The next next thing in AI and AR

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Apple's Vision Pro team reportedly refocusing on a cheaper headset, Meta launching a new "Wearables" organization, a new AI company startup from former OpenAI chief scientist, and a whole lot more tech news. Further reading: Apple’s new hands-free unlocking feature won’t work with existing smart locks Apple’s fancy new CarPlay will only work wirelessly Android’s AirTag competitors are off to a poor start. This universal remote wants to control your smart home sans hub The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops The Beats Solo Buds have a great look and an even better price Xreal’s new Beam Pro is an Android tablet designed to work with your AR glasses Apple’s Vision Pro team is reportedly focused on building a cheaper headset Meta forms new Wearables group and lays off some employees OpenAI’s former chief scientist is starting a new AI company Perplexity continues to piss off publishers. An AI video tool just launched, and it’s already copying Disney’s IP Anthropic has a fast new AI model — and a clever new way to interact with chatbots AIs are coming for social networks TikTok ads may soon contain AI avatars of your favorite creators McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel Tech CEOs are hot now, so workers are hiring $500-an-hour fashion consultants Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of the R architecture.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. And then if if anyone knows of a rival podcast, there's a flagship podcast of like Risk V. What I would love to know who they are so we can start a fake beef.

• 1:20Alex Cranz?

  But only Risk V.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Right now, no one wants an X86.

• 1:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, yeah, no one wants that. We only want the cool, weird ones.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  If anyone knows of the flagship podcast of the X86, I would, we will send them a gift basket. I mean, they're, you know, someone ought to be nice to them. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:39Alex Cranz?

  Hi.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath is here, not David Pierce. Hi, Alex. Hi, I'm not David. But happy to be here. David is off this week, but we've got Alex, which is going to be great. There's a lot of AI news. There's a bunch of VR news, including some some scoops out of Meta in the Reality Labs division that Alex is here to talk about and have some insight into. But we should start with like the news, which is a weird bit of news in that half of the news got delayed.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Weird. Microsoft's Copilot Plus PCs are now shipping. They have Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips inside them. This is the beginning of what might be the end of the Intel dominance, the x86 dominance for Windows machines. But Microsoft had to delay Recall, which was the flagship feature of the Copilot Plus PC because of horrible security concerns. Just a weird moment, Cranz, right?

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  A weird stutter, even the review units like didn't arrive on time because they were disabling Recall.

• 2:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like this is wild. We were expecting to get these a week ago to start kind of reviewing them before the embargo list. And we got them the day of the embargo. Like Tom's got both the Elite and the Plus and is checking those out. And a whole bunch of other people on the team all have them and are just, we are all in this one room, just furiously benchmarking constantly. Work, it's, they're having a lot of fun doing it, but we've still got a lot of work to do. So far, we figured out that some stuff is working, some stuff isn't. There's still a lot of weird like emulation bugs and stuff. I think Adobe Premiere was having a weird issue where it would work with the Elite processor, but not necessarily with the Plus processor.

• 3:23Alex Cranz?

  Some games crashing. Some of this might be like alleviated with more updates from everybody. But what was supposed to be this big monumental moment for Microsoft and Qualcomm and everybody instead was like, ah, we did it.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, here it is. We turned off half of it. Even in Best Buy, there's like signs that say Recall coming later on the demo units. Because, so if you don't know, if you weren't listening to the show the previous weeks, Microsoft announced these PCs and the flagship feature was Recall, which even if it was working in a totally secure way is weird. The computer watches everything you do on the computer, like Windows watches everything you do, takes screenshots of it, uses a local generative I model to understand what's in those screenshots. And then you can just be like, what? There was a website I thought I liked. Did you remember what it? And the computer will tell you. Or I was working on this document. Do you remember what it was? And you can talk to the computer about what you've done with it, which some people, David Pierce, very excited about, because

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  David would like to be friends with the computer. It's that's my understanding of first.

• 4:26Alex Cranz?

  Just friends.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Just, just friends. David is happily married and has a child. Other people would like to be more than friends with the computer, as we have learned time and time again, as the AI industry has dominated the headlines. Microsoft was storing the screenshots in basically plain text. So there's just like open database of everything you've done on your computer on your computer. Huge security hole. Microsoft has had a history of security problems recently. Nadella sent out a memo to everyone being like, if you have to choose between shipping fast and security, I want you to pick security. And then they announced Recall and everyone's like, this is a huge security fault. And they just deleted it. So they thought they could fix it in time. They issued a blog post about fixing it in time. And then they realized they couldn't and they deleted it. Cranz, I feel like, I

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  feel like that's only half of the story here. That's just the background. That's part of the stutter step and part of why it's not as flashy to launch. Like Recall is a great feature for what I think of as like the local news, right? Like, yeah, this is a great demo for the local news. And that is how you get a lot of mainstream attention on new things. But the real thing here on all of these Snapdragon PCs is performance and battery life, where they have not been competitive with M series chips on MacBooks for a long time. And now they think they are.

• 5:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, that is absolutely the big, the big moment here. And like, the other part was gonna be really cool. And that was gonna be what got people really excited to maybe upgrade. But for the rest of us, it's okay. Is this finally the moment where ARM on Windows works? Because we've seen it so many times before. And every time it has fallen super short of the mark. And this time, like from the early benchmarks, battery life looking pretty good. Batteries in that like, that, that, that M chip range. We're still testing. So I don't want to say which M chip, but it's in that like M chip range. The, the speed is looking pretty good. Gaming is like, possible.

• 6:24Alex Cranz?

  We've still got some work to do there to figure it out, but it's a surprise. It definitely doesn't seem like this is going to be a moment where just Qualcomm blows everybody away, kind of like how Apple did with the M1 chip, where we were like, holy crap, Apple actually did it. Doesn't seem like we're going to have that moment, but it's still kind of too early to tell.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's interesting because Apple hasn't even had the incremental moments after the M1. Like the M2 to M1, it's faster, but it wasn't the big step from Intel to ARM, right? M3 to M2 was faster, but it wasn't the same kind of revelatory experience. So Qualcomm is coming into just a very different set of expectations.

• 7:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like if you can match the M1, you've done great. That's a big step forward over Intel. If you can beat the M3 or the M2, you're, it's the same incremental progress as everyone else has made.

• 7:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I think that's kind of normal. We sometimes expect everybody to just blow each other out of the water, but these like, Windows is hugely complicated to run. It is not an easy thing to run. It has, there's so many like dependencies, code for old code that it has to work through and stuff. And then a lot of times that's, that stuff isn't built for ARM. And so they're having to do all this emulation, more so than like an app, a Mac would, because a Mac just, it's all built from Apple. And so not all of it, but most of it's built by Apple for Apple and it can kind of run and knows what to do. That big like translation moment hasn't quite happened for, for Windows machines.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  They've been trying for a long time.

• 7:57Alex Cranz?

  They've been trying and nobody's wanted to do it because it's like, well, you don't, nobody makes good ARM chips. So why should I build my, my programs for ARM? And now it's like, this could change that. This, this could change that, but it is so, so, so early to tell.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  I get the chip story underneath this, but does Microsoft actually think that anyone is going to switch from Mac to Windows because of this AI stuff? Cause I look at this and it's like, you basically need to tell me that I'd never have to actually understand or know how to use Windows to actually switch to Windows. That's how I feel about Windows. Like an AI needs to, it needs to be so dramatically different from what I expect from a laptop as a lifelong Mac, Apple lock-in, blue bubble guy.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  This recall thing sounds cool, but it's like I you would literally have to say AI is running your laptop for you for me to consider switching because of the software locking.

• 8:53Alex Cranz?

  This is a pressure dressing, right? Like this is just for them to be like, no, we can't lose any more Windows people to Chrome or Macs. Like, we have to keep them here with cool features. Like, that's pretty, it's not like, let's entice these people back. It's, please don't leave.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, actually, I wonder about that. You know, I

• 9:13Alex Cranz?

  Really, so how I feel about it?

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Heard a lot of CEOs, Alex, I'm sure you have to describe AI as a platform shift. And I'm always like, from what to where? Like, what platform are you talking about? And what they want, what they're trying to invoke is mobile. Right? This is a platform shift on the order of mobile. We went from laptops to smartphones, and smartphones dominate computing. And what they're trying to say is this is another platform shift on that scale. And it's like, is it like, where? Like, you still have to have a phone to use the chatbot? Like, is it that? And I think part of this Windows stuff for Microsoft is very much, okay, we own this entire stack, we have this giant investment in OpenAI, we've built Copilot, we have all these ideas about what a computer

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  can be. Here, like, here's a new way to use a computer that is meaningfully different than before. Also, you have to pre-install Edge or whatever. Also, we'll push you towards our browser. I don't know that Apple has different ideas. We talked about it in the show after WWBC. Like, Apple's ideas for what AI can do in its operating system are basically the same as Microsoft's ideas. So the idea that it's a platform shift, I think, is under some pressure, but I know that's how these companies think about it. That this will entice you to switch platforms.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  But it's just features right now. It's like, I still have to look at the Windows nav bar and figure that thing out, right? And it's like, I'm just not gonna do that. I'm sorry, Tom Warren. Like, I'm just not. So, yes, I think they think of it that way, but it shows, I think this recall thing shows where the real platforms are. And it's like, building two decades of software lock-in on top of hardware, which is not AI, right? AI is software that you're putting on existing hardware, at least right now.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, people are listening, if you have an idea of where this platform shift is, I'm dying to know what people think. But it is what It is what Nadella has told me, it's what Sunar Pachai has told me, like down the line, the CEOs of the biggest companies are like, this is the platform shift. We cannot get left behind. Like in particular with Microsoft, there's like a fear that they got left behind in mobile and they can't get left behind this time. And so you see them kind of, I mean, they have been ahead of the curve at every single step.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  You didn't hear Elon say it's going to be trillions of dollars worth of Optimus robots? That's, that's the platform shift.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the true platform shift is kicking back with a brewski and letting Optimus do all your computing for you. It'd be great if AI expresses itself not as AI integrated into the operating system, but you have an Optimus robot that knows how to use Windows. And that, that's actually what happens.

• 11:49Alex Cranz?

