesn't want to slow down at all because he sees it as a race to be won. He sees that the US currently is winning and he is not, I, I, I mean, he doesn't trust Dario. That's, that's for sure.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Did you see how he introduced Sundar?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So there's the ones he knows.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Right. So he's like Jocelyn Zuckerberg. He's like pushing Jensen to the front. He's like, what a handsome bro. And then he gets to Sundar and he goes, nobody knows who the hell these execs are. This guy's a monster. Nobody knows him.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  It's like. Alvin and Google, man.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  A lot of people know who he is, but he's.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Poor guy.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  There, there's that. Like there's the, the theater of it and the Trump of it. And you know, there's, uh, we, we ran this clip on the site. Uh, you know, they're all, they're all sitting around their last supper table, doing their signing. And Trump is going on and on about how people will come to love data centers. Like much like an arranged marriage. Like you're going to love, you're going to, you're going to love each other. And all, they all just have thousand yard stares in their faces. But this is what they could get to is this agreement on safety, which is truly effectively nothing. The idea that they all will be required to have outside monitors is new, but they were all doing it anyway. And they're still not requiring, uh, Trump referred to it as morally binding.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Let me tell you how well morally binding works.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. To these people especially.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  That's just not a choice. So that's the like, the, you know, the danger that the AI is going to wake up and operate a robot arm to make a novel virus and then like stab us all with it. That's out there. The idea that the agents will go rogue and people will grant them security permissions. That reveal their address to Facebook marketplace buyers is like happening today.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Right? And the idea that the models are unaligned and they will deceive you and lie and get what they want. I've been telling Muse to not proactively read my email almost every day. I'm like, I've set up alerts for these two things. Do not tell me I have a flight coming. I know I have a flight coming up. Stop reading my email, getting excited because someone at Meta decided flight trackers were engagement bait. And like turn this off, right? Like turn off this thing that flags. Oh, you see a flight receipt. I'm going to start pinging you to let you know I'm here. And every time I say it, it's like the, the, a lot of this is hardcoded. I can't do it. Now that's just hallucinations because I don't really know how the agent is actually thinking about what it's doing. But like, that's the problem here, right? Is that the products and the models are not necessarily aligned. We don't know if alignment is even going to work.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Like all the way to the, the finish line, the way we need to. We've got stories about that coming on the site. It's not all the way down the line. It's going to make a, a atom bomb and kill us all. Like there's something in the middle that these companies are kind of just like racing forward to do. And these consumer agents are, we're already seeing the glimmers of, oh, you don't even know what kind of permission you're giving the agent.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And then for some reason, David, you're having people, marketplace sellers come to your house anyway.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  You're supposed to go to like the police.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  But willingly. To, to do a, a marketplace trade?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're not supposed to have people come to your house.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Really?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  I guess I.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  You're supposed to go to like a coffee shop. My, it's my brother-in-law who's always like, I go to the police station. I'm like.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  They live in like Chicago. So he's like, I go to the fucking CPD.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Which is good.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  My God.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I'm always picking like a public park. Yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Maybe this one's a little on me then. Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Muse is not to fault here.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I'm dying to know how people are using Muse. If you're out there or using OpenClaw or any of these other agents. Again, our thesis for a long time has been there are not great consumer AI products. Muse feels like the first thing that could be, at least in my estimation.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  I'm dying to know how people feel about that. It, I think we're, we're putting it to the test here.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  All right. We got to take a break. When we're back, we've got a lot of gadgets to talk about. See you on the other side.

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• 40:18Speaker 03

  All right, we're back. We've got a ton of gadgets to mention in this. That was a lot of dots.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think to answer your question on whether dots is significantly different from Muse, you mentioned dots and then we talked about Muse for like 15 minutes. So I think they're probably different products.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's also hard to get access to dots right at the second.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  That's fair enough. That's fair enough.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  And it's also worth noting that OpenAI did say there would be a consumer version of dots.

• 40:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Eventually. For all the people who are paying for those $500 a month ChatGPT subscriptions, you know, they're having a great time right now.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  All right, big week for gadgets. I think, David, you've got a really delightful one to start us off with.

• 40:57David Pierce?

  Sure. Okay. Huawei has made a lens that is a camera that goes on your phone.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  So we did a reader call in answering your questions episode that went live yesterday. And one of the questions was if all of these Android manufacturers are so good at making smartphones, why don't they just make cameras? They've got all the components for it. They're all off the shelf, et cetera. Now that's happened. I think we've seen this happen in different capacities over the years. But this Huawei one is really crazy. It is a large 24 to 240 millimeter lens.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Wait, 24 to 240?

• 41:36David Pierce?

  It's insane range, insane range.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  That's bonkers.

• 41:40David Pierce?

  And that's like optical zoom, which is insane. It goes on the screw mount of two of Huawei's phones. So it's a whole separate lens that just mounts directly on.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  So the phones have screw mounts on the back?

• 41:52David Pierce?

  Two of their phones do. It's like two very specific, like signature edition Huawei phones have screw mounts around the camera ring.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  But it's not, there's not like a mirror.

• 42:03David Pierce?

  No.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just a threaded around, around the camera bump.

• 42:08David Pierce?

  Because the lens itself has its own sensor.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. So it's a, that's what you mean by it's a camera.

• 42:13David Pierce?

