It’s already the year of AI again

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz kick off the new year with a preview of what we're excited to see at CES 2024 next week, but not before a brief discussion on copyright, the open web, and the first movements of a battle between The New York Times and OpenAI. Further reading: The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement Here’s how major media companies are handling OpenAI. Read the lawsuit! For the second year in a row, Sony won’t have new TVs at CES CES 2024: Dell’s XPS laptop lineup is about to look very different Samsung’s new AI-enabled smart fridge can design recipes for you Jony Ive imagined the Vision Pro giving you Zoom eyes and sunglasses Alamo Drafthouse blames ‘nationwide’ theater outage on Sony projector fail Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:10Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Quantum Dot Technology. You ready? It's we're like leading up into the CES hype. We got to start making up buzzwords left and right. The AI powered podcast of quantum dots. Now with more AI. Please stop this best buy. I'm your friend, Neil. I'm it's been it's been a minute. We the last time we spoke to you was last year. Welcome back. It's good to see you again. Alex Trans is here.

• 1:39Alex Cranz?

  I am here in my mom's house. That's why I have a creepy background.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  You do have a real mom's house vibe.

• 1:46Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Flowers, graduation photo of someone, guitar from my brother's like guitar years.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  You get the little posable figurine guy?

• 1:55Alex Cranz?

  Don't know what that's about, but I got it.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Dress making, I believe.

• 2:01Alex Cranz?

  That's how they do it.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is here.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  What is the age at which you get to have like a chair that is your chair? I'd like to be that person. Like Alex, you're in a chair that like, like is a person's chair.

• 2:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  Like, that's not your chair. That's someone's chair. And I would like a chair that is mine.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  You're in your own home. At any moment, you can acquire a chair.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  I know, but it's, it just feels wrong. Like, if I went and tried to buy a lazy boy right now, they'd be like, get out of here. You're not ready. You haven't earned this yet.

• 2:31Alex Cranz?

  That's what you know when your wife is like, it's okay, get the lazy boy. You'll be like, I did it. I'm at that age.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  If that happened, I'd be like, this relationship is like, she's, there's someone else. That's how I would know. If she was like, I've given up on you, you may have a lazy boy. I, I would know some other information that I, I wouldn't want to know. Anyway, there's a lot of news. It's been a, it's a very slow period of sort of iterative things, but some things happened before the break that we should talk about. And then we are headed into CES. And the trickle of CES news is, you can see that we're going to have a pretty noisy CES in Vegas. There might not be a lot of stuff, but there's going to be a lot of news, if that makes any sense.

• 3:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, the trends are converging on CES. Just for example, I, I think we're going to hear a lot about Windows laptops with various AI features in them. Based on the fact that Microsoft just announced an AI button on Windows keyboards is coming.

• 3:28Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's, it's here. We're going to talk about that when I talk about the Dell XPS laptops.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's going to be a very CES-y CES, I think. Like, I think we've, we've spent the last, I don't know, decade watching it become kind of less and less CES-y. In the sense that it either was teeny tiny upgrades to mostly mature products or like weird, wacky nonsense from Europe that no one was ever going to buy, but seemed potentially interesting. And now we're back in a place where there's like, New kinds of gadgets, new ideas about gadgets, new stuff. And there's like, somewhere in there is stuff people are actually gonna buy. And it feels like CES has not been about things that people might actually buy in a while. And I'm kind of excited about it.

• 4:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna make myself sound like an ancient wizard. Like a man with a chair, basically.

• 4:19David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  I started writing about gadgets before, before the iPhone existed. Like-

• 4:25David Pierce?

  1958.

• 4:28Alex Cranz?

  Just wants to be like age, same.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I started writing about those big mechanical typewriters, you know? No, but, you know, sort of like 2006, 2007. There were smartphones, but we parked them on Engadget Mobile. Because our gadget audience on Engadget was like, what are these weird European smartphones? Get them out of our face.

• 4:46David Pierce?

  They were like, netbooks are nothing.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  This, that's where we were.

• 4:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  And so CES every year was basically how gadget stores would get stocked. Like, this, this is where the buyers from Best Buy would like, go and like, figure out what would be in their store for the next year. And they were just full of gadgets, like AV receivers and weird TV, lots and lots of weird TV ideas. An infinite amount of weird TV ideas. And then all that stuff converged into phones. And even TVs became basically Android tablets that you hang on the wall. Like, if you think about a modern television, they've got an ARM processor, they're running some Linux variant, very often Android, sometimes ties in. Like, they're just big tablets you hang on the wall. So all this stuff converged into computers.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  And CES got boring, because almost every product involved you having to believe that Panasonic was good at making software.

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, nah, I don't know about that.

• 5:46Alex Cranz?

  Someone at Panasonic believes that.

• 5:48Nilay Patel?

  Many of these companies fully believed it. Or they, or like, remember there was a year that like Sam, the big announcement CES was that Samsung bought SmartThings? And they're gonna like, take over home automation? And it's like, oh, we all really believe, oops. Like, I don't know if you've used SmartThings lately.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  I have it on my Frame TV. Uh, it's a weird, weird product, all the way around. Anyway, the point of this is we're just back at a place where there's a little bit of what you might call a de-convergence happening. And I say this every year about CES, because I always catch, but you can just see that there's interest in things outside of the phone. And AI is like, uh, the thing that is not totally dependent on Apple letting it exist.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  So it's just like happening in more and more places. And I think that's just like fundamentally interesting. But it but for the most part, yes, is like where salespeople go to do sales stuff.

• 6:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  And where tech reporters go to be like, what's happening here?

• 6:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, maybe this year, after several pandemic years, and with the emergence of AI, maybe this year, the balance will shift a little bit back towards interesting things. We'll have to see.

• 6:54David Pierce?

  It's at least weird stuff from companies with resources to make that weird stuff and sell it to you. Right? I feel like Samsung, for so long, has just made slightly better versions of all of its stuff, and then been like, look at this refrigerator.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:11David Pierce?

  That's where our innovation lies. And now we're coming back to, and I think this is a trend of this whole year. And I mean, it goes to your point about the copilot button on Windows computers. Like, we are coming back to these incredibly mature devices that I think are going to start to change faster and in bigger ways than they have in a while, largely because of AI. But everybody is kind of like, ground up, reimagining all of their devices, including the ones that haven't been touched in a while, for this next phase. It's going to get weird, and a lot of it's going to get much worse. But just from a pure, like, I like covering gadgets perspective, it's going to be so fun.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm excited. I haven't gone in years. I'm excited to go and have a conversation with something other than whether a huge dependency on the smartphone will kill whatever product I'm looking at.

• 7:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is basically what we've been doing for years.

• 8:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  Before we get into that, which we will get into, we should talk about the big news that happened while we were on break, that is deeply related to whether the AI industry can continue the way it is currently going. The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. They are far from the first to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. Sarah Silverman, other famous authors have sued OpenAI. George R.R. Martin, in a different case, has sued OpenAI. But in classic Times fashion, now that they have sued OpenAI, they're covering it as though this is the watershed.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  So this is the one that's stopping it. And they're like, the pivotal moment for AI has arrived now that we have sued, have sued OpenAI. You can, you can believe about that what you will. I just think it's.

• 8:50David Pierce?

  In reality, aren't all of these cases destined to kind of merge together into one, the people versus AI kind of case?

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they, I think it's the Sarah Silverman case filed in the same court. They've assigned the Times case to the same judge because they've been deemed related. A lot of the fundamental legal questions are just the same here. So you should go read the Times' complaint. It is well written. Very often, we point this out, but a lot of these filings are written for the public to read. And their relationship to the actual questions that are determined in the court are potentially quite fuzzy. Like, this, this thing is, is a piece of marketing. And like, that's what a good complaint is supposed to be. But that means also, it is very readable. It is not like a technical document, or a technical

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  legal argument. It's just a list of problems. For example, you can just ask ChatGPT to tell you to recite a Times article at you, and it will just do it. Which implies a number of things. First, that OpenAI has a database of New York Times articles that it has made, which you need permission to make. Like, that, that's just a very straightforward, did you have permission to make all of these copies of Times articles?

• 10:06David Pierce?

  Okay, but wait, can we, can we pause on that immediately? Because that is like, the, the thing you have beaten into my head over the many years that I've known you and Eli is copyright law is about copies, right? Like fundamentally, it is about things that get copied.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  No one believes me, but you do. I'm very happy that you do.

• 10:20David Pierce?

  I have learned this. I've known you a long time, and I have finally learned this. And a lot of the talking that I've seen about this case, which like fundamentally, the Times makes a lot of allegations, and we should talk about them because I think they're really interesting in ways that some of the other cases have not been as straightforward about that thing you're describing, where like, you can tell that ChatGPT knows New York Times articles because it will tell you about them. But I think, what I have not figured out, and what everybody has been sort of talking in circles about in this is.

• 10:51David Pierce?

  Is this actually a copyright thing at all? Like, is it against the law for OpenAI and ChatGPT to know the contents of a New York Times article? I've read a New York Times article. If I tell you about a New York Times article, is that copyright infringement? Is that even remotely the same thing? Like, just like first principles.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  Can you just make sense of this for me? Because I feel like I've read every direction of this and I have no idea where to land.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  OK, so the most important first principle is that no one knows how fair use cases will get decided.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  Ever.

• 11:24David Pierce?