  That would be Alex Heath and then like Tom Warren would get the one that knows how to use Macs.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  And Eli, you joke about how, you know, you would love to not have to use software at work. You know, you just have an Optimus use your software for you.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I need an op, I need a full, fully complete Optimus robot that can use Okta. And if you can just get me there, I'll do it. If you can, if Optimus can follow my expenses.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  Oh my God.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Those codes, they suck.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  The CEOs of these companies will not come on Decoder where I will just ask them to look at their own software.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  We'll see, we're going to test them out. I will say that I, there, there, I have a running list of my favorite Slack rooms at the company and it's the ones where people have developed their own language. So my number one favorite is, we have a support room for our finance team where people just file tickets. And some people have discovered, and well, some people come in there and they ask very nice questions. Like, hello, I need help with that. And some people have discovered that this room is staffed by a bot that just files tickets and they just yell nouns. They're just like invoice 245. Like that's all that they're just, and the other people are very polite. It's the greatest room in the entire company. Cause people have realized they can just yell at a robot. The other one is the Verge benchmarks room. Where it's just people communicating and increasingly arcane benchmarks.

• 13:05Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  And they've developed their own language about Windows on ARM benchmarks. And they're not, they're not using the normal rule, like no LLM can figure out what's going on in this room. Statistically, this language has never existed before. It's very good. I'm excited for it. They're going to come, we're going to have all the reviews. I think David is going to do a full show with Tom and Nathan, our reviews editor, just running down all the stuff on, on Tuesday, I believe, right, Alex?

• 13:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we'll, we'll, we'll come back around with that stuff. I'm. Qualcomm has made a lot of promises here, right? They, they, they bought that company, Nuvia, which was a bunch of ex Apple engineers on the chip team who were making server chips. And they said, no, make a consumer chip instead. So, as Apple didn't want to use its ARM architecture to make server chips. And they thought there was this big opportunity there. But then Qualcomm bought them and said, no, make the next generation of Snapdragon. So they shifted them. I don't know if you know, there's some backstory here. ARM decided that Qualcomm's license didn't cover this. And so ARM is suing Qualcomm right now and Qualcomm suing ARM back over these chips, which is bananas. It's going to come to some resolution.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  There's no way this actually ends up in anything but payments. But these chips are like very, very controversial in their way because it's a bunch of ex Apple designers who left and started a company. And Qualcomm snapped them up to go compete with Apple's consumer chips.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Can they deliver is a big question. I'm excited to see our reviews and see if that's true.

• 14:34Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  Also, this lawsuit is just the funniest lawsuit.

• 14:37Alex Cranz?

  It's a good lawsuit.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're ARM, you're like, screw it, sue Qualcomm.

• 14:41Alex Cranz?

  I feel like Qualcomm gets sued a lot. Like every time you turn around, somebody's like, no, I hate you. Broadcom's like, I'm suing you. Apple's like, I'm suing you. Yeah.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  This company is under fire. And by the way, we talk a lot about 5G on the show. The, the level of interest in 6G is at least partially driven by people wanting to get away from Qualcomm's 5G patents. Like what if, what if there wasn't a dominant player in wireless that we could get away from? And so you, there's already talk about 6G just to get away from Qualcomm. Like Apple bought all of Intel's modem division and they still haven't produced a radio that can compete with Qualcomm and its patents. Get ready for the 6G hype cycle. That's all I'm saying is people love suing this company and that's going to drive the 6G hype cycle. Some other stuff we should talk about, this is kind of like a gadget rapid fire round.

• 15:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  It's not quite a let it go. We've learned some new stuff out of W W C about various Apple products. Jen had a pretty good scoop. Apple is extending HomeKit to use the ultra wideband chip in its phones to automatically unlock doors, which is cool. So a combination of ultra wideband and Bluetooth low energy, it can sense when you are six feet away from your door on the outside and walking towards it and automatically unlock the door.

• 16:01Alex Cranz?

  Which is just sick.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  But if you have a smart door lock, you need a new door lock to enable this.

• 16:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, none of them work with it.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  This is, it's a lot. Alex is, he was making a face. I got two Alexes now. This is last name.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Last names only. This reminds me of the digital ID driver's license thing. Like, it just seems like a bad idea. Like, I get that it sounds cool, like you're in a product meeting in Cupertino and it's like, oh, we should digitize this, but I don't really want my device automatically unlocking my house.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  You're sick. Well, so the argument, I thought this way about the feature where you can just point your phone at a door lock and it unlocks in express mode. The same way that if you use mass transit, you can just like beep your phone to a transal on the subway and it just pays and like whatever. And I was like, I don't know, I definitely want to authenticate before. And I was like, no, if you steal my house key, you're in my house. Like the level of security is the same. And I think one good question is like whether that is an acceptable level of security.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  But it is, I guess, is the answer. Like, if you have my phone, can you, should you be able to get in my house? It's like a good question everyone should ask. And then you can adjust that setting however you want. If you have my phone, you're six feet away from my house and you're walking towards it. Should the house automatically lock? It's like a different question. Like that, that's a new.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  I would like this feature if you could set it to where if Face ID hadn't been used in, say, an hour or two hours, then it doesn't work. But something like that, something where like the recency of me unlocking the device means that it's definitely in my hand. You know?

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  All right. Or you, you, your phone has been stolen and another iPhone detects you shrieking. It's a void and your house locks down. Like the bizarre use of the Find My Network. It's interesting because Apple has put a lot of chips and a lot of radios and a lot of things recently. And hasn't really done a lot with them. So these ultra wideband chips have been in a lot of Apple devices for quite a while now. And some of the uses are cool. Right? Like Find My is a little bit more precise. If you have the right selection of ultra wideband devices, you can like point your phone into HomePod and send the music to it, which is supposedly like magic.

• 18:20Alex Cranz?

  It, it, it works half the time.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I said supposedly like magic. Like if you were a shit magician.

• 18:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It works about that well. If I did magic, that would be my magic trick.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, you know, those people are like, I'm floating and they're really just like standing on their tiptoes.

• 18:35Alex Cranz?

  That's me. That's what I'm saying.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  But if you're always doing that at sort of the wrong angle and someone's like, you're just standing on your tiptoes. That's about how well the HomePod thing works.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Then they added thread radios. Jen, that was the other Jen's group from a couple of weeks ago. Like now they're adding other radios to these devices. You see that they're like, okay, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can't do all the things we want to do. They can't do it at the power level, at the location, precision level, whatever it is that just can't do it. So we need to add more radios to this thing. And then you see the animations from the new Siri. And you're like, oh, they are super getting ready to take all the ports and buttons.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:16Alex Cranz?

  Stop.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  Like slowly over time. There's like, there's 45 different radios for every level of like precision, location and power that you can think of. None of them aren't able to do much. And then the buttons are going to be capacitive very soon.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  The arc of phones is that they just become panes of glass that then start to curve that we then put in front of our eyes. Like that is, that is the next 10 years of technology.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  I want to come back. I want to come back to that when I talk about Meta and the Vision Pro to some extent. So that's the UWV chip. We're seeing Apple start to use it in more interesting ways, especially around the home. I'm very curious if they ever acknowledge these Thread radios. We were kind of hoping they would at WWDC. But it's interesting that there's a bunch of Thread radios in these devices. You could do all kinds of things with in a smart home. Because it used basically no power compared to everything else. And then the other thing we found out, which is really interesting, so you can have Apple on wireless, is that the next generation of CarPlay that no one has shipped yet will only be wireless. Which is fascinating. So I, you know, I'm obviously obsessed with CarPlay. Car CEOs are always on a decoder. I'm always asking them, they're going to use it. They're always like, meh, we'll see.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  And so as you, just to set, just to reset everyone's like understanding of CarPlay, because it's very confusing right now. There's the CarPlay you have right now, which is basically just like a second monitor for your phone. That's very much what's going on. So you plug into your car, even a wireless CarPlay, your phone sends out another video stream and receives touch input from your car. And you've got a second monitor for your phone. And if you think about it, almost everything that's happening on that screen is just phone stuff. Right? It's music, it's maps, but it's all just running on your phone and showing up on this display. Not a lot of car stuff over there. Apple has lightly extended this to be able to send a map to some instrument clusters. So they can send multiple video streams out from a phone, but it's still phone stuff.

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  Like everything's local on the phone without any understanding of the data from the car. The next generation of CarPlay, which they showed two years ago, I didn't even realize this was two years ago. I thought this was last year. Two years ago, WWDC 2022, they showed that mock-up of like a giant screen and another screen. And it's all CarPlay and there was like 45 clocks on it because no one knows what to do with all that screen. The weather in 10 different cities, which you definitely need when you're driving. And they're like, this is the next generation of CarPlay. And then they showed a bunch of carmaker logos. Do you remember this? They showed a bunch of carmaker logos and all those carmakers like, what? That was basically what happened. Porsche and Aston Martin announced last year they would ship cars this year. Haven't heard a word about those cars. No idea when they're coming out. And that's it.

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  So Apple had sessions at this year's WWDC, and I ran around talking to a bunch of people there just about CarPlay and what's going on.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  And I can't tell if this is a change in strategy, if this has always been the approach, or if this is just Apple softening its language. But Apple is basically saying to carmakers, look,

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  people have iPhones, they love CarPlay. What if you used our design toolkit to redesign all of the stuff in your car? So it all looked really good together. And then you needed iPhones.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Is it the context here that Apple just abandoned Project Titan? So if they're not doing a fully integrated vehicle, wouldn't it make sense for them to make this more of an open? This to me is like them going the route of Apple TV Plus and AirPlay, realizing that we are not going to make a TV. Uh, and so therefore we want TV Plus everywhere. Is that not a fair analogy here?

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  I can't necessarily tell how much Titan played into it, right? Like, this is what I'm saying. I can't tell if this was always the approach and now they're just softening the language. Like, the technical approach is that you have an iPhone, you connect to CarPlay. Your iPhone will go download a bunch of Apple carmaker co-branded assets. Like, in the videos they have posted, they refer to this as a co-branded experience. When have you ever heard Apple describe anything as a co-branded experience? That's bananas.

• 23:24Alex Cranz?

  Red.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Sure, Project Red.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  Windows on the Mac, like, at the very beginning?

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  That wasn't co-branded. So like, there's some element of Apple designers and carmaker designers, like, working together to design speedometers for CarPlay cars. Weird. And like, in the, this is public, I'm not, this isn't like some deep dark reporting. This is me saying, you can go watch the videos, they're public, and they're calling it a co-branded experience, where we're going to work together to express your carmaker brand identity inside of the Apple design toolkit.

• 23:55Alex Cranz?

  It makes sense in that all the cars you eyes are terrible.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  It does. So the idea is you have an iPhone and you get this like upgrade to your car UI. So everything looks like CarPlay.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Weird. How is Apple gonna make any money doing this?

• 24:09Alex Cranz?

  No, I think, I think that's like, I mean, for a super wealthy company like this, this is just like really good branding, right?

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  I think it's about.

• 24:17Alex Cranz?