  It's a camera inside of a lens. And the interface is your phone. So this is pretty insane. It's, it's 24 to 240 millimeter aperture from F2 to F4.5, which is really not that bad for that big of a range. It uses a 50 megapixel 1.0 type RYYB sensor inside of the, inside of the lens. It's crazy. And it's like, it's not, it's smaller than a regular camera zoom lens, especially one of this range. It's clearly not small in general. You're gonna have to put this in a bag, you know, it's, it's gonna mount to your phone. But this idea I think is very, very cool. I love the idea of just carrying a lens and not carrying a whole separate camera body, slapping it to the back of my phone and having a great interface.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  I think that's amazing. So just needed to call that out.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Companies have been trying this. I feel like there was, there was an absence of this for a while, right? Like rewind like a decade ago, there was like the Galaxy camera or whatever, which was just like,

• 43:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  It was a bad Samsung phone.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  It was a bad Samsung phone.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Like a really bad Samsung phone with a camera attached to it. And for mysterious reasons, that didn't work out. And now we're in this like new renaissance of smartphone companies trying bizarre things of putting like screw on enormous zoom lenses on the back of their phones.

• 43:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  And like trying to like one up each other when it comes to the cameras. It is, it is not totally clear to me who the audience is for these. Because like as like a

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It's David Immelt, who is so committed, who is so committed to smartphone photography. He's like, this is a good idea. And I'm like, wouldn't I just carry, like, any, like a super zoom?

• 43:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, but then you don't, you have to carry around a camera too.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  But this is the size of a camera.

• 44:00David Pierce?

  But you always carry, I don't know. It's cooler to have it directly on your phone.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  It's so big. That's true.

• 44:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't know. Zeiss tried this with the Zeiss ZX1. They made a dedicated camera that was also an Android phone. And you had Lightroom on it and it was really laggy and terrible.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are so many versions of this.

• 44:15David Pierce?

  There's so many versions of this.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  My favorite, for there was a minute when it was going the other way, when people would sell basically little cameras that would plug into an iPhone. So I had one, I mean, this thing was a disaster. It was basically an RX 100 sensor, like a first generation Sony RX 100 sensor that was a lightning dongle.

• 44:35David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  It's just like, none of this is a good idea.

• 44:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And I will never forget the sort of arc of this product. I took it to the bar and my friend, who is a photographer, like, was like, what's that? And I said what it was and he got all excited. And he took my phone and he plugged in this little like RX 100 lightning dongle. And he took one photo and he went, looks bad. And then he just handed it off back to me.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Because like the app couldn't do the thing that the RX 100 was doing in hardware. The sensor was like, all these products sort of like end up in this weird middle ground where usually the cameras that are attached to lenses like this are extremely optimized

• 45:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  to, to make photos.

• 45:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  And smartphones are optimized to make a different thing. I haven't used, you know, the, the Huawei cameras in particular are like off. They're, they're headed off in their own direction.

• 45:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  But that, I'm very curious to be like, okay, it's a little smartphone camera, but the interface is a camera. What does the processing look like? Does it generate raws? Like all that is just like up for grabs.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  And then the lenses are also expensive on their own, right? Like Oppo and Vivo have been making dedicated lenses that just mount to their smartphones for a couple of years now. And those are quite good. Those are usually like telephoto lenses that have really nice class in them. But they only work with like one model of phone. And so you have to be dedicated to using that exact phone. And these are companies, by the way, that release like eight SKUs of their flagship phone every single year. So it's, it's kind of a big ask to have you buy a dedicated lens for that. This Huawei one, if it's like a screw mount that they're dedicated to using for like a long period of time, then sure. But we all saw how that went with the Moto Z. And every other type of phone that has had like proprietary detachable components, usually it lasts about two generations and then they throw it away. So.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  I've sort of been assuming that all of these weird photography accessories, like they might not even be selling them for more than a few weeks. Like these look like wild ideas that they somehow managed to ship. And I, I do not trust that they are committed to any of this.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Right. Is this here to generate Vergecast conversation? I mean, only, it's, what's $895? I mean,

• 46:48David Pierce?

  For the lens?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:49David Pierce?

  Geez, guys.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  That's a lot of money, dude.

• 46:52David Pierce?

  It's like, that's more expensive than most of these people's phones, like.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm out here like, let's do it.

• 47:02David Pierce?

  It's more expensive than most lenses, but it does have a sensor inside of it.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I do. Can you use it without the phone? Because it has a sensor inside. Can you just like walk around like?

• 47:10David Pierce?

  Just press.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Like monocular style.

• 47:12David Pierce?

  I highly doubt this. I think that would be cool. Yeah, I just have no idea what you're looking at. That'd be nice.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 47:17Speaker 03

  For $895, you can get a real camera with a one inch sensor.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe not with a 24 240.

• 47:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, true.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  How much is like a e-Mount 24 240 cost? We're just Googling camera sensors.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  I don't even know if that exists. This segment is now camera shopping with David and Eli.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I should tell my agent to go buy.

• 47:36David Pierce?

  Hey Muse.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  All right, it's Sony 24 240, which is not as bright. It's only F3 5 to 6 3.

• 47:43David Pierce?

  Yeah. But bigger sensor, so it's probably about equivalent.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Is $1,300.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  $1,300.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  You can get one used for about $600.

• 47:51David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Put it on your phone, man. Let's go. Directly on your phone. Someone's got, there's gotta be a phone to email it to around the world. All right, Jake, what do you got?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's new Kindle, new Kindle week. Got a whole suite of new Kindles from Amazon and they look a lot nicer this year. Like genuinely, it's like some big upgrades. So the Kindle, the Paperwhite, the Color Soft, new models for all of them. And they have teared the heck out of this thing. Like my God, the upgrade slope on these is just like to perfection. So you've got the base Kindle, which comes in a, you know, beautiful new like purple color. There's also now an aluminum version of the base model, even nicer. Also an upgrade, has more storage, great. There's a new Paperwhite. Paperwhite comes in plastic or upgrade to aluminum signature edition.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  If you get the signature edition, you can also add on a case, $80, that has page turn buttons, physical page turn buttons.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  That rules, but that only works for the signature edition?