  Like, first principle is blurred lines.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyone making that argument to you is definitely doing it for money. You know what I mean? Like, they're all coin flips. David mentioned blurred lines. I will just say this again. I'm at the point where I'm a soundboard about fair use cases and blurred lines. Like, I gave this argument on CNBC and the anchors looked at me like they didn't know what blurred line was. And I was like, Emily Radikowski? And they're like, oh, yes.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  So blurred lines, the Robin Thicke song with Pharrell Williams. Marvin Gaye's estate is like, hey, that sounds like a Marvin Gaye song. And they sued Marvin Gaye's estate preemptively.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  Other way around.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  To get a court, no, that way. They preemptively sued Marvin Gaye to get a court to say, no, this is a copyright infringement. Because they hadn't used a note, they hadn't used a chord. They just used like a vibe. I did a Decoder episode with Charlie Harding about this that we can link to. It's just a vibe. Like, he's a musicologist, like, this is just a vibe. And they lost. The jury was like, no. Like, you, Robin Thicke, are kind of like an unsympathetic defendant.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  This song's kind of weird, there's like, whatever. For whatever reason, they lost. They'd paid the money. Years later, just recently, Marvin Gaye's estate, emboldened by this, sues Ed Sheeran because Shape of You has the chords of a Marvin Gaye song in it. So much so that he like plays them all together in concert. Like, he like transitions from one song to another. And Ed Sheeran, vastly more sympathetic defendant. Old floppy hair is like, oh, you need chords. And he wins. Just objectively, he has used more of the Marvin Gaye song. Or what you might consider is the Marvin, and he wins. That is a total coin flip. Just dead ahead coin flip.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  You do not know, and you shouldn't have that permissioning based on whether you think Robin Thick is more or less sympathetic than Ed Sheeran. Like, that's a bad place to live.

• 13:25David Pierce?

  So is the only approach here like total nihilism? Nobody knows anything, nothing matters?

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying right now. Like, people have asked me, what do you think will happen? What do you think should happen? And I just keep reminding everyone that fair use law is literal coin flips every time. They are legally supposed to be coin flips. They're all supposed to be evaluated on case by case basis. So that one thing is not supposed to be precedent for the next thing. So even if you think, okay, Robin Thicke won or lost. That doesn't give Ed Sheeran a rule to follow, which is how he ended up back in court. And then he won. And now no one has a rule, like, you just move on to the next song and try again. Right? So this is a really weird murky area of the law. So that's like just the first, when you talk about first principles, the only, like, the thing that I will just put in everyone's brain is that no one knows what's gonna happen.

• 14:14David Pierce?

  The first principle is that there are no principles.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  In fair use law, there is just chaos. Like, it is, it is supposed to be chaos. Because times change, our attitudes about remixing and copying change. The specifics of each use and reuse are totally different. And the law is sort of designed to make you fight it out. Like, that, it's very much where they want it to be.

• 14:39Alex Cranz?

  I mean, artistically, that sounds right.

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Whether that's where it should be is like a different question, especially at internet scale. Like, again, this law was written in 1976. Many things have happened. Between smartphones, for example, just recently. The internet, not contemplated. So like, there's, there's just something that's disconnected there. But more specifically, to your point, David, now that I've answered your question with everything is chaos. The first thing you look at is like, did you make a copy? Even if you want to make a fair use argument, a fair use argument is what they call an affirmative defense. So it is, but you're like, you did copyright infringement. And you're like, yes, I did do it.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  But let me tell you, it's fine. And here's why it's fine. And you have to, you have to accept that you've made some copies without permission. Right? That you didn't have a license to copy the entire database of New York Times article or scrape the entire website. You didn't get permission. You don't have a license. But your use of it in the end was fair for XYZ reasons. And there's all these reasons you can go into.

• 15:44David Pierce?

  To even make a fair use case, I have to forfeit my copyright infringement case. Because what I then have to say is, yes, I took it, but I'm doing something transformative or, you know, useful or whatever with it such that it's okay. But I have to, I have to say at the beginning, yes, I did make a copy in order to be able to do that.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just have, you have, you just have to give that up.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  And, and that is complicated in a lot of cases for a lot of reasons. It is less complicated in the case of computers. Because anything a computer does is a copy. Like merely taking a text file out of memory and putting it on a display involves making several copies along the way.

• 16:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a copy of the New York Times article that I'm reading right now somewhere in a cache on my computer.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  And at hundreds of different cache points across the internet.

• 16:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  And to enable to load fast. And all of those, I will remind everyone over and over again, all of those were litigated. The thing I'm saying about loading bits from memory from one place on a computer to another, straight up, that was litigated. You can go read MAI versus Peak Systems, a case that may be like spitting mad in law school because it's so stupid. Where one company sued another company that was installing its software without permission and said, the, the illegal copy here is when your people copy our bits from a disk to memory to load it on your computer. And they, they won. Like they, that was copyright. And the court was like, yep, that's a copy. And the law was rewritten to protect what are called ephemeral copies that let, like the internet work. Because it is obviously a bad policy outcome to say copying things from disk to memory

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  is actionable copyright infringement. That's just using a computer. So here we have this like total unknown. Can you take, make a database of the internet and then do stuff with it such that you can spit back out the internet? I don't know. I, I think probably there should be some payments in the mix there. Right? That, that, that seems like the thing that should happen here, right? Is like, yeah, like OpenAI has a gigantic valuation. They need this data to train their systems. If you need the data to make your valuation exist, you probably have to trade some of your valuation back to the people that made the data in the first place. Right. That's just abstract. That's not me carrying my journalism or whatever. That's

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  just like, if that is the raw material of your business, you should probably pay for the raw material of your business.

• 18:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, and they, they've made deals too, right?

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they made a big deal with Axel Springer, which publishes Business Insider. I think that's, it's not a very lucrative deal. It's quoted at like $10 million over a number of years. Which is, right?

• 18:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  $10 million is, 10 divided by any number over one, a number of years is like, you're making a couple million dollars a year, right? Like, that's what that sounds like. So like, the deals are not very lucrative, but I think a lot of companies would rather get paid than spend 10 years in court. And I think the Times is like, no, we're gonna spend 10 years in court. I think Sarah Silverman is like, we'll spend, she'll spend 10 years in court. George R.R. Martin, that dude, he's gotta finish the book. Like, he's happy to litigate this through.

• 18:51Alex Cranz?

  He's not gonna do it.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't have to now. Yeah. So like, I, I just think like, this case is a big deal and the Times is gonna fight it pretty vociferously.

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  But the argument here from all the companies, from Google, from OpenAI, from whoever, is this is fair use. We're gonna make the copies, we're gonna do stuff to the copies. And that is fine because we're, you know, we're, we're creating a new product based on those copies, which is basically what Sampler, like, sampling in music is supposed to do, even though that is all licensed now. Like, you get to a place where you make the argument about everything being a remix long enough, and then you run out of original work to remix because you've destroyed the market for it, and then you start paying for it. So like, the music industry. By and large, has sorted this out, right? There's just a lot of payments going on for publishing, for interpolation, for rewriting,

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  for sample clearance, in a way that in the eighties, when all this happened, like, you know, the Beastie Boys never cleared a single sample. They just didn't do it. And there's so many in that record that, you know, the argument is you can't now. No major label runs that way anymore. Like, they've built a market for remixing work. And you have to expect that OpenAI and the others will have to create a market for remixing the data that they're ingesting.

• 20:08David Pierce?

  Well, and I do think a huge amount of that market you're talking about comes from nobody wanting to go to court. And I think, in this case, what you have, like you said, is a couple of parties that are really, really psyched about going to court and actually hashing this out. No matter how it goes, it's going to be really interesting. But I think this is one of those things that strikes me as two separate issues. And I feel like we've talked about this a bunch with these companies recently. There is the kind of what feels right as a person in the world case. And then there's the like, is this, does this match to what we understand to be our laws in the country, right? Because the thing you're describing about The Times and paying for the raw materials of your stuff, there are debates about this, right?

• 20:52David Pierce?

  All the AI companies say these things won't exist if we have to pay the billions of dollars of money required to get the data to make them, which I find deeply hilarious, because that just means you acknowledge that it's worth money and you're just stealing it for free. But leaving that aside, the idea that The Times and whoever else has stuff that's going into the training data for ChatGPT and all these other things, that those parties should be compensated seems obvious, right? Like, I don't think you can make a super compelling case that says OpenAI and Google and everybody else should just have free access to the entire internet forever to do with whatever they want, including compete with all of those publications.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, take your hypothetical from earlier and just remove AI from the equation and just sort of run them as they were normal products. You, David Pierce, have memorized the entire New York Times. And for, and you've not compensated them for it. And for a small fee, you will just tell anyone what's in the Times today.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  That's copyright infringement, like directly. There, there's no getting around it.

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:58Alex Cranz?

  It's also impressive.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  It's, and, and the reason that we don't like sit around worrying about it is because you can't do that.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, human memory is so fallible. President Barack Obama on Decoder said the, the genius thing about the human memory is that it changes everything all the time. This is like, this was his argument when he was talking about copyright law and AI. He's like, your memories change things and AIs don't. And so I think, and his argument was like, human creativity will be forever unsurpassed. Which, you know.

• 22:29Alex Cranz?

  Thanks.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  He's, he's famously a very hopeful man.

• 22:32David Pierce?

  But like, Mike Masnick at TechTart wrote a smart piece about this after the, the lawsuit came out. And one of the things that he said is that if the Times wins, it opens up the Times to a lot of issues because the Times is famous for basically taking and building on work done by other reporters elsewhere without giving them credit. And people at, you know, smaller blogs and sites have been yelling at the Times about this for, forever. And anyone who aggregates anything on the internet could suddenly be open to these same things because just by taking something and knowing it and doing something with it, you open yourself up to copyright infringement. And that's like, that strikes me as like a ways down that road, but I think is, is not a totally impossible outcome. But again, all of this is like, I think there, there is a case to be made

• 23:15David Pierce?

  pretty simply that it just feels right that everyone who is helping make this thing for these enormously profitable companies should be compensated in some way, right?

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, so two things. One, OpenAI isn't profitable yet. It's burning money. But they are collecting a ton of investment dollars. So like, that's interesting.

• 23:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  But the product itself is not yet profitable.

• 23:36David Pierce?

  Microsoft's pretty profitable.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft is pretty profitable. Google, right, but like, these products right now represent sort of rising costs, not falling costs.