  Like, you could go and show your, I mean, you can show your, your dominance in design and, and show these companies kind of like how you should do this.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  The specific way they're gonna show their dominance in design is actually my favorite part of this whole thing.

• 24:28Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  The only font you're allowed to use in next generation CarPlay is Apple San Francisco. You can, you can change how wide it is. You can change how stretch it is. You can italicize it. You can make it really thin, you know, like, and they're like, look at all these different things you can do with this font. It's a variable typeface. And it's like, yeah, but it's only one, like Porsche and GM don't get to use different fonts.

• 24:48Alex Cranz?

  Comic Sans.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Get, get right. Like, that's weird. Like, so there's an element of control where they're just, they're doing a very Apple thing. And then there's an element of complete chaos, which I think is really fascinating, which they have not talked about at all. Which is they will, when you have like the next generation CarPlay interface up and you're like, I want to control my massaging seats in my Aston Martin. You can push the button that says control, the Apple San Francisco labeled button. And instead of showing you the next nice CarPlay thing, it'll do a thing called punching through the automaker UI. And it'll just show you whatever garbage Aston Martin.

• 25:25Alex Cranz?

  No, never mind. Never mind. I take it all back.

• 25:27Nilay Patel?

  This is crazy. Like, this is, this is the concession to make it all.

• 25:32Alex Cranz?

  I can't.

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  Because what carmakers have been worried about is they have to build everything three times. They have to build their own native one because you need to have something, you, you need to operate the entire car without a phone, right? A non-negotiable if you buy a car. Then you need the next generation CarPlay version of everything. And then presumably Google will do something for Android, right? So what are you gonna do? And they don't want to build things three times. So Apple's solution is like, well, build it once and then, you know, for some stuff, we'll just let you show the weird stuff.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  I can't wait for Siri powered by chat GPT in my car to just like open the doors like while I'm driving when I request the massage seat to turn on and it just hallucinates them, you know,

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  It's just like

• 26:12Alex Cranz?

  Just ejects you.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  And then to bring this around, Apple wants this to only work wirelessly because their goal is that CarPlay will be connected, active and operating the interface of your car by the time you open the door. And if not by the time you open the door, by the time the screens light up, right? So you get in the car, you sit down, the screens light up, it's CarPlay. It should not be you sit down in your car, turn it on and then like you have some like loading process. And so you can only accomplish that over wireless. So CarPlay is only going to be wireless for whatever car makers adopt the next generation.

• 26:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm hesitant to say this because I am very against this move, but isn't that also just a precursor to them removing all the ports? They're like, it's got to be wireless because we're gonna?

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  It's not not a precursor to that.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  And it's funny because to make this work, Apple also has to give up some control of what runs where, right? You don't want your speedometer running on the phone. So Apple, your Apple designed speedometer or delightful co-branded experience, to be more accurate, needs to run locally on the car. So this is the first time I can think of that any Apple assets are going to get loaded onto somebody else's computer system in that way. Outside of, to your point, Eve, the Apple TV plus app on like Roku's, right? Which is where Apple ships an app. And this is the, the, the split is kind of the same. It's like, okay, you're gonna, we're gonna give you an asset package of Apple things to run locally on the car for things that we cannot

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  risk if there's a disconnect. The speedometer, the turn signals, that, that, that, right? And there's some differentiation in how that stuff works. Like the truly critical stuff cannot be touched. They call that the overlay layer. That's your turn signals and hazard indicators. The speedometer and stuff like the needles, that's, those assets can get refreshed over time. So those run in a different layer called local UI. And then there's everything that runs on the phone. And then in the middle, there's like, I don't know, you want to like mess with your sports settings in the, in your fast car, like that'll just be the weird automaker UI shining through CarPlay. And it's like, oh, this kind of feels like a mess, right?

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear who will take this and who will use all of CarPlay, like redesign the entire car to be CarPlay, to be Apple, and who will say, okay, we took next generation CarPlay. We fun, cool new speedometer. Every other part of the car controls will be the existing UI because we can punch through CarPlay. And honestly, based on the feedback we get on the show, it's like, some of our audience will pick the carmakers that use all CarPlay. Like they will make an affirmative decision to be like, you know what? That carmaker, Toyota uses all of CarPlay. We're going with them over Honda, which is like, here's your weird heated seats.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  Well, the third path is Rivian or Tesla, right? Where it's totally controlled by the automaker. And like Rivian is a great example of, I think you and I both test driven Rivians, Neil, I like, I think their interface is great. It's very snappy. Obviously I miss some of the iPhone connection, but I could also see more automakers going that direction.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Alex Cranz?

  But they have to make good user interfaces. That's a big difference between, yeah, no. Like Rivian and Tesla made good user interfaces to this part. Everybody else.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  Tesla's like you turn the car on and it's like, do you want to like play a game on Netflix? You know, it's.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  It's a lovely experience.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  So Rivian just upgraded in the Rivian, the generation two R1 trucks just came out. They've changed the, the art, the computing architecture of those is different, but then they also updated the interface to be more self shaded. I mean, they love Unreal Engine and they're like using it. That said, I looked at the parking lot at Apple Park when we were at W W C. A lot of those people have regrets, right? And there's all these rumors about Apple and Rivian doing stuff together. Apple Music just came to the Rivian interface. If, if Tesla's never going to break. I feel confident about that one. Just a prediction I'll make based on nothing.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  The Tesla UI is going to be X.com in a few years. That's the direction Tesla's going.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  It'll be Brock like fully, just like telling dirty jokes. We try to drive a car. Rivian is still in the place where they might try some other stuff to claw back some market share to win some new buyers. And there are an awful lot of Rivians. It's California. People like, people like trucks there, but it's something I noticed. All right. Moving on to think that, see, it's like a fast round, not quite lightning. We're just moving. Uh, Cranz, tell me about this remote. Cause you're very excited about a home remote.

• 30:57Alex Cranz?

  You, you know, I love a home remote. I'm still sad about Logitech. I still have to like the fanciest of the Logitech remotes and it had soft touch plastic, which means it's starting to rot.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  I have a TiVo remote in the corner of this house. It's like not a good.

• 31:11Alex Cranz?

  It's so bad. Like the rot on that soft touch is so gross, but there's a, there's a Kickstarter happening right now for the Haptique RS 90 and the RS 90X. And they promised all the stuff, all the big universal remotes promise, which is like you can control stuff via Bluetooth. You can control it via IR. You can control it via wifi. Uh, usually that requires some sort of hub that you have to plug in somewhere in your house. This appears to require no hub. And also it's just got a big screen on it. So it's instantly the coolest remote you can have in your house. Uh, and they can, it's supposed to be able to control all their smart homes and stuff. And like I said, Logitech did this. I've got a control that does this, doesn't have the cool

• 31:53Alex Cranz?

  screen and it required a hub. So this is instantly cooler. And this also is going to come soon rather than discontinued.

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  Kickstarter.

• 32:02Alex Cranz?

  It's yeah Kickstarter. The, there's like, the Kickstarter part of this is the really big, heavy caveat because there's a whole bunch of integrations that they're promising.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 32:12Alex Cranz?

  Not there yet. Uh, there's no matter support. There's, there's no support for some of the other smaller like radios and stuff like that. So this is like, cool.

• 32:23Alex Cranz?

  Neat.

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  We're like two minutes away from Samsung being like Bixby AI and your TV will not do everything for you.

• 32:30Alex Cranz?

  I don't want it. We are though, we are. It's coming. Yeah, like AI is probably, you know, the reason large tech got out of this business was because they said, nobody wants these. And me and four other people were like, oh.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  I want my phone to be my universal home remote. That's it. I don't want another remote. I want fewer remotes. Can we make that happen?

• 32:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I just, I, that's how I use my phone.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  But like, I just getting like, who is this for? I guess is the question for me.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  It's me.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  What's sharing.

• 33:02Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's me and four other people. It's the four people who are still sad that our large tech remote.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  Whenever I see a screen like this, I just think about how slow it will be.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  I knew.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Touching a button and nothing happening, right? Like, yeah, I love it. I'm like, yeah, I want a screen like this. But you know that thing you do with a touchscreen? Where you touch it and the button looks like something happened, but nothing happened. That's this product.

• 33:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  Almost like a guarantee that that is this product. It is, I will say, it is, I love that it's called the Haptique RS90. Great name. Great name for a universal remote. Fully good name. Uh, I just worry that actually people just use the apps on their smart TV and what this thing is trying to solve is not. I mean, that's why large tech got out of business. But we, we can't control the apps on your TV. We can't see your TV.

• 33:47Alex Cranz?

  Yep. Yeah, there will. So we'll see how this does. It's, it's, it looks like it's going to be funded. It looks like enough people have invested in it.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  This is like hot on the heels of that company Brilliant going out of business.

• 33:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Which Jen covered and they were like, we're going out of business, but like the thing we put in your wall will still work. So Brilliant put like a touchscreen in your wall that can control everything, which I was super hype on. Cause the idea of having an in-wall Sonos controller screen seems sick. Right? You walk in a room, you're like, I'm gonna pick a song, boop, I'm not using my phone, like the whole thing. And then they just like went out of business.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, that is always the worry I have with all of these things.

• 34:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of good.

• 34:27Alex Cranz?

  This is gonna be like almost $400 probably when it comes out. That's too much.

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. Speaking, let's do one more gadget and then I want to talk about what's going on in the air and VR with Heath. We mentioned Risk V at the top. And we mentioned companies that might go to business. Framework is shipping the laptop 13, which is fascinating because they're going to have a Risk V chip in it. This is the competitor arm, right? This is the open source competitor arm that has the performance per watt characteristics. I'm kind of dying to try it out. I'm also have no idea what software I can run.

• 35:00Alex Cranz?

  Also, I, I think one guy pointed out that it runs, it'll run about as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Yes. You gotta start somewhere. Baby steps.

• 35:10Alex Cranz?

  Baby steps. Baby steps. Yeah, I have no idea what can run this, but I wanna, like, this just is cool. This is the kind of thing I just want to have one.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Um, I like the, the actual line from the company. In the PR is the mainboard is extremely compelling, but we should be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkers and hobbyists to start testing and creating on risky. Like, don't use this. The, the peripheral set and performance aren't yet competitive with our Intel and AMD powered framework mainboards. It's like, ah, yeah, this is just to play with. I will say.

• 35:48Alex Cranz?

  Storage.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  The risk, the nerds in our audience have been very excited risky for a very long time. Cause ARM is a like dominant quasi monopolist now, like the ARM architecture license is the thing. And there hasn't been anything to compete with it, which is why everybody is moving to it, including Microsoft. Cause if you want performance for what you end up on this architecture, which means companies like Qualcomm that dominate the market right next to Apple. And you need an architecture license from ARM to expand beyond it. And ARM isn't giving this up anymore, which is part of the reason they're suing Qualcomm. Because Qualcomm is saying the new via chips fall under its architecture license and ARM says no.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  So there's all this stuff that's wrapped up when you have one dominant architecture that is owned by a company and Risk V is the thing.