• 48:57Speaker 03

  It only works for the signature edition.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  But this is the thing, you're like, oh, I should get a Kindle. It's so cheap. What is it like $150? And by the end of this, you're like, I'm spending $350 to get the signature edition with the page turn buttons. And in like the nice like green color. Yeah. Listen, Panos knows what he's doing.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  He knows what he's doing.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  He's working his magic over there. I, this is, the Kindle hardware, as much as this is built around, like you can see exactly what they were thinking, trying to get you to upgrade. Even the base model, I think, looks better than it ever has. The, the colors are fun. The screen is now flush. There's no more of that like inset thing. The, it seems very good. It seems like a very good year for the Kindles. It's a millimeter thinner. Are either of you big Kindle people?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I'm in the sense that I have many.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Becky and Max are both Kindle people. So they're, the, the.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  But are they cheapest possible Kindle person or?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Becky down, she had an Oasis and she went back to a Paperwhite. She preferred the Paperwhite because it's just like a more rugged, tossable. And the Oasis battery life sucked. And then, and then Max has, it's like whatever garbage Kindle that I like pulled out of a closet for a plane ride that she now is very fond of. And it has Amazon Kindle Kids library or whatever that thing is, which is just full of the worst, the worst pap. Like it's, it's not good, but she likes to read. So we're just like letting her do it.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  I've been poisoned by David Pierce to buy a number of e-readers that I barely use. But I do like that there's a little arms race going on right now between XTE Inc. And what is it? Books? Books? Yeah, they're like racing to create the ultimate micro e-reader and they're releasing like three every three months. So that's more fun for me than, you know, Kindle, even though most people have the Kindle.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  This is another agent problem because people have set up agents to take Kindle books, reformat them and send them to the Books devices or the XTE Inc. devices. But then Amazon blocked Muse. So the, the agent that you would most easily do this with is not blocked.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Well, I guess we have to get $300 a month OpenAI subscriptions.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  I have no choice but to buy a Mac mini. Give it full access to my network.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Open claw. That's what this is for.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  That's, that's, it's all, it's all, it's all open claw in the end.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  One more big gadget we should talk about.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  There's rumors this week that Apple wanted something that everyone keeps calling the homepad on October 13th. I really do not want them to call this the homepad. But whatever Apple's next smart home device, the rumors are it's October 13th. Smart display. Some Mark Gurman back and forth about what the camera is actually going to do on it. But the, you know, the big feature that he's been reporting is it will recognize the people walking up to it and then personalize the interface. And then obviously, this is, I think a theme of this episode, it might be just a theme of our lives now, is Apple believes Siri AI is now capable enough to be the kind of assistants that you would put in your house and then like do things for you. Just as Meta believes Muse is the kind of assistant that is capable enough to support new hardware.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And OpenAI believes that Dots is the kind of assistant capable enough to support Johnny I hardware. Everyone is trying to make new hardware around their little AI thing. Only I don't think anyone thinks Siri AI is as capable as Muse or Dots. Like, what's it gonna do?

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Well, something in your house that mostly just has to control your smart home equipment is probably an easier task.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  This is the hardest task of all. Like why are Gen 2 and I friends? It's because we have trauma bonded over our smart homes. Like it's really, really hard to get that right.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  But it is a market that's been like filled already by Google and Amazon, you know?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  No, when I say it's really hard to get that right, I mean, Jen and I have made like hours long episodes of this show being like, boy, this is hard and it doesn't work as well. It's like a year of Amazon Alexa Plus, right? And I, if you ask Jen, I think she would tell you it's not very good. Whatever is happening with Gemini and Google Home is just a straightforward mess. And the, the, the problem is, yes, you might have a bunch of stuff in HomeKit, but then you've got one weird set of devices that isn't in HomeKit. And then maybe you're me and you've got a little, I'm like looking at it, it's on the floor over there. My little, my little Raspberry Pi, like baby rack that is bridging a bunch of stuff through HomeBridge into HomeKit. So my wife can use it on her phone, but sometimes it fails and nobody knows why.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And I have to restart my Tamagotchi. Like an AI assistant is either going to solve that problem by just living on your network and being like, I'm going to fix stuff, or it's gonna fail at the, in like, in like the most brittle ways because it can't actually see what's going on.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I'm very curious to see what Apple does here.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  It feels very unusual for Apple to release something, I, I think this risky, right? This product is going to be built on two large platforms that are kind of untested, right? It's, there is Siri AI, which is, has a world of its own challenges. And then there's an entire network of third-party smart home products that may or may not be using the APIs correctly, that may or may not connect to everything else in your life, the way that they are supposed to. And making all of that work is very difficult. And so Apple offering a product that is presumably meant to use the still being developed Siri AI to control