• 23:45David Pierce?

  That's fair. Yeah.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, every hit on a, whatever tensor unit or GPU that they're using to run these things. It costs more money than an average Google search or whatever. So there's some like interesting economics that they're not quite as profitable as everyone wants them to be, but everyone can see the future in which they are extraordinary.

• 24:03David Pierce?

  But also, does that matter? Like in copyright infringement, does your company valuation make a difference?

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  No, but I think that's the moral case. It doesn't make a difference. Copyright infringement, copyright infringement. This notion that there is some sort of big taking happening economically, I think, provides ammunition to the moral argument that you're making, which is like you should, you should get compensated for this use. You just, there's gotta be money at the other end of the line, right? And like that is sort of as yet unproven. I think everyone believes that there will be a lot of money at the end of the line. I believe there will be a lot of money at the end of the line and you should sort out the economics early. That all makes sense, but the money isn't actually at the end. We're not actually at the end of the line. So that's just one thing.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  But I will say just one other thought to that and then you should keep going. Is that like, there's a weird thing in this where kind of everybody loses, right? Because if OpenAI is taking the New York Times information to make a thing that loses tons of money, but in so doing is taking readership away from the New York Times because it can answer some of the questions people might have otherwise gone to the New York Times for and even tell you about New York Times articles, the New York Times also loses. So you're stealing my money in order to not have any money, which is kind of a wild current version of affairs.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  I agree. And there's a weird zero sum notion to the value of information embedded in there that is hard to unpack. Like it costs the New York Times a lot of money to generate the reporting. It costs us a lot of money to generate the reporting. And then everyone sort of believes that it should be free.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 25:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  I know how much it costs to employ our staff.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  We should make more money than it costs to run our business. That, that argument plays in every part of the world, except journalism on the internet.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's very weird. And like, you can see, you know, the reaction to that across the sort of media landscape is more paywalls are going up. Like, people are trying to value the information at what they think the market should value it at. And that is working and not working in different ways. The other thing I want to say is, I love Mike Mazek. I think he's very smart. I retector it all the time. People should retector it. This is the place where I tend to disagree with Mike, and I am a copyright minimalist, I would say. Like, I worry about the expansion of copyright law all the time. That's how I started my career as a lawyer. It's like, what I've written about a long time. But I think sometimes Mike just devalues everything to zero too quickly. And embedded in the argument that he makes in that piece, which, again, you should go read, I love tech,

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  you should read tech at all the time, is the notion that the Times' work is not valuable. That the Times insisting that its work has value unto itself somehow is hypocritical, because then everyone else can insist that their work also has value, which will destroy the New York Times. There's, there's something in there that I, I think on the internet, we're getting to a place where more and more people are insisting that their digital work has value unto itself, not just as a rapper around some advertising, or like, a rapper around some like influencer merch hustle, or like, whatever. And that's like, that's just new. The joke I keep making with Addy Robertson, our policy editor, is that we

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  came up in a time when the dominant, like, vibe on the internet was everything is a remix. And now, the vibe on the internet is fuck you pay me.

• 27:30David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, that's a big shift. It's a big culture shift. Like, it's hard for me to wrap my head around it, because I am very much of the everything is a remix school. But you just, you, it, there has to be, like, some money has to flow to original creators. And it, it isn't happening at scale on any of the social platforms. Like, every influencer is pivoting into selling you goods. Like, whether it's water bottles, or shoes, or Mr. Mobile just launched a keyboard case for the iPhone today. Like, it's fine. Like, that's what, all their businesses are going there, because there isn't enough value in the content itself on the platforms.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  I mean, that's why they're boxing. Like, literally, there are, YouTubers are becoming professional boxers, because that's how you make money.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  You can now buy a bottle of Prime that is just Logan Paul's blood.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's not true. Uh, okay. I, I will be remiss if I don't do this. It will take a little longer, but it's the actual legal nerd thing that we should do to talk about fair use. Uh, and there's one point in here that I, I want to make before we, we break and talk about CS. So the fair use analysis, which I have pointed out is always chaos, always a coin flip. But there is a legal analysis, like you can go read the statute. There are four factors to consider in a fair use analysis. So just think about OpenAI and a times in this way. So the four factors a judge is supposed to consider, the purpose and character of your use, what are you using it for? The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  substantiality of the proportion taken, how much of the work you're using, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work. So if I take your thing and I make something based on it, and then I destroy the market for your thing, I've lost, it's not fair, right? That's an unfair use of the work. So this is, I think, this is why it's always a coin flip, because in every single case, these four factors are weighted differently. Sometimes judges wake up and they have different ideas about what the market for art looks like in America. Like, this is why it's a coin flip, because these factors are different every time and different people evaluate them. But the one I would point to here for the times that I would guess that they lean on the most is

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  the fourth factor, the effect of the use upon the market for the original work. Because it is sort of undeniable that the purpose of OpenAI's use is to do the things the Times does, right? You ask it questions, it delivers you answers that potentially were first generated by the New York Times. The nature of the work is, it's tech. Um, the amount and substantiality of proportion take, well, it's all of it. Yeah. That's, that's all of it. So what's, what's the one with the wiggle room in it? Yeah, it's the effect of the use on the potential market. And if the Times can prove that OpenAI is replacing the market for the New York Times by copying the New York Times, if I had to make one prediction, I would say it's this

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  fourth factor, the market factor, that is the most heavily weighted and the one that gets discussed the most.

• 30:31David Pierce?

  Well, and there's a bunch of that in the complaint even, right? Like, the Times talks a bunch about trademark dilution and the idea that the ChatGPT hallucinating New York Times articles and attributing product recommendations to the Wirecutter that didn't come from Wirecutter, that that kind of thing is actually bad for the New York Times as a competitor in the market of good and valuable information. And again, like you said, this thing where you can just basically have it read you paragraph by paragraph a New York Times article, like, it's already seeming to push past this idea that it's illegal to have a database full of our things. I think it would like to make that case, but it seems to have quickly jumped past that too.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  By doing this, you're making the Times look worse and trying to steal our business. And I think, at least of the cases that I've seen, that is the step beyond a lot of the other stuff that I've seen. Not just it's illegal for ChatGPT to have trained on this data, but it is actually turning it back around in ways that harm us. So I think you're right, and I think the Times is gonna push that pretty hard. I mean, an amazing amount of this complaint is just like examples of conversations with ChatGPT about New York Times articles, which, again, to your point about these things being marketing is not accidental.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  This thing is made to make the argument for us to read to you on this podcast, for news anchors to read, you know, like, that's what complaints are for. Eventually, they're gonna have to make more pleadings and actually have a trial. And the thing that is crazy about all this is if... The time settles with OpenAI. It doesn't mean anything for the next case to come along because there's no fair use precedent here. So I, I think some of these cases will like run to ground. But what you don't have is a music industry that is invested in its own survival as the music industry to develop a whole bunch of deal structures around sampling and interpolation, which they have done.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  Like it has taken them several decades to do, but there's a whole business model for like publishing rights and sampling in the music industry because it's a closed ecosystem. You're like, I'm gonna take some music and make some more music based off it. And I'll give you this example. Major record labels have songwriter workshops where they get a bunch of songwriters. They take their own catalog of old hits and say, write new songs based on these hits. Because they know that's the safest way to, to sample their own work and they can trade on some nostalgia. That is a totally wild. Like if you said this would be happening in the eighties at the dawn of hip hop, people would think you were crazy. But they've built and, uh, they've built a legal and financial ecosystem around this copyright problem of sampling that is actually now generated.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Here's how songs are written. There's none of that on the internet. Like there's, there's no closed ecosystem of news providers and tech platforms and YouTube creators. It's all gonna get together in a room and be like, how are we gonna do this? There's just chaos.

• 33:24David Pierce?

  So hypothetically, if say the CEO of Amazon were to buy one of America's largest national newspapers, would that, would that, you know, close the ecosystem a little bit? And maybe another one like bought Time Magazine. Like hypothetically, if these tech companies started to buy these media organizations, like maybe, maybe we'd start to see something like that.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  So that would be hilarious. If like all, the entire Salesforce UI was based on the Taylor Swift article in Time Magazine. Which is like, she's great. I don't know what you're asking about. I can't increase your sales, but she's amazing. That's actually what Salesforce today I should be. Just talk to your clients about Taylor Swift. Number of times Taylor Swift was mentioned on this.

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  The Amazon example is better. So Jeff Azos owns the Washington Post, and he obviously has a huge controlling stake in Amazon. If you get to the place where the purpose of the Washington Post is not to make money as the Washington Post, but it's to serve as a cost center for training Amazon's AI, that's a weird reason to do journalism.

• 34:35David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  And like you can, you can like skip to that ending pretty fast in a lot of these cases.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  Like faster than you think. The purpose of X, you can argue is to serve as training data for GROK.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  That's the argument Elon Musk is making. Like, is that what we want? Is that, is that the right incentive to, to make content? So that we can mush it all together and spit it out as AI somewhere else? Like, I don't, I don't know the answer to that question. That does not appeal to me. Uh, I don't know if it appeals to you, but that's, you can quickly get to the end result where even if the AI companies are paying millions of dollars in fees to journalism companies or media companies or YouTube creators or whatever, because there's more margin on the other end of owning the AI tool? Well, then a bunch of YouTube creators are basically working for the AI tool. But that's, that's weird.

• 35:30Alex Cranz?

  That supposes that the AI tool will like, actually make that kind of money.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. Which is why I said, like, I don't, we're not at that place yet, actually. So you, you, it's, I find it tempting to skip to the end of like, what does YouTube look like in the world where Bard can summarize a YouTube video? And it's like, none of that is good right now. That's like, that's a problem Google wishes it had.

• 35:51Alex Cranz?