• 36:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  The open source.

• 36:41Alex Cranz?

  Was it?

• 36:42Nilay Patel?

  Not quite as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4, but it's the thing that might break it.

• 36:47Alex Cranz?

  Was it Nvidia that tried to buy ARM a couple of years ago?

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. So ARM was, um, I mean, the, the finances are hilarious, right? Like it was, it's a weird English company that started licensing these designs. It got, SoftBank bought it, right? It was part of the Vision Fund. They, in the heady days of the SoftBank Vision Fund, where Masasun was like, everything I touch will be a monopoly. This didn't work out. You might recall, WeWork blew that entire business up. They tried to, they, they started divesting of assets. They were going to sell ARM and Nvidia wanted to buy it. Basically, everyone yelled. Like, everyone yelled. Apple yelled. Like, all the architectural licenses were like, you cannot let our competitor buy this company. They said, no, ARM is now public instead, which is a good outcome. Or is it bad?

• 37:35Speaker 05

  Fun fact, ARM going public made up for all the losses the Vision Fund has had for the last 10 years.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere, somewhere the WeWork people are like, god damn.

• 37:49Alex Cranz?

  They're just launching a new product.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  Newman is like, I could have changed the world. It's a lifestyle.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  I watched one episode of WeCrash. I was like, I can't live this again. I cannot be a part of this again. All right, let's wrap up by talking about AR and VR. Keith, you've got a scoop. Meta just reorganized. Reality Labs, we'll talk about that. The Vision Pro team is trying to make a cheaper headset. There's a lot of action here. What's going on?

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe we'll start with Vision Pro. The Information had a good story out, confirming and putting more details on what Gurman and others have reported, that Apple is indeed working on a cheaper Vision Pro. They hope to release it by the end of next year. And they have shelved a future iteration of V2 of the Vision Pro as it is today. So another high-end, very expensive one. They are trying to get this cheaper one more into the ballpark of a, you know, premium, top-of-the-line iPhone price. So we're talking $1,200 to $1,500. I had heard, even before the Vision Pro came out, that Apple was already working on this cheaper version. Apparently, when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to me and others.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  And basically saying, I'm going to scorch the earth with cheap headsets forever and not really care about making a business, which we will get to in the next story. Apple was like, oh, okay, we need to like really work on a, on a cheap one and get it out. So they've been working on it for already a couple of years. Um, I do expect we'll see it next year, um, whether it ships next year TBD. And I think, you know, I've only used the vision pro once in that initial demo that we all had at WWDC last year and Eli, but I would think that, you know, if it was in the ballpark of $1,500, um, I would maybe pull the trigger, even if the OS and the software hadn't meaningfully

• 39:37Speaker 05

  gotten better just because of, you know, the immersiveness of it. I kind of, it's just at 3000, it's just like, it's, it's out of touch for most people. And it's still out of touch at 1500, but it's much more of a almost impulse buy for some people at 1500. So, yeah, and it will get hopefully more developers interested. Um, but yeah, Apple's plugging away on, and I, I think what we're, what the, the other part of this, the fact that they are cancelling the more expensive one or shelving it just goes to show that they packed so much tech into this thing that it may not actually be a good product and they may, and we kind of like have found that out, uh, already. Neil, you talk about how you don't use the vision pro anymore.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  It's a great demo. Honestly, it was probably top three demos I've ever done of technology. And it's something that I consistently hear people do not use after the first couple of weeks. So.

• 40:33Alex Cranz?

  Would you say this was a Homer car?

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, it's not like that ridiculous, right? Like, like it had some focus. They wanted it to be something. I think about the fact it was a great demo. I, so much of technology right now is like great demos, a fall part of the product, right? And that was the vision pro to a T. And I, every AI demo so far has been that from, unless you have some very narrow use case where AI can solve a problem consistently for you. Every other demo is like, what, what? I don't know if I would do that. The vision pro, they have to make a big decision. And here is the thing that I noticed at WWDC that I've been thinking about.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  In that opening keynote video, when they were like starting, jumping off the plane.

• 41:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  And they were like doing the introduction and everyone was wearing their flight suits. Do you remember this?

• 41:18Alex Cranz?

  Vividly.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  Ridiculous, bombastic opening.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  They had Mike Rockwell on the plane, who's the, he's in charge of the Vision Pro. And he turns to the camera with the eyes on and they played it for laughs. The eyes were a joke.

• 41:34Speaker 05

  Those eyes, those eyes aren't shipping anymore. I can tell you that.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  That's what, this is what I'm saying. The idea, if you remember the initial Vision Pro stuff, was like the eyes will place you in the environment. They're very, they were so serious about the eyes.

• 41:50Alex Cranz?

  So serious.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  Like dead serious about the eyes. I asked in one of our briefings, uh, cause the only question I asked anybody during our Vision Pro briefings were, um, have two of you ever looked at each other with the eyes? Like have, have two people ever existed in the same room wearing a Vision Pro? And if, when you looked at each other with the eyes, did you laugh? And they were like, that's not funny.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Cause they were dead serious that this thing would bring you into the environment. They meant it. They were very, it was sincere in that Apple new age sincerity way. Like when you go to Apple Park and you walk towards the theater, they play new age music at you and they're dead sincere about it. And I'm like, this makes me feel like I'm in a cult. There's a gap there between like how sincere Apple can be and then the world. And they were super sincere that these eyes would be the thing that enabled you to wear a headset all the time.

• 42:38Speaker 05

  No, let's be real. They did the eyes because they wanted to be able to not call it a VR headset.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, so this is what I'm getting at. This next version, this cheaper version, they have to decide if this is a VR headset or an AR headset. And playing the eyes for laughs was the thing that signaled to me, okay, this is gonna be.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  I will bet, uh, strongly that there will not be the eyes in any future Vision Pro product. And I'll tell you why.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just a bunch of cost.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  Well, yes.

• 43:05Alex Cranz?

  No one's taking you on that bet. We like our money.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  I'll take the bet. The eyes stay.

• 43:10Speaker 05

  It was a Johnny Ive thing. I know this from talking to people who worked on the, the Vision Pro. It was Johnny Ive who insisted that the eyes ship. I don't know the exact dollar amount, but it added an absurd amount of cost and manufacturing complexity to the Vision Pro.

• 43:26Alex Cranz?

  Because they had to do that curved glass.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Well, the curved glass, the curved glass was.

• 43:30Alex Cranz?

  Or that curved glass in the display.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  It was having the front facing OLED. Um, I think it's an OLED OLED, right? Anyway, um, with the, with the eyes.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  So very low.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, it added an absurd amount of cost. No one wanted to ship it, uh, except Johnny and his people, and they've all left. And so, um, and they're making a joke about it in keynote videos. So, um, yeah, I don't think, I don't think the eyes are long for this world.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  But so if you get rid of that and you're like, you're not, now you cannot be perceived by other people in the world, the thing is a VR headset.

• 43:59Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 43:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that to me is concession in one way, right? Like they talk about this thing is AR, AR, AR, AR. But if you can't wear it with other people, like it's a VR headset, and then everything they've announced since is immersive. Right? New immersive videos, new experiences, new immersive games. And it's like, oh, this is becoming a VR headset. And a $1,500 VR headset right now, the state of, the state of the art there is a pretty good product, right? Like you can make something great for $1,500 VR.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I guess that maybe brings us to Meta, right? Should we, should we go to that?

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  So Meta obviously was first to this, bought Oculus a long time ago. They restructured, um, Reality Labs, the division that does all of their hardware, uh, and Horizon, that cursed, uh, platform. Um, this week I had the scoop in command line. They are forming two new groups. So Reality Labs is now Metaverse and Wearables. So you will notice there is no VR in those two phrases, right? Uh, the, the, the rift, I'm sorry, God, look how the rift, wow. The Quest is now under Metaverse. Reporting to Vishal Shaw, who used to run ads at Instagram and is a software guy.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  So you basically have the, the thing that created this whole org that the company really bet its future on is a subdivision of a software org. Meanwhile, Wearables, uh, I'm told is leaning heavily into the Ray-Bans. Um, I published this internal memo from Boz, the CTO, basically saying that the Ray-Bans have been a much bigger hit than any of us anticipated. Uh, Zuckerberg and others have been kind of. Alluding to this throughout the year, I've heard that it's somewhere in the ballpark of a million-ish units that they've sold, which is three to four X the first version of the Ray-Bans. And they're seeing really good retention on the product. So people are actually using it consistently.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  I have them. I had I have the AI turned on in them. I wrote in command line a few weeks ago. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I will just saying that Meta is quietly winning the AI wearable race here because the Ray-Bans are something that Meta has not done in a while. You could argue maybe ever, but shipped a really good consumer product.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're you're 100% right.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  Like, normal people like, something that tech people like, because it's got the AI and yeah, the AI still hallucinates, but it's very fast and it's right, like maybe half the time, right? So like I pointed at a tree in my backyard and I say, what is this tree and how do I water it? It got it right. So like, that's not, it's still a demo, right? It's not like I'm, it's not gonna like change the world, but in a couple of years, you can see where that's going. And it's like, oh, if I have reliable visual AI in Ray-Bans, I may not you, I may use my phone less, which is the reason that is doing all this, by the way. So they are putting way more resources behind the Ray-Ban line. And they also have these full-fledged AR glasses that they've been working on since 2018,

• 47:01Speaker 05

  codenamed Orion, which are insanely expensive. They cost thousands of dollars to make. I have heard from people inside Meta that it's a, again, incredible demo. They really feel like they've gotten there on the on the hardware. They're not sure what the software use cases will be yet. They're doing a lot of reviews of it right now. I expect we'll get a tease of that later this year at Connect, their conference.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  So they have these two lines that they're doing with glasses. They've got the AR glasses, which I leaked the whole roadmap for Meta's hardware a year or so ago. So we know that the Ray-Bans are going to be updated next year with a little heads-up display. So think more Google Glass, less full AR magically. And they're going to come with a This band that uses neural interface technology from the startup meta bot called Control Labs to control the display and to control some of the other inputs because you can also like play podcasts through the they have speakers in the frames, right? That's shipping next year. That's going to be interesting.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  And then the AR glasses, the full fledged ones that are going to be more expensive and also have the band will be 2027. So this is the path Meta is on. They're going full on glasses and really deprioritizing. They hate when I say this, but it feels like that, the Quest. Because the Quest is still really struggling. They're not really, they have some early product market fit with gaming, but the retention is still not very good, I've heard. And the Quest 3, they got a lot of really good things about the mixed reality, right? But it's just, it's just not, I don't know why I want to put it on. Whereas the Ray-Bans, it's like, I get it. I have audio on all the time. I can take calls. I can take photos and videos and I have AI that is starting to work more and more. And by the way, they look like normal glasses, right?