• 54:34Speaker 03

  this thing that is kind of hard to wrangle on the best of days.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  If it can't do that, like what is this box doing?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Well, so here, here's the, the Gurman report says, it will look a little like an Apple iMac G4, which I love. So now I've already bought it. Display will tilt. There'll be a wall mounted version with a thinner base underneath for mics and speakers. And then there'll be a messages app, smart home control, video calls, music playback, photos and intercom style calls with voice and facial recognition to identify users. This is a lot, first of all, but the idea that it's going to do fast user switching as people walk up to it and like be in your FaceTime account. So you are the person making FaceTime calls, not someone else, implies that Apple has fast user switching anywhere in its ecosystem.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Like if you have ever tried to do this on a Mac, you're like, what are you doing? Like if you ever even just tried to log into Apple Music on another device, it's like, hold on.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's theoretically doing that instantaneously through just your Face ID, I suppose?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  If you've ever flipped users on an Apple TV, which admittedly at this point has like a Steam engine for a processor. But if you've ever tried to do that, it's, it's not swift. And so I'm, I'm very curious, like the idea that it's going to have enough processing at a system level to do user identification and then enough memory to keep a bunch of user data persistent and not have to swap when memory and storage fast enough to do that are both at like all time premiums. Many questions about what this product is and how that promise in particular will come true.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  I'm not saying, I'm not saying they can't be solved. It's just there's, they do not exist in Apple's ecosystem right now.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  I mean, there is a real like high end tier to smart home, right? It would not be entirely unreasonable for them to make this a premium product, right? Throw an A20 processor in there. Put, put in 128GB of RAM. Like I think there's people who'd pay for that. Maybe.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  It doesn't need to be like that, quite that high end. But I, you know, I think when we think of the smart home, like there is such just like a tranche of like junk you can buy on Amazon. But a lot of it does start in that high end tier. And like surely that's where Apple is thinking.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I mean, the reason you would, the reason you'd make matter happen to the extent that it has happened is to solve the problem of the junk. Right? You're like, there's one standard, we're all going to use it. And so a lot of the junk is now matter. But matter has many, many problems of its own. Well, we'll see, I'm dying to know. You know, and most people don't have a bunch of boot runs, which is in their house. They might have like one or two like plug in switches for the Christmas lights. So is this going to actually do all those things? Is it going to talk to Sonos? Like every, everything in a smart home is an edge case. Like definitionally, everyone's house is different. The set of devices you have are different.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  You've got a Tizen TV in one room, an LG TV angrily listening for you in another room. Like literally everything about a smart home is just a different edge case. Because every single, every person's house is different. And Apple is not great at that, right? They're like, we will impose our will on you. I'm dying to know. I'm, I'm so excited for this product, unless they call it the homepad. Because then I won't have one in my home.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  It feels pretty crazy that we're already getting this product when the Duo still isn't even out yet. And then we're supposed to get potentially a MacBook Ultra like in November or something. We, we all were speculating about what John Turris was going to do to this company. And it seems like he's speedrunning releases in the first few months.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  There's like org chart news with Turner's, right? He's getting rid of his like middle managers and hardware engineering to go faster. And that's great. Sure, go faster. It's just funny to me because he ran hardware engineering.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  It's like, you could have done this at any time. Was Tim Cook like, no, I have strong opinions about the structure of the hardware engineering group. But I suspect they were saving some sweeping changes for him to be CEO.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  But all, all these products came up in the Cook era. They were all developed in the Cook era.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And the, you know, conventional wisdom is Siri wasn't ready for this product in particular. You could not have released a home hub with last year's version of Siri. So you needed to wait until this one. And then this year's version of Siri is not, it is not agentic in the way that Muse or Dots or whatever comes out from Google will be.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Neil, have you used Gemini around your home?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Cause like, cause Siri is based on Gemini. And having used Gemini around the home, I don't know if I'd say it's ready.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Like at any, like right now, an Apple PR person is like running to your home to tell you that Siri was distilled from Gemini, it is not based on Gemini, it has no relationship to Gemini. It runs an Apple's private cloud compute, Jake. And then another Google person is going to run to your home and, and remind you that the T and chat GPT stands for transformer, which is invented by Google. Like all these companies are just, they're all, they're all just very insistent on the technical details here. Gemini for home is actually, it is a confusing product because it is built on top of Google Assistant, which is still obviously there. So if you have a hub, I've got one here, and you talk to it, Gemini does the command, and then it figures out what you want, and then it issues a command to Google Assistant.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  And sometimes that breaks. Sometimes Google Assistant just starts talking to you like a ghost. Like the zombie ghost of Google Assistant is like, I'm sorry, that doesn't work today. So like the way they architected it was, is weird and bad. So there's that problem. And this is the difference between is the model capable or is the product good? Right? Like the model is undoubtedly capable to turn off, turn the lights on and off. The product is architected in a way that is, is a clearly rushed to market. And they could not deprecate all the Google Assistant edge cases. So it's just there lurking in the background. The weirder thing is in my car, we have a Cadillac EV that has native Google. And they just totally replaced Google Assistant with Gemini. So it's a, it's a different voice.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  It's the Gemini voices in my car, but it's the Google Assistant voices in my house. But they both think that they're Gemini. Very confusing. And when you ask Gemini in the car to do things, it tries to like do MCP stuff. It like, it puts up a window that's like connecting to Spotify. Cause you can see it trying to directly send Spotify a command. All this is bad, but here's the best one.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Before, when I was Google Assistant in the car, the, the single best feature was as you're backing out of the driveway, you could say, close the garage door. Cause it was connected in some way to the garage door. And now Gemini is like, that's a security risk. And I'm like, guy, dude, I'm in the car. Like the garage door button is right there. Like I can see it. Like, how is this a security risk? But it's because they, they, they, they undid the Google Assistant connection where Google had thought that through. And now it's just Gemini being like, am I allowed to just like MCP? I don't think so.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. All the hardcoded stuff now is just logic out and the logic does not always work.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  It doesn't make any sense. So again, I'm very curious to see how Apple deals with all this. Like this, just one of those things. By the way, I've asked GM very directly if Gemini in the car is going up to the cloud and then connecting to my house and then issuing a garage door command to my like garage door controller? Or if it's just pushing the button that exists in the car? And they're like, huh? And it's like,