  No, but to some extent, it's already doing that, right? Because so many YouTube videos are now made to the algorithm. Right? Like, like they're already made to appeal to an AI algorithm. So it's just like, okay, that, that homogenization that we see on YouTube just gets like accelerated.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  I cannot wait for the New York Times to adopt the Mr. Beast style for all journalism.

• 36:13Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  This is how we're, I was wondering how we're going to cover the election and it's just straight rips of Mr. Beast videos about tech policy.

• 36:20David Pierce?

  Oh, man. Every, every picture on the homepage of the New York Times is just the reporter with their mouth open, making a face.

• 36:27Alex Cranz?

  No, it's closed now, right? It's closed now.

• 36:28David Pierce?

  Oh, you're right. It's, yeah, it's, your mouth is closed and there's something gold and a bunch of money behind you. And it's just the New York Times reporters.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Look, it would certainly be interesting. That's all I'm saying. All right, we gotta take a break. I talked about copyright law for two. This is my fault. We're gonna watch the chart in Apple Podcasts. Be like, Neil, I did it again.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about some CES. We'll be right back.

• 37:00Speaker 00

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• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. That's all the copyright law talk. Well, there'll be a little more copyright law. I was gonna say, you've made that promise before.

• 38:09Alex Cranz?

  Don't believe him, guys.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  It's my favorite. It's the only law that works on the internet. Telling you this is true.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  It's also the law that might break Google in the end, which is fascinating to think about. Okay, that's enough. That's enough.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about CES. CES is coming in a week. We're going. We're gonna be there.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  I would say there's a bunch of stuff here that has been announced pre-CES. I always wonder if they announce the best stuff early to get the early wave of hype. Or this is just the, hey, pay attention to us, the real stuff is coming.

• 38:43Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like both. I think, I think it depends on the company. Some companies are like, I want to get my cool stuff out early. But most companies are like, I want to get some fun stuff out, tease you, and then do the really cool stuff later.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and nothing will have a price or a ship date.

• 38:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  All of it will be like the weirdest render you've ever seen, and then you can come see it in person or in a booth.

• 39:04Alex Cranz?

  Or it'll be a sticker.

• 39:05David Pierce?

  Or it is the thing you are most likely to buy, but is kind of the least interesting, right? Like the, if you're going to release a spec update to your already existing laptop, do it before CES. Because by the time we get there, nobody cares because everybody is like drowning in weird flying iPhone cases. But if you have something that is like, here is an actual product that actual people will probably buy. This is when some of this stuff comes out. That's why we're seeing a lot of like monitor upgrades and, you know, spec bumps to laptops and things like that. And then I think, you get to CES and that's when they're like, have you seen these speakers? They're 62 feet tall and they cost 5 million dollars. CES.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  And there's just me standing in front of them being like, this is why I do what I do.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm home again. Alright, so I'm just gonna read a few of them that I think are incredible. Um, LG released, uh, what, like a speaker system? I don't know how, what, how to describe this thing. It's a speaker with vacuum tubes in it and a transparent OLED display on the front of it. The display is the name of the song in like old time font.

• 40:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  I want this thing so badly. It is so stupid. It is so dumb, but it is so cool.

• 40:17Alex Cranz?

  It's just like a Kickstarter that somehow LG made real.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly right.

• 40:23Alex Cranz?

  Like a 2014 Kickstarter and they're like, no, we're just gonna sell this thing and put LG's label on it.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  It is so cool, like ridiculously cool. Big vacuum tubes, little vacuum tubes, old timey fonts. I'm not even sure if it's recasting the name of the song into the old timey font. Or if they just found a song whose album cover is in an old timey font. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what's going on here exactly. I just know that this picture of this, it's a black and white picture of a guy leaning back in a chair. But then the speaker system is in color. But then it's actually not in color. It's just the orange of the vacuum tubes is the color.

• 41:02Alex Cranz?

  It's just sepia.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's perfect.

• 41:04David Pierce?

  It's so good.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  It's a very CS product. I'm very excited about it. I'm gonna go look at it a lot. Um, then there's been a bunch of display news that I'll just read quickly because it's a bunch of gaming monitors. Samsung now has more OLED gaming monitors. Uh, some of them have up to 360 hertz refresh rates. Which I believe is many times faster than human perception, but good for Samsung.

• 41:26David Pierce?

  Hell, yeah.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then LG has topped Samsung with a 27 inch OLED that has a 480 hertz refresh rate.

• 41:33David Pierce?

  You face Samsung.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  So we are, we are just doing like what war horsepower war specs.

• 41:38David Pierce?

  Is this the new thing? This actually kind of makes sense that if, if we're definitely in a phase where the best way to sell a really fancy monitor is to sell really great gameplay to gamers. Like, that's who buys your fancy monitors. And I think we're just in a place now where we're just gonna be on like a crazy hertz refresh rate arm race. And eventually Samsung is gonna be like, we did it, everybody. 1080.

• 42:06Alex Cranz?

  I think it'll be more like, everybody will start to realize they don't actually need that. And most of their games will never take advantage of it. And it's probably not worth their money.

• 42:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that's like three years from now. After a bunch of people buy monitors that no human would ever notice. Right, exactly.

• 42:22Alex Cranz?

  It's after. And then we'll be like, oh, remember that phase? Weird.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I just to be specific, the LG display is 480 hertz at 1080p.

• 42:31Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  Which is, I think that's why a bunch of monitors hit 1440 for a minute. That was a sweet spot of resolution and, and refresh rate. And so I think what this actually signals is you're gonna get faster refresh rates at the resolutions you actually want to run at. And then, and then you have to make some sort of decisions about what you prioritize. But yeah, this is just a spec war and I'm here for it.

• 42:52David Pierce?

  Absolutely.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  I want to be very clear that anytime LG and Samsung decide to engage in a display spec war. You just call me. I'll be there.

• 43:01David Pierce?

  100%.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna cover every ounce of that spec war, because display spec wars are what this business is made of.

• 43:06David Pierce?

  I also still really like this trend where everybody is putting smart TV stuff into computer monitors.

• 43:12Alex Cranz?

  It's the best.

• 43:12David Pierce?

  It's so good. Like, just to have a thing that's like, I have a 32-inch screen and I can, it is my television and my gaming monitor and my computer monitor and it does all those things pretty, it's like, I love it.

• 43:24Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine being a college student and having that? Like, I'm just like, why? I want that?

• 43:29David Pierce?

  I know.

• 43:30Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna go back to college just so I can have this monitor experience. But then I'm gonna be in the dorm one night and be like, wait. I like having a house.

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  I just want to be clear, both of you are very senior editorial staffers at Verge.com. David's like, I can't wait till I can own a chair.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna go back to college to get a monitor.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  It's good. We all need dreams and hopes and aspirations.

• 43:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, our dreams just going backwards or forwards rapidly in time.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna get a chair, guys. It's gonna be my chair.

• 44:01Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna have his name on the back.

• 44:02David Pierce?

  You have to earn comfort, Eli.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:04David Pierce?

  Don't forget that.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, the last little display one I wanna call out and then we should do this is lighting round, is this LG projector that looks like an old Bell and Howell film projector. Like, it, this, it's a handle, but it looks like a crank on the side. It's called the Cinebeam Cube. Cube is spelled with a Q. Extraordinarily important to note that it's spelled with a Q. It weighs 3.2 pounds. It's just a little bit shorter than an iPhone, so it's itty-bitty. And it can do 120-inch image at 4K. It's pretty dim. It's 500, it's not, it's not great, but it is so pretty.

• 44:44David Pierce?

  It's beautiful.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  It runs WebOS, of course.

• 44:47David Pierce?

  So I really think back to like what we were talking about, about the kind of disintermediating phones as a thing. I think this is one way it's gonna happen. I think we're gonna get this really cool run of like furniture-y gadgets that I'm really excited about. Like, we spent a long time with all the smart speakers and all this stuff being like, what if we made everything in your house more gadgety and it looked more like the future? And everybody said, that sucks. And then, like, with TVs and like the Samsung Frame, which I know you haven't have many feelings about, we've, we've kinda gone back to like, what if these things actually looked, you know, nice? Designed and looked like they belonged in your house and weren't just sort of dropped

• 45:31David Pierce?

  out of a Best Buy. And I think you're starting to see it from some of these bigger companies too. These things are all kind of like special edition larks right now, but you really get the sense that these companies are testing the waters to see, like if we made a thing that doesn't look like a big fat white piece of plastic, would people buy that? And like, I know for me, the answer is yes. And I really hope it is for other people too. Cause I think design, like this is what a projector should look like.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:00David Pierce?

  I'm so excited.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Cool as hell. Yeah. But what's funny though, about all of that is, you know, old projectors looked this way, partially beautiful, but partially because form followed function. Like they were very utilitarian products. This is just a projector. Like this is just an ARM chip and some, I'm guessing some like very standard off the shelf projector parts that they have lying around. And they've made it beautiful. They've made it look like the old form, like the old function. And we haven't, we haven't quite figured out like, oh, you can just make it really, really small. Like, oh, we should make it bigger and like beautiful. And like, that is interesting to me. The Frame TV is like a deeply fascinating product to me. As, as somebody who now owns a Frame TV in a frame, I will rant about this product all day and all night. First

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  of all, have you used smart things? What, what?

• 46:49Alex Cranz?

  I used it like four years ago. Horrible.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  The Frame TV is fascinating because Samsung will just tell you, this is a TV that's designed to be off. And people buy it because they, they realize that their TV is off more than on.

• 47:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  And so it should be beautiful when it's off, which is just wildly interesting. Second, if you actually put a frame on it, you destroy the functionality of a Frame TV. This is a true thing that I will talk about it like, because it blocks all the sensors in the front.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  Nilay has assigned like a half dozen stories investigating what went wrong with his Frame TV.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  I think a tech product that is a bad TV that kind of doesn't work when you do what you're supposed to do with it, and is still the best selling tech product in this category, is a fat, like, is a cultural object. We should just think about that more.