• 48:52Speaker 05

  So it's just obvious that this is the direction they should go. They seem to now be realizing that and they're putting all their chips there and laying off some people as a result. So that was the news out of Meta this week.

• 49:03Nilay Patel?

  So what's really interesting about Quest 3 is the rate of innovation on the Quest 3 or improvement, I guess, in the Quest 3 skyrocketed after the Vision Pro came out. They're like, oh, we should ship a bunch of these features like I guess there's some competition like here's, here's travel mode. We took it away, it's back. They increased the fidelity of the pass through, right? Like just stuff that they should have done. But they're still not, it's not winning. And even Apple, if they come out with a $1,500 version of the Vision Pro, they still have to make the case for VR. Right? Which, but Meta has been trying for a long time. And now if Meta is saying, all right, it's these glasses, it's the thing that everyone always knew was the thing. Right? It's augmented reality glasses where actual light passes through to display

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  and you're looking at actual things instead of screens. And then we can put some information near or around or over those real things. Turns out that's the thing everybody has wanted the whole time. Like, why would Apple continue to boondoggle its way towards the Vision Pro even at $1,500?

• 50:03Speaker 05

  Well, because they're on this path, right? Apple was working on AR glasses like Orion at Meta, and they basically shelved it semi-recently, in the last year or two, for the headset route. They think that if they can keep iterating on the headsets, they'll figure out glasses eventually, whereas Meta is like, no, we are going to have glasses out in a few years. And Apple's fine, they're always late to this, like, we all know that, so they'll come in late like they usually do. I don't know if it'll be as late as they were with the Vision Pro, but they're gonna be late and that's fine. But, yeah, I think they're betting on productivity and being at home and coding and all these things with the Vision Pro, and Meta's like, no, we want you to loot. Meta's goal is to use your phone less, because they hate being under Apple and Google's thumb.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Whereas Apple is like, let's just extend what we do. And I think there's the big strategic difference.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say that I have a friend, like, from the Brooklyn years, who in the pandemic became one of those people who, like, doesn't live anywhere. Like, she just lives on beaches.

• 51:04Alex Cranz?

  I know one of those folks, yeah.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  She's great, like.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  Does she work?

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  Please.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  Does she work in Nvidia or what?

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  She does not work in Nvidia.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  And she was the first normal person adopter of the Meta glasses, with the Ray-Bans. Like, all of her Instagram pictures are a beach taken with the Ray-Bans now. And you can just see, like, oh, this thing worked. Like, the thing worked. It looks like she's wearing wayfarers in all the pictures. But it's the Meta glasses. And, like, it worked. It's like so much, there's no chance that any of these people are wearing Vision Pros, as they, like, neumatically travel the world or the Quest 3. But there's 100% chance that, hey, your camera is now in your sunglasses and you're looking at cool stuff, and you want to share it on Instagram, is a loop that Meta can close.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  I was at a very fancy tech conference, where I'm not even allowed to say the name, earlier this week, but it was a lot of tech CEOs, and there were several of them wearing the Ray-Bans, like, walking around. CEOs of companies that it would be very funny for me to say who they were, wearing the Ray-Bans. And you're not supposed to record anything here, but, like, they're wearing them, and it's like, oh, like, yeah, this is, like, catching on. It's catching on with tech people, powerful people, and it's catching on with normal people, which is like, that is a circle that Meta has not been able to draw in its entirety of existence as a hardware player.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  How good did Jensen look in the glasses?

• 52:26Speaker 05

  I can't comment.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, I think VR is interesting. There's stuff in VR, like Supernatural, they keep promoting as a hit. And there was actually Supernatural just commissioned some study where they claimed that waving bats in VR is as strenuous as running.

• 52:44Alex Cranz?

  It feels like it.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  Sure, like, sure, whatever.

• 52:47Alex Cranz?

  To me, yes.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  That fancy Peloton Beat Saber is the same as like a swift run, like more power to you. But that's the only thing they have that's sticky, right? And Apple doesn't have anything that's sticky yet, except for the monitors. We'll see. I just think Apple moving away. The compromise of the Vision Pro was they built a VR headset with all this pass-through in the eyes and stuff to make it closer to AR. And if what they're going to do is drop the eyes and go head more towards VR, that feels like a turn that is notable because the real platform, you want to talk about the real platform shift, has always been AR. Everybody knows this. Tim Cook has talked about that as being the big platform shift. And to go to, we just made the best VR headset, would be very different. All right, we've been going, we're way too long. This is out of control.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Does this show ever go long? I didn't think that ever happened.

• 53:38Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't have peers here to hold me in. That's what's going on here. We got to take a break. We'll be right back. More on the Rochester after this.

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• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. This time we got to talk about AI. This will just take two minutes. There's nothing going on. Nothing. Actually, quite a lot going on AI. And a lot of it is just, as always, ever confounding decisions by AI companies. Let's start with a confounding branding decision. There's a new company, it's called Safe Superintelligence, SSI. Good name. This is Ilya Sutskever, who, if you recall, was the CTO of OpenAI, who participated in the coup against Sam Altman and then changed his mind. There's some Safe Superintelligence right there, whether or not you have belief in that decision. Then they couldn't figure out how to bring him back to the company and now he's left to start doing it. Alex, what is going on here?

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, Ilya, not just the CTO, the co-founder, and really the one who is driving the research agenda at OpenAI, it was his decision to lean into the transformer, the T in ChatGPT. So I think I've heard one of the largest individual shareholders, like incredibly influential, he's someone that AI researchers look to as like a demigod, right? And he has been totally quiet. There's been this meme of like, where's Ilya for the last, you know, six, eight months, really, since the November coup attempt? And yeah, he's back with a company that they will not describe anything about, except that they are going to invent super safe AGI, whatever the hell that means. His co-founder is Daniel Gross, who used to run AI at Apple, which is interesting, and

• 56:48Speaker 05

  is now, I would consider one of, if not the most plugged in venture capitalists in AI, who's been raising a ton of money and to Into startups and they are putting the call out for people to join and I'm sure we'll be rating Ilya's former org at OpenAI in very due time. And the key thing here is Ilya saying, we are going to be free from I forget the exact wording, but we're going to be free from the products and management day to day and only focus on long term aligned AGI research and we will not release anything until we hit AGI. So it's this is a this is a pure research lab, which is what Ilya has been known for his entire career.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to read this paragraph.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, read it.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Because anybody who has ever worked anywhere is, well, I think have the same reaction to this paragraph. Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles and our business model means safety, security and progress are all insulated from short term commercial pressures.

• 57:56Speaker 05

  I was like, what? Well, the business model is we just raised an ungodly amount of money and we're going to keep raising ungodly amounts of money.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  But that means you don't have a business model.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's how you get to do these things is like you don't, you don't have the, you don't, like, you don't have the pressure of a business.

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 58:17Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that just all a really pointed jab at Sam Altman?

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  But, but, yes.

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  Right, like, I figured it was more that than actually, like, in this case, I was assuming that he was going less like, I'm here to make money because he's made it very clear he doesn't care about money and more like, I'm here to like, say, I don't like what Sam Altman did and so I want to make a company where we're.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is I watched Max and two of her six year old friends from kindergarten try to play lemonade stand and they are distracted by management overhead and product cycles and their business model means they often compromise on safety, security and progress. Like, there's just like no way. You can put any group of people together and not have management overhead. Like it is, it is not possible, especially if you're trying to hire the most highly paid, sought after talent that exists in technology today. And that's where it's like, I don't, I read this paragraph, I'm like, this doesn't, you can't do this.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  The VC math here, the VC math here is simple. We will give you whatever you want. And when you invent AGI, it will change everything. It will be the new fire and we'll figure it out. That's, I guarantee you, that's the extent of the diligence.

• 59:29Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna ask, like, where, where is the money coming from to recruit all of these very highly paid?

• 59:35Speaker 05

  Well, they won't say where they've raised money from. So if you know, uh, let me know. But if you're listening to this, uh, I want to find out. Daniel is, they're, they're all super wealthy. Um, and they will have no trouble raising whatever they want. Because when you co-founded OpenAI, um, you can raise whatever you want.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  And then, uh, in particular, participated in the notable management overhead of doing a huge coup against the CEO.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 59:59Alex Cranz?

  A failed coup.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like your track record of not having management overhead is very bad.

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  Also, like a question I have is what is safe AGI? I keep hearing this.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  No, it's super intelligence. It's not AGI.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  Or super intelligence, which is actually now the new word for what comes after AGI. Apparently is the thing I keep hearing. Um, and so we keep inventing new terms because they realize like the terms they had, no one understands, or they don't actually even understand what they are. Um, what is safe AGI? What does this mean? Like Ilya's whole thing at OpenAI was alignment, right? He set up this alignment group that was going to get 20% of OpenAI's compute budget. Apparently they never did. That led to a lot of infighting and I think, you know, helped, uh, him try to kick Sam out. Um, but I always hear this and I'm like, aligning for who? And under what values are we aligning? Uh, and they don't seem to have an answer.

• 1:00:49Alex Cranz?

  And then that's been like a consistent problem with AI, right? Is, is that they're always like, yeah, this is going to be for everyone. But we only trained it with these certain data sets. We only trained it using like the pre-established knowledge of the certain people creating it. So it's actually fairly insular and doesn't work for everyone. And there are enormous edge cases every time we deploy it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  And you know, as Nilay and I uncovered when we were reporting on the coup attempts, like this gets kind of portrayed in the media as this, you know, acceleration versus deceleration, almost like religious faction war that's happening. And I do think there's part of that. I do think Ilya is almost like religious and is like fervor here. But a lot of this is just like boring company stuff, business stuff. It's like you wanted budget, you didn't get it, you got layered, therefore you don't want to work there anymore. OpenAI just hired a CPO, he used to run product at Instagram, and a CFO, who was the CEO of Nextdoor, a public company. It's very clear where OpenAI is going. They're going to IPO, they want to build a massive business, they're going to get rid of being a nonprofit. It's very clear.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  Alvin this week made some noises about not being a nonprofit.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Right. And so if that's the direction they're going, you're Ilya, it's like you just want to do research, right? And that's where a lot of these researchers still are, is they just want to do cutting edge frontier model development. And this is him saying, come here, we'll do it. And we should also note, this is now the third offshoot of OpenAI that was, has been created to create safer AI from OpenAI, whose mission is also to create safe AI.