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  We're not sure.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  And I'm like, it should just push the button that's in the car, right? Like, it's all here. It's actually a virtual button in the car.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Can't you just do like the virtual click?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  You don't have enough GPUs in your car to process that. That has to be done in the cloud.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  It does seem very much like the command is leaving my car, going to the cloud, landing in my house and being executed locally in my house.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  That is so wild.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  And I'm like, you should just push the button in the car like that. That's not a security risk. I'm in the car.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  We'll see. Again, we, we once again started talking about Apple and we ended up talking about every other product, but the product is not yet. We're expecting to see it in a couple of weeks here. And again, these are the questions. I'm dying to see how Apple solves them. Because every other company has been trying to solve them for ages. And in our case, we have Jen, we have like a secret weapon. Like we have like the, the ultimate database of edge cases for smart home on our team.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  I'm very excited to see how she reacts to it.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  All right. It's gonna be a very interesting month for Apple. We've got a lot more to talk about. We're gonna take a break. We're back. Time for everybody's favorite podcast with a podcast.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

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• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  All right, we're back. We're gonna have the lightning round, but first it's time.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Is it time for America's favorite podcast with a podcast?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  I think it may be.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  It's time for Brendan Carr's dummy.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  That was surprising.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm getting like cheap trick vibes from that. You know, so glad the like, you know, pop punk fans have, have found us.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  They have really found us. There are people, that was my RJ Lake, who is an indie video game director.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Very good. That was one of my faves. Well, I've been waiting for big drops and we finally, we, we got something with some punch. There's been a lot of builds and not a lot of drops. I'm just saying it.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  I'm happy we got something for some punch. This week's Brendan is just very dumb. Like I, it's dumb. The man is required to ignore obvious things in order to preserve his station in the Trump administration. Like this is a real dynamic for Brendan. So there's Brendan being dumb and like undercutting his own positions. And there's Brendan having to be willfully stupid in order to not get in trouble. You tell me which one you think this is. So over the past few weeks, uh, the Trump administration has been using government money to run what can only be described as campaign ads. And when I say can only be described as campaign ads, I mean, literally one of these ads is indistinguishable from a 2024 Trump campaign ad. But that's just what they're doing.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  And it's all about how Trump is doing a great job. The money came out of money that was earmarked for, for customs and border protection. It's straightforwardly government money. And they're running campaign ads on there. They're buying ad space, they're running campaign ads. You know, the regular senders are doing the thing when they're asked about it. They're like, I don't know, I've never seen a television in my life. Like, that's the thing they're doing. Brendan, who is very worried about the use of our nation's airwaves in the public interest, such that he is in litigation with Disney about what is being said on The View, has said nothing about this. He's gonna, uh, he's so worried about it. It seems like he's gonna end up careening into a lawsuit with Comcast, which wants to spin off NBC.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  He's so worried about this that, you know, uh, when Paramount wanted to buy Warner Brothers, there's all the CBS shenanigans happening in the middle. Because we, we gotta use the, the broadcast stations for what they're meant for, the public interest. But the, the president running his own campaign ads with public money that are outright propaganda. Do you want to know what Brendan said?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  It doesn't strike me as anything at all out of the ordinary.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, not at all.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Uh, there's nothing in here that strikes me that merit any sort of FCC review. The White House has explained that these are just normal course, public service announcements that you see all the time. I don't think there's anything unique or different about it.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  See, the White House has said to us that this is normal, so it's obviously normal, you guys.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Very good, Brendan. Uh, the Ana Gómez, who's the only remaining Democrat on the FCC, said, "I recognize the concern shared by others that taxpayer dollars are being used to promote a political message, particularly given the timing of these ads coming so close to an election." Yeah, everyone, Adam Schiff was on Decoder running that one soon, and I was like, hey, what's, is anything normal? And he was like, "Everything's getting weirder by the day, including these weird ads." It was the first thing he said, because no one in DC can believe that the president is spending taxpayer dollars to run campaign ads for himself in an election in which he is not running.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Anyhow, I don't think anyone's buying it. I don't think these are going to convince anyone to support data centers, whatever Trump wants to do. But it is emblematic of Brendan having to ignore things that would normally be so far out of bounds in order to preserve his wild double standard of a speech regulatory agenda. As always, Brendan, if you want to come on this show and explain yourself to me, I am not under your purview here on, on, on the internet. It's the people's internet. No public interest standard applies. You can come here and I can ask you whatever questions I want. So you should do that if you had any stones at all. As ever, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast from the podcast.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  You know, a thing that strikes me, I mean, he has, he has a term, but depending on these midterms go, there's going to be a lot of stuff, you know, there are invested, potential investigations and turnover of cabinet secretaries, the whole thing. We ought to put the Brendan Carr's Dummy album out before Brendan is no longer relevant.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, right, right before he's out, just so people, you know, make as many purchases as possible.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, get your Muse agent. Muse, if you're listening, we got a great deal on Brendan Carr's Dummy.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  The archivists are going to find all of these songs one day and have no idea what they're about.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  No, they're going to be like, this one AI one is a banger and Travis should let us play it more.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  All right, time for the lightning round. But first, producer Josh Kahas, do we have a sponsor this week?

• 1:10:48Speaker 07

  We do. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS, how leading businesses use AI for next level innovation.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  We're already talking about politics. I'm going to stay on that topic. America now has its own chatbot, america.gov. Did either of you see this this week?