• 47:33David Pierce?

  Totally agree.

• 47:33Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of like what happened was, for a long time, when they were making technology for like going in the homes, they wanted to make it look cool and like, or they wanted to make it look like it was meant for. Anyone and not be scary. That's why they had all the wood paneling and stuff like that. And then one day they were like, oh, we can just go like balls to the wall, do whatever we want. Like do our spec wars, get to 1080 hertz. We can do all of that and have fun with it and not worry about the design factor. And now they're starting to realize like they're starting to hit a lot of those limits on like on a lot of the technology. And so they're like, okay, what do we have left? Oh, we can actually make it not look like garbage.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Well, there's such a, there's such an interesting philosophical shift underneath what you just described too, right? Cause we, we went through this whole long phase where technology was exciting because it was technology, right? And you kind of wanted the things in your life to scream technology.

• 48:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  And I feel like we are headed into something very different from that, that is going to be like, technology is not supposed to be everywhere and scream its name in my face all the time. It's supposed to like blend into my life and surroundings. And I think like, if that's this next generation and the design is sort of the leader of that, it's going to change a lot of things in really interesting ways. But I think you're right. I think that is at least where a lot of people are pushing us right now is out of this thing where it's like, everything I have looks more and more like a gadget and my house just becomes one big gadget. To like, I have more gadgets, but they don't show themselves the same way.

• 49:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, we're seeing it too. And like how, how people are moving that in different spaces in their house, right? Like, like the, the office is not in the kitchen. It's not in the dining room. Generally speaking, it's often a room. The home theater is another one. Like most people's home theater is probably isn't the same room where they do other just like hanging out stuff. It's probably cool and dark and I want to own every, like all $10,000 worth of equipment.

• 49:21David Pierce?

  Do you have one of those in your dorm room also?

• 49:23Alex Cranz?

  I will, I will. When I go back to school.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  No, the, the home theater thing is really interesting. And I'm sure we'll see at CES a bunch. This is why soundbars exist as a category.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  Cause people didn't want to put five speakers in their house. Now, if you're me, you want to put 12 speakers in your house. So that's a very different approach. But most people are like, no, what about one inconspicuous black bar under the TV that sounds good? Leave everything else out. And that more or less won. The thing you're talking about, David, is what we used to call like the ambient computer. Like several years ago, this was the theme, the, the computers would disappear on the walls and we would just like talk to Alexa. And that really didn't play out. And I think the twist here that is interesting, and again, this is just one 500 Lumen projector. But the twist here that is interesting is that things are designed to be seen.

• 50:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're designed to be beautiful objects. And because you can take the smartphone supply chain and say, okay, now your computer monitor also has its own operating system and its own ARM processor.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  And also, by the way, it's like easier to get a bunch of streaming services on this weird custom computer than on your desktop computer. So we'll just like run it over here, or we can make a little projector, or whatever we want to do, using all these commodity smartphone pieces. You're seeing more technology, more complete computers put into different things, as like single purpose things that actually work well. And that lets you get to the design element of it. Whereas before, I think, the idea of putting a computer in anything required like an awful lot of computer.

• 50:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  And that made everything ugly. And now all that stuff is just teeny tiny and small and cheap because we've had smartphones for so long.

• 51:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think we're gonna see a ton of that at CES, including some of the stuff we've seen already.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, so let's wrap up this little CES preview segment by doing a CES lightning round. Then the third segment will just be a regular. None of these are never quick. I don't know why we pretend this is a lightning round.

• 51:18David Pierce?

  Please buy the lightning round.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  Someone show up. You can have it.

• 51:23David Pierce?

  We'll rename it for you.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  This is the one thing where I will abandon my journalistic ethics and just sell, sell, sell.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  The Samsung Frame Land.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Tell me. Yeah, whatever kind of refrigerator you want me to hawk. You got it. What's that weird brand that just makes the retro fridges? You want the lightning round?

• 51:40Alex Cranz?

  Smeg?

• 51:41Nilay Patel?

  Smeg. The lightning round chilled by Smeg.

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  You got it. Anything, just show up. His name is Andrew Malazek. He's our director of like network integrations or whatever. Just talk to him. Write him a check.

• 51:57Alex Cranz?

  He got it.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Say whatever you want. All right, Alex, what's your CES lightning round?

• 52:02Alex Cranz?

  So this one is, they announced it before CES. They're gonna show them off at CES, but Dell has redone the whole XPS lineup. The XPS 13 Plus is gone away.

• 52:13David Pierce?

  Which is good because it sucked.

• 52:15Alex Cranz?

  But it is also technically the new XPS 13. It's using a lot of the same stuff.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  But then they've they've gotten rid of the 15 inch and the 17 inch. Those will both still be around. You'll still be able to buy the old version for a while, but they're not going to be doing big upgrades to it. And instead, you're getting a 14 and a 16 inch. And the 14 inch, I'm really excited about because it's only like a pound more than the 13 inch, which I don't carry my computer everywhere. So that's not bad for me. It gets you like a much larger battery. I think it goes up to 69.5 watts per hour versus the previous one, which was 55 watts per hour. And it gets you discrete graphics and that's just really exciting. And also there's a little tiny copilot button, but they like hadn't figured out the rounding.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is one of the funniest pictures we have ever run.

• 53:06Alex Cranz?

  With just a little sticker?

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  The sticker on the.

• 53:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they hadn't figured out they they like they didn't get the they they they didn't get it until the last minute. And so they're like, okay, a sticker. We already made these laptops.

• 53:19Alex Cranz?

  Thanks, Microsoft.

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the sticker's a little fuzzy. It everything about this picture is perfect.

• 53:23Alex Cranz?

  I love it. Thank you, Amelia, for taking beautiful photos.

• 53:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just it's just what is this? The is this the menu button that they just literally put a little sticker over with the.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  And now it'll go copilot, which just it really, I know everybody's very excited about the copilot button, but for me, maybe it was because I first experienced it with the Dell XPS. I had big like Cortana vibes.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, this is the dream for Microsoft, right? It's like there's a button and assistant shows up. You ask it some things that lies to your face and tries to bang you and you move on with your day. That was the original pitch for Clippy.

• 53:58David Pierce?

  Clippy tries to bang you.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't want that. Clippy, get away.

• 54:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's somehow worse.

• 54:05Alex Cranz?

  Those eyes.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  The fact that I keep insisting that they haven't said a word to me about it is like very funny.

• 54:13David Pierce?

  The silence is deafening Microsoft.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna get you for clipping. Not one email, not one text, not one LinkedIn message from some aggrieved Bing product manager. They're just like, yeah, I'm trying to bang a bunch of people. Sure did. All right, David, what do you got?

• 54:29David Pierce?

  Mine is, and I literally have to load the page so that I can tell you the name, because the name just breaks my heart every time I say it out loud. The Samsung 2024 bespoke four-door flex refrigerator with AI family hub plus.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 54:44David Pierce?

  Which is the Samsungiest thing to ever Samsung. It is Samsung's new smart fridge. I love, love, love that Samsung is all in on smart fridges. Like, this company will not abandon the idea that your fridge should be the biggest and most important screen in your house. And I think that rules, and I hope it never changes.

• 55:09David Pierce?

  So, and like, and I actually think, like, I have two thoughts about this. One is that we're going to see just, just infinite gadgets at CES that are just gadget plus chat GPT. Like, name a thing, plus chat GPT, and they'll be like, is this anything? And I'll just be wandering through the Venetian, being like, that's nothing, that's nothing, that's nothing. You can't just put chat GPT in it, that's still, it's still nothing. But then the other thing is going to be companies that are further ahead of the game, trying to figure out what cool stuff you can actually do with some of these AI tools. And Samsung has been doing this for a while. It's had some fun slash bizarre ideas about what you can do with a camera inside of your fridge.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  And this one in particular, it uses a camera inside of your fridge to not just figure out what you have, but to help you identify recipes that you can cook with what you have in the fridge. Which for me is like, the dream, right? It's like, you want to open it up and be like, okay, I have, I have broccoli and pasta and a half a thing of Worcestershire sauce. Like, what can I make for dinner? And it'll just tell you. That's like, that is-

• 56:18Nilay Patel?

  If you can't figure out what to do with broccoli and pasta and Worcestershire on here, you mix the broccoli with the pasta and you set the Worcestershire aside.

• 56:26David Pierce?

  Throw the Worcestershire sauce on.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  You rizzle it on. You're like, not today, weird sauce.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  That's, I mean, you should.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I just, I, I, I support your dream. Can I just point out the most hilarious limitation of the dream as expressed in this refrigerator? The AI camera can only recognize 33 different.

• 56:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  So if you're just like a little bit out of Samsung's strike zone of 33 foods it knows about. It's like, I don't know, man, you're on your own.

• 56:59David Pierce?

  Just one small clarification, it can, it can identify up to 33 foods.

• 57:06David Pierce?

  33 is the dream.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  Does it have to be like specific brands?

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, unclear. I will say the touchscreen has a TikTok app and a YouTube app.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's what I.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  And standing in front of your fridge scrolling TikTok videos, actually kind of amazing. Like, honestly, kind of, like, I'm gonna go try to have that experience.

• 57:28David Pierce?

  I mean, how have you never done the thing where there's something in the microwave for 60 seconds? And you're like, oh, I'm just gonna look at four TikToks while I do this. You could do that on your fridge, the screen's huge.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  And the way that I'm gonna choose to express that desire is not by pulling out my $1,500 state of the art phone. It's by using the computer in my fridge.

• 57:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't see what the problem is.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  By the way, deciding who in the family gets to determine the TikTok algorithm, or even the TikTok account loaded onto the refrigerator.

• 57:59David Pierce?

  I think you gotta give the fridge its own algorithm. The fridge gets its own account, I think. Yeah.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  It's like the, truly one of the most dangerous and destabilizing pieces of technology you can introduce into any family is full-size TikTok on the fridge. And you're like, whose account is gonna sign into this TikTok?