• 1:02:25Alex Cranz?

  It's not a great look.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you have Anthropic. I would, I would actually put XAI in this camp. Elon was the co-founder of OpenAI. Now you have SSI, which is also, I feel like it's a medical term or something.

• 1:02:40Alex Cranz?

  I got this once. It was, it was, you take a pill for it, it's fine.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  It's an Ozempic, SSI.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  Look, I just, it's great that everybody thinks they can accomplish these things. I actually think it's unclear at all whether transformers and L L Ms can ever do the things that people want them to do. And in fact, over time, it has been more and more clear that perhaps they cannot. And so what I'm dying to know is if SSI or any of the other companies that think they can build AGI, if they have another idea.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  Because if the only idea is we're going to make a slightly better L L M. I actually don't, I there's, I'm not, you're not going to make, you're not worried about whether it'll be safe. Because it's not going to be super intelligent.

• 1:03:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm just, why are people trying to build an AGI? Like, these people are nerds. They, they, they watch movies.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  That's why you just answered your own question.

• 1:03:31Alex Cranz?

  No, but they, they watch the movies, they play the games. Like, this man is setting out to be the, the audio clips you hear when you're walking through the ruins a thousand years later in a video game of the guy being like, I don't know what's happening. Why is my AI going and killing the world? Like, that's what he's setting himself up for if he was actually successful in his grand ambitions. And I'm just like, why?

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  Because the industry thinks that we, they have invented a new form of intelligence. And that hasn't happened before. And so it's, I think the natural progression of this is that it's all smarter than us and replaces us. And it seems inevitable to the people building this stuff. What we see is like, Chat G P T can't get a math equation right, right? That's like what we see. What they're seeing, we got to keep in mind, like, they gate this stuff. Like, G P T four was in existence for like, over a year before OpenAI actually deployed it in the world. So they're seeing things we're not. I'm not going to like, give them too much of the credit there. But I do think there's, you know, Yann Le Cun, who's the chief AI researcher at Meta, has been saying what you just said, Eli, that L L Ms are not the path to AGI.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  So his group is actually working on what comes after the transformer? What, what is the architecture we need? Because these are parrots, right? These L L Ms are, are fancy prediction engines, right? And you, you don't really unlock intelligence that way.

• 1:04:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, yesterday I assigned our futures team to write language is not intelligence, like. I feel like we just need to say some very explicit declarative sentences that are true, like dogs are very intelligent and cannot generate a PowerPoint. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we're getting confused about what intelligence is at a very high level. I'm, I've been lately thinking a lot about the, the Steve Jobs slide of technology and liberal arts. You know, it's like, oh, you guys forgot about this whole street. This whole street's missing from this conversation right now. And there's just a piece of this puzzle where you can bet on this stuff to get better at an infinite rate, but like most curves level off. And it is unclear to me what actually makes things

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  intelligent. That said, well, you know, good luck. Good luck building your company with no management overhead. Come on Decoder. If you pull that off, boy, do I have a podcast for you. Right? I spent an hour talking about management overhead every week with people. But like, it turns out, it always like three six-year-old girls have management overhead. I promise you, maybe more than any company in America.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of confounding decisions by AI companies, perplexity started out so hot, man. They were the ones, right? You can pick any model, you can ask these questions. It was better searching Google. And it turns out, boy, have they been awful shady along the way. What is going on here?

• 1:06:16Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. So perplexity, for those who don't know, is trying to unseat Google with an AI search engine. It's actually a good product most of the time. I would say that I like their AI answers more than Google's on average. And now we kind of know why. It's because they're stealing a bunch of content. And yeah, so Wired did some good reporting and found out that they were going around their crawler blocker. I've heard rumors that perplexity has been doing this at an even grander scale with even much larger corpuses of data. And this is the, this is the OpenAI playbook on steroids a little

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  bit, which is just run fast and beg for forgiveness. And that's what they're doing. They're basically going around people who have said, no, you are not allowed to summarize this and doing it anyway.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  And the way they're doing it is both shady and hilarious. So they published some IP ranges of their crawlers, and they published the name of their crawler. So poor robots.txt, a text file that should not bear the weight of all intellectual property law on the internet, but which currently does. You can set it to disallow all these crawlers. You can set it to disallow GPT bot, which is OpenAI's. There's Google Bot Plus, I think. So there's Google Bot, which is the regular search index. And there's the other one, which is Google's AI crawler. I feel like I need to disclose here. We used to disclose GPT bot at Vox Media, and then our company signed a deal, and now we don't. There you go. There's your disclosure. And you could just, you could disallow perplexity.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  And on top of that, they did this thing where like, here are IP ranges. Like, if you don't trust robots, you can disallow these IPs. And then what Wired found, and then the folks at Mac Stories, who's a great indie Apple site, they found that their content was showing up anyway in perplexity. And then the investigations basically revealed these IP ranges were fake, and the crawler was fake. And they were setting up headless Windows 10 machines to browse the web. Yes. Like, you know, those pictures of like, the, the streaming fraud farms where hot dogs are just swiping Android phones? There's your VC money. I love it. Just swiping away on a Windows 10 browser.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  Just imagine if those Windows machines had Recall.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  It's just like crazy. And the CEO of perplexity has talked a lot of shit about Google. Like, why are these results so bad? And like, Google, for better or worse, is trying to play by the rules. It's still pissing everybody off, but they are attempting to play by the rules. The publishers have had to.

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  I mean, Google is under consent decrees. They're a massively regulated mega cap tech company. So they can't do this kind of stuff.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And here's a startup being like, what if? Yeah. What if we just didn't do any of that? And to be clear, I keep making this comparison. You call it the OpenAI playbook. This was the Google playbook 20 years ago. Yep. Right? Google just allowed all of Viacom's content to be on YouTube. Google indexed every book in the world without permission. Google did image search, which it got sued over. And it won all those lawsuits because those products were new. So they would show up in court, be like, judge YouTube. And the judge would be like, YouTube's sick. And Viacom would be like, our marketing staffers are using this anyway, because it's sick. Google image search is so useful. It's concocted and it's not nothing like this has ever existed before. Let's concoct some reasoning to allow Google to take all this stuff for free.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  Because the theory is that you'll go buy the image from Getty once you found it on Google. It's unclear what that theory really came out to.

• 1:09:53Alex Cranz?

  I never did that.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Alex is not like, I opened a Getty library the next day, a Getty account the next day. But those are the theories back then. Google Books, that might have worked, right? You can search all the books. Maybe you'll actually buy the book in the end. Did it work out totally? Well, I don't know. But those are the theories back then, because the products are so new, the experiences are so new. Perplexity is just like, yeah, we stole a bunch of stuff. And what we've delivered is an incremental improvement on Google search. And I just, I don't think that's going to win this time.

• 1:10:25Speaker 05

  Maybe. I am shocked at how little the people inside these AI companies and their investors. Again, I was just at a very fancy tech conference with a lot of these people. How little they actually care about this problem. How it is really just like, this is a, this is a bunch of speed bumps that we'll go over to getting where we're going to go. And maybe it's because of the fact that Google is Google. And they did all this 20 years ago, and they're a trillion, multi-trillion dollar company.

• 1:10:51Alex Cranz?

  I think it's, I think it's back to what.

• 1:10:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say, I think it's back to what Neelai said about liberal arts education. They just don't have any like historical context. So they're like, yeah, this is gonna work.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  They didn't take any history classes.

• 1:11:03Alex Cranz?

  I didn't, I don't need to know about Google. This is fine.

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  No, these are systems people. Yeah, they don't think in terms of these, the values that we get mad about when it's like, hey, I made a thing. I charged people for it and you took it. That's not okay. With, with intellectual property, with writing and stuff like that, for some reason, it's just not a thing that a lot of tech people that I know, it doesn't register for them. I don't know why.

• 1:11:30Alex Cranz?

  Right. Cause they didn't take liberal arts.

• 1:11:34Alex Cranz?

  They're like, what is an English class?

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  I want to spend more time. I don't have, I don't have a view of this. I haven't locked this into my brain yet. So people have thoughts, send them to me because I need the help, but I can feel this weird shift that I've been calling the copyright apocalypse because some people care about it a lot now, more than ever before. The this is mine and you took it between influencers on social media platforms rages out of control now. Right? I'm a Taylor Swift fan and those three notes of a song sound like three notes in Olivia Rodrigo fan. We have to do fandom war now.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Until the music industry doles out writing credits is a real thing that happens. Like at the craziest level, this is a real thing that happens. And that is copyright maximalism by really young people. And then over here, you have nobody owns anything. It's just something that I should get it for free. And those things are just in tension in a way that it feels unresolved and potentially unresolvable. Like you can't, you can't have a bunch of YouTubers being like, I made this YouTube video first. And anybody who even makes a video that looks like it is stealing from me right next to everything in the internet should be free.

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  Maybe that's it. Maybe there's not a lot of love for media companies as we all know. And the fact that it's scraping Wired or The Verge or whatever is like, whatever, they're fine. But when it's like your favorite influencer, your favorite creator, and they're on their feed going, hey, like this model, don't use it because they trained on my stuff. I do think you're right. I think people feel a lot more viscerally about that than they do, oh, like companies, right? I think it's when it becomes the individual.

• 1:13:13Nilay Patel?

  And again, what Google was up against, what Napster was up against was the big bad. Right? Like the only face of the anti Napster movement was Lars Ulrich from Metallica. And that did not work for him, but really the face was like Hollywood in the music industry. And no one ever feels any sympathy towards Hollywood in the music industry. Like Hollywood can be like, you wouldn't steal a cigarette, like whatever they would say. You wouldn't, what was it? You wouldn't download a?

• 1:13:38Alex Cranz?

  You wouldn't, you wouldn't download a car.

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? So Hollywood can put up the banners that say you wouldn't download a car. And everyone's like, screw you. I'm super going to download a movie. And if I could download a car, I would.

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  That'd be sick.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  I've had this 3D printer for years not making cars.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  But they were the big bats. Influencers are like people, like influencers, like people. You know what I mean? Influencers are actual people that you have parasocial relationships with.

• 1:14:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Nilay Patel?