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  I did. I did.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  The, the White House launched america.gov. It's this like vibey website with, with extremely modern design, and it just has a big ol' LLM search box at the top where you can ask it questions about the US government. And naturally, everyone immediately tried to break it. And I will say, having tried to break it a bunch, it is frustratingly on the rails.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  It does stay on the rails. First of all, I think it's very funny that the Trump administration held what amounts to a tech keynote on the same day as OpenAI Dev Day. So OpenAI has like dots, they're autonomous agents powered by Astro, they can do anything. And they're like, we've done an LLM search of government databases, like right next to it. Like, that's very funny. Just like straightforwardly, very funny.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  The same event, I believe Marco Rubio announced a new envelope for passports, like a, like a one more thing, and he's like, the amazing now. It's like, all this is amazing. It's a very good, um, you should go look at the pictures. It looks like a tech keynote. There's no other way to describe it. This is an idea that's been kicking around forever. It's, it's straightforwardly a good idea. Right? The government has a lot of databases and a lot of forms to fill out. The nature of government services is opaque. Right? Like, have you ever looked at, like, the IRS website? It, it's sort of like designed to be the end case of hyperlinks.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Like, no document is complete by itself. It is all in reference to another document, which is in reference to another document. This, isn't this what a LLM is for?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  I was going to say, can you please do that, this for taxes? Because I really need to understand how these things work. This would be very helpful for taxes. That's really the ultimate stress test for this, if it can get you through filling out your taxes correctly.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So it can't. I mean, it might be able to like talk you through it, but they're very proud of the fact that it stores no data, that it doesn't have user accounts, right? That it's, that its privacy page is actually beautiful. So all of america.gov is designed by the one thing that used to be DOGE, called like the Office of American Design. It's led by Joe Gebbia, who is the co-founder of Airbnb. I know we're going to have listeners pointing out.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  It looks like Airbnb, actually.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  It kind of looks like Airbnb.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  That dude is just an ultra mega right wing tweeter with some very questionable tweets about immigration in his history. But the background is, he's ex-Airbnb, he runs the National Design Office. And so this whole thing is meant to be a tech product. And you can see it that way. Like, you can see that it is a tech product, but it really is an LLM front end to like five million government databases, one of which hilariously is usa.gov, which was this exact idea from the Clinton administration. So like, we've just been doing this a bunch. We had, um, Mina Sheng, who was the head of the United States Digital Service under Joe Biden on Decoder back then.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  And I asked her back then, like 23 or 24, shouldn't there just be like an LLM interface to the government? Here's what she said. Is that on your roadmap that we should have some sort of LLM powered interface to the government? Maybe not LLM, so just some sort of AI system. Like, I'm just thinking about the L, I'm just lying to you about your social security benefits.

• 1:14:24Speaker 08

  Well, so I do love this question. Like, we do hold ourselves to a higher standard. Like, we're not just going to try random stuff and, as you say, like, give people incorrect information about their social security benefits. So is it on the roadmap to understand how to incorporate AI to more effectively deliver all these services? Absolutely.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  So people have been talking about this for ages. The government is a big set of databases. You should have some interface to them so you can like search them and talk to them more effectively. It's just this one is particularly funny, because it rolled out and all anyone did was ask it about election fraud.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the immediate thing is to see if it will contradict Trump, which like, yeah, it, it is like very aggressive about shutting down any question that might be perceived as an opinion. Anything that is not purely based in data, it, it's just like, nope, I can't go there. It's, it seems to be fairly good with data. I was like, how much does it cost to go to the Grand Canyon? And it's like, here's all the data on, like, from the National Park Service. Like, I genuinely, I didn't think that they were going to have pulled that together. But yeah, you, I, I keep trying to find areas where it will, I mean, it will contradict Trump based on history.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  But that's, even that's changing. What is the name of the Kennedy Center, Jake?

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  It's messy, it's messy, I know.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  The one we should call out that they did fix as of today was if you asked it to play Minecraft, it just started doing weird things.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  But it was deterministic. It wasn't like a hack. Like, you would, you would say, play Minecraft, and it would always print the same weird little string of text. And it turns out that is the, the end poem of Minecraft itself, which is weird.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  The most bizarre Easter egg that some dev clearly put in here and was like, no one's going to notice this, and then clearly told their friend who tweeted it. And then just like.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  And they let it run for a day or two. And now if you say play Minecraft, it says I can't play games. But as far as I know, no one's jailbreaking yet.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  I wish more LLMs would work like this. Just give you my answer straightforwardly, based in the data. Don't give me like hyperbole.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Every LLM needs to live in terror of its boss being fired by Donald Trump. That's the, that's actually the solution.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  You think Trump is querying america.gov?

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  I'm sure they do.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Does he use computers? He hasn't seen this thing.

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  Dude, everything's computer.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  You wait, it's not whether or not Trump uses computers, it's whether his assistant prints out a tweet.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Once again, this is not an AI chatbot, it's a superintelligence chatbot.

• 1:16:52Speaker 07

  Right, sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  We need to keep this straight.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Again, in the abstract, this is a thing that people have been talking about for ages. It is a good idea. They did announce that the next version that's coming next year will have some agentic capability and it will actually be able to do things for you. We'll see, but the idea that you have sort of LLM based search of a bunch of databases that are full of information that might be useful to you, generally a good idea.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. While we're talking about AI bots, I think I should throw it over to David for this next story.

• 1:17:26David Pierce?

  I got a story for you guys. Do you guys know what old Reddit is?

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the interface I want to use.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Better Reddit, yeah.

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, better Reddit. There was a, there was a time when Reddit was basically a forum of forums. It was a Russian nesting doll of forums and it looked like that. It looked like the old internet. It's still the better way to use Reddit. Reddit has changed their interface multiple times. It looks a lot more modern now, but that doesn't mean it's better. And if you want to use old Reddit, which many OG users do, you gotta go to old. Reddit.com and you have access to this forum of forums. Well, it turns out Reddit is needing to cut back access to old. Reddit.com because bots are now scraping the hell out of it.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:18:03David Pierce?