• 58:21David Pierce?

  I don't know about that. It's a lot of trust.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  I, are, we have an LG, by the way, LG has a, a smart platform called Think, Think Q, that looks exactly like smart things. I know everyone always wants to dunk on Xiaomi and Huawei for exactly copying iOS. The fact that LG and Samsung have exactly copied their bad smartphone experiences, very funny. Very funny. So we now have a Think Q microwave and a Think Q fridge. The microwave will send you a notification when it is done, which is the least useful notification in the world. Because how long, like, getting a notification on your phone for something that you've set for a minute? It's like not useful.

• 59:02Alex Cranz?

  People used to roast turkeys in them. Maybe, maybe you're roasting a turkey.

• 59:05David Pierce?

  Turn on your microwave and just sprint out the front door.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm out, I'm gone.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  Ours is over our stove, so you can also tell whatever voice assistant to turn on the light and the fan. And my wife was like, but the button is right there.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  And then our refrigerator will not send me notifications for when it thinks our ice is too old. And it's like, throw away your ice. And I've, I've never even considered this before. And I don't know why I have any of these notifications turned on, or why I've even connected any of these devices to the internet to begin with.

• 59:37David Pierce?

  Wait, are you supposed to throw away your ice?

• 59:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like quietly Googling.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Straight up. I got a notification. It's like, it's been seven days. Please discard your ice so we can make you fresh ice.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  Seven days? If you had said a year, I would have been like, oh, I've never, I've still never done that.

• 59:53Nilay Patel?

  So our old fridge didn't have an ice maker. So I, you know, we bought the most ice maker. It can make four kinds of ice, my good man. And I was like, what a luxury. And then it turns out we don't use ice. So now I just have like a fridge full of ice. And the fridge is like, get this ice out of me. And that is the relationship I have with technology now.

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  If you are listening to this and you know if you're supposed to replace your ice every seven days, please email us, [email protected]. If you're an expert on ice replacement situations in fridges, I need to know this. Please.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  I think LG is in the pocket of big.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  That's what I, that's where I'm at right now.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And as also someone who's been installing a lot of new smart light switches, I think Lutron is in the pocket of big wire nut.

• 1:00:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  Cause God bless the Lutron switch, but that's a lot of wire nuts. You're just packing them in that box and screwing them tight.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh.

• 1:00:46Alex Cranz?

  Hey, what's your lightning round?

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  So mine is the TV stuff. We're getting some glimmers of the TV stuff. There's two trends that I think are really interesting in TVs this year. One, they're bringing AI to settings. So actually, if you go back years now, AI has been at CES for years because every TV company is like, look at our AI picture processing and upscaling. Like, they've been talking about it forever and ever and ever. And everyone's like, haha, AI. And this year, it's gonna be out of control. Um, because now the AIs can can lie to you. But they've been doing AI and upscaling for years and years and years to get, you know, to upscale your horrible 720p Fox NFL broadcast to 4K. They've applied a lot of AI to that at the panel level. So they're gonna do more and more of that this year. The thing that they're all doing

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  is they're applying it to settings. So they're gonna say, okay, we're gonna recognize your content and adjust to the settings of the TV. So you won't have to switch between game mode and cinema mode or whatever. We'll recognize, okay, you're playing a video game. We're gonna switch you to the highest refresh rate, lowest latency, the whole thing. Okay, you're watching a movie. That's Tom Cruise's face. We're gonna put you in Tom Cruise mode. Which is fascinating. They should have done this ages ago.

• 1:02:00Alex Cranz?

  Wait, but why does that require AI? Couldn't that just require acknowledging that you've changed inputs?

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  You, we can already do input level settings. But if you have, if your input level setting is like an Xbox, knowing what kind of content is coming out of the Xbox is actually really hard, right? Like, the Xbox either needs to communicate with the TV, which, given the state of Aishma, seems unlikely.

• 1:02:23David Pierce?

  What was the name of that thing that, the, the box that had all the inputs that, the Cavo? That was the, one of the things it tried to do was figure out what you're watching and actually like, tune the experience based on literally the content on the screen.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Cavo is different because it was a universal remote. So its whole pitch was like, you tell us what you want, and we'll know what you have, and we'll deliver that. Like, we'll click around the Apple TV interface for you. And because it was machine learning, it wouldn't be brittle. Like, if you wanna do a, it most universal remote, if you wanna do a macro, you're like, okay, press power, wait four seconds, click right three times, wait, you know, like, and that is all inherently brittle and broken. The Cavo is like, we will look at the screen, and we'll make sure we're gonna click on the Hulu app. We'll click on the Hulu app. We'll see what's on the screen. We'll find the thing you want. It did not work. That company pivoted to selling video conferencing solutions for nursing homes. This is a true story. But the idea that you can recognize it's on the screen and take action on it. Kind of an old idea.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  Advertising on connected TVs has worked this way for a very long time. Really weird stuff, but automatic ACR, Automatic Content Recognition, has been built into most panels for a long time. So the TV manufacturers know what you're watching. They can sell ads against it, which isn't great. And now they're going to finally start doing a useful thing with that technology. Which is saying, okay, it's a movie. Where I put you in the best mode for this movie. Roku is going to announce new Roku Pro Mini LED TVs. They've got smart picture modes. Their pitch is 90% of people never change the settings on the TV. This will help a lot of people. They're also, Roku's going to do Mini LED TVs. They're going to make higher end TVs that I think is really interesting. Mini LED is going to be everywhere at CS this year.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  And then Sony is not going to announce new TVs. Sony is off the TV cycle at CS. Which is fascinating. The Sony A95 Quantum OLED, that was the flagship TV of last year, just hit in October. So Sony is just way off the cycle. They're just doing whatever they want. But they previewed, we've got a bunch of Mini LED tech coming this year. It's better than before. So like, they're still making CS announcements, which is fascinating. And then LG announced its next generation of OLEDs. Kind of minor bumps from last year, but the, the big news is MLA, it's multiple lens array technology is going to hit the 83 inch size on the G3. And then they've got smaller versions of its ones that are wireless.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  Which means you plug all your stuff into a box on the other side of the room, and you start to plug your TV into the wall, which, I don't know, man. But so like, sort of iterative on the OLED side, and then I think huge strides in the Mini LED side, which is going to be really interesting. Because Mini LEDs are cheaper. They're just LCD screens with really, really advanced backlights. But the backlights are getting simultaneously more advanced, more interesting, and cheaper.

• 1:05:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  So they're, they're going to crash right into OLED. So I just bought an A95. My thesis is that the TV has gone on my wall for like a decade. Spending money on a TV is actually a pretty good investment. And I came this close to buying an X95.

• 1:05:26Alex Cranz?

  Like

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  Shout out to Value Electronics in Scarsdale. I went, they had two calibrated Sony TVs, like not in retail mode, but like calibrated. Uh, A95 next to an X95. A95 is the OLED, X95 is the mini LED. And I was like this close to buying.

• 1:05:41Alex Cranz?

  What was, what were they playing on it?

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  They're playing some, you know, dark stereo.

• 1:05:46David Pierce?

  I literally, I feel like.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, look at this lizard.

• 1:05:49David Pierce?

  I want to know, A, how many hours you spent standing between the two of them? And, and quit, and like, how close you got to one and then you'd walk over the other, like, did you bring a, did you bring a loop? Did you bring a microscope? Like, did you, did you bring your trusty Nikon macro lens to take pictures of the pixels? Like, they just closed and left you in there overnight. They were like, we'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  It was like me alone in a dark store with like various $30,000 like BW speakers, hugely expensive. I was just like in heaven. Um, and then this store, they're the ones who run this thing on YouTube called the King of TV Shootouts. We've been here for like 20 years. And so like they calibrate everything. It's like beautiful. So I, but I came this close to buying the X95 because the mini LED tech is so close. It's like, it's right there. And I think at CES, we're going to see the next evolution of it across a number of manufacturers. And then Sony's going to show us some more stuff this year. And the point I always make is if you pay attention to displays, like one, it's fun because it's just a, it's a stakeless spec war. Right? Like, it's not like, will TikTok ruin democracy? You know, it's like, will this display look sick or not is like all you need to know.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  But if you keep track of it, you can kind of tell what kind of devices we're going to get a few years down the line.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Cause this, the display is usually the thing that limits the form factor of any device you're talking about. And so TVs are where you kind of get the, the state of the arty state of the art. And that stuff just trickles down to everything else. And I, the mini LED moment is like, we're right here. We're spending the extra money on an OLED for a lot of people, isn't going to be worth it, which I think is fascinating.

• 1:07:24Alex Cranz?

  That's gonna suck. I like to be smug about my OLED.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I just, I bought, I didn't buy the X95. I bought the A95 because I want to, I want to be smug. I want to look at that thing and just feel a wave of smugness every time I look.

• 1:07:36Alex Cranz?

  Like, I need to know what I'm going to be smug about in four to five years.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm smug about. I now have access to the world's most useless streaming service, Bravia Corp.

• 1:07:46Alex Cranz?

  You get the really good reds on Spider-Man, though.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  You get the really good reds. It's it streams in pure stream. It streams 80 megabits per second on Bravia Core, but you can stream four movies and three of them are Spider-Man.

• 1:08:00David Pierce?

  And as soon as you turn it on, Comcast calls and says, are you running a Bitcoin mine out of your house?

• 1:08:07Nilay Patel?

  But one of the movies on Bravia Core that I had access to, because it changed the library all the time, was a remaster in IMAX of the original Ghostbusters. And I was like, I'm in heaven. Like, this is a kind of, it was kind of like a bad 4K upscale.

• 1:08:20Alex Cranz?

  You like see the pores, but they were weird looking.