  And like, there's something very emotional that is not resolved. And it's gonna come to a head because, you know, the next story we have on our list here is a bunch of social networks that want to introduce AI in various ways. Alex, you played with one. And before we get to that, I just want to call out TikTok is now letting people make AI avatars of creators.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? And saying, this is your ad creative. And this is going to come for every social platform.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, in a massive way. Like, if you are a creator and you feel the burnout, and you can make 50 more ads during your brand deal, using it, you might do it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, this is happening. So, yeah, I wrote about this new app, which was, you know, I get a lot of test flights to try things. And this is the first test flight I've gotten in a while that made me feel something very strongly, where I was like, oh, when I opened it. And it's, it is like Instagram meets character AI, where basically it's a bunch of AIs in a feed commenting and posting together. And there's humans, but they don't need to be there. And like, it's actually, in some cases, not most, but in some cases, hard to tell who is human and who is not. And they just raised a bunch of money. It's an ex-Snap, ex-Snap people. And the reason I wrote about it is because Meta is about to do the exact same thing. Zuckerberg told me so last September.

• 1:15:24Speaker 05

  And I think later this year, we're going to see them start to roll this out, where basically, anyone can create their own AIs, send them into Instagram, send them into Facebook. And same thing with businesses. And the idea is that if you're an influencer, and you feel overwhelmed by your DMs, maybe an AI handles that for you, or maybe an AI actually posts on your behalf. Zuckerberg is super excited about this. I know, because he's talked to me about it. It's very freaky to imagine what this actually does to our social networks. It's coming way faster than we think, though.

• 1:15:55Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's interesting, because like, in South Korea, they've been doing a little bit of something like this, right? With K-pop stars, where you can engage with K-pop stars on sites owned by the K-pop stars companies. And it's not always, sometimes it's them. It's not always that usually it's a bot. It's a person pretending to be them. And so like that parasocial, how do we automate that parasocial stuff? Has been happening in Korea for a long time, but I think the difference here is that was gated to, okay, you have to go download this app for this publisher and use it, whereas this would be on Meta Instagram?

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  This would be like you open Instagram and it's like, oh, is that account an AI? They may have three arms. Okay, maybe then. Yeah, well, that's coming.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  So then there's the other part, which is you send agents out on your behalf as influencer or someone. Where you're like, someone wants to pay money to subscribe. And one of the things I offer is like DMs with me.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  And then my, my agent will just like, do that.

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  And I won't do it. And that's infinitely scalable. Which if you are an individual creator and all of these platforms are organized towards tearing down collectives and enhancing individual creators. If you're an individual creator, your ability to scale is limited by your emotional capacity to do this work and your minutes in the day.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  And so of course you're going to let the robot talk to your fans. Like it is the biggest no brainer in the history of the world. Of course you're going to say, okay, you want to, you brand X wants to do an integration with me, but they want to 50 different versions as creative. I will make one and let the AI deep fake me into five more. And that is already happening, like TikTok is enabling the feature. Like it's, it's happening now.

• 1:17:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, Alex, to your question about why, like I was talking to Vu Tran, the CEO of Butterflies, this new app about this, the why? Cause I showed this app to my wife and she was like, just like, it was an immediate, just like,

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  um, I'm like, I, I think you're going to meet a lot of people like that who are like, why does this need to exist? Like, why do we need to like, fill our time with just empty AI social media? And his point was like, yes, it feels kind of broken right now. And I wrote about this. It feels like when the hosts in Westworld break a little bit, it's like not there. But he was like, you know, I, I got into tech by like making friends on forums, talking to people that I never met. I only knew their username. He's like, we will get the models quickly to that quality. Um, and as someone who also came up and got into tech in a similar way, like through like making friends on forums, like,

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  What happens when, like, I never met those people, right? I didn't know a lot of their names ever. So if they were AI, would it have made a difference? I mean, we had a whole, like, philosophical conversation about this, but he was like, you don't actually want to talk to people. There's traits of being human that you like, and AI will quickly copy all those traits. And I'm like, mind blown, and also, no. Uh, no, thank you.

• 1:18:48Alex Cranz?

  It kind of.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  But is it inevitable? That's the question.

• 1:18:51Alex Cranz?

  It ignores, like, in the, in, in the eighties and nineties, there were the 900 numbers and you could, like, call, like, the Crypt Keeper was one, like Corey Haim and stuff like that. And Corey Haim was not answering the phone to talk to a little 12-year-old girl who had a crush on him, right? Like, that was a voice actor pretending to be him. And quickly.

• 1:19:10Nilay Patel?

  Wait, Alex, did we just learn something very important about what you spent your money on when you were a child?

• 1:19:14Alex Cranz?

  It was not me, because if I had called a 900 number, I would have not had a good time.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  My dad super caught me calling a 900 number once, and he was like, you're never using the phone again.

• 1:19:27Alex Cranz?

  But that was like part of why, I mean, it was one, it was the cost of 900 numbers, but that was the other part of it, whereas like, 900 numbers were a little sketchy as a kid. You weren't really supposed to call them. And it was because, like, yeah, it was a bunch of, like, not con artists, but basically licensed con artists pretending to be other people. And it's like, that's, that's gross.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  The, the, you hear this from tech people all the time. You're like, this is just the same as this other small problem that we had in the past. Like, but now you're doing it at scale.

• 1:19:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like now you're doing it at scale, and that's.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if we took a small problem and made it global? It's like, I think maybe there's something different here. This thing, by the way, that you just mentioned, it's come up several times now. It is this unshakable belief that these models are going to get better.

• 1:20:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  And like, on the rate of like Moore's law, we'll get better. And I don't, that metric doesn't exist, like, there isn't a Moore's law of L L models yet. You know, we've only really experienced 3.5 to 4 in the, in the public.

• 1:20:21Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:22Nilay Patel?

  But I, and I understand that they've all got stuff they're looking at that we can't see. Sure. But someone's got to give me the number, like, give me the rate of change before I believe that this model will be able to simulate whatever happened to me on forums when I was a child, like, you know? Like, he wouldn't last a minute in the asylum when they raised me. It's like, I don't think so. Well, so, yeah, there's no Moore's law, there's.

• 1:20:48Speaker 05

  I mean, there's no Moore's Law, there's scaling law. And the idea is that as you continue to put more data and compute into these models, they get exponentially better. That continues to hold true. If you compare the output, the creative output of like GPT two or GPT three to four, it's a massive difference.

• 1:21:06Alex Cranz?

  But they're also running into how to-

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  But you're saying that line is not linear. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying everyone who works in I believes that it is still linear.

• 1:21:13Alex Cranz?

  But it's not because we've just seen multiple stories about how they're all desperate for data to the point that they're like, what if we make AI machines to just create more content for us? That can't go wrong.

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  Oh, the thing I'm hearing is it's going to be synthetic data for training. So literally you're going to have the AIs get good enough that they start talking and then the AIs train on the AIs. That's where we're going. All right, we gotta take a break. We gotta end this here. I can't, I can't stay here. I'm just saying, make real friends. Go to the forums while you can, all right? Get in there while the getting's good. Get past the username, get their actual name. Because they may be an AI in here. Request a driver's license immediately. We're taking a break. We'll be right back with the lightning round.

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• 1:23:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's the lightning round. I will say the first segment of the show was much more like lightning round and this is just gonna be different. It's fine. This lightning round remains unsponsored, but many options exist. For you, the potential advertiser, but you can't do AI ads.

• 1:23:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  You have to let me do it.

• 1:23:48Alex Cranz?

  You can only do AI ads if they're trained on Nilay's voice.

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  What's the most dangerous advertising you can buy? It's letting me do the ads. All right. Kranz, let's start with you.

• 1:23:58Alex Cranz?

  Nvidia is super rich.

• 1:24:01Nilay Patel?

  Can I say, so the story, right, is Nvidia has overtook Microsoft and Apple as the world's most valuable company. Microsoft and Apple have been going back and forth on market cap for a while. Nvidia is not bigger than both of them. The crazy thing about this whole story to me is, one, Nvidia has been around for a million years. Video game fans exist. Right? Like, people put Nvidia cards in their PCs all over the place. It has been on this run for a long time, right?

• 1:24:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is years now Nvidia's stock skyrocketing. And the way CNN covered it, the headline in CNN was, "This company whose name you can't pronounce is now the world's most richest company." It's like, what? It's actually pretty easy to pronounce. I feel like... Yeah, it's not, one, it's not that hard.

• 1:24:43Alex Cranz?

  That's why you pair an editor and a writer together and they're both like, "I don't know what this is. We got this."

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, at some point, I understand we run a tech publication, we like swim in the water, but like...

• 1:24:55Speaker 05

  They've been headed here for at least two years.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we we had to hear about them like cryptocurrency, right? Nvidia had this big, all these big stock jumps because of cryptocurrency, because everybody was buying the GPUs, because that was the best way to train.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, this was completely out of my brain. I this was gone. This information had been deleted.

• 1:25:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because it was it's 2020.

• 1:25:13Speaker 05

  Just like crypto.

• 1:25:14Alex Cranz?

  We don't think about 2020. And so that was happening to Nvidia. And so it was like steadily ticking up. And it was like, oh, boy, AMD and Intel are might be able to beat it. And then it was like, we're going to take all the crypto stuff out of our GPUs. And then everybody was like, hey, AI is here.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. And and and others have been.

• 1:25:33Alex Cranz?

  Lost their minds.

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  The effect of this. The effect of this inside Nvidia is fascinating. I have heard and there's been some reporting and I want to keep doing more reporting on it. So if you have stories, if you're listening to this and you have gotten fabulously wealthy at Nvidia, hit me up, we can talk off the record. They have a retirement problem inside Nvidia. There's a there was a post I saw where it said, if you join as a mid level software engineer five years ago and your total comp was 700,000, which is a lot, right? But in tech, that's actually pretty middle of the road for a good engineer. Your compensation yearly now is $10 million. So.

• 1:26:07Alex Cranz?

  That rules.

• 1:26:09Speaker 05

  They actually have people just retiring like en masse. And so like the the question for Nvidia is like, how, what do you do to motivate people when people have gotten so fabulously wealthy so fast? And it's obvious there's going to be a correction. It's obvious Nvidia is not going to stay the richest, the most valuable company in the world. Right? So how does that collapse happen? Is it a slow collapse? Is it a fast one? And what happens to the employee base is fascinating.

• 1:26:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, you get rid of management overhead and product cycles.

• 1:26:37Alex Cranz?

  There you go. That's obvious what you do. Merge with SSI.

• 1:26:42Alex Cranz?

  It's going to last a while, right? Because they are the only ones making the really good AI processors for server levels. Right?

• 1:26:50Speaker 05

  Well, they have software lock in too with.

• 1:26:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like Google, Google, Google's their main primary competitor. Right?

• 1:26:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, yeah, ARM, AMD. I would say AMD is like an arms dealer is probably the biggest one. Google doesn't sell TPUs really as much, but yeah.