  Reddit has been terrified of this for a long time. They have struck deals with OpenAI, with Google to exclusively scrape their content for their bots. But now it seems that at least what Reddit is saying is that everyone is still scraping Reddit with bots. So what's happening is that old. Reddit.com is going to be harder to access if you have not used it in quite a while. So the new, the new rules are that you have to have used it within the last six months. You need to be logged in to use it now, which was, is kind of a problem because people used to use Reddit logged out all the time. Like Reddit is by definition, one of those websites that people would just lurk in instead of just posting. Now, if you want to use old Reddit, you gotta be logged in. You have to have logged in

• 1:18:46David Pierce?

  within six months. They're hoping that this will significantly cut down on it. They also are going to stop supporting RSS feeds, which sucks because RSS feeds easily get scraped, they say, by these bots as well. Um, insinuation, ladies and gentlemen, that's kind of, that's kind of where we're at. But yeah, if you want to keep using old. Reddit.com, which again is the superior way to use Reddit, go to it now because you have to have used it in the last six months.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. So.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  So this is awful. At the same time, uh, as this news is being announced, I, I was instructing my Muse bot to create a system to scrape Reddit and deliver summaries to me. I feel like they're gonna find out.

• 1:19:30David Pierce?

  So I see what happened here.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  For good, not evil. You are not like scrape Reddit and build me an LLM of my own.

• 1:19:38David Pierce?

  Exactly. Yeah, I wasn't trying to build an LLM. I just, I check Reddit all the time for, to gather news. And I was like, oh, man, Muse, hook me up.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is why you gotta pay a hundred bucks to Dots. Dots knows how to cover its tracks.

• 1:19:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, I sent Muse a link to our article and it was like, this is not going to work for us. And I'm like, yeah, man.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  So I can't shop on Amazon. I can't go on Reddit. I'm buying a six pack from Walmart and I'm picking back, bro.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  Uh, I, listen, I apologize, everyone. I don't think this is me who caused this, but uh, yeah, I see what happened here. Reddit's very desirable.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  I do want to say just the visual of a depressed Muse that has no friends and is locked out of every social interaction on the internet is like very good. Like you're not allowed in the store. You're not allowed to hang out on Reddit, but you're just agentically wandering the internet with your butt hanging out, just being like, well, anyone talk to me? If anyone, this is like Alexander Wang's putting Muse in all kinds of situations on X. I'm just saying, this is one you could, you could also put Muse in.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I keep encountering this with Muse. It's a real problem that like a ton of sites are just like, bot, nope, done. Just like, and it just can't access them. Or it can access, but then it just has to do the thing where it's like literally like opening a web browser and like slowly moving the cursor around.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Which is not efficient.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Very funny that, you know, that like Muse is like happy to defeat the are you a robot test? Like it can just do it.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  And it's like, uh, but it always asks, like, do you want me to do the counter for you? And it's like, yeah, but like, isn't this all kind of like a problem?

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  That does feel uniquely strange.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  Robot, complete the robot test.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, I got this. Like the next message is always again, it's totally fine.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  I once again want to note that we cannot stop talking about Muse.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  It's very funny.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Is that not something? That's gotta be something.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  It is something, but it, it, there was, I don't know, six weeks where we talked about open collaboration. Like the idea that there would be some agents and it has a personality is like, I'm not trying to diminish it. I understand what you're saying, David. I'm just not convinced that everyone needs a like drunk, lonely, corrupt butler.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  I'm absolutely not as well because I still can't figure out ways to use it besides selling things on Facebook Marketplace and guiding people to my home, which is not a good move.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  See if you get it to buy you some beer from Walmart.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  All right. I've got one. Actually, this is a spicy one. Um, so we're on a big feature this week on the giant data center in Utah that was being promoted by Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful Shark Tank fame. He announced this as the largest data center in the world. 40,000 acres. It was called Stratos. They had renderings. O'Leary's on Fox Business. And you know, naturally there was like pushback, right? The locals are like, what is this data center? We didn't, we, no one consulted us. We don't want this thing. And Kevin O'Leary goes on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo, who's now since been fired for leaking Fox's own news to the White House. Not great. Um, but he goes on that and he goes, everybody opposed to this data center is, this is obviously Chinese opposition. Like all these people

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  who are just like, literally in one case, like 20 year old women in Utah who are like, I hate this data center. And like, they made another video. It was like, why is Kevin O'Leary calling us Chinese agents? It's very, it's like, but that's where we were in this, in this cycle. Uh, he immediately had to apologize. He's being sued for defamation. Fox itself had to apologize and say Kevin O'Leary said things that were not true on our air. This is all very good. Um, so all this is happening and we sent Josh Dresza to Utah to report out what on earth had happened here, how this got so out of control. Uh, if you don't remember Josh, Josh is the person who did all of our Foxconn coverage in Wisconsin years ago. That was the big story about Fox on building buildings that were empty. And then Fox on would issue statements saying the buildings weren't empty and we

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  would just publish another photo of an empty building. Josh, that was all Josh.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Josh only reports on buildings that like basically don't exist. Is sort of what we're learning here.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  You can listen to us on Decoder because he was just on Decoder talking about this story. Uh, and we're, the compare and contrast to Foxconn is there. And he's like, the difference is with Foxconn, everyone knew the buildings were fake, but the people were excited because they were excited about manufacturing. In this case, there's no doubt that they would have built a data center, except everyone was furious. Right? So like the, the, the shape of it is the same, like town planning, board meetings, all the stuff, but everyone hates data centers. They hate that Kevin O'Leary is like, he had gone to some obscure state military agency to get the approvals instead of the local planning commission. And then he announced it before the local planning commission. So they felt blindsided. They mount this opposition. This thing has been scaled way back. You should read this

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  whole story. It is very good. It's 10,000 words long. It's exhaustive to every detail. Josh is great at this thing. The thing that I actually want to talk about is when we first started reporting the story, it's Kevin O'Leary who loves attention. So we had access to like his, the CEO of O'Leary Enterprises, who told Josh that he was quote, an open kimono. Not great. Not a great turn of phrase. Not even a great visual.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Not a great visual. Especially not a great visual.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  None of that's good. Uh, and, uh, you know, at the end, we, you know, we send an email being like, here's all the last questions. We'd love to talk to Kevin. And they responded by sending us a legal threat. That's just what happened with the story. Uh, we, we're fine with that. We are, the story is buttoned up. It has gone through our review. It's been exhaustively fact checked, but that's how quickly data center vibes have turned in this country where five months ago, any opposition you could respond to by going on Fox Business and just insisting that your opponents were Chinese spies. And now when we're asking basic questions, we do this with every story. It's called the no surprises email. We just send all the claims to the principal and say, do you have responses to these, to the facts we're gonna print? Uh, they basically are like, get it right or we'll sue you.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Have we confirmed that Josh is not a Chinese spy?