• 1:08:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, there's like too much contrast. You were, Alex, what was the one you were pointing out the other day? You quick posted about. There was something that just got upscaled and it looked really bad.

• 1:08:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, they're doing it a bunch with everything, like YouTube, on YouTube right now, if you go and look up an old trailer, almost all of them have been upscaled.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  And you're just like, oh, that's weird.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  I sat and rewatched all of Ghostbusters in this bad upscale. I mean, it looked, it looked insane in some ways. Like, just like too contrasty. Like, that's the thing I always catch with these bad up scales, like, it's like too contrasty and some things get blown out in weird ways. But then I was like, I'm reading the titles of the name tags.

• 1:08:56Alex Cranz?

  Because you can.

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  This is a movie I watched 100 times on VHS on a 13 inch screen. I'm like, look at, look at all those words that are on this, on the screen.

• 1:09:04Alex Cranz?

  How was Slimer? Beautiful?

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you look, no, it's like, parts of it are blurry, like, because, you know, the old lenses weren't perfectly sharp across

• 1:09:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  the whole frame. And they were in like, you know, they, a lot of that movie is shot at night. So there's like a lot of film grain that's getting re-upscale. Like, none of this looked good. I do not think you should buy a Sony TV for this experience. But in terms of things I am smug about, having had this experience because I own this TV, very high on the list. Like, I need a shirt that's just like Bravia Core Stan. And everyone's like, what are you watching? I'm like, nothing, Air Force One. I gotta go.

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  Got rid of your Netflix account years ago.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm watching four movies on Bravia Core.

• 1:09:48David Pierce?

  Meanwhile, I was just making plans to watch Oppenheimer on my iPad on the way to Vegas next week.

• 1:09:54Alex Cranz?

  Christopher Nolan is gonna be behind you on the plane. Like, be careful.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. As you can tell, I'm very excited to go look at TVs in CS. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back with a non-CS landing round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  We're back. The lighting round, not sponsored by Smeg.

• 1:11:18David Pierce?

  It's unchill.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  This poor company is like a great business selling retro fridges in the back of Office Max. And like, uh, boss.

• 1:11:30David Pierce?

  Whatever, man. We said Smeg like 10 times already on this podcast.

• 1:11:33Alex Cranz?

  Weird name, weird name.

• 1:11:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  Our Google results are blowing up today.

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  Someone's got the Google. It's like, what is going?

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  They're adorable. They look like the 50s, only using modern. Pay us the money and I'll finish the sentence, Smeg.

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  Hit the modern what, Smeg?

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  By the way, in case you're wondering, this is not how you generate sales. I don't know how. I think that should be very clear to everyone. That's not my side of the business at all. But I'm very clear that this isn't how you do it. By threatening the maker of a retro refrigerator. But if you know the good people at Smeg, if you know Alan Smeg, you know, call him up. All right.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if his name is Alan.

• 1:12:21Alex Cranz?

  It's probably not. Last name is probably not Smeg.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, lighting round, part two, non-CS. David, what you got?

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  So there was this patent that came out this week. Uh, we think we're about three weeks-ish away from Division Pro launch from Apple. That's the, the word on the street, I think, is like January 25th, 26th seems to be, what that means, who knows, but it, it appears to be imminent that this thing is coming. And, uh, one of the things that came out this week was that Apple was granted a patent for stuff to put on the outside of the display. So if you remember, one of the things that the Vision Pro will do is essentially give you googly eyes on the front of your Vision Pro so that you can sort of look through them. And it's like creepy

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  and weird and I hate it, but it's technologically kind of cool. But what it turns out happened is that Apple, including Johnny Ive, who is named as an inventor on this patent, had a bunch of ideas about what it might do with an external screen on your face. And I think they're awesome. Uh, there's, there, one of the ideas is just that you could have the words "do not disturb" written on the outside of your face. One of them could just project the weather on the outside screen.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  I love the weather. The weather one is incredible. So useful.

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  It could show your...

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  All the rest of these are sort of like, ah, the weather one is incredible.

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  I agree. It could show your eyes in a bunch of different shapes, including, uh, like zoom icons in front of each of your eyes for when you're on a video call. It could show a, a play button, like if you're playing YouTube, it could show a screensaver. Like, it's, there's so many ideas here. And this all reminds me of like early Apple Watch when they were just like, here's a bunch of wacky features. You can send your heartbeat to somebody or draw on your wrist to draw on somebody else's wrist. And this feels so in line with that to me where they're just like, what can we do with a screen on your face? And Johnny Ive is just like, hearts.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  I I I'm missing the the heartbeat thing, though. On the Apple Watch, that was.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Was it?

• 1:14:36Alex Cranz?

  It was like creepy.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Did you ever do it?

• 1:14:38Alex Cranz?

  I mean, just be like creepy to people. It's it's from that's how I do the walkie talkie now, too, is just to be creepy. Never to like actually communicate with another human being.

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, see, I my wife.

• 1:14:50Alex Cranz?

  You use it. Yeah.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  It's it's it's really quite good. And actually, now our our house does not. It's not necessary, but we still do it. So I will walkie talkie her and she will just yell up the stairs.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  It's great. Technology, everybody.

• 1:15:03David Pierce?

  But I think the the thing I like about this is. At one thing Apple has always been really good at is taking things that are otherwise kind of problems and making them sort of iconic, like all the way back to the the white headphones on the silhouette uh in the iPod commercials, like it took the cable of your headphones and turned it into a thing. Right? And it like it did the same thing with AirPods, which are objectively ugly, but it made them like culturally cool. And I think Apple's gonna try to do the same thing with the Vision Pro. In some way, it's going to try to make it like, no, this is not a stupid thing you wear on your face, because it gives you stuff like this is a cool thing for your face, which is a hard sell to make, but I think Apple's gonna try.

• 1:15:43David Pierce?

  But yet, as uh as Jay pointed out in this story that he wrote, we still have not seen, as far as I know, anyway, an Apple executive, Tim Cook or otherwise, with a Vision Pro on their face. And it is it is very rare that one of these things comes out and is not instantly made a meme. And so for Apple to both simultaneously pursue this idea of like, how do we do more and more and more and more and more with the screen on your face? And let's maybe hide the fact that it's a screen on your face for as long as we possibly can.

• 1:16:19David Pierce?

  I just we're like a few weeks away from figuring out which one of those is gonna win in the real world. And I think it's fascinating.

• 1:16:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited for Tim Cook's digital eyes.

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  Tim Cook just like giving interviews and he gets bored and the weather pops up. It's just gonna be incredible. Like, I cannot wait.

• 1:16:37Alex Cranz?

  The little play sign.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  You can go read the post and look at the pictures. The actual claims of this patent are very small.

• 1:16:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, the actual thing that is being patented, a wearable electronic device with a camera in it that captures images of the wearer's face, and then a display in the housing that displays images of the wearer's face, the images based on the captured images, and then a sensor that detects the position of the observer so they can point the images. That's the whole thing. That's the whole patent. Oh, and the usual thing, they stick this in all computer patents now. They're like, "A computing system that does it." And it's like, "Yeah, we understand. The patent office doesn't understand computers."

• 1:17:19David Pierce?

  There's not a small person inside doing it for you.

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. It's always fascinating to read what Apple is actually claiming in these, because they'll put a lot of pictures in these. As everyone knows, you're going to read the actual claims, and the claims are here are just like, "We put a camera in it."

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  And a display on the outside. That's the whole claim of this patent. And then, Johnny, I've got to do some pictures. I will say, if you walk around in an Apple Vision Pro, just displaying to people the weather in Cupertino, California, it's very good.

• 1:17:47Alex Cranz?

  I like the idea they don't even change the weather. It's always going to be Cupertino.

• 1:17:51David Pierce?

  I think if you wear one of these, you should be obligated to be showing your TikTok feed on the outside of it at all times.

• 1:17:59Alex Cranz?

  Shame.

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  CES is next week. Apple has said Vision Pro is coming early 2024. A lot of rumbles out in the world. I would bet there's some sort of Vision Pro announcement that interferes.

• 1:18:10David Pierce?

  Apple loves upstaging CES. Loves it.

• 1:18:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14David Pierce?

  I bet you're right.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  So, that's just my bet. I don't have any inside intel on that. I just, based on history. Remember one year at CES, Apple was like, "We're having an event," and I was like, "The iPhone's now on Verizon."

• 1:18:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's the same one. Uh, all right, Cranz, what you got?

• 1:18:33Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so it is with like great sadness, I say that Amazon is moving to advertising starting in January 29th. That means you're gonna have to watch ads if you have Amazon Prime unless

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy.

• 1:18:47Alex Cranz?

  you want to pay extra, but it's also like, it was always inevitable, it was always gonna happen, they were, nobody was shy about putting ads on these things, uh, when they, when they started with, maybe Netflix, but everybody else is always like, yeah, ads is, is somewhere in a forecast for us. So now it's just like, okay. And for Amazon, a company who, we don't actually know how many people watch their shows, we just know they have all of the subscribers because everybody has Amazon Prime, this makes a lot of sense because now they can make.

• 1:19:14David Pierce?

  I think we can confidently say it's not very many, based on the success of their big shows that they have.

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  Which ones?

• 1:19:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  Womp womp. Hey, there's the boys.

• 1:19:25David Pierce?

  The Boys is good.

• 1:19:26Alex Cranz?

  It's Reacher and Boys.

• 1:19:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a show.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's dad watches Reachers. Like, you two are gonna be watching it soon, you don't know it.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  Isn't it just singular Reacher?

• 1:19:35Alex Cranz?

  It's Reacher, yeah, you're right. It's just Reacher.

• 1:19:38Nilay Patel?

  That's like the James Cameron sequel, Reachers.

• 1:19:44Alex Cranz?

  It's coming for you guys.

• 1:19:45David Pierce?