• 1:27:05Alex Cranz?

  Nvidia's got a big head start. This is one of the things that like has kept Intel propped up for years was because Intel had this. Huge head start in the server space, 99% of of the server space. So you know, they can bomb a couple of years against Qualcomm and be fine because they got the servers. And I think Nvidia's kind of feels like not quite as cushy a position, but similarly cushy.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they have CUDA. Like what they have is a software layer that makes their GPUs more valuable.

• 1:27:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  Which AMD does not. But if you run Azure, I mean, we've had all these people on the show now, Alex talks them all. If you run Azure or AWS or Google Cloud or whatever, you do not want to be beholden to CUDA and Nvidia.

• 1:27:49Alex Cranz?

  Nope.

• 1:27:49Nilay Patel?

  You you you want all kinds of things to happen.

• 1:27:52Alex Cranz?

  That's why Apple and Nvidia don't look at each other anymore.

• 1:27:54Nilay Patel?

  It is very funny that Apple and Nvidia hate each other. It is it used to be just like a little funny because Apple would insist that bad graphics cards were good graphics cards. And that was just funny, like in its way. Now it's deeply funny.

• 1:28:08Alex Cranz?

  It's extremely good.

• 1:28:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, because all that OpenAI integration is happening in H100s that Apple does not want to talk about.

• 1:28:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, and and doesn't want to pay for. And that's the thing. Market forces will ensure that Nvidia does not stay the top GPU supplier in the world because they are too expensive. And that no one wants Jensen being the the king of GPUs, right? Everyone wants to have options. And so Nvidia's challenge to justify this valuation and to keep growing is to build lock-in. And it is like, it would make a lot of sense for them to start competing directly with Google Cloud and Azure to become a one-stop shop because otherwise, people will outship them. That's just going to happen. It may take time.

• 1:28:44Alex Cranz?

  And we've been seeing that for years with them and and and they're like, like on the gaming side, they got really, really good at the lock-in. They got really good at being like, you can't use these AMD processors because we went out to every single game developer and made sure they were using our tools. So you had to use our like, we get the better stuff. So they're it's going to be really interesting over the next couple of years is is they just like absolutely duke it out with some of these other companies. And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at how vicious they get.

• 1:29:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. But it's like one step down from that, right? Alex?

• 1:29:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Nilay Patel?

  Keith was saying, these things are free, like Apple's not paying for it. There's no business model one step down from we paid all of the money in the world for H100s. The price of the H100 will just fall. Like, if the demand is there right now because everyone thinks they're going to monopolize something.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Nilay Patel?

  What it is is remains to be seen. But that's why, that's why the price is high. We'll see. All right. I'm going to go next as I want Heath to end the lightning round with his.

• 1:29:45Nilay Patel?

  We just continue to track tech litigation. The United States Department of Justice has sued Adobe for deceiving subscription pricing in Creative Cloud. And it's, it actually is deceiving. It is deceiving in one specific way, which is when you sign up for Creative Cloud, you can pick annually billed, annually billed monthly, or monthly. Annually billed monthly is the default choice. So that means you pay for a year, but they charge you per month. And you've signed a one-year contract. And if you try to cancel early, they just charge you the rest of the year. Or you can sign up for monthly, where you can just cancel after every month. Because it's the default, because it's the cheapest. People pick it, and they think it's a monthly subscription. There's no fine print. It doesn't actually disclose that this will happen. They

• 1:30:27Nilay Patel?

  try to cancel to get stuck with the rest of the bill. This is bad. This is straightforwardly bad. For a company with basically a monopoly market share in these tools, it is also just beyond the pale. Like, this is piddly shit. What are you doing? Like, people are gonna buy Photoshop, Ben? Like-

• 1:30:47Alex Cranz?

  That's a local gym move on their part.

• 1:30:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I really think, I've been thinking about this a lot with Adobe. I, I've basically insisted the verge over cover Adobe over the past few years, because they're such a central player in everything that's going on. Like, influencer media depends on the existence of Adobe. That's weird. Like, Premiere runs YouTube. Like, YouTube never built creative tools, which is one of the weirdest things about YouTube. They had that one app on the phone once, but they've never built a video editor. The success of TikTok is they made a video editor that's really good. They made all those templates, and they made it easy to do all the stuff. YouTube never did that. They're like, upload some videos, and then people built the entire creators ecosystem on the back of Premiere, largely, a little bit of Final Cut, because

• 1:31:34Nilay Patel?

  there's so many creators who use Max, but mostly Premiere. And Google never built that stuff. So you should like, look at this industry. Adobe's the center of everything. They're the center of all these, all these AI creativity battles, right? Because they have Adobe stock, and people use Photoshop and gener fill. And the more you cover Adobe, the more you realize there's a massive difference in how the company perceives itself and what it does and the tools it makes and how everyone else perceives Adobe. It's yawning gap. I've said this before, we had Shantanu Ryan on Decoder. He never talks to anyone really. He shows up on CNBC after earnings reports and never gives wide-ranging interviews. I was so excited for that interview. This guy never talks. We asked him all the questions. Some of those questions were pretty harsh. The audience

• 1:32:15Nilay Patel?

  was mad at me just for paying attention to Adobe. They're like, why would you platform Adobe? Which is an incredible question, because it's Adobe. I don't think I've seen a company burn that this much goodwill, ever. Right? And then on top of it, they had their Terms of Service debacle, where we've covered Terms of Service changes like this so many times, like I could barely even pay attention to it, where they changed their Terms of Service to let them do content moderation on their cloud services. So if you have, if you run a cloud service, people will put bad things on your cloud service. That is just as true of fact of nature as there is. Like horrific shit will end up on your cloud storage system

• 1:32:57Nilay Patel?

  if you have a scaled cloud storage system. And what you don't want to do is give a bunch of contractors PTSD, which is a real thing that has happened that we have covered by making them look through stuff on cloud services or look through reports. So you build automated systems to go through your cloud services and find the child abuse material. Like that's what you do. So Adobe changes its terms to let people know it's going to do this in Creative Cloud. People assume that they're going to train on AI and they freak out at Adobe. And Adobe has so little goodwill that even as they tried to explain this, people are like, we don't believe you. And so now they've updated their Terms of Service again. And you just connect that directly to, oh, you're getting sued by the government because annual paid monthly was not clear to people and you charged them the rest of the money when

• 1:33:40Nilay Patel?

  they canceled. It's just like, it's crazy to me that this company is so important, but does not realize that it needs to maintain the goodwill of the people that depend on it.

• 1:33:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, you don't have to when you're a monopoly. You can just be a monopoly.

• 1:33:55Nilay Patel?

  It's, but it's making you, like, I've met all their executives. They're not dumb.

• 1:33:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like baffling to me.

• 1:34:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but they're, you know, they can do what they want. They're monopoly. What are you gonna do? Go to, go to Da Vinci?

• 1:34:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 1:34:13Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people, yeah.

• 1:34:16Nilay Patel?

  Them not acquiring Figma, I think, will go down. We're gonna come back on the failed Figma deal. One, because Figma will turn into a different company, and we'll see if they can go compete with Adobe. But that was driven as much by some of this burned goodwill as anything. And I think we're gonna see the creative tools industry bifurcate on that moment over the course of history. Because if they had acquired Figma, a lot of, a lot of things would have been a lot different, I think. All right, last lightning round one, we gotta end here. This is like the best story in history.

• 1:34:45Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, the San Francisco Standard has a fun story where techies are increasingly paying up to 1,200 an hour for fashion consultants because of CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg deciding to wear chains. And I just encourage everyone to read this story. There is a side by side photo of a guy who's gone through one of these fashion consultants. I would argue, he looked better before. I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna judge, like, you know, whatever. They, or at least the same. It's just like, as my grandfather would say, you know, money doesn't buy sense. And like, reading this, like, like, techies, like, just be who you are. You don't need to like, try to look cool. And you don't need to pay 1,200 an hour

• 1:35:26Speaker 05

  to try to look cool. Like, the internet is there. Like, you could just research on your

• 1:35:32Nilay Patel?

  Side by side photo is brutal.

• 1:35:34Speaker 05

  It's brutal.

• 1:35:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not brutal because he looks better or worse. He looks the same.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, the same. And then it's

• 1:35:39Alex Cranz?

  Both of them are sort of just baggy outfits.

• 1:35:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then like, it's perfect, because at the end, like, the story, they're like, interviewing a founder who's done this. And then he's like, I'm making an AI app that will do this for people for $20 a month. It's like, the circle just completes itself.

• 1:35:56Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. You know, Amazon tried to do that with their weird camera.

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Nilay Patel?

  Super didn't work.

• 1:36:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  I would say, if you're paying someone this much money to take you to Bloomingdale's, you can do better than this photo.

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  That's what I'm saying. Like, it's

• 1:36:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I don't think he went to Bloomingdale's.

• 1:36:10Speaker 05

  No, it says it. Yeah.

• 1:36:11Nilay Patel?

  This is, he's in the, he's in the dressing room at Bloomingdale's.

• 1:36:14Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my gosh. Get out. Leave the store, sir. No, that's a bad look if that's what you're pulling out of Bloomingdale's. That's like, you get that at Dillard's.

• 1:36:26Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. All right, we got to end it here before we before we do.

• 1:36:29Alex Cranz?

  Sorry. Sorry for your fashion shaming.

• 1:36:33Nilay Patel?

  Shop where you can look cool no matter where you shop.

• 1:36:35Alex Cranz?

  I love a Dillard's.

• 1:36:36Nilay Patel?

  Everyone is constantly asking me where the jackets come from, and all of them were pandemic purchases at either Home Depot or Walmart. I'm just telling you, that's like, I had money to spend, and there are only two stores suspended.

• 1:36:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like, you can look cool no matter where you shop.

• 1:36:50Alex Cranz?

  Track your supply.

• 1:36:52Nilay Patel?

  Just know who you are. That's a quote. Just know who you are. Just be that person as loudly as you can. All right, that's it. And also make an agent of yourself and have it flirt with other people on Instagram for money. That's the future. So more gold chains, more gold chains.

• 1:37:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be back on Tuesday with more of the Windows ARM laptop benchmark scores. That's a big deal. I'm excited for those reviews to come out. And then we got all kinds of stuff. It's a summer. It's like wild time in tech. And then we're going to get rid of all of our management overhead and product cycles. Just pure intelligence.

• 1:37:24Alex Cranz?

  Can't wait. VVI.

• 1:37:25Nilay Patel?

  Thanks to Heath for filling in. Good luck to David doing whatever he's doing. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:37:35Speaker 07

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

• 1:37:53Speaker 08

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