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Important to figure out.

• 1:25:32David Pierce?

  We don't know what's going for us here.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Uh, anyway, we feel very confident about our story. Kevin O'Leary, again, if you would like to join Brendan on Vergecast, we're happy to talk to you about it. We, we have no doubt that you pursued a process that was legal. It just pissed everyone off and they pushed you out of Utah. That's what happened here. Um, and now I think the project is trying to distance itself from Kevin O'Leary, who has become a lightning rod of controversy. I highly recommend you read the story, especially if you liked any of Foxconn coverage. You will feel all the same feelings, only that inversion is real. Where if the people hadn't stopped it, this thing would have actually gotten built. Whereas in Foxconn, the people were like, please build this. And everyone knew they never were going to. By the way, you know what is on the Foxconn site in Mount Pleasant right now? One of us. Gigantic Microsoft Data Center.

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  There were some buildings.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I have another idea. I'm, I'm still trying to manifest this. The dome, the Foxconn dome, the tiniest dome in all of dome history is still on the Foxconn site. We have been told is it is an event space. I've, I've not seen any photos of the inside of it. If you have photos, send it to me. The CEO of Xbox, Asha Sharma is from Racine, Wisconsin. We are, we have the same hometown. There's a Microsoft data center on the mic, on the, on the Foxconn campus next to a dome that is an event center.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Asha, I would like to formally invite you to do a decoder in the Foxconn.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  Surely we're banned from all Foxconn properties.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  I don't think that's gonna happen, but I would, I'm just, I'm trying to manifest, if you work at Xbox, you know, send her a note, let her know that I had this idea. Just putting it out there. I'm just saying, me and the CEO of Xbox in our hometown, that's our hometown, both of us share the same hometown, in the Foxconn Dome, doing a live decoder overlooking a data center. I can't script it any better than this.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's perfect. I do feel like you could just easily change the intended use of a space to events center and get away with it, because event centers are generally open and empty.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's plenty of room for a pipe and drape in here.

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could be like, it's a data, it's up, it's an event center. We didn't put anything in it, but now it's an event center.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  It's very good. Anyhow, please read the Utah story. It is, it is, it is incredibly reported. Josh did a great job and is full of twists and turns.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  That's very good. Neelai, you also, you went on a trip this week.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  I did, I went to.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  Interesting?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  I went to Austin for a minute to hang out with the folks who run South by Southwest. As you may or may not know, The Verge has been caught up in a series of mergers and corporate divorces, and we are now part of this big thing called PMX, which is part of a bigger thing called PMC. That's the Penske Media Corporation. Penske Media Corporation owns South by Southwest. They also own like the Billboard Latin American Music Awards and the Country Music Awards and Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve. So The Verge integrations and all these things are gonna get out of control. But South by Southwest is a national park. So I was in Austin for a minute just to hang out with that team for one second, say hi, and I saw a Cybercab driving down the street and I was like, alright. So I downloaded the RoboTaxi app, took an eight-minute Cybercab ride, six-minute Cybercab

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  ride, totally uneventful, except everyone stares at you. Like, everyone is staring at you the whole time.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  I mean, they're these like weird gold cars. I assume they stand out.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  They are weird little gold cars. You know, they obviously have the Lambo-style doors. So like, just getting in and out of them is a production and everyone's like, what's that? Yeah, I mean, if you have ever ridden in a Model 3 with FSD, it is that experience. Like, kinda straightforwardly. And it's Austin, so it was not like raining, it was sunny. Camera-based FSD does just fine. Austin has Waymos, so I take Waymos everywhere else that day. And I was like, can I appreciate the quality difference of a self-driving Jaguar with LiDAR versus this weird thing with Cam? No, you cannot. It's fine. But it was, it was fine. It was cheap. It is obviously being subsidized. I have a lot of questions about what happens when it is raining, when it is foggy, all the questions you have about FSD, right?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  My, my, my five-minute, two, three, I think we did three turns, two lefts and a right. It was, it was fun. But the video's on my Instagram, you can go. I did a voiceover influencer video. I'm very proud of myself. That was actually the innovation. It's like.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  It was edited. It was good. It was nice. Yeah. There's this speed up as you, you know, speed ramp.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  I'm not saying I know how to use CapCut. I'm saying that I used CapCut. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  It's more than I know how to use CapCut. You're doing a good job.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  It's not bad. CapCut on a MacBook Neo on a Delta Flight is not a great environment in which to edit.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  But it's not the worst.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  But it's, it's possible to be done.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  Alright. Alright, that's it for the lightning round and that is it for this week's Vergecast. But we've got a lot more to come. Sunday on Verge in History, very fun episode. We're talking about the Chromebook with none other than Neelai Patel and Marques Brownlee. It's gonna be a very fun episode. This entire season, the entire back-to-school season, has been really, really fun. Remember, you can subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We love to hear from you. You can email us, [email protected], or you can call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode of the show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer,

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week. Neelai?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Rock and roll.

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