  Just a lot of tall, quiet men running around small towns in America.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  The only thing I know about Reacher is I saw a Tik, who's the main actor? I don't even know. I just saw a TikTok with him where he was saying that the amount of muscle that he has to carry on his body to portray Reacher is actually causing a physical toll on his body.

• 1:20:01Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:02Nilay Patel?

  He's like, imagine walking up a flight of stairs, but you're holding two 40 pound dumbbells. That's my life now.

• 1:20:09Alex Cranz?

  That's a lot, that's too much muscle.

• 1:20:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he was like, yeah, but it's worth it because I'm, I'm Reacher. Soon as starting the sequel, Reachers, direct to James Cameron. Uh, it is inevitable that all these streaming services are doing ads. Like, everyone watches Netflix, turn on ads and make more money. Amazon is actually a secretly huge player in the ads business.

• 1:20:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, a huge player in the ads business. It's, it's Meta, Google and Amazon. And of course, they're gonna do connected TV ads. But it's kinda gross. Like, the whole point of Prime is like, not that, right? Like, you pay Amazon the money upfront to get all the good service on the backend.

• 1:20:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Nilay Patel?

  And now it's like, now it's just cable? You just, I'm paying for cable and shipping?

• 1:20:50Alex Cranz?

  I think for them, it's like, okay, you get free shipping, you get whatever other stuff comes with Prime. And now you also get free cable. And if you wanna get rid of the, the ads on your cable, you can give us even more money every month. And four people are gonna do that.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no one. Write us a note. If you're gonna pay for the ad-free tier of Amazon Prime Video, I wanna meet you. I feel like I could meet you individually.

• 1:21:14David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, that, that's a scalable proposition, is I wanna meet all of you.

• 1:21:19David Pierce?

  You could fit all of those people in, like, a single Dave and Buster's. Like, no question.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have a party sponsored by, you know who you are.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, I have two, cuz I, I added one, cuz it's so funny. But, uh, my first one is, Alamo Drafthouse runs Sony digital cinema projectors. And they had some sort of certificate timeout over the break, and they just stopped showing movies.

• 1:21:52David Pierce?

  It's so brutal.

• 1:21:55Alex Cranz?

  And that's like, they're, they're supposed to be the good company. They're supposed to be like, the good movie theater that like, actually cares about how they screen things. So for them to like, drop the ball this bad is...

• 1:22:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's, it's unclear what happened. We've read a bunch of forum posts from like, theater employees and like, projectionists. Um, one amazing thing about the internet is you're like, man, I wonder if there's a community online that's deep in the weeds of this. And like, oh, it's the projectionist forums.

• 1:22:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Obviously. Um, so there's, there's people like, explaining what happened, you know, they're like, man, the company. But it feels like, David, I know you read a bunch of the stuff too, and we're gonna write a story on it, cuz it is very, it's like, perfectly virtualized. There's a lot of DRM involved in digital projection. Like, you send a movie to a movie theater, there's a bunch of DRM steps in being able to play back that digital file. And somewhere between the projector and the file, there was a certificate timeout and no one, like no one saw it coming.

• 1:22:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, that that's about as far as I've gotten down the rabbit hole. I think that's right. And Sony kind of increasingly has no interest in this business. And these things are notoriously brittle anyway. Like, remember, we did that story a few months ago about the IMAX theaters that still crucially rely on a Palm Pilot and are now emulating a Palm Pilot on an iPad. And like, the the true nature of the tape and strings that hold these things together is just unbelievable. Even if you're Alamo Drafthouse and care deeply about how this stuff works, these folks just don't upgrade the equipment unless they have to. And meanwhile, the equipment on which these movies are made is increasingly high tech.

• 1:23:35David Pierce?

  And the way that they're being shipped around is increasingly digital and increasingly high tech. And to your point, these companies are taking more and more care to lock this stuff down, especially with big, important movies. Like, these things are more carefully controlled than ever. They're not just shipping giant reels around the country nearly the way that they used to. It a lot of this is happening online. It's mostly happening digitally now. Like, there are just so many more places for it to break in these old weird systems than there used to be. And if you're Alamo, there's just like nothing you can do. You just update the firmware and hope for the best.

• 1:24:12Alex Cranz?

  I think I think the suggestion from a lot of those projectionists, though, is that, like, Alamo probably did mess up here. And there's been like a lot of talk about, like, in the theater community about Alamo and its kind of decline. And so this is kind of like an indication of that decline. They've they've been rough since like 2017.

• 1:24:28David Pierce?

  But like, there's there's no such thing as like a full stack movie theater, right? Like AMC is not out here making its own projectors so that it can show you the movie better. Like, everybody is still reliant on this crazy chain that is not really designed to make the process seamless and good.

• 1:24:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's supposed to be as complex as possible because they don't want like a young projectionist to be like, ooh, let me just upload this to BitTorrent, gonna have a good time, beautiful film.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Can I tell a story from my youth?

• 1:24:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:25:00Nilay Patel?

  When I was in high school, my friend Allison's dad was the manager of the local movie theater. And somehow this emboldened us to believe, as we were walking out of a movie, that we could pick up the reels of Austin Powers 2, the film reels of Austin Powers 2, and sprint them to our car.

• 1:25:17Nilay Patel?

  They were very heavy, we got nowhere, before we were just stopped by a group of theater employees going, what are you doing?

• 1:25:26Nilay Patel?

  We don't know.

• 1:25:30David Pierce?

  What was your plan? Like, like, wind this all the way back for me. What was the ideal outcome to this story?

• 1:25:36Nilay Patel?

  We...

• 1:25:37Alex Cranz?

  Did you have a projector?

• 1:25:38Nilay Patel?

  Still in stuff? I don't know. High school, Racine, Wisconsin, we saw the reels to Austin Powers 2, we're like, now we'll have them. I was like 16 years old, but it's burned into my brain how heavy they were. Like, you know that, oh, this is a mistake?

• 1:25:54David Pierce?

  But then you're too far in.

• 1:25:55Alex Cranz?

  Was there like a huh! As soon as you picked them up?

• 1:25:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the second you pick them up, it's already over. Even if by simply trying to pick them up, you've realized you've made a horrible mistake.

• 1:26:09Alex Cranz?

  Fun fact, the opening sequence for that movie, you couldn't play it on Twitch now. Because they just...

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  Because of the nudity rules?

• 1:26:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because of the implied nudity rule, and that's the whole first, like, section chunk of the movie.

• 1:26:23Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's probably for the best.

• 1:26:27Alex Cranz?

  Where were you watching now?

• 1:26:28Nilay Patel?

  There isn't a time and a place for the opening sequence of Austin Powers 2, and I don't know, if it's Twitch, to be honest with you.

• 1:26:35Nilay Patel?

  It's on Bravia Core, in 80 megabits per second, crystal clear, pure stream.

• 1:26:39Alex Cranz?

  See every strand of chest hair.

• 1:26:41Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of stealing things, the Kia boys are back.

• 1:26:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Nilay Patel?

  And Kia has a new plan to stop them. So if you're aware of the Kia boys, it's apparently very easy to steal many, many Kia and Hyundai cars. So Kia acknowledges this problem, they're getting sued by various states who say Kia is negligent because they've made their cars too easy to steal. Very funny outcome, deeply funny outcome. Kia is doing like software updates, Hyundai's doing software updates. They're shipping out like steering wheel locks, like the club to people. It's all very funny. Now, in addition to this, there's a press release. They're shipping out devices to protect the ignition column. Incredible, incredible line in this press release. This is a bullet under the headline in bold.

• 1:27:29Nilay Patel?

  "Device reinforces ignition cylinder body to guard against theft methods popularized on social media."

• 1:27:35David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:27:38David Pierce?

  It's one of those things that you write and you're like, what has the world become? Like, what are we doing here?

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Very good. And then in order to make it clear to the Kia boys that you've installed this device, that are giving everybody a sticker. So now your, your car can have a sticker that says, "Stay away Kia boys. We have a device that reinforces ignition cylinder body."

• 1:28:01David Pierce?

  No chance whatsoever that that'll backfire. None that sticker will solve all of your problems for sure.

• 1:28:09Nilay Patel?

  Another bullet in this press release. "Second wave of local software upgrade clinics also planned in coordination with local Kia dealers in key cities across US." Yep. Software upgrade clinics at the Kia dealer. If you have a Kia on it, go get your car fixed, because the Kia boys are on the loose.

• 1:28:26Alex Cranz?

  Only park it in the garage.

• 1:28:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, there are Kias in my family and I have family members who are like, I gotta get this thing in the garage.

• 1:28:33David Pierce?

  I'm like, Neelai, do you think if you were a teen right now, you'd be a Kia boy? I feel like there's like, like the same Neelai that is stealing Austin Powers 2 reels is definitely out here being a Kia boy right now.

• 1:28:44Alex Cranz?

  Just be like, yeah, I'll take a car.

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  I think it is very good that I was not a teenager in the age of social media. That's what I got for you. I think I would have, I would have, I would have turned out different.

• 1:28:55David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  Probably in jail.

• 1:28:59Nilay Patel?

  That seems like the most likely outcome of Teenage Eli plus the internet. Uh, all right, that's it. We're way over. As always, there is an extended copyright law segment for which I apologize nothing. Zero apologies for that. And also zero apologies to the local refrigerator factory, which should sponsor this lightning round immediately. I like how they're turned into a local refrigerator factory.

• 1:29:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just around the corner.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  I'm coming over there. Uh, we're going to CS next week. We'll have a ton of coverage. We have two Vergecasts, right?

• 1:29:31Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:29:32Nilay Patel?

  At CS. Uh, so two Vergecasts from CS historically are craziest Vergecasts of the year because we're all sleep deprived. Um, just tons of coverage on the site. CS is where the year really kicks off. So I'm excited to go look at some gadgets, see a bunch of people, uh, do a bunch of reporting, and obviously talk to all of you on the Vergecast. So we'll see you next week at CS. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:29:57David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:30:50Speaker 06